Our World and Everything in It

I read in the Union of Concerned Scientists newsletter, Volume 10, Number 3, Summer 2008, that the U.S. Senate approved bipartisan legislation in March to improve the effectiveness of the Consumer Product Safety Commission. Good idea after last summer’s tainted spinach, tainted lettuce, beef recalls, and toxic toys went unchecked.

It seems there has been political interference in the work of CPSC employees like statisticians, psychologists, chemists, and engineers. The legislation is meant to keep science independent of political tactics to ensure consumers remain safe. There are whistle blower protections built in to the legislation that extends to other employees of companies regulated by the CPSC. The agency must also accept anonymous complaints via the Internet.

The Union of Concerned Scientists worked with doctor’s and consumer groups to put this Senate Bill together and encouraged scientists to speak up if they have had political interference in the past.

There is a House Bill that addresses the same problems but lacks the whistle blower protections. The idea now is to combine the bills to become the strongest legislation possible.

I’m certainly glad this is happening, but does it occur to anyone that we are now in the habit of writing legislation to keep the Bush administration’s mitts out of most things scientific, that we’ve had to use the supreme court and federal court judges to get the EPA to act on our behalf relative to the environment, and to get the Dept. of the Interior to move on putting polar bears on the endangered list?

If the agencies that are in existence to keep the public, environment, wildlife and habitat, food, and imports safe are being kept from doing their respective jobs by interference from politicians, then instead of doing this round about and creating new legislation, on top of legislation that already exists, wouldn’t it just be easier to get rid of the politicians affecting the problems? Remember to vote for a heck of a lot more than president this November, like voting out of office those that interfere with our safety, the earth’s safety, and wildlife looking to survive in a safe haven. 

Boy, am I slow. I just got around to putting a bunch of e-mail and newsletters together to figure out why wildlife, habitat, and our national parks have been under attack by the Bush administration. Well, at least the how. A group of wealthy hunters that comprise Safari Club International (SCI) are using their funds to permeate congress once again to allow hunting polar bears, and everything else on their exotic big game list of course, whether or not the animals are endangered, and to bring the carcasses back into the U.S. as trophies.

People all over the world are outraged about our treatment of polar bears already by not putting them on the endangered species list much sooner and continued threats to the bear’s environment by oil drills. And these guys want to hunt the bears. Is that not adding insult to injury that we civilized humans just dismiss a beautiful species and hundreds of other equally beautiful species already threatened by global warming as trophies? How utterly superficial. We fight the use of ivory, but condone canned hunts. Do we know what we’re doing half the time?

I read a little about SCI on Wikipedia, and Source Watch and how they direct their lobby money predominantly toward Republicans as their allies in congress. SCI also advertises that they donates money for the preservation of animal species and that they do not advocate canned hunts–except they do it. And they pretty much are interested in the preservation of species so they can hunt the animals they preserve. Got a crippled exotic, put it in a canned hunt. Got too many exotic offspring put them in a canned hunt. Nice, real sporting.

I just read my mail from the Humane Society Legislative Fund about canned hunts. I had no idea that 25 states still advocate them and the trend is growing via lobby money from SCI and others. America is hitting rock bottom on ethics/morals when it comes to money vs. our national parks, animals, and habitat lately. I couldn’t figure out how the wolf slaughter, the buffalo slaughter, the push to put guns in our National Parks and a lot of other abuse was happening with help from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service despite thousands of protests. It seems Dirk Kempthorne, as Secy. of the Interior isn’t the only hunting/gun advocate working too closely with wildlife and habitat.  Director of our U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, Matt Hogan, is the former chief lobbyist for Safari Club International, and another Bush appointee. Figures. Talk about conflict of interest. I thought the EPA was bad!

Considering the plight of all of animals and humans due to global warming, there really should be a moratorium on big game hunting for trophy’s sake. The people in Gana Africa are eating exotics to just stay alive for Pete’s sake. Complain to you senators and reps about canned hunts and lobbyists like SCI.

The Bush administration urged Congress today to lift the 27 year ban on offshore oil drilling. No one is surprised. It probably won’t pass, especially during an election year. I can’t believe McCain endorsed the idea knowing full well the price of gas will not go down for years from any drilling that takes place now. Crist a McCain pick for VP, also changed his tune toward oil. Somebody got greased or rather oiled. One article stated we wouldn’t be touching any of that offshore oil for at least 3 years. So using gas prices as an excuse is a pretty lame. That and the fact that oil companies are sitting on 68 million acres of FEDERAL lands that they’ve already leased and haven’t drilled.

Besides we don’t have enough refineries, and building new is not looking to a future free of fossil fuel. Considering we’ve got whole TV channels dedicated to showing people all the new green innovation out there, how long will it be before we catch on that we’re being lied to about a lot of it? We can get off the fossil-fuel-a-coaster but we need new management.  Think of the environment this election year and put an end to the oilarchy before Mother Nature puts an end to us.

I’m sure people that have lost everything to fires, tornadoes, and floods believe the weather is getting worse and we need to do something about it. President Bush admitted in 2002 that our use of oil and coal do have an impact on the environment. But he still pushes to lift a ban on offshore drilling during a year when the middle of our country is under water, and so many tornadoes have already hit the midsection, while fires rage in N. California.  The common sense here is to have some reverence for Mother Nature before we all end up to our necks in either water, wind, or fire, and without food and fresh water, but we just keep stalling.

http://edition.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/06/18/bush.offshore/?iref=mpstoryview

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=alQzmBT3sqbs&refer=home

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. 

My 85-year-old mother asked me why there aren’t as many stars at night? I told her; to begin with, it has to be a clear night to see a bunch of stars. She said it seems when she was young there were a lot of starry nights. She’s intently watching the skies over Monroe to see if we have any clear nights, and how many stars are visible.

She thinks there aren’t as many clear nights because of pollution. My mother also remarked that some of her friend’s children were down from northern Michigan for a visit and it was quite noticeable to them that our skies are different, not as clear, even in the daytime.

I’m still wondering when the EPA is going to release reports about all types of things in our air, water, and land mass. It’s the same old stall or obstruction used by the Bush Administration against the environment for 8 years. I witnessed the put-off again on the news today when President Bush, during his talks in Britain with Gerald Brown, said that the U.S. would embrace environmentalism when China and India agree to the same pact or “whatever the U.S. does just won’t be affective.”

What a crock. First of all the U.S. only has 300 million citizens compared to both China and India with over one billion citizens each, yet the U.S. holds its own creating one quarter of earth’s total pollution. I think we could make quite a big dent in cleaning up the environment without China and India along for the ride. Has this administration ever heard the term, leading by example? Besides India is making huge strides by using their pollution for methane production to fuel their cooking and lighting needs. Bio Tech India has both a portable and permanent models of residential bio mass digesters. Just feed the digester food scraps and it produces methane gas to burn. Bio Tech India is also working on incorporating human waste into the works. India is already using the cow dung from its sacred cows for methane and energy production. Just think of all the fuel we could get from doggy parks, and litter boxes.

So it’s the same old song and dance from Bush. I really didn’t expect much more from his regime, but then I read an article on ENS website that congress is wondering about the big stall on reports about clean air, water, and land too, and what it’s costing us health wise.  It seems Congress “questioned the health effects of a new White House policy that delays the completion and release of chemical assessments into a public database maintained by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.”

There it is, the purposeful stall from the Bush regime that delays the release of assessments that inevitably affect our health in a bad way, but no doubt help some big polluter down the line. I’m starting to feel like a Polar Bear more and more all the time.

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2008/2008-06-12-093.asp

I can’t pass up reading the Science Daily website. There are so many articles lately about microbes, that they are the real engineers for climate control. As one article stated: “Microbes will continue as climate engineers long after humans have burned that final barrel of oil. Whether they help us to avoid dangerous climate change in the 21^st century or push us even faster towards it depends on just how well we understand them.”

Well it seems science understands them better and better every day and hopes to use the enzymes produced by microbes to break down all sorts of material in a “closed, integrated system that produces edible products, flowers, and biodiesel with little waste.” Sugar cane and hibiscus flowers are key to this closed system.

Scientists plan on using the enzymes from microbes to break down the sugarcane/hibiscus biomass to sugars, and ferment them to ethanol. I have to LOL here because this product is basically the same as that pure grain alcohol that we can get out of the hills of Tennessee, namely WHITE LIGHTENING. Every drink this stuff? I think a person could hallucinate on it. I know the ring from the pint jar it comes in can be lit easily and burns for a while. But I digress.

After the biomass is fermented the carbon dioxide produced during the fermentation is trapped. It’s then fed to micro algae (more microbes) in ponds. Once this micro algae goes to work a type of polymer is produced that could be refined further into jet fuel. The spent micro algae is then harvested and used as fertilizer for the sugar cane and hibiscus flowers again. That’s quite an efficient loop.

I say they get on with this microbe research because the Bush/Cheney regime is about to ruin more of our country than invading enemies would ever do. Right now, Halliburton is ruining parts of Utah, Colorado, and other places in search for natural gas, when methane is right under our nose, get it, methane—nose? Ditto for oil. Halliburton’s trucks are already corroding prehistoric drawings that stretch across the rocks in Nine Mile Canyon.  No one knows or cares because everything is either overshadowed by the economy, Iraq, and the election. Let’s just say the Bush/Cheney administration is having a field day in its final months in office to the detriment of irretrievable artifacts, land, and animals in our national parks and areas around them.  

I would love to see these guys just deflate like a balloon and buzz off into the atmosphere but that would just be adding some really defiled waste into our air.

Remember that what the powers that be tell you about not having enough alternative sources of energy to replace oil and natural gas is a lie. There is probably enough methane alone to blow us sky high. That’s a lot of energy laying around they like us to believe is waste, because it’s cheap and works just as well as natural gas because—it is.

Read more about microbes at Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080604141014.htm. 

We’re hearing a lot lately about drilling for oil. There are people so naive to think that by drilling in the Arctic or anywhere else we will see an instantaneous reduction in prices at the pump. Anyone with any street smarts should know that an instant price reduction like that means that the whole scenario about oil and availability is a fabrication. Some people evidently think that drilling for oil is like sticking a straw in a glass of chocolate milk when in reality the process of extraction is getting tougher and more expensive as the world’s oil supplies get more elusive.

A quote from a National Geographic article from 4 years ago states:

Others think that by curbing our oil use and developing sustainable alternatives now, we can delay the peak and wean ourselves more easily when the inevitable happens. There are many things you can do to ease the transition, says Alfred Cavallo, an energy consultant in Princeton, New Jersey. And you can have a very nice life on a sustainable system. Of course, not everyone is going to be driving SUVs.

 

This was the idea in 2004, yet in 2008, people in the U.S., some of the biggest fossil fuel hogs in the world are still arguing about global warming, and just curtailing the movement to replace fossil fuels with clean alternative energy sources once and for all.  In 2002, George Bush even admitted that global warming is man made and exacerbated by the fossil fuel industry. Yet the argument against environmentalism continues. Think how far ahead we could have been by now, and how many people could have had new employment with progressive companies in green business.

The Bush/Cheney administration has loosed so many environmental laws and/or ignored them that many citizens in many states are experiencing the result of companies like Halliburton devastating the terrain in search of natural gas and/or oil. Think of humans as giant mosquitoes. We’ve bit the earth in search of oil like blood over 500,000 times. The U.S. alone has approx. 500,000 abandoned/operating mines also. We’re abusing the earth plain and simple. Now we want to keep using coal fired plants and forcing the resulting CO2 emissions from them deep into the earth. Forcing gas into the earth has a bad sound to it, and is not an exact science yet. We don’t know what will happen.

When we think of environment we immediately think of air and water, but the earth is taking an awful hit too. Before we even think to drill more, more, more, we need to gage how much fossil fuel we really need, not what we currently, hungrily devour. And in order to do that we need to establish a baseline, which can’t be done until we restrict all extraneous usage and lower speed limits, car pool, change light bulbs, use a clothesline, shut off our techie equipment–you know, the easy stuff. It’s the least we can do.

Until we’ve done our part, we shouldn’t expect poor Mother Earth to keep doing hers to the extreme. Our world is sick and could use some TLC. Conserve first, drill later if at all.

.http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/does_the_us_lack_sufficient_oil_refining.html

http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/ngm/0406/feature5/fulltext.html

If you’ve never heard of or viewed the panorama of Utah’s Red Rock Canyon area, do it. It is absolutely beautiful. I saw a travel channel segment on Zion National Park and want to visit there. It looks like a place of God. Our national parks are a real treasure, but the Bush administration doesn’t have much time left, and is trying for land grabs right out of OUR national parks to drill for oil.

If Bush has his way, oil drills will destroy eleven million acres of national park in Utah’s Red Rock Canyon. I’m hearing about these attempted land grabs happening all over the place. What I want to know is what is the sense? We know we’re short of refineries in the U.S. It’s a well known fact every time the U.S. has an oil crisis, large or small, that right away we want to invade new areas and drill for more oil. But it’s of no use unless it’s refined, and we don’t have enough refineries.

And it’s not likely we’ll be seeing brand new refineries in the future because of global warming. And yes even the Bush/Cheney administration admitted quite a while ago in 2002 that humans do indeed cause global warming. The U.S. EPA submitted a 268-page report to the UN back then admitting to and agreeing with scientists that oil refining, fossil fuel power plants, and car emissions are significant causes of global warming.

It’s 2008. What aren’t they getting? I know what the Bush administration is getting–more neglectful of our rights when they simply try to take over public lands for nothing more than filling the pockets of the rich from oil production. Trashing these beautiful areas of our country will not sit well with a court system that has been standing for the environment in a number of cases so far.

According to an Earthjustice report, just recently another federal court judge ruled that: “After years of court battles, Kane County must halt its illegal efforts to create roadways through Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument and other wilderness areas,” which is in another area of Utah’s Red Rock Canyon. A U.S. District Judge “ordered the county to take down its signs inviting vehicles into areas closed to protect sensitive streams, wildlife habitat, archeological treasures, and wilderness values.”

This is good news but Dirk Kempthorne, Secy. of Interior, needs to hear from us again, even though he and the Bush administration know that attempts to drill in Utah’s Red Rock Canyon is going to meet with some mighty big resistance since this judge’s ruling.

http://action.wilderness.org/campaign/utahm00/xwnke5k44xx5mjj?

http://www.earthjustice.org/news/press/2008/utah-county-must-stop-illegal-seizure-of-rights-of-way.html

Bush admits humans cause global warming: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/2023835.stm

http://www.factcheck.org/askfactcheck/does_the_us_lack_sufficient_oil_refining.html

 I just got a letter from Earthjustice today about the polar bears. It seems that AGAIN the Bush/Cheney administration pulled a fast one with Dirk Kempthorne doing their bidding. They put the polar bears on the endangered list but didn’t provide any real protection for them or their habitat. How convenient for all the oil leaseholders.

There are holes in the judgment for the bears, so that big oil can still feasibly drill in polar bear habitat. You know, like most criminals, if this administration would just take the time to put as much effort in doing something good for our world and everything in it as they do to connive, cheat, steal, and mislead the public to do the exactly the opposite, they would go down in history as one of the better administrations in a time of great global need instead of hitting an all time low.

So according to Earthjustice, (who always catches up with their maneuverings), Representatives Jay Inslee and Maurice Hinchey introduced THE POLAR BEAR SEAS PROTECTION ACT last week to protect polar bear habitats until “essential environmental impact questions are answered and the Dept. of the Interior, [that would be Dirk] clearly designates critical, protected habitats.”

Let Congress know that you want this Act supported, and you want polar bears, their habitat, babies, grandbears, and great grandbears protected. I don’t know about anyone else but I am so sick and tired of chasing down this administration. It is like an evil child, like Damian of “The Omen” that pays little if any attention to ethics, and is manipulative and conniving to the point they just can’t be trusted. When they announce something good for the environment anymore, it looks like I’m not the only one looking around for the real angle.

This act covers some of the holes they’ve purposefully constructed. We’ve got polar bear allies in Congress that just need to hear from us—AGAIN.

Go to Earthjustice to send your message:

 http://action.earthjustice.org/campaign/polarbears_0508

Now that the polar bears made the list, the push is on for global warming legislation. Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, has scheduled the Lieberman-Warner Climate Security Act S2191 for a floor vote in early June.

It looks like another senate vote that requires 60 votes. Currently about 40 senators support the bill, and another 20 are undecided. Environmental Defense Action Fund  “is working to find the votes and to strengthen, protect and pass the bill to put the Senate on record in favor of a strong policy to cap and reduce America’s global warming pollution. But I don’t think this is a strong policy yet. It’s a start.

I’m not the only one that thinks so. I ran into this article on http://www.sunlightfoundation.com/tags/americans_climate_security_act that says Friends of Earth took out ads to oppose this bill. FOE “thinks it does not go far enough and would be a windfall to the fossil fuel and nuclear industries.”

I saw another URL that Greenpeace opposes it also. So I looked the thing over @ http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=110_cong_bills&docid=f:s2191is.txt.pdf.

I found a lot of things right off the bat that were ludicrous like the sections below:

On page 7:  (5) the ingenuity of the people of the United States will allow the United States to become a leader in curbing global warming. Sure, but only if Big Oil and those in its pockets let us do so.

Then page 8 says that the idea is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions substantially enough between 2007 and 2050 to avert the catastrophic impact of global climate change and to accomplish that purpose while preserving (23) robust growth in the United States economy, and (24) avoiding the imposition of hardship on United States citizens.

Right, just like many state energy packages lately that throw the entire burden on consumers in the form of higher rates. Boohoo, multimillion-dollar companies can’t afford to change quickly. What, they couldn’t see this coming for the last 8 years? Heck, there were climate change talks in 1994. I did a blog on companies that just forged ahead with their polluting practices, regardless of a growing global movement for the environment, that in the end would cry they couldn’t afford a fast turnaround. Why should we pay for their lack of foresight? Oh we have to think of the economy. We can’t let big business falter. Well why don’t we do away with the old fat cats and get new environmental industry going? The economy isn’t choosy about what affects its growth.

And finally my favorite part that really disappointed me about this bill is on page 13. It’s the same do-you-think-we’re-stupid list of what constitutes greenhouse gas:

(15) GREENHOUSE GAS.—The term ‘‘greenhouse gas’’ means any of—
       (A) carbon dioxide;
       (B) methane;
       (C) nitrous oxide;
       (D) sulfur hexafluoride;
       (E) a hydrofluorocarbon; or
       (F) a perfluorocarbon

This is the same long tired list that allows the removal of one or two gases while not reducing any of another. As long as the total greenhouse gas emissions of an industry falls within the limits of what that industry is allowed per year, and this sounds really high also, than it’s legal. This is what is wrong with the cap and trade solution, too many gases on the list to choose from. What if all industry decides to go the easy, cheap route and eliminates the same two gases only? For example: A coal burning facility decides to install what is called a scrubber on its plant. Lets say the scrubber collects most of the sulfur emissions and nitrous oxide depending on how it’s configured, and that alone lowers the overall emissions of the plant that’s allowed by law. CO2 just keeps on spouting forth. This is not to say that the sulfur or nitrous oxide is any less dangerous to overall global warming. Actually, it’s worse, but CO2 is the most concentrated in the atmosphere right now, and it’s not being dealt with because that industry concentrates on sulfur or nitrous oxide or hydrofluorocarbon instead.

All in all, it looks to me like the U.S. Court of Appeals did the environment a whole lot more justice than this bill when it vacated the EPA’s Clean Air Mercury Rule and told them cap and trade of mercury is nothing more than moving that pollution around. Amen.