Our World and Everything in It

Ford Motor Company is really reinventing itself. Ford is not just concentrating on delivering cars with greater mpg and lower emissions, but transportation in general for growing population centers.

Ford, in partnership with U of M, has been studying congested cities worldwide, tracking growing populations, and the migrations of these populations in order to offer solutions for metropolitan traffic. Their answer is a network of hubs within big metro cities that suffer the most traffic congestion. According to an article on world-wire:

By 2015, about two-thirds of the world will be living in urban areas, which will exacerbate traffic congestion and present major challenges to basic transportation and personal mobility.

“Ford Urban Mobility Networks” is a pilot program that is exploring how to coordinate a variety of transportation options and provide vital real-time information to individuals living in densely populated urban centers.

The program is the result of Ford’s ongoing collaborations with University of Michigan’s Sustainable Mobility and Accessibility Research and Transformation (SMART) initiative.

Ford’s Urban Mobility Network considers all types of transportation, buses, trains, taxis, car-share fleets, mopeds and bicycles. All or some of these modes of transportation transfer at the hubs. The hub idea looks to me like a way to converge and disperse smaller packs of people all over simultaneously, rather than allowing everyone to herd along in one big jam pile of traffic until individuals peel themselves out of the pack as they near his/her destination.

Well good luck with this one if our populations grow out of control that badly. The article said some 35 cities worldwide would have populations of over 10 million. In honor of George Carlin’s death, and his wonderful truths, I think he would say something like “wouldn’t a better solution be a little abstinence so we don’t have population explosions? I mean if we have to really gear up for all these people that are going to be born, wouldn’t it be a lot easier to forgo that big growth and just maintain for awhile. Afterall, population is something we can control.

And I would add,  if we can’t control our garbage, can’t sustain ourselves comfortably, can’t help ourselves let alone someone else, why are we still procreating like it’s 2,000 years ago?

Before I digress farther, the article is a good read to get a idea of what our transportation future might be: http://world-wire.com/news/0806110002.html.

I love this. Canadian citizens as part of an environmental group called Friends of Canada are suing their country for breech of the Kyoto Treaty. Out of 180 countries that signed the Kyoto Protocol, Canada is the first to be brought to court for neglecting its legal commitment to fight global warming.

Canada’s government is conservative right now and evidently playing to big business polluters. Sounds like the U.S. As the chief exec of Friends of Earth stated: ‘While other industrialized countries actively work to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and fight climate change, our government has offered pollution holidays for emitters for decades to come.’

So Canadians are taking their country to court over the environment. I wonder if they’re going to get specific and if it will affect Canada’s drilling for oil in the Great Lakes? The Friends of Canada exec said: ‘This government has broken the law [] and, as Canadian citizens, we have both a moral and legal imperative to insist on enforcement of our own laws on climate action.’

Geez, I wish Bush would have signed the Kyoto Treaty. He slid away from it with a promise to enforce our own environmental laws. We see what happened there.

This is going to be pretty interesting. It’s setting a precedent for one, and it could force the Canadian government to come up with detailed plans on how they plan to lower their emissions six percent below 1990 levels. This is legally binding but Canada says it cannot meet that goal. It seems to me the more a government monkeys around and stalls on actively and earnestly trying to produce alternative sources for energy the more impossible it is to meet specific goals that will curb catastrophic events down the line.

Mother Nature certainly isn’t going to wait around for us to figure out how to conserve. Look at the floods in corn country. It kinda puts a damper on massive ethanol production. We’re still not getting who is in charge here. The environment trumps just about everything. We absolutely need the cooperation of weather for so many things. Maybe gas prices are high to truck food to us, but without the cooperation of the climate, there simply won’t be any food to truck. There isn’t much we can do about Mother Nature. We can’t shoot missiles at her. We can’t blow her up. We can’t place embargos on her. There isn’t much we can do to Mother Nature except abuse or nurture her. If we decide to nurture, we make our own paradise where we live in harmony with our world and everything in it. Or we can continue the abuse until MN kills us out of self defense.

Read more: http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2008/2008-06-18-02.asp

The floodwaters in the middle of our country may be dangerous. People are lining up for tetanus shots. If you figure this is America’s farm country, then figure there is a lot of animal dung, pesticides, and fertilizer floating around. Oh and some 55 gallon drums labeled, “corrosive,” are in the swill, like the raunchy flood waters needed any help. 

People returning to their flooded out homes are frightened because the smell is a mix of all the above along with the gas slick that appears on top of stagnant water. One man said he could hardly stand it. And another woman who had a gas mask on said she could still smell it. I’d be worried about someone lighting a match!

Water damage is one thing but to not really know what just traveled through everything in your house is a health hazard. That and the millions of mosquitoes that are spawning from all the standing water. I’m looking around to see if anyone is reporting what the water samples turned up.

Meanwhile, read more about this horrible disaster. Pray that the 27 questionable levees along the swelling Mississippi stay in place, and be thankful that we haven’t seen this kind of action here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25198134

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 received an interesting e-mail from a French blogsite, e-citizen.tv, with an article about 16 year-old Canadian high school student, Daniel Burd, who put together the right balance of bacteria to eat plastic bags at a record rate of  42% elimination in just 6 weeks. That’s really close to ½ of a bag in a very short period of time. Plastic can take up to 1000 years to disintegrate.

I read Daniel’s report. Burd’s experiment is on PDF and the link is in the article. He worked with three different bacteria strains that feed on the organic material in the plastic bags. Daniel reasoned that if plastic eventually breaks down then there are bacteria that are able to digest the plastic bags. He was able to isolate the microbes that eat plastic and by mixing strains created bacteria that can really gobble the stuff without creating CO2 in the process.

Powdering landfills with Daniel Burd’s mix could substantially reduce the size of them. All I can ask is why didn’t an adult think to do this? Why didn’t science do this? Makes you wonder doesn’t it? Read about it:

http://www.e-citizen.tv/wordpress/2008/06/11/lang_frsacs-plastiques-genie-environnement-sciences-recherchelang_frlang_enplastic-bags-environement-sciences-research-geniouslang_en/langswitch_lang/en/

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. 

I wrote about riding bikes to save on gas and get in shape before, but the biking business is really taking off now with high gas prices. I participated in a survey by an environmental group that listed all types of things that can help ease global warming and the bicycle was number one by 34 percent. Prophylactics were second at 19%, but I digress.

It seems the bicycling trend is really picking up. There has been a 100 percent rise in cycling since 1985. There are 3.2 million people that bicycle to work at least once a week. Burning one gallon of gas equals 20 lbs. of CO2 released into the atmosphere.  I would guesstimate the average car used to get about 20 mpg. My old car does anyway. If the average distance to work is 5 miles one way, then two days of biking by just one bicyclist to and from work would equal one gallon of gas and save 20 lbs. of CO2 from being released into the atmosphere. One day would save 10 lbs. of CO2 per bicyclist. Never underestimate the power of one. Never say your individual actions don’t account for much, because other people are doing that same action too. 

One bicyclist times 3.2 million bicyclists cycling an average 10 miles round trip for work saves 32 million lbs. of CO2 from entering the atmosphere IN ONE DAY!  The results are pretty staggering, not to mention those American bicyclists are getting in shape at the same time. It’s healthy for the individual, and healthy for the earth.

My husband just said if work was just a little closer he would bike. We used to bike together. It’s unbelievable how far a person can bike quite easily. I know I did plenty of biking in my day. I used to stash my bike in the trunk of my car and drive my car to get serviced. I’d simply take the bike out and ride it home until the car service called to pick up my car. It was about 5 miles one way. 5 miles on a ten speed is a breeze. I think we are just conditioned to catching a ride everywhere, instead of peddling ourselves. We would do it more if we just thought about it. Well, we have to own a bike too.

Read more statistics about biking in America: http://www.solutions-site.org/artman/publish/article_395.shtml.

When we think of greenhouse gases we immediately think of CO2 emissions. But there are others on the list that are far worse and growing at a greater rate. CO2 just stands out because it is the most prevalent and can last in the atmosphere for 100 years or more.

On the Hinkle Charitable Foundation website for the environment there are some pretty interesting facts about global warming presented in a series of reports. Burning fossil fuels for energy is the main source of atmospheric greenhouse gases. We pretty much know that. The third report explained a measurement called the Global Warming Potential (GWP) that includes both a gas’s ability to trap solar heat and how long the gas persists in the atmosphere. I learned there are a lot worse gases than CO2 that are man made like perfluoromethane, an etchant and cleaning agent. It’s presence in the atmosphere is increasing at a much faster rate than CO2.  Not good.

Mother Nature certainly isn’t putting cleaning agents into the atmosphere, or sulfurhexafluoride, another dangerous greenhouse gas used in the electric industry as a dialectric medium for high voltage circuit breakers and other electrical equipment. We produce 8000 tons of this stuff to use every year.

Now get these numbers. If CO2 has a one hundred year GWP of one, and stays in the atmosphere one hundred years, how bad is perfluoromethane with a GWP of five thousand seven hundred, and lasts over fifty thousand years. And sulfurhexafluoride is outright evil with a GWP of twenty two thousand two hundred and stays in the atmosphere three thousand two hundred years.

As usual these gases are measured in parts per thousand. Again our lives are measured in parts per thousand. How many ppts have accumulated in the atmosphere over the years? This stuff never goes away. We’re messing with more than a few generations here.

Read more and look at the charts: http://www.thehcf.org/emaila3.html

Consider a few challenges for the environment: http://www.treehugger.com/files/2007/10/pure_waste_challenge_cfl.php

 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

There was interesting news on BBC World this morning about a study done by scientists in India. The scientists seem to think there is a link between cancer and pesticides. The study centered on farmers in Punjab. The farmers didn’t necessarily suffer a higher rate of cancer as much as a change in DNA that leads to cancer.

Of course a spokesperson for the crop industry trade said that just couldn’t be. They don’t use pesticides enough, and the pesticides in use simply do not cause cancer. The author of the article found that the farmers were indeed spraying all the time, not occasionally.

The scientists were careful to rule out age, alcohol, and smoking as a factor, and still ‘found significant change in the DNA, so the cancer risk is greatly increased when the extent of DNA damage is very high.’

The farmer that claimed he was spraying night and day had cancer already. Yields of new crops have gone down, while population rises. The farmers are doing everything they can to maintain crops until harvest, but it doesn’t look promising for the crops, or the health of an India that is slowly emerging from a third world status, and getting cancer now.

Is it me or does it seem that if the country is poor, it suffers deaths and problems from simple diseases we don’t have? But when a poor country begins moving up in status, using modern methods, bingo, cancer makes an appearance relative to DNA damage.  Hmmmm?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/7407707.stm