Our World and Everything in It

Watched Oprah’s “Green” show tonight, and learned some things I’ll pass along here.  I know it’s a rerun, but hey, I missed it the first time around.  She handed out reusable cloth grocery bags first, reminding everyone that it takes 1000 years for plastic to break down. I know what most of the ladies in the audience were thinking. How are we supposed to get a huge shopping basket of goods into that little bag? It’s only good for small trips. My answer is to look for grocery stores that recycle those bags in bins in the bottle return area. I don’t throw mine out. I swear I can cram 50 plastic bags into one. I’ve got a trunk full for drop off now. Also look for paper recycling drop offs near your home. I reuse big plastic shopping bags to collect and cart my junk mail and any paper for recycling.

Recycle your clothes, your sports equipment, fitness equipment, appliances, yard gear, aluminum foil, and glass, just about everything. Have yard sales and meet your neighbors. My neighborhood has them all the time. Here are some interesting statistics that were on the show relative to recycling and conservation:

We use 10 billion paper bags per year that takes 14 million trees to produce.
We use 380 billion plastic bags. Try bringing your own, and then recycle.
Junk mail uses 100 million trees and 20 billion gals. of water a year.
We ask for 8 billion ATM receipts a year. It is equal to a roll of paper 2 billion ft. long that would wrap around the equator 15 times.
Using 1 less 2-ply napkin a day will save one billion tons of paper waste per year.
It takes 5 liters of water to make the plastic bottle for just one liter of water. Use re-useable bottles and for Pete’s sake get a water tap filter! New Wave Enviro products have personal reusable plastic bottles with built in filters.
Oh and our little obsession with bottled water costs big money, enough to provide the entire world with clean drinking water.

Some brand names that provide really good green products are 7th Generation, Meyers, Method reusable micro-fiber clothes. And Shaklee has been producing all natural cleaning products for years. People rave about a product called H2. Two drops of the natural cleaner in a container of water will clean everything in your house, and it works.

Americanforest.org is a website where you can buy a tree for $1 each and they will plant it. It’s the least we can do considering. And for absolutely stunning cinematography, do not miss “Planet Earth” on the Discovery Channel. I’ve seen some of it. We were given the care of such a beautiful, majestic planet, and pretty much pigged it up. The DVD and book are also available in stores. This DVD could be thought of as an heirloom for future generations to witness. For those of you out there who have pooh, poohed the poor polar bear this is heart-wrenching stuff. A woman said it changed her life when she watched a polar bear swim, and swim, and swim in what is now open water to the point of exhaustion. He finally found land where he dug the hole that would be his grave. He curled up and died.

For more statistics and tips look for The Green Book a Guide to Saving the Planet One Simple Step at a Time by Elizabeth Rogers and Thomas M. Kostigen.

A lot of the info came from Sundance at http://www.sundancechannel.com/thegreen.

Robusta coffee might ring a bell to coffee aficionados out there but I am not one. When I was young I never drank coffee during warm weather. It made me sweat. I would occasionally drink it in the winter but never at my own apartment. I couldn’t afford a coffee pot or the coffee, and I like it with cream or milk, sometimes sweet. That would mean that I would have to stock all of that. Living on my own in the 70’s was just shy of being a pauper. We left home before the age of 30 back then, most of the time we weren’t even 20 yet. Milk, sugar, and coffee were an extravagance to have around.  I relied heavily on vitamins, a can of tuna, a can of cream of mushroom soup, a can of peas, and noodles and you pretty much know what I had there. 

Now I’m past middle age and one would think I need coffee to start up in the morning. Wrong. Turns out I’m naturally hyper…and am sensitive to caffeine. I don’t even drink regular diet Pepsi at night. It has to be caffeine free. But I’ve started to like the taste of coffee since those flavored, fat free creamers came out. I drink decaf just for the taste of java. But recently I ran across some articles that Indonesian tigers, elephants, and rhinos are being threatened by a certain type of coffee called ROBUSTA because it is illegally grown in patches of plantation that invades the perimeter of a particular game park, Bukit Barisan Selatan (BBS) National Park in Sumatra. The park is a reserve that is supposed to protect the habitat of these endangered species. The World Wildlife Federation had a really good article on sun-grown coffee, and another on peopleandplanet.org about this growing problem.

The illegally grown Robusta coffee beans are mixed with legitimate beans and American companies like Nestle, Kraft, and others aren’t prepared to screen all imported beans, so they don’t know what they’ve got.  I learned that traditionally, coffee is grown in the shade under a canopy of trees. These shade coffee plantations have a high biodiversity of birds and animals much like a rainforest.  These shade coffee plantations are being transformed into industrialized sunny plantations with little shade. Without a lot of explanation we can see this will result in a loss of biodiversity for animals that thrive in shade coffee plantations and that their habitat is threatened over coffee. 

And there is a problem with sun grown coffee. It may turn over faster but requires a heck of a lot of fertilizer, care, and water than is required of the slower growing shade coffee. So the Robusta brand is not an environmentally friendly coffee bean using more water than necessary, and causing more fertilizer runoff into fresh water supplies while eliminating the rich green life-sustaining canopy of forest like the traditional coffee everyone was perfectly happy with before.

Do you know what kind of bean you’re drinking? Is this going to be a problem for Starbucks? They have an awful lot of environmentally friendly customers nationwide. Sir Paul debuted his latest CD at Starbucks and we know he’s all about preservation and respect for animals. If Kraft and Nestle are hard put to figure out what they’re importing how would Starbucks know which of their 100’s of combinations of coffee contain beans that are threatening elephants, tigers, and rhinos? And what about Dunkin Donuts, and the thousands of coffee houses everywhere?

I love elephants, tigers and rhinos so when I finish the last of my instant decaf, that’s it for me, Robusta beans or not. If you’re thinking of cutting back, now is the time to do it. Here is a little anecdote about elephants: Science has long stated that the difference between animals and people is the ability to recognize themselves as an individual in a mirror, that most animals think it’s another animal or that their reflection registers nothing at all. Well just last year I watched on GMA an experiment at a sanctuary for elephants. A large mirror was put in a pen. The elephants occasionally looked at themselves but the researchers had no idea if the animal recognized its own particular reflection. That is until someone swiped a patch of paint on one of the elephant’s heads. That elephant looked in the mirror and immediately tried to rub the paint off, and kept checking. I wonder if it was a female elephant? 
http://www.peopleandplanet.net/doc.php?id=2918

http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/where_we_work/asia_pacific/where/singapore/news_publications/index.cfm?uNewsID=91840

It’s really funny to me that scientists from around the world declared global warming to be real and that we are the cause of a lot of it, and people–senators, judges in England, all types, argued and some are still arguing the point, but once again capitalism and the old pocketbook is the catalyst for change in America.

Rising oil prices have industry scrambling to invest in energy saving technology. Wind is taking off so fast, GE, one of the biggest producers of wind turbines, are strapped to keep up with demands. Four billion gallons of ethanol were produced last year. We have 100 ethanol plants already, although I don’t like this trend. Wind good, corn NOT.

The MSNBC article I read stated that it’s no wonder. Industry consumes 1/3 of all energy. Without cutbacks, their profits get squeezed. Since there are some government incentives to invest in alternative energy sources, high oil prices are just the catalyst needed to drive industry into conservation ur umm going green, never mind that without massive change we suffer bad, bad consequences. Fires, floods, tornadoes, no matter, the real motive is profit.

I say, whatever works! I’ve read other articles that predicted the retail and industrial market is what will drive environmentalism forward. Those articles speculated that governmental policy in this administration would not likely be the catalyst, duh. The article also said what I blogged about before, there is more and more capital available for going green.

It’s a very encouraging article about how companies are cutting costs, making changes that are driving the market forward. This is good folks. The more interested industry is, the better the innovation gets, and the lower the cost to us.

Read: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/12040418/.

I know I write this environmental blog but I’m not real savvy with a lot of the new stuff. Although I’ve got step down halogen recessed lights in many places, and I’ve replaced all my lamps with energy saving bulbs, I have still to tackle the photocell/motion detector outdoor lights.

I’ve already discovered you can’t just buy an indoor/outdoor type energy saver and plug it into the carriage lights like on the garage. They have a photocell and no you can’t just screw the energy saver bulb into the photocell. Mine went off like strove lights. The Aurora Borealis doesn’t flicker like that. I’m so glad I chose the carriage lights to fool with first. I had two humdinger floodlight replacements for my motion detector light off the deck. Now that would have been a real disco deck, flickering away.  Of course my neighbor’s yard light went off because I was out there in the dark messing with my lights.

So they all get returned tomorrow and in the meantime I’ve found a good place to look for answers at the url below. I found out I should probably just buy the energy saver lights with a photocell built in for my carriage lights. As for the floods, I’m still searching. I found one that states it is not dimmable. But a review of it by a lady said the bulb worked fine, and she plugged that baby into the same type of motion detector flood light apparatus I have on my deck. I think I’ll keep searching.

I really want the outside bulbs changed over. Take a good look at how much wattage goes on outside at night. That one motion detector flood is great when someone walks up or I go out, but the confounded thing really goes off on a windy night. It’s way too touchy and at 200 watts every time it lights up, well it’s too much. And the stupid carriage lights. They are another 200 watts together. Turn the porch light on and that’s quite a draw. The reason I’m especially concerned about it is because in the summer I controlled a lot of my electricity and practically cut out my gas usage altogether. My bills dropped dramatically. In the winter months I’m stuck using gas or I freeze. My best bet and easiest thing to do is to cut out all the useless electricity. Besides photocell lights are on many hours longer in the winter than summer. My motion detector won’t even trip light until about 10:00 pm in the summer. Ditto for carriage lights.

So the search is on. I may even look for some type of solar lights. I figure I can be happy with the light from the equivalent of 80 watts TOTAL from the new fluorescent lights. Going from 400 watts to the equivalent of 80 is a good start. I know you’re thinking just turn off the carriage lights altogether and I would, except I live in the boonies and there are absolutely no streetlights. When it’s dark, it’s real dark. People have yard lights around here for that reason only it seems we all prefer the sneaky type of light that flash floods you went you step too far into the yard, like a big Gotcha. A snapshot to accompany that moment would be the icing.

http://www.environmentaldefense.org/page.cfm?tagID=634&bulbID=24.

I was watching “Nova” last night on PBS. The theme was solar energy. It was stated that the green movement is progressing through big business. Whole Foods has teamed up with Sun Edison. Sun Edison pays for the installation of solar panels on the flat rooftops of Whole Foods stores. Whole Foods in turn has a contract to buy their energy solely from Sun. This link of capital markets with retailers will be a big thrust for the solar movement. There is also a big movement by small governments to advance into a green future out of frustration with our federal government for not moving forward environmentally.

When you figure all the government owned rooftops available, there are a lot of flat rooftops on which to put solar panels like public school buildings, and municipal buildings, along with retailers that want to join in. There are also some states that offer incentives to homeowners to put up solar panels like paying for a percentage of the cost. All homeowners can deduct solar panels on the income tax. Right now solar panels are still pretty expensive, and they do not conduct enough energy. But like the program “Eco Tech” on the Science Channel showed, there are some pretty extraordinary inventions already happening, like the battery made from viruses. There is also someone who is working on creating solar paint for a houses.

The program also highlighted Kramer Junction in Boron, California. It’s the name of nine solar power-generating plants in the Mojave Desert. The plant utilizes parallel rows of concave mirrors. Much more efficient at collecting and reflecting sunlight for energy, it powers 150,000 homes in the outer LA area. What’s odd about Kramer Junction is that it was created in the 70’s when we had another oil crunch. The only thing about then as compared to now is that the federal government acted quickly back then. Speed limits across America went from 70 mph to 55 mph. There were ethanol pumps at gas stations. Ford already had ethanol cars. People were asked to reduce use of lights around the home. There were virtually no Christmas tree lights for a few years.

Someone on “Nova” remembered that era as a small kid. As an adult, he now has solar panels on his house. He said the same thing that I’ve often thought. If we would have kept to the straight and narrow as far as limiting our energy consumption since the 70’s, maybe we would be in a very different environmental state of affairs now. Imagine all of the inventions that would have come along. And quite possibly we would never have known terrorism. Oil wealth brings power. Besides that, our world would be breathing a whole lot better.

I read an interesting article on World Wire about electric scooters. People are fed up with gas prices and are genuinely concerned about the environment. So scooters are selling like hotcakes all over the country. The number one question potential scooter buyer’s ask: “Will it get me to work and back?” Sure will. They run on pennies compared to dollars per gallon for gas, have 1/10th the impact on the environment, a cheap model can be purchased for $200-$300 dollars, and they are quiet.

Cities are beginning to revise their laws to allow these scooters on the streets. Will we have scooter lanes? Some cities have bike lanes. It’s all very Asian I think. It reminds me of pictures of downtown Saigon. Everybody is on a scooter. Unfortunately, Vietnamese scooters are puffing out CO2, but the picture remains the same. Will people in suits use a scooter? I can see the tie trailing behind now. Will everyone have to wear a helmet? This is all pretty new.

Green is a brand new industry waiting to happen. Scooters sales are a good example of a green market that is taking off because it offers a product that does the job with very little environmental impact, comes in all price ranges, and the savings on gas pays for the scooter in a short time. It’s a good green product that the public will buy when offered the choice. An electric scooter dealer reported over 28% increase in his sales on-line and at his Tampa retail-outlet since 2006.

Tampa retail outlet? New picture here. Senior citizens, I love em to death, but many do not drive well. My new mental picture is of senior drivers on the street at the same time as a bunch of electric scooter commuters. Scooter Commuter has got a ring to it. Anyway this could be a recipe for disaster.

My dear departed father was a moped man in Florida. To me, moped is a scooter with another name. I got him a baseball hat that said “Senior on Wheels.” He had all kinds of mopeds. His hobby was restoring them to run like new. We each had our own when we visited and would tear around in the orange groves on them.

My husband set out with my dad on mopeds. When they got back my husband, hair sticking straight up from the wind and eyes wild, swore he’d never go with my dad again. Why? Because they went along side a highway on the shoulder (illegal), my dad then cut across 3 lanes of traffic to a ramp, while cars were winging buy, and then stood up and waved for Ed to come on; it was all right. Mind you my husband has owned 2 Harleys. On top of that my dad had a heart condition and knew it. He shouldn’t have been out there to begin with. See what I mean about scooters in FLA?

Now that I’ve taken you off the subject, if you are interested in becoming a scooter commuter, or want one for fun, to get around your property, or to buy for your kids (scooters come in sizes) check out this website:

http://www.tm-scooterhaven.com/

Hey, I just remembered. Mary, who writes the HR blog, used to wing to her job at the bank on a scooter way back in the 70’s. It was an old gas bike, but I remember that now. She wore a helmet. I can’t remember if she wore a skirt too. Rotten I should blog this huh? LOL
 

As I write my 84-year-old mother, who is visiting, is occupied at my kitchen counter checking all my ballpoint pens for use. She wanted some Crazy Glue, and in my search through my junk drawer, I decided to pull the neat little organizer tray out of there. By time I stacked what had fallen out of that neat little organizer tray and piled it on top, it no longer had any semblance of an organizer tray. She volunteered (I think she’s bored) to test all the pens. None of them, so far, are dried up. Which leads me to accumulation and what many of us do with it.

I told her that maybe I could give the excess pens to a nursing home, hospital, office, etc., anything but the landfill. She replied “How about a school?” Right, how about a school? We read about underprivileged kids everywhere that don’t have the money to buy school basics. Instead of this massive waste we’re creating on earth by being a “toss and buy new society” why aren’t we doing more recycling everywhere? Do those with nothing demand brand new? I’m using used stuff all over my house and I’m not underprivileged. Sorry, no pride here. If it works, I keep it shined up and use it. My car is 8 years old. I just don’t think people who get free stuff are all that picky. I’m not talking about passing down junk, but…

Take for instance one of my biggest pet peeves, flowers, shrubs, and trees for sale everywhere this time of year. It’s appalling what happens to most of this stuff. Frank’s Nursery is out of business now, but my mom and I saw them throwing 2-3 year old trees, beautiful trees, in the garbage bin. We asked if we could have them. Nope, something about posting losses keeps nurseries like this from giving those trees away. So as a loss, they are a tax write-off. Fine, but so is donating to charity.

Wouldn’t it be nice to know that all those beautiful plants that overflow everywhere, every spring end up in the garden at some nursing home, children’s play yard, and how about those subdivisions I wrote about that look like you could fry an egg on the sidewalks for lack of trees?

We need to realize when we see all this glorious growth every spring and everywhere that most of the time what took much labor, water, earth, nutrients, and as much as 5 years of time to become a substantial tree or shrub is tossed like garbage for the almighty dollar. True the losses qualify as a tax write-off but does it ever occur to anyone that maybe we should cut back on growing too much of this stuff in lieu of saving the labor, water, and earth for other things like restoration of all the forests that are burning or for more farmland for food sources instead. After all, do we really need every food market, hardware store, department store, and even gas stations selling flowers, trees, or shrubs?

 Since I saw those trees hit the garbage bin years ago, the view of all the flower markets overflowing every spring makes me about as sad as seeing all the road-kill. I’ve raised a tree from a twig. Try it sometime and see if you don’t find yourself caring for that particular tree as if it were your child. To see a twig grow to a tall, strong, glorious tree that shades my yard and me against increasingly hotter summers is not much different than raising any other living thing. We need to take notice, appreciate, and nurture all living things to include the plant kingdom. There may come a time where we will no longer be able to grow anything. We’ll miss the green things.

It’s Sunday so I’m preaching. If we read the bible and are befuddled by the meaning, know this, some words like “light” always mean the same thing. Light means knowledge, knowledge of the Word. Well, the word on the street is about global warming evidently. That knowledge or light is turning on everywhere, literally.

 People are buying CFL lights like hotcakes. My husband ran to Home Depot yesterday. As usual it was a madhouse. I forgot to tell him to pick up some more CFL lights. He said they were all picked over. Everyone was buying them. One guy had a basket full. Another was wondering about them. My husband en”light”ened him about all the varieties out there now and told him everyone he works with changed their houses out with the new bulbs. My friends are changing out.

Lowe’s has a good selection too. They have smaller CFL’s, different shapes, 3 way, flood lights, etc. We have to hand it to light bulb manufacturers. They saw the opportunity change brings and jumped on the bandwagon. Three years ago I bought 2 CFL full spectrum lights for my bird for the winter. They cost $20 each! Now I can buy a 4 pack for half. The old bulbs used to flicker and take way too long to actually go on. That’s been fixed. People demanded variety and the bulb manufacturers not only produced, but passed the reduced cost onto us with lower prices.

To finish up my preaching, I hope the wave of light keeps moving and rubs off on big energy. Had they invested in the infrastructure for alternatives like ethanol years ago, (remember the ethanol pumps in the 70’s), we wouldn’t have polluted the earth anywhere near as much. Big energy would still be richer than Roosevelt with the new endeavor, and maybe we would be up to par by now. By that I mean I am grossly disappointed that we are not the Jetsons yet. I so looked forward to that back in the 70’s. I figured we’d be in hovercraft. We could board a mass transit tube of some sort and be shot home. But noooo, we still roll around on rubber, burn fossil fuel, and depend on ourselves to actually steer, accelerate, and brake while the distractions we engage in while driving grow, (cell phones, booming music, On Star). Tell me it’s not so. This cannot be the 21^st century.

So this,  the eve of another 21^st century year, can we please push the big guys to move to the future. Can we shake off the dust of the 1900’s. It will be 2008 by time we have American hybrids that run on hydrogen, ethanol, or electric. We’ll still be rolling around on rubber, driving cars that go way too fast for the speed limits, (what’s the sense?), and that we can’t legitimately drive anyway if we stop for a few beers. I’m for skipping the whole morphing process. It’s too slow, we’re already behind for my taste, and quite frankly if I could crawl into a tube after drinking too much and be shot home safely, great.  Now that would be one heck of a ride. 

Last minute shopping for Christmas? If you have someone concerned about the environment or their energy bills, or bills in general here are some stocking stuffers to give:

• Five CFL light bulbs, (the twisted looking kind), and offer to change them out from regular bulbs.

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  • If every household in America switched just 5 light bulbs to CFL’s it would be the same as taking 100,000 CO2 emitting cars off the road for a year!

• A Pur or Brita water filter for the tap and offer to install it.

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  • Think of sparing the trash dump all those plastic water bottles.

• A set of solar lights for outside and offer to change them out.

• A programmable thermostat and offer to install it.

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  • Dialing down just 2 degrees will spare us 9% of overall CO2 emissions.

• A gift card to Lowe’s or a hardware store.

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  • Urge the recipient to use the card to purchase new furnace filters.

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  • A hot water blanket can spare our air 4-½ % of overall CO2 emissions.

• Finally, only buy Energy Star appliances if you’re in the market.

These stocking stuffers not only save the environment extra abuse, they also save the homeowner money. The solar outdoor lights operate for free. CFL bulbs will lower your electric bill.  They come in 3-way. I even bought a CFL outdoor floodlight to shine on my wreath for the holidays.

The money we spend on bottled water is ridiculous and a waste. I’m talking experience here. I quit drinking tap water over 25 years ago, so I’m ahead of everyone with this clean water thing. I’ve never purchased 8 packs ever. I would buy 2 ½ gallon containers of water with their own spigot. Those jugs were much easier to take to a recycling center. When Pur and Brita came out with a tap filter, I ran to buy one. I’ve used them ever since. The obsession with bottled water is an ironic act. We’re afraid our tap water isn’t safe to drink because of pollution, so we buy non-recyclable bottled water and pollute the ground with plastic instead.

Dialing down the thermostat is a no brainer for savings as are furnace filters. The hot water blanket acts like a cozy cover. It takes less energy to keep that water hot. And if the power goes out, the water stays hot much longer.

Notice I didn’t suggest we simply buy the products but also offer to install them. Many of us know older people or someone who can’t change their light bulbs can’t install a tap filter, or a programmable thermostat. Giving someone a gift is not always a good measure of love or kindness. Buying is easy. We’re a nation of shoppers. Investing time and patience to do something for someone is a better measure of our true feelings. Time is something we never have enough of. To share it is a real act of giving.