60 minutes of darkness

It is that time of the year again. As last year I am asking you all to turn it off! Maybe you want to have a romantic candle light dinner. Or try that new windup flashlight you got from auntie at christmas. Or maybe you just want to make a statement about how much less energy we could all be using. Let us all put out money were our mouths are!

faux palin 3

You know how I asked you to beat the first funi faux palin video I sent out? And how many opportunities have there been since then? I know, you can't count them either. But none of them get remotely close to this one. This is the funniest thing I have seen since Georgieboy said he wanted to help Americans put food on their families. If you just cant stand her, go start at minute 1:18.



Just a reminder:
American population: 3% of world population
American energy consumption: 25% of world consumption

Chinese car mileage: 43 mpg
USA car mileage: As of 2004 27.5 mpg, new rules enacted in 2007 say that by 2025!!! cars need to be at 35 mpg.

Again: China 43 mpg : USA 27.5 mpg.

Funniest thing is Palin's Joe Sixpack (debate) sits at home goes "Yeah man, screw them polluuutin Chinks, and them Arabs too, driving them nice cars while I pay 4 bucks at the pump."

bangladesh or niederlande

Niederlande is what we call Holland in German. It means Low-Lands. When the East Antarctic Ice Sheet melts I don't know what would be worse: to be in Holland or in Bangladesh. Check out the Sea Level Rise Explorer I just picked up from Salon. The darker the color, the bigger a snorkel you will need. Have a look around and see what happens to your favorite shoreline.

You may think that this is slightly sarcastic on my part, to be posting this map, when I live in high and dry Phoenix. However, if you would scroll down my contact list, you would see at least one person in each of the worst spots on the planet, except for Bangladesh. It makes it personal.

I guess the Dutch will just build higher dams. Maybe if they are sweet, they could form a modern East India Company that helps the Bangladeshis, who happen to be east of India, dealing with their low-land issue as well.

On a side note: Do you think that even Google should refrain from making money from some of its content? I find it macabre to be subjected to Global Warming related text adds while looking at the end of the world as we know it. Which happens to be created by too much consumption of too much stuff by too many people.

before i forget

The WB wants your feedback. If you are any good at any of this do give them a holla. We don't want to just be bitching, do we now?

zoellick makes me vomit in my own mouth

Please see my post a little lower. Somehow “I told you so”, just doesn’t say it right. There was hope; as usual it was a false hope, that maybe my future would be considered. Unsurprisingly, the fat cats and the big hats think only of their checkbooks, which I am sure aren’t fat and big enough by any standards. And the bastard Zoellick dares to try disguise it by saying that he just wants to hook up his poor brothers in India with some power. How many solar panels can you buy with four billion dollar? In case you are trying to answer that question; it does not matter, because that would mean decentralized energy production, which is not under the control or part of the profit scheme of Herr Zoelick and his henchmen. Ergo, it won’t happen.

It boggles the mind, to know that locally produced and used renewable power is possible, viable and just bloody smarter, than pumping out four gigawatt of power via burning a lot of coal and shipping it from one end of a country to another. California Edison is about to install 6.5 Million SQF of Solar panels on commercial buildings in Southern California. That power feeds directly into the grid, no need for mile long cables that loose power and cause cancer. What does the World Bank do? Thinking of your welfare is certainly not it. Maybe they need an Austrian at the top, instead of a babyhawk.

Do you know how much water a four gigawatt power station uses? I don’t, but I bet you anything in the world that the fat cat’s cousin is already rubbing his hands together in anticipation of the profits from selling water to poor Indians because the naturally occurring water is sucked up by his cousin’s power station.

Do you know how much CO₂ belches out of the smoke stack of a power plant like that? I don’t, but I am telling my friends to sell their beach front property. It’s a good thing I don’t have any Bangladeshi friends, because I would just have to tell them to go &@%$ themselves, like Zoellick just did, since their whole country is so low that it qualifies as beach front property. Except it ain't a beach you want to be on. They recycle your crappy scrap metal on it. I guess the alternative for them would be to just move on out, get themselves some property on Fifth Avenue, start lobbying their local congressman to build more power stations in India and China, hope that increased entropy in our climate system will not affect us on our fair and far away shores, and wait for Armageddon. Oh, I forget, they don’t have any money. I guess it's back to option one, “You and your children can go &@%$ yourselves!”

“Zoellick, are you familiar with the term Armada Storms?” I know you are not, so JFGI baby!

rannofo

The river Rannofo is in the south of India. Four tributaries pay their nasty tribute to this once mighty giver of life in a great churning mass of chemical processes kicked off by various reactive particles at the more aggressive end of the Periodic Table of Elements. The levels of pollution in the tributaries are not unusual by Indian, Asian or even global standards of water pollution. One of them, the Supar, is a muddy cesspool with the olfactory properties of one of those Yellowstone mud-holes, the ones that smell like a million stink bombs had been thrown into a vast vat of vapors-inducing vapidity by especially ugly redheaded stepchildren. The second one used to be called Viriditas, the Greening Power. Today nobody remembers why it was called Viriditas. It greens no more, and nobody remembers when people started calling it something else. The new name cannot be mentioned in polite company or in front of your mother. The third one is not really a river anymore. It is not a tributary in the natural sense, where water happily springs forth from a meadow in the high Alps, or seeps out of the ground in a swampy sweet smelling marsh with dragonflies buzzing and little birds flying lazy loops in the air. It used to be all that. But now its headwaters are the spouts of a mighty coal burning power station, that produces four Gigawatt of electricity. The financing of which was approved by the World Bank on Monday April 7th, also known as the day that humanity signed its own death warrant. The fourth tributary is on fire more days than not.

Originally, I set out to write this story as a metaphor of hope in the tenacity of humanity and our amazing ability to survive horrible situations. The four tributaries would miraculously clean each other up in this great churning mass of chemical reaction. I wanted to brush the cobwebs of my old mental periodic table, and come up with a process where this becomes reality. But now that I set all the ugly veritas down on paper, I don’t want to anymore. Because if I do, somewhere some idiot will take it as a metaphor, not of destruction and willfulness, but of some magical way that we will by pure chance happen upon, enabling us to pollute the living daylights out of our home planet and happily survive in a clean world anyway. Well, it won’t so I don’t.

Your little future Gandhi of the green movement will not bath in the soothing waters of the Rannofo (orig. ran-more-four => Ranmofo => mama would wash my mouth with soap, so => ran-no-four => Rannofo), and will not discover nature’s wonderful self-cleansing ways, and will not apply his newly found idea of green resistance the world over, and will not save humanity from itself.

Instead he will die of a large amount of chemically induced ailments at a very young age. His parents knowing the reasons for his death, but nevertheless powerless to stop it, will not be able to find recourse from the polluters. The polluters are the whole entire world, and how do you sue something like that? The financiers at the World Bank, the planners of factories, the consumers of products, the drivers of cars and the users of cloth driers. It is one giant tragedy of the commons, and that description has never more hit the last nail in our coffin right on the bloody head.

60 minutes

shoe size?

guilt trip

Because we don't get to see enough of this kind of Data in the USA. Not that we are all necessarily moral human beings, but if you do lay claim to such morality, you better start taking the bus. For more and to learn German go here.

deep economy

Just finished reading Deep Economy by Bill McKibben. Nice read, too much community for my taste, but that’s just me. I am however in the process of talking myself into joining a CSA here in Phoenix, although I will depend on my cooking-fiend roomy to cook up a storm with all the fresh produce I shall get every week (don’t tell him). The basic of premise of the book is to go local, in all manners possible. He says its good for the planet, the taste buds, the wallet and even the soul. That last one I am dubious about. I am just not a big fan of people and meeting more of my neighbors strikes me as really annoying – why do you think I blog if I could just talk to you instead?

Of course food is the prime example, we all know how far that strawberry you are enjoying in midwinter traveled to get to your plate. Do you remember the years, when certain fruit and vegetable simply were not available? I do, although I hated veggies back then, so it didn’t bother me so much. How trippy is it, that now when I go shopping I don’t even know which fruit and veggies are out of season and ergo shouldn’t be bought.

Surprisingly enough, McKibben also mentions power generation as a possible locally produced product. Here in Phoenix solar power is pretty obvious, I am not sure why there isn’t more of it. I don’t think it is possible to get more sun than Phoenix does, and SRP the local power company allows you to net-meter. It doesn’t get any more locally produced then having power coming from your roof. Imagine how happy you will be when prices of power start reflecting the real costs of energy production. Lets say the Democrats win the presidential election, and the President doesn’t get shot, at least not right away. And lets say, for a change, our hopes are audaciously fulfilled and that person actually does what they say they will do. A cap and trade system on carbon dioxide is put in place. Who do you think will pay the additional costs of production? If you are thinking consumer, you are probably right. How cool would it be to have that Solar on your house, instead of paying SRP through your nose so they can pollute your planet even more. If the new prez is really smart he will enable private consumers to buy and sell their CO² emissions as well. You could sell your CO² Permits to SRP because they are still burning that stupid coal and need to offset their emissions with yours. It would make it so much more personal and local, too.

• So you would use less of their dirty power.
• Produce your own emission free power.
  
• Get paid by SRP for feeding power back into the grid.
  
• And get paid for selling them your emissions permits.
  
• Screw the grand kids if I can make money of this.
  

Of course the more efficient thing to do would be to reduce consumption instead of increasing production. Replacing those single pane windows will go a long way, its cheaper than solar as well, but just not as cool! Imagine all the girls you can pick up with “Hey, wanna see my solar panels?” Windows just aren’t sexy like that. “Yup, the panels power my Jacuzzi!”

my new toaster

I bought a toaster the other day. Not a fancy toaster, just a plain old toaster. It cost 7 dollar! How can a toaster that consists of several pounds of raw materials, that needs to be manufactured, and since it is made in China, also shipped over here cost less then a matinée movie ticket?!?

I question this discrepancy. The question obviously leads back to how cheaply things can be produced in China. We in the West, in Europe and the USA love that these things are so cheap, we with our cumbersome regulations and environmental protection rules could never achieve that. Which is why the heavy industry machinery (smelters the size of seven story buildings) in the German Ruhr-Gebiet along the Rhein, have been dormant for some time, and recently and finally have been dismantled. The German Greens love this. The Germans love it because they are so green. They point to the 20 % CO² reduction in their heavy industry and pat themselves on the back. We do the same thing here in the States. We love that our rivers are cleaning up, that Sulfur is not raining from the skies anymore, that those old Cap and Trade systems actually worked. Our smelters have been dismantled as well, and glad we are of it. But where did they go?

Oh, that’s right, 1000 Chinese dudes came to the Ruhr Gebiet, put numbers on all the moving parts, took them apart, stuck them into a bunch of crates, shipped them to China, and put them back together again. Well, aren’t we glad that those smelters aren’t smelting in our backyard anymore? We killed a bunch of birds with one stone here. We helped the Chinese produce cheaper because their second hand capital costs were much lower. We got rid of our pollution. We get to concentrate on the new economy and don't have to worry about the nasty working conditions. We get cheap products. And on top of it all we can blame the demise of the world as we know it on them. We cleaned our act up after all. Look at our lovely record on environmental protection. All we need to do now is get our cars cleaned up and we will be model citizens, the good guys that we always knew we were. It’s those capitalists in communist's coats over there who just insist on belching their crap into the air at ever more alarming rates.

While we are at it maybe we can send them our Pig Farms as well. That way they will get the untreatable staph infections from the little piglets and our mono cultures of food production. We already outsourced manufacturing, why not the rest as well? They can breath that crappy air, infect themselves with the deadly staph, dance in the acid rain, drink the poisonous water, and die of the Bird Flu. We will build a big-ass arcology on top of them, because then we won’t have to build one on top of ourselves. It’s only fair to confine their nasty multitudes and by-products so we don’t have to contain our green pluralist population. Its their fault after all, they are the ones flushing the planet down the toilet.

This is all too Orwellian for you? Never worry, I have just the thing to calm your chittery nerves and their bad attitude: Here, have some Soma.

ideas for your climate

Does this sound like a good idea to distribute the costs of controlling climate change? I do think it sounds quite positive, as it rewards good consumer behavior. I think this is good, because when we institute a cap and trade system the costs will in the end be handed down to the consumer anyway. The car will just be more expensive and we are already paying more for gas than ever before.

Only problem I see is that the next two years are earmarked for negotiating in Bali. And what will result is global NIMBY. I guess if thats where I would be negotiating, I would try to stretch it out as much as I can myself. Its nice there, and before the Climate Change hell breaks loose completely and drowns Bali's treasures I would want to enjoy it as much as I can.

Bugger that the UN tells us we need to arrest the increase of CO2 in seven years otherwise Blue Mars will be an understatement and Armada Storms the norm.

a green life

Most of you who know me are probably tired of listening to me ranting about 7 years this and Armageddon that. I don't do it to make you feel bad or scare you of the future that we will all live in. It comes across like that though, right? You must understand that I come from a family of green party book holders, if there were such a thing. My parents have driven their car less then 1000 KM in each of the last 10 years. Every year they report to me how low their mileage was. You ask how they get around? They ride their bicycles.

So you see, it's not my fault, but neither my achievement, that I urge my friends in my clumsy unconvincing way to green their lives. I simply am a product of my environment. Which puts me on a continuous guilt trip because I feel like I am not green enough. Currently, I am examining how I can put my money where my mouth is in regards to the house that I own. And I discover that there are many sites out there that promote and disseminate these ideas. In fact there is even a green housing standard LEED. I like this site very much, because it puts it into simple terms how I can do a few simple and painless measures that reduce my cost of living and increase my green of living.

At the moment I am deciding if it would be better to put solar on my roof or to get better insulated windows. What do you think? Windows make more sense because before I create more energy I should use less. I also just remembered, the first thing I am going to do is buy a couple of clothes hangers. Maybe I will even throw out my dryer because it is the most energy hungry appliance, because I remember that it never used to bother me hanging my family's clothes up by hand (well not more then other chores), and because drying clothes in the dryer is hard on the material and makes you buy new shirts every three years.

unbeatable logic

So, I admit that I did not try very hard to beat this logic. Check it out and let me know if you can see something wrong with what he is saying.