Bookworm

Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up - NYTimes.com

Back at Junk Value, Recyclables Are Piling Up - NYTimes.com.

"The economic downturn has decimated the market for recycled materials like cardboard, plastic, newspaper and metals. Across the country, this junk is accumulating by the ton in the yards and warehouses of recycling contractors, which are unable to find buyers or are unwilling to sell at rock-bottom prices. Ordinarily the material would be turned into products like car parts, book covers and boxes for electronics. But with the slump in the scrap market, a trickle is starting to head for landfills instead of a second life."

Thomas Friedman: 9/11 and 4/11

"When a person is addicted to crack cocaine, his problem is not that the price of crack is going up. His problem is what that crack addiction is doing to his whole body. The cure is not cheaper crack, which would only perpetuate the addiction and all the problems it is creating. The cure is to break the addiction. Ditto for us. Our cure is not cheaper gasoline, but a clean energy system. And the key to building that is to keep the price of gasoline and coal — our crack — higher, not lower, so consumers are moved to break their addiction to these dirty fuels and inventors are moved to create clean alternatives. . . If you want to know what an alternative strategy might look like, read the speech that Al Gore delivered on Thursday to the bipartisan Alliance for Climate Protection. Gore, the alliance’s chairman, called for a 10-year plan — the same amount of time John F. Kennedy set for getting us to the moon — to shift the entire country to “renewable energy and truly clean, carbon-free sources” to power our homes, factories and even transportation. Mr. Gore proposed dramatically improving our national electricity grid and energy efficiency, while investing massively in clean solar, wind, geothermal and carbon-sequestered coal technologies that we know can work but just need to scale. To make the shift, he called for taxing carbon and offsetting that by reducing payroll taxes: Let’s “tax what we burn, not what we earn,” he said. Whether you agree or not with Gore’s plan, at least he has a plan for dealing with the real problem we face — a multifaceted, multigenerational energy/environment/geopolitical problem."  [Op-Ed Columnist - 9/11 and 4/11 - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com.]

Yet again, it does make you wonder what would have happened if Al Gore had been elected President by the American People the Supreme Court in 2000.  I'm obviously still of the opinion that that a smart science-minded guy without familial ties to the oil industry would've been the better choice.

On the other hand, by not becoming President, Gore has been able to focus on critically important issues in a way our Chief Executive would not be able to do.

And while I agree with Friedman's take on this, for the most part, the consumer can't just "decide" to stop on a dime and stop using fossil fuels.  If the government really wants a quick turn-around on this, we're going to need help changing the heating systems in our houses.  There would have to be a multi-year phaseout of the use of heating oil -- and assistance for people who couldn't afford to switch out their current heating system.  If you want people to use public transportation and/or drive hybrids, there would probably have to be some public monies to help support new and existing public transportation initiatives.  There are large swaths of this country where it's too sparsely populated to support adequate public transportation.  There would have to be an adequate supply of hybrids to buy and charging stations along the interstates.  (Note: I'm not 100% sure how hybrids work!  Think they only go so far on a charge or something?  Or is that just completely electric cars?)

Updated 7/22/2008:  Oh, and the public transportation already in existence will have to be better than described here.

Wyoming

"Wyoming is under assault here, Ms. Fuller said, standing on a road buffeted by the infamous high plains wind. She believes people are being used by the energy industry. In the past several years, dozens of workers have died on the rigs around the West.

“Throwing warm beating hearts at a failed energy policy is a tragedy, whether it’s the war or the oil fields,” Ms. Fuller said. “The jobs are a good thing. But going after it so frantically and doing so much damage is wrong.”

“I travel between these worlds. I couldn’t leave the oil field behind when I came home to Teton County,” she said. It has been hard, Ms. Fuller allows, to tell her friends about the other Wyoming. “I can’t talk about my childhood, I can’t talk about the war, and its hard to talk about what’s going on in the oil field. That’s why I wrote the book.”

. . .“Rather than write in the rhetoric of conflict, she’s chosen to tell a story of one young man,” said Terry Tempest Williams, a neighbor of Ms. Fuller in Wilson, who has long written about the West. “That’s much more powerful because it touches our humanity.”

It is critical, Ms. Fuller said, that people know who to blame. “Teton County has a huge carbon footprint with heated driveways, roofs and huge houses heated all winter long with no one in them,” she said. “I don’t see this as something the roughnecks or the oil companies or the administration alone is doing. It’s something we’re all doing.”

~ Jim Robbins, in the New York Times

Short-Sighted Leadership?

"It is great to see that we finally have some national unity on energy policy. Unfortunately, the unifying idea is so ridiculous, so unworthy of the people aspiring to lead our nation, it takes your breath away. Hillary Clinton has decided to line up with John McCain in pushing to suspend the federal excise tax on gasoline, 18.4 cents a gallon, for this summer’s travel season. This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. . .

But here’s what’s scary: our problem is so much worse than you think. We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite."

~ Thomas Friedman, New York Times

Gore Shares Peace Prize for Climate Change Work

"Former Vice President Al Gore, who emerged from his loss in the muddled 2000 presidential election to devote himself to his passion as an environmental crusader, was awarded the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, sharing it with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations network of scientists." [NY Times]

Who Will Succeed Al Gore?

"In sum, Al Gore has been justly honored for highlighting — like no one else — the climate challenge. But we still need a vision, a strategy, an army and a commander in the White House who can inspire young and old — not only to meet that challenge but to see in it the opportunity to make America a better, stronger and more productive nation. This is our crucible moment." [Who Will Succeed Al Gore?]

Gore Derangement Syndrome

"The worst thing about Mr. Gore, from the conservative point of view, is that he keeps being right. In 1992, George H. W. Bush mocked him as the “ozone man,” but three years later the scientists who discovered the threat to the ozone layer won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. In 2002 he warned that if we invaded Iraq, “the resulting chaos could easily pose a far greater danger to the United States than we presently face from Saddam.” And so it has proved.

But Gore hatred is more than personal. When National Review decided to name its anti-environmental blog Planet Gore, it was trying to discredit the message as well as the messenger. For the truth Mr. Gore has been telling about how human activities are changing the climate isn’t just inconvenient. For conservatives, it’s deeply threatening." [NY Times]

Leafy Green Sewage

"Farmers and food safety officials still have much to figure out about the recent spate of E. coli infections linked to raw spinach. . . this epidemic, which has infected more than 100 people and resulted in at least one death, probably has little do with the folks who grow and package your greens. . . [T]he villain in this outbreak, E. coli O157:H7, is far scarier [than more common strains], at least for humans. Your stomach juices are not strong enough to kill this acid-loving bacterium, which is why it’s more likely than other members of the E. coli family to produce abdominal cramps, diarrhea, fever and, in rare cases, fatal kidney failure.  Where does this particularly virulent strain come from? . . . O157 thrives in a new — that is, recent in the history of animal diets — biological niche: the unnaturally acidic stomachs of beef and dairy cattle fed on grain, the typical ration on most industrial farms. It’s the infected manure from these grain-fed cattle that contaminates the groundwater and spreads the bacteria to produce, like spinach, growing on neighboring farms.  . . [In an experiment,] when cows were switched from a grain diet to hay for only five days, O157 declined 1,000-fold.  This is good news. In a week, we could choke O157 from its favorite home — even if beef cattle were switched to a forage diet just seven days before slaughter, it would greatly reduce cross-contamination by manure of, say, hamburger in meat-packing plants.  . . The United States Department of Agriculture does recognize the threat from these huge lagoons of waste, and so pays 75 percent of the cost for a confinement cattle farmer to make manure pits watertight, either by lining them with concrete or building them above ground. But taxpayers are financing a policy that only treats the symptom, not the disease, and at great expense. There remains only one long-term remedy, and it’s still the simplest one: stop feeding grain to cattle. . . [T]housands of acres of other produce are still downstream from these lakes of E. coli-ridden cattle manure." [NY Times; emphasis mine]

I don't eat a lot of spinach, but I had a bag of baby spinach in my refrigerator when this story broke and, even though it was probably fine, I'm very grateful I didn't eat it or feed it to my family.

Environmentally Aware?

30 questions to elevate your awareness (and literacy) of the greater place in which you live:

1) Point north.
2) What time is sunset today?
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
Click to the originating blog to see all thirty questions, along with recommendations of places/ways to answer the ones you don't know: [ Kevin Kelly -- Help Wanted]

Bush does something good

"President Bush on Thursday created the world's largest marine protected area — a group of remote Hawaiian islands that cover 84 million acres and are home to 7,000 species of birds, fish and marine mammals, at least a quarter of which are unique to Hawaii.

At a White House ceremony, the president designated the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands the United States’ 75th national monument. The islands have been described as “America’s Galapagos” and as the most intact tropical marine region under U.S. jurisdiction.

“To put this area in context, this national monument is more than 100 times larger than Yosemite National Park,” Bush said. “It’s larger than 46 of our 50 states, and more than seven times larger than all our national marine sanctuaries combined. This is a big deal.”

Bush said he drew inspiration from a documentary on the island chain’s biological resources shown at the White House in April by Jean-Michel Cousteau, the marine explorer and filmmaker whose father was the late Jacques Cousteau." [MSNBC.com]