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Category: Environment

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By Erich Vieth on November 19th, 2009

U.S. falling far behind on the green race

Robert F. Kennedy recites some startling facts demonstrating that if you want to see how to really invest in one’s economy, you should follow the lead of China, not the United States:

The Chamber has continued to argue, idiotically, that energy efficiency and independence will somehow put America at a competitive disadvantage with the Chinese. Meanwhile, the Chinese have shrewdly and strategically positioned themselves to steal America’s once substantial lead in renewable power. China will soon make us as dependent on Chinese green technology for the next century as we have been on Saudi oil during the last.

While the U.S. is busy using massive amounts of tax dollars to prop up corrupt Wall Street banks, China is weaning itself off of fossil fuels.

Environment • Sustainable Living
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By Erich Vieth on November 19th, 2009

Use nudity when potentially child-killing chemicals don’t garner enough attention

Back in September, Senator Al Franken and Rep. Steve Israel has introduced the “Household Product Labeling Act,” which will enable consumers to determine whether potentially harmful chemicals are present in the household cleaning products they use. Here’s the full text of the Senate version of the Act. Here’s the problem:

In many households across the country, the entire family pitches in on household cleaning chores. The effort is obviously intended to keep everyone healthy by cutting down on germs, bacteria, and mold. But unfortunately, many of the ingredients in commonly used cleaning products may be dangerous themselves. Current law requires that product labels list immediately hazardous ingredients, but there is no labeling requirement for ingredients that may cause harm over time.

Many chemicals contained in household products have been shown to produce harmful health effects. Consumers have a right to know which of these potentially harmful chemicals might be present in their kitchen and bathroom cupboards. This information is particularly important to families with small children, who as we all know have more direct contact with floors and household surfaces. This legislation simply makes that information readily available to consumers, giving them the opportunity to make an informed choice about the chemicals they bring into their homes.

This is an incredibly important bill, because consumers should have a right to know the chemicals to which they are exposing their families (see here for related post). How do you promote a bill when the “mere” sickness and death fail to attract enough attention? A private company called Method decided to shoot this clever (and somewhat provocative) video:

American Culture • Environment • Health • Media • Science
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By Erich Vieth on November 11th, 2009

Peak coal

For those of you who read this shocker that the worldwide oil reserves are dwindling much faster than official reports have been coyly indicating, don’t get too cozy with the concept that we can always move on over to coal. At least that is the opinion of Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute. He claims that cheap coal is running out quickly too, and that we will have hit peak coal by 2025.

There are a lot of good reasons for avoiding coal. It’s a dirty fuel that has spawned dozens of massive ecological disasters, including this one in Tennessee. Another reason to not depend on coal is that there might not be enough of it to consider it to be a long-term solution. And please tell me: why is “conservation” still such a dirty word to so many people out there when it is the cleanest and easiest why to even out energy input and outgo?

Energy • Environment • global warming • snake oil
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More to the peak oil story
By Brynn Jacobs on November 09th, 2009

More to the peak oil story

A few weeks ago, I wrote a post entitled “The Unspoken Reality of ‘Peak Oil’“, in which I tried to convey the scale of the problem we face. “My main motto never changes, the era of low oil prices is over,” said Dr. Fatih Birol who is the Chief Economist for the International Energy Agency (IEA). Now we have even more confirmation that peak oil has arrived. Today, the IEA released their 2009 version of the annual World Energy Outlook, in which they attempt to forecast supply and demand through 2030. And once again, the IEA continues to forecast that there will be plenty of supply, if only we can muster the needed capital investments. Unfortunately, the needed capital investments are enormous:

The capital required to meet projected energy demand through to 2030 in the Reference Scenario is huge, amounting in cumulative terms to $26 trillion (in year-2008 dollars) — equal to $1.1 trillion (or 1.4% of global gross domestic product [GDP]) per year on average. (p.43)

As if that weren’t bad enough, the release of the report has been almost completely overshadowed by yesterday’s Guardian which has alarming allegations from two different whistleblowers within the IEA

Current Events • Featured • Sustainable Living
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By Erich Vieth on November 02nd, 2009

Thinking through global warming

Greg Craven argues that we should “choose columns” rather than “guess rows” when thinking through global climate change:

This lecture seems to amount to a “Pascal’s Wager” of GCC.

Politics • Psychology Cognition • global warming
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Fundamentalism, Fox, and … Scientology?
By Dan Klarmann on October 28th, 2009

Fundamentalism, Fox, and … Scientology?

I was recently chatting with a friend who has been a Scientologist for several decades. He was attacking the White House for its conspiracy with other networks to censor and muzzle Fox News. He later sent me this screed on the Campaign for Liberty blog under the Subject “Fox News is Right”. The CfL is one of the political arms of Scientology. Check out their mission and board if you want. The introduction to the post is (in part, go read it yourself):

Why is America under such a vicious and prolonged [internal] attack against its basic beliefs? Why are some Americans attacking the hand that feeds them? Why tear down a working system? None of the attacks make sense. It is as though we are living in a looking glass world. I am looking backwards and it seems left is right and wrong is right and right is wrong. Politically correct speak replaced plain speak and the silent Christian majority are called domestic terrorists.

Okay, I paused at this point and replied (in part):

Lost me at “silent Christian majority”. An iconic building in every neighborhood, billboards every mile, ads every hour on radio and TV channels not already owned outright by Christian networks, and their creed printed on money and embedded in children’s daily oath to the flag does not fit my definition of “silent”.

I didn’t mention the wholesome Christian activities of blockading health clinics, continuous protests with gory signs on streets and campuses, bombing clinics and shooting doctors.

But the actual point of the article is that the KGB is alive and well and still trying to take over America via a conspiracy with the Psychiatric Industrial Complex. They have (the article claims) powerful mind control methods that are being used on the public.

If so, I asked in reply, how did we ever manage to get rid of CheneyBush?

Today, my friend sent me (among other Scientology political pieces) a YouTube video attacking Obama’s plan to sign the latest international emissions control treaty. It took a while of watching to figure this out, among the doomsayer speech of One World Government, global warming denialism, and the demise of America and such. Many of the positive comments to the video seem to be from garden variety End Days Christians, but the platform is quite visibly Scientology.

The point of all this is, Why are the Scientologists aligning with Fox and Christian Fundamentalists? For recruitment? For political palatability? To hijack a powerful propaganda machine?

Read and listen to what they actually say, and get back to me.

American Culture • Censorship • Civil Rights • Communication • Culture • Current Events • Featured • Law • Networking • Politics • Religion • Science • advertising • global warming • ignorance
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By Erich Vieth on October 05th, 2009

The twelve countries with the highest quality of life

The twelve countries with the highest quality of life do not include the United States. We come in at number 13, which means that we”re not doing badly as a whole. But we’re not doing as well as we should be doing, assuming (as many conservatives insist without reference to any metric) that there is no greater country than the United States. We were beaten in the rankings by many “socialist” countries, such as Norway, Canada, Sweden and France.

The U.N.’s measurement system is the Human Development Index, a complex objective formula, not a subjective determination. Some of the many dozens of factors that go into the HDI include the following:

  • Adult illiteracy rate
  • Asylum seekers by country of asylum
  • Average annual change in consumer price index (%)
  • Children underweight for age (% under age 5)
  • Combined gross enrolment ratio in education (%)
  • Earned income (estimated), ratio of female to male
  • Female adult literacy rate (% aged 15 and above)
  • Female estimated earned income (PPP US$)
  • Female life expectancy at birth (years)
  • GDI rank
  • GDP per capita (PPP US$)
  • Government expenditure on health as a percentage of total government expenditure
  • Government expenditure on health per capita (PPP US$)
  • Healthy life expectancy at birth (years)
  • Human development index value
  • Human poverty index (HPI-1) rank

Consider, also, this recent news from the Commonwealth Fund:

Although the United States now spends $2.4 trillion a year on medical care — vastly more per capita than comparable countries — the nation ranks near the bottom on premature deaths caused by illnesses such as diabetes, epilepsy, stroke, influenza, ulcers and pneumonia

Community • Economy • Environment • Featured • Quality of Life
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By Erich Vieth on September 25th, 2009

Maher: American is the land of get nothing done

Bill Maher is distressed about America’s lack of capacity to do good things and stop doing bad things. Our mechanism for meaningful change is completely broken.

Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can’t make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there’s still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can’t make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress’s climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions… by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where’s the fire? Oh yeah, it’s where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States! We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn’t start until 2016.

What do we need?

a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, “If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense.” So let’s start from scratch.

I find Bill Maher to be especially insightful–he cuts right through the BS over and over. This particular article by Maher was especially well written.

Corruption • Environment • Politics
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To get serious about sustainability, move back to the city.
By Erich Vieth on September 20th, 2009

To get serious about sustainability, move back to the city.

According to Witold Rybczynski (writing in The Atlantic), it’s time to get serious about living sustainably. Currently, we do that by going out to buy the latest and greatest gadgets for saving energy. There’s a much better foundation for accomplishing this goal of living sustainably:

The problem in the sustainability campaign is that a basic truth has been lost, or at least concealed. Rather than trying to change behavior to actually reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. Keep doing what you’re doing, goes the message. Just add a solar panel, a wind turbine, a hybrid engine, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the burbs is still a house in the burbs, and if you have to drive to it, even in a Prius, it’s hardly green.

Instead of putting little Band-Aids on the big problem, Rybczynski argues that we ought to move back to the city. We would save much more energy by prohibiting spread-out low-rise buildings than by pasting solar panels on them. “A reasonably well-built and well insulated multifamily building is inherently more sustainable than a detached house.” He advocates three or four story “walk-ups,” which don’t require elevators. These can create sufficient density “about 50 people per acre, to support public transit, walk ability and other urban amenities.”

Another important approach is to focus on the way we construct our commercial buildings. When we combine residences with commercial and institutional structures, buildings consume 48% of our energy, more than any other sector.

Consumerism • Featured • Sustainable Living
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How’s your water quality?
By Brynn Jacobs on September 16th, 2009

How’s your water quality?

The debate over tap water vs. bottled water will probably go on for quite some time. Many people believe that by purchasing bottled water, they are consuming better quality water than that which comes from the tap. Others argue that the environmental impact of bottled water is massive, and that bottled water is no safer than tap water. A report earlier this year from the Government Accounting Office claims that because public water supplies are regulated by the Safe Water Drinking Act and those regulations are enforced by the EPA, they are therefore safer than bottled water, which is regulated by the FDA– and we all know what a wonderful job the FDA has been doing. But a new investigative report by the New York Times calls this conclusion into question.

In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.

However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.

Campaign Finance Reform • Environment • Featured • Law
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How peak oil affects food and everything else
By Erich Vieth on September 15th, 2009

How peak oil affects food and everything else

Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called “Blind Spot” which

explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as “Peak Oil,” the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.

You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:

  • The U.S. now has more prisoners than farmers.
  • Corn ethanol is energy negative (making it uses more energy than burning it).
  • It takes 30 calories of energy to bring one calorie of lettuce from California to the average plate.
  • The average item of food travels 1,500 hundred miles to your plate.
  • The concept of peak oil (essentially, that we are running out of cheap oil), is still ignored or rejected by most businesses, governments and individuals.

See the related posts for more information on peak oil, as well as here and here.

Economy • Energy • Environment
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A big suburban shopping mall is dying, yet I’m not shedding any tears
By Erich Vieth on September 12th, 2009

A big suburban shopping mall is dying, yet I’m not shedding any tears

Today I took my two daughters to a movie. The theater was located in a large suburban shopping mall in Southwest St. Louis County, “Crestwood Plaza.” I had not been to this mall for several years, and I was shocked at what I saw. Approximately 40% of the stores have been shuttered and the entire place was like a ghost town. A lonely security guard told me that the stores have been rapidly failing over the past two years. That comports with my recollection. Two years ago, this mall was a packed and thriving shopping area located in a solidly middle-class community. Crestwood Plaza is not an isolated story; shopping malls are failing all across America.

[I've posted a gallery of today's images many of these shuttered stores along with this post. If you don't see that gallery, click the title to this post to go to the permalink, where you will see those thumbnails.]

I sometimes get snarkish when someone tells me they’re going to a shopping mall. I sometimes ask the Intrepid shopper to do me a favor and buy something practical for me, “Could you please buy me a hammer.” I usually get the same reaction, a puzzled look accompanied by a response “They don’t sell practical things like hammers at shopping malls.” Now I’m not denying that malls sell clothes or that we need clothes. Most mall clothes are for far more than staying warm or covering up. They are much more often than not, for impressing others.

For that reason, I’m not shedding tears for the shattering of dozens of mall stores at Crestwood Plaza or anywhere else. The failure of most of the stores means that we won’t be buying things we don’t actually need. Because Hallmark no longer sells its commercial greeting cards, we might be “forced” to create and send our own personalized cards and letters to each other. Now that Libby Lu gone, our pre-teen daughters can get back to being children rather than obsessing about their sex appeal. In my mind, many of these store closings are mostly good things, although I am saddened by the thought that so many people have lost their jobs due to these shutdowns. See these terrific videos by Josh Golin of CCFC regarding the dangers of turning our children into rampant consumers.

Another silver lining is that the mall owners have been forced to do something different with their space in order to survive (assuming they do survive). What they’ve done at Crestwood Plaza is to lease out many of the “store” spaces to art galleries, educational facilities, community theaters and other arts and crafts workshops for children and adults. In other words, it appears that the mall owners are opening up their malls for people who want to develop their minds and skill-sets rather than simply their pocketbooks.

American Culture • Communication • Community • Consumerism • Environment • Evolution • Featured • Meaning of Life • Psychology Cognition • Science
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By Erich Vieth on August 29th, 2009

500 ways to save energy around the house

Would you like to save energy around your house. This is the most comprehensive list I’ve seen. I found this link on the site of Rocky Mountain Institute, and the list is cross-categorized in several helpful ways.

BTW, have you seen a gradual shift in the media coverage regarding “peak oil“? Though this term (”peak oil”) is still avoided, I’ve seen many articles and many sources that are now acknowledging that we are in the twilight of the age of oil. Yet go back 5 years, and the thought that we were running out of reasonably priced oil in our lifetimes was mostly scoffed at. I think we have entered the age of resignation, without any official announcement.

“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win” — Mahatma Ghandi.

Energy • Environment
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