Our World and Everything in It

The news suggested yesterday that skyrocketing gas prices may not be a bad thing. I’ve always believed higher pump prices could be the proverbial kick in the shorts for people to pay attention to what’s going on. It’s working. Demands for greater gas mileage and energy saving alternatives has been just the catalyst needed for a whole barage of ideas to burst forth to a tune of $448 billion dollars so far this year, DOUBLE that of last year already.

Venture capitalists are having a field day. There are even some pension plans racing to invest in a green market.  Some of the inventions are remarkable. There are already plastic bottles created from corn by-products so they are totally biodegradeable. And every thing and any thing is being sought after to accomplish either energy production or energy storage, right down to bacteria.

So it is true, out of something bad can come something very good.  

I was watching Planet Green about solar energy, specifically residential solar panels, and found out answers to a lot of questions. An average 2000 sq. ft. home would need to use 24–3 X 5 ft. solar panels to supply 90 to 95 percent of all electricity to the home. The panels sit on a rail and install within hours. The current produced from the solar panels goes to an inverter box hooked to the home’s main electrical box. The inverter converts the direct current into the U.S. alternating current and that’s about it.

Now for the cost. Depending on the size of the house it would cost 15 to 25 thousand dollars for the solar panels. With federal rebates the cost is lowered to 12 to 20 thousand dollars. This is very affordable for many people, and for those that can’t afford to eat, let alone put panels on their roof, I don’t see why the U.S. doesn’t just supply the darn things.

I figure if there are 300 million people in the U.S., then there are more than likely 100 million homes. The average cost of 12 to 20 thousand dollars for solar panels is 16 thousand dollars. If the government can get trillions in debt over a made up war, and keep pork barrel spending in the millions, not to mention earmarks on bills that amount to millions, then why doesn’t Uncle Sam just bite the bullet and supply 100 million homes with solar panels? The total cost would be 1.6 billion dollars but over a 4 year time period, it would come to a paltry 400 million per year.

I say paltry because of all the stupid waste I’ve read about. If you read, you know. It’s as if there are two alternate worlds. One world is where our officials come from regarding the environment, which is totally disconnected from anything I’m watching on Planet Green lately. I’ve actually written to the offices of senators, the governor, and reps asking whether they have someone on the payroll to just watch all the latest innovations that are available because our leaders seem completely out of touch, and keep trying to feed us a bunch of bunk that we must drill for more gas, drill for more oil, fossil fuel, fossil fuel, fossil fuel. They’ve had their blinders on so long they fail to realize it’s the 21^st century, and we’re able to watch and see for ourselves that there are an awful lot of alternatives out there besides the same ole, same ole. I think it’s criminal the way we are blatantly lied to.

Just yesterday I watched as Gerald Brown, Great Britain’s new prime minister, and President Bush agreed that 1000 new nuclear plants will be built world wide in order to meet energy demands. This is the big alternative we’re being fed now. But why? Furnishing homes with solar panels is so much cheaper, and immediate. There is no 5 years of building a nuke plant, with the end result being no reduction in energy costs at all. Instead of paying big oil, we pay the nuclear industry, and still end up with radioactive waste that doesn’t dissipate for 1000 years.

Evidently helping consumers deal with global warming is one thing. Helping consumers deal realistically with global warming once and for all by getting homes off the grid will never happen because big utilities won’t be able to get a piece of the action. Heaven forbid we affect the monopolies of America in such a way they would no longer be viable, and therefore unable to gouge us at every turn. We should be feeling more and more like pawns everyday. 

Watch Planet Green on the Discovery Home Channel. There are a lot of myth busters on the show. You know myths that solar power is not a viable source of energy  in cloudy areas. Wellllll, in cloudy, rainy Seattle a couple just built a home using solar collector tubes to heat their water. It’s so simple an idea you wanna smack yourself in the forehead like a V8 commercial.

The tubes are made of glass that contain parallel rows of smaller glass tubes along which are metal fins. There is no air inside so that the fins do not corrode easily and the tubes last a long time. The fins heat up and in this case in Seattle on a rainy/cloudy day of less than 60 degrees, the heat inside the tube almost doubles to 113 degrees in minutes. The water flowing through these pipes is indeed hot!

The other night there was featured a 7,000 sq. ft. home in a colder state like S. Dakota, Montana, etc. The homeowner used solar panels that cost him $34,000, but provided 90% of the energy to his home even in the winter. The trick is to incline the panels enough so that the snow slides off, the same principle as a roof. In this case a foot of snow slid off the panels in short time after the sun came up.  

The price  of solar panels is not all that staggering, and what a return on investment, as well as a tax write-off. I rounded the $34,000 up to $35,000 and divided by the 7,000 sq. ft. equals $5.00 per sq. ft.

That’s pretty good if a person has a large, large gas/electric bill every month. I do not. So the $7500 investment won’t pay for itself as far as utility savings for me for a long time, but as a resale feature, and with the tax write-off, I might be able to recoup all of that investment at once. There are a lot of different angles to look at. Of course the conservation and environmental issues are always important. To be free of the grid is a very good thing.

This is a very cool channel to watch where we can actually see the opposite of what we thought was the truth. There are all sorts of solutions out there that aren’t that expensive like soft beautiful carpeting made of recycled plastic bottles, that does not stain, and is cheaper. Once you’re done with it, it gets recycled again. I wonder if it would deter fleas too?

Soon to come on this channel, Leonardo DiCaprio will host a series, which will detail the making of a model green community called “Greensburg” I believe. There are, however, community models for solar power somewhere near Southern California that are not only off the grid, but generate excess solar power.

What I can’t figure out is if there are communities baked by the sun that can generate a massive amount of excess power, why can’t we just realign our power source centers in these areas to supply enough power everywhere? Because it seems that of the homes and/or communities I read about as solar powered experiments there is always have an excess of power.  Islands habitats share both an abundance of sun and wind. Islands should be looking to immediately get off the grid via solar and wind power. I know Hawaii has passed legislation requiring all new homes have solar powered water heating systems, and they’ve had wind fields for quite a long time.

Check out the Discovery Home/Plant Green Channel. If you don’t get that subscription channel then goto: http://planetgreen.discovery.com/.

I read an article “More Problems With Plastics” in U.S. News and World Report, May 19, 2008, by Adam Voiland that will be very disturbing to males. It’s about chemicals called phthalates found in plastics. I’ve already reported and insinuated that we’re slowly poisoning ourselves with gender bending bisphenol A (BPA), another additive in plastics. Phthalates are endocrine disruptors, (interferes with hormones) like BPA, whose results are already seen in fish with both male and female reproductive organs, no organs, or a variety of mutations in between. BPA could soon affect birds and mammals, if it hasn’t already done so. Who knows? We’re lied to so much with scientific jargon relating to parts per million, trillion, and so goes the story of phthalates.

It takes me a long time to research scientific reports about industrial toxins because I have to look up every other word and then find out what the baseline is. Then I have to look at the industry that produces it and figure out how they are lying about it. It’s like every time I hear that water and air are so much cleaner than 30 years ago.  I want to scream. Thirty some years ago we were so awfully polluted, and I was here to see it, when beaches were closed not sporadically but regularly. Out of this pollution came the Clean Air and Water Acts where we began to clean up. So of course we’re cleaner than at our all time highest pollution levels. But how much cleaner? If we mean 2 parts per trillion less of any of a myriad of toxins in our air and water than in 1970, we can honestly make that claim, but it’s hardly ideal or healthy now is it?

So here we have an article that talks about birth defects from phthalates especially in male babies. One out of 300 baby boys, (scary numbers here) don’t have a urethra that emerges out of the tip of their penis. It ends up somewhere else underneath, midway down the shaft, or barely out of the scrotum. It’s called hypospadias and studies show that phthalates reproduce it in rodents. The article says, “Phthalates are used widely as softening agents in certain plastics,” PVC mostly, but also pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, and all types of products. 

The article states that in 2005 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention found that “most Americans have traces of hormone-disrupting chemicals in their body.” Another advocacy group found “84 percent of American have at least six different phthalates in their urine.”  Scientists have been studying 3 of the most prevalent hormone disruptors that are also linked to “testicular cancer, reduced sperm quality, diminished penis size, and undescended testicles.” Told you it was a male nightmare.

Of course, and here is the lie, not everyone thinks the effects seen in animals justifies concern. Again, the excuse is that the doses the animals are given are higher than anything in humans. Risk to humans is minimal. Lives are weighed by parts per million/trillion. Nice, real nice. One in 300 babies has hypospadias, but nah, no big risk. That’s why many European countries have banned phthalates in certain toys. America is still in the consideration stage at this point; even though some companies stepped up to the plate and phthalate free products are showing up in stores. Now you know what that means.

I have to take the time here to point out one of my biggest complaints also. What’s the sense of experimenting on animals if someone ultimately uses the same tired excuse that it’s not the same for humans? It is why I am and have been adamantly against animal experimentation for a long time. It is an absolute myth that it is necessary. Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine, NEAVS, and many professionals have been testifying about it for years. We’re in the 21^st century now. There are superior methods. But research animals are a big racket and cheap. Don’t ever lose your cat or dog.

If you’re male and already in your 20’s or 30’s breathing a sigh of relief, think again. Or rather look to your hairline. As a licensed cosmetologist that had my own shop for almost 8 years, I paid close attention to the most successful products for baldness. Baldness is relative to some of the many hormones our body produces. An overabundance of a certain type chokes out the hair follicles. My husband’s father and grandfather on his mother’s side were bald, as were all of his uncles on both sides of the family. My husband is 55 with a full head of hair. Hmmm. Eating freshly cooked meals every night, not drinking tap water for almost 30 years, imbibing minimal pop or junk food, and growing our own fruits and vegetables is starting to really show results. It’s not just a cliché that we are what we eat, drink, and breathe. Believe it!

Michigan’s House and Senate passed the Great Lakes Compact yesterday but it’s still not a done deal. Accompanying legislation about groundwater usage is still unsigned. It’s necessary before the Compact can head to the governor’s office for final approval. The House and Senate are wrangling over how much water can be taken from groundwater, streams, and inland lakes. The House wants to issue permits for users of more than 1 million gallons a day, and the Senate wants the ceiling at 2 million gallons a day. Of course the Senate leans toward business concerns and the House leans toward environmental concerns. Isn’t the whole idea of the compact to conserve our water by keeping it here? And our Senate still insists on excessive use of it?

I say we do away with bottled water all together for a big savings both in water and oil. According to  Environmental Graffiti’s website:

Three gallons of the wet stuff is required to produce one gallon of what you will happily pay a dollar for, largely because of the length and complexity of the various “purification” processes and the evaporation loss that takes place while the water is in the plant. This is quite an ugly statistic, when juxtaposed to the fact that less than one percent of the water on our planet is both accessible and potable.

Besides the extravagant amount of oil used to make the bottles and large volumes of water used in the bottling process, there are of course, several other considerations. Firstly, there are the transport costs - by the time you transport every bottle by rail or truck and keep it cool, you may as well have filled it one-fourth of the way with oil. Let’s also not forget the operating costs of the factories themselves and the profit the bottled water companies have to make for their shareholders. Therefore, purely from an economic standpoint, if you only drink bottled water, you’re a mug.

Beyond that, there is also an environmental impact from production. This in fact, is quite simple to calculate: every ton of PET plastic for the bottles produces 3 tons of carbon–adding 2.5 Million tons of carbon dioxide emissions to the 17 million barrels of oil.

We need to move ahead with this bill and only allow minimal water withdrawal, since we can see by the above the excessive use of water can be eliminated. Get a Pur or Brita water filter for your tap for Pete’s sake! Besides we now know plastic can leach bisphenol A, a hormone disruptor. We don’t want that now do we?

Because Michigan is surrounded by the Great Lakes, being one of the last two states to sign makes us look, well, not very environmentally green. And we are one of the last two because Wisconsin not only passed the Compact today, but it’s headed to Governor Doyle’s office for signature. We should have had this hammered out long ago.

http://www.mlive.com/news/index.ssf/2008/05/michigan_legislature_approves.html

http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/green-living/what-is-cost-of-bottled-water/1129

http://www.biztimes.com/daily/2008/5/15/

Check out this news from the Sierra Club: “Cars That Never Need Gas. Wish you never had to fill up again? Darrell Dickey doesn’t. He drives an electric car that’s charged by photovoltaic panels on the roof of his house. He’s one of three drivers who told us how they got into owning cars that are charged by wind or solar power.  As Dickey puts it, ‘For $45,000 we got a car and fuel for the rest of our lives.’” It covers the electricity on his house too.

Heck I paid more for my premium gas guzzling Cadillac 9 years ago. For anyone who pays a lot of money for their cars, this is a possibility. Throw in the house electric and what a deal! 

Read about other people who are taking the initiative to help themselves while they help the environment.  http://www.sierraclub.org/wecandoit/home/electric_cars.asp.

It’s also the largest landfill redevelopment in the state of Michigan situated over the former Allen Park Clay Mine Landfill. Ford turned this Brownfield project into something green, really green. According to a World-Wire article:

The development not only reuses the landfill property, it preserves more land than it develops. In all, nearly two-thirds of the site will be natural green space, including prairie fields, ponds, trails and a future 43-acre park surrounding one million square feet of shops and restaurants.

Furthermore, the buildings on the site feature the latest in green design and construction. Fairlane Green Phase I is the first multi-tenant retail development to earn gold-level Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification from the U.S. Green Building Council.

Environmental characteristics include high efficiency, CFC-free heating and cooling equipment, white reflective roofing, low-emitting materials, water-efficient plumbing fixtures, recycled and locally sourced building materials, windows and skylights, and a cistern to capture and re-use rain water.

More visible examples of the site’s environmental mission include large prairie fields and extensive native landscaping in parking lots, entryways, along store fronts and up the sides of buildings. Native plants require less irrigation and fertilizer while providing wildlife habitat. Additionally, rock gardens and landscaped swales cleanse and slow the flow of stormwater, which is captured in several large ponds.

Fairlane Green’s wide paved trails wind through prairies, along the ponds and through the mature woods bordering the site. Plans for the 43-acre park are underway and may include sledding, playscapes and nature study.

Read more:

http://world-wire.com/news/0805050001.html

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I read Mitch Albom’s column in the Free Press this past Sunday, and although I agree with him, I think it was well, um, a little bit dated. His perception that environmentalists are a league of people still derided as Chicken Littles is a little off. As long as I’ve been writing this blog, I think maybe I’ve been called a Chicken Little twice. I had one opponent that appeared to be a drinker going off into raves eventually calling me a cur so as to not get axed from the website for calling me something worse. But that was long ago. Another opponent eventually came to terms with the fact that on a lot of levels we are simpatico. We agreed that we do indeed create trash and should be cleaning up after ourselves, whether or not it does or does not contribute to global warming. Isn’t this moment of agreement in the environmental argument all that’s needed? Because cleaning up after ourselves is the first step to realizing just how much garbage we actually create, which should logically lead to more conservation efforts regardless of global warming.

In this light, how the pro-environmental argument is presented seems to make a heck of a lot of difference. Finding common ground brings people to agreement faster, and that’s what seems to be happening. Unlike Albom, I’m seeing a huge surge of environmentalism on TV and the Internet lately. My 85-year old mother pointed it out to me about 2 weeks ago. I paid closer attention after that and she’s right. There are all types of commercials on TV that are telling people to buy in bulk, don’t shampoo their hair every day, you know insidious mantra that eventually gets an entire population moving toward conservation without knowing it. Admit it. We’re herded more times than not and industry with the help of the media is like the rancher.

I blogged about industry moving the green market quite a while back. Industry’s push to go “green” is getting increasingly stronger because they can’t afford high energy costs either. GE can hardly keep up with the demand for its industrial wind turbines. Green rooftops are appearing on city buildings everywhere thanks to newly formed environmental organizations like Green Roofs for Healthy Cities. And just look up companies growing in leaps and bounds like Sun Edison, who provides an affordable way for industry to benefit from rooftop solar panels, that is, if they aren’t already planted green. Retail giant Wal-Mart starting moving to go green, and now companies like SC Johnson are looking to supply those big stores with their “totally” green .products. Even Conoco Philips (Big Oil) threw in the towel, and joined Tyson Chicken to create biofuel from chicken fat at no real profit, just because it’s the right thing to do for the environment. And when moguls like Ted Turner make statements that it’s absolute suicide to continue to pollute and consume the way we do, well, try calling terrible Ted a “CL.”

I’ve lost count of all the home improvement shows that tout “green,” as well as, media outlets like PBS, Discovery, Science, and National Geographic channels that consistently show the latest findings and discoveries regarding the environment and man. I’ve even watched Canadian TV like “The Outsider,” or “The Fifth Estate” air documentaries about U.S. government cover ups of scientific reports relative to global warming. I’m seeing more and more green shows coming out of Canada now. And I can’t say enough for organizations listed as links on my blog like EarthJustice, The Sierra Club, Defenders of Wildlife, Union of Concerned Scientists, and many others that don’t think twice to take on the U.S. Government or anyone else over the environment and wildlife. While we sleep, or go about our usual day, these guys are out on cold oceans, at the edge of public forests, in congress, and everywhere they need to be to stop bad things from happening to our world and everything in it.

But best of all when I see Nancy Pelosi and Newt Gingrich in a commercial urging citizens to contact congress to push ahead to embrace environmentalism, it’s a clear indication that forces are looking to gather against the old energy lobbyists and the spin machine. This was topped off last week when Henry Waxman, Chairman of the Committee for Oversight and Reform, sent a letter to EPA Administrator Johnson, that he need be prepared to testify regarding the recently released Union of Concerned Scientists Report documenting extensive and widespread political interference with the work of scientists at EPA. Yes!!!

Add to that the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling that the EPA should be regulating CO2 emissions from autos as part of the Clean Air Act, and the U.S. Court of Appeals vacating the EPA’s “Clean Air Mercury Rule,” literally throwing out the EPA’s cap and trade system for mercury, and demanding the EPA set new standards for the coal burning industry within two years. Concurrently, it also vacated the EPA’s “Incinerator Rule.” This bodes exceptionally well for the Chicken Little movement.

The timing is uncanny, but unlike Mr. Albom’s perception of environmental efforts, this past Sunday, for the first time in a very long time, I was optimistic about environmentalism, my faith in America restored. After researching the onslaught against our parks, our air, our water, animals, and their habitat for so long by the Bush/Cheney administration, I finally sensed a real, hardy shove back by the other powers that be, which is American industry and ingenuity. They don’t seem to suffer low self-esteem as a “Chicken Little” crowd at all. Had Mitch written about the “CL” complex a year ago I might have wholeheartedly agreed. But now, all I see is the “greening” of America, like it or not. As for “Chicken Little” calling, sticks and stones…

I saw the Mileage Master on GMA last week. It’s an invention by 69-year old Fred Crane. Of course it didn’t go into any explanation how the gizmo works because the patent is still pending. But if you install a Mileage Master (when they are available), you will be able to flip a switch at 35 mph and cut off fuel to half your cylinders. Crane says he gets 42 mpg on his current car, but the one he had before got a whopping 60-mpg.

Crane is feisty. He won’t sell out to the oil companies. He thinks, “They would just throw it away.” He also says that if you get 20 mpg and spend $100 per month, you could lower that bill to $35.00 with his gizmo. This should be on the market sooner than the prototype electric car. Now if a 69 year old man come up with this tinkering around, we have to wonder don’t we?

http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=4464201&page=1

Ian Wright is an entrepreneur that’s out to change the perception of electric cars, that they are slugs or as he called them in a GMA article “golf carts.” Well he’s built a $150,000 prototype that goes 170 mph, and is all electric. It looks like a little racecar. Sharp. But it won’t be a production car for 12 years. But this does go to show that electric cars may be a possibility after all. In everything I read I couldn’t find how they recharge these cars. The first link in the first paragraph also takes you to other prototypes like the T-Zero car.

Read about it and see it: http://www.wrightspeed.com/x1.html.
 

Last week on Good Morning America there was a guy who has been fueling his little diesel car with Chinese oil. What is Chinese oil? It’s the leftover oil from Chinese restaurants. He said the restaurant was only too happy to give the oil away. He put it in a plastic gas container and uses a funnel to put it in his car. He said he probably saved $3,000 last year by not buying gas. So if you have a little diesel car you drive to work, why not? The Welsh do it. The Welsh were using so much vegetable oil in their cars they had to come up with laws to stop it because the country wasn’t getting enough money from gas tax. The big clue? Everytime there was a new delivery of cooking oil to the supermarkets, the shelves were wiped out in hours. Now the Welsh police are allowed to stop a car and look at what it’s running in its tank. 

On that note, I ran across something good from an oil company. While I was researching oil company contributions to alternative energy, I read that Conoco Phillips is working with Tyson foods to use chicken fat for fuel.  Reuters.com has the entire article. The article stated: “Beef, pork and chicken fat from Tyson rendering plants will be processed at ConocoPhillips refineries to create transportation fuel.” They plan in the future to produce about 175 million gallons per year of this biodiesel. Conoco Phillips is already preparing some of their refineries for processing the animal fat. The first one is in Borger, Texas. ConocoPhillips is processing soybean oil as a biodiesel fuel already at its Whitegate refinery in Cork, Ireland. Tyson said “the fats will be processed with hydrocarbon feedstocks to produce a high-quality diesel fuel that meets all federal standards for ultra-low-sulfur diesel.” And unlike ethanol, this fuel can run through pipelines. 

This is good news. These two companies are making good use of leftover pollution, and there is a lot of it in the meatpacking industry. Since Conoco Phillips doesn’t stand to gain or lose from doing this, this is a very generous move.  I just hope finding a way to get rid of rendering material doesn’t cause a spike in eating more meat, or establishing more CAFO’s! There is a humane and ethical side to the treatment of animals that figures in here, not just the environment, or money. Industrialized farming is extremely horrific for animals, totally inhumane, and we end up with sickly meat.

http://www.reuters.com/article/consumerproducts-SP/idUSN1629340720070416?pageNumber=1&virtualBrandChannel=0