Environment

Here's how I see it. We are responsible for our actions. That's the basic idea. The debate shouldn't be about whether we are really causing as much change to the environment as we are told. It shouldn't be whether the price of oil goes up or down, it shouldn't be about how many resources we can use up.

Simply, we live on a finite world. One planet per customer. In this case the customer is every living thing on that planet, a single organism of sorts. We are living in a single cell of the universe and we are doing whatever it is we are doing. It doesn't matter if we keep going as we are and kill ourselves off. It won't kill everything. The Earth will remain and other forms of life will adapt. We just won't get to enjoy it.

In every single other field we are advancing and throwing out old ideas for the new ones. The important part there is "throwing out". We almost never do things the hard way that can be done more easily. Not as a normal way of life anyway, exceptions always will exist, that's not the point. More to the point, in technology when we advance, we do so in a forward direction. Nobody goes out and buys a commodore 64 now. Even if they could find one, they wouldn't. So why are we still using basically the same technologies for our energy production that we've always used?

We have the technology to move beyond it. We can easily advance that technology like everything else IF we start using it on a grand scale like we have done with the internal combustion engine. Heck with the exception of solar, wind and hydro, or other similar systems all of our primary energy is still coming from various ways of superheating water to power steam turbines. That's not a bad way to produce power, don't get me wrong, but it isn't terribly efficient compared to the other possibilities out there. Mainly energies that don't consume fuel at all. Instead, we for some reason, measure efficiency in the cost of the fuel or the cost of the energy system for a small time frame. Solar may only be 25% efficient on a good day, but the cost per KWh shouldn't be factored by what can be gained in the short term. Take the cost of the panels, buy that much coal and see how much power you get from just that amount of coal, plus the cost of the power plant and compare that to the power you can get from the entire life of a solar cell. I would guess that efficiency reports would change directions given a bit of time after the coal burned away.

There's a lot of talk currently about nuclear power again. It's getting a lot of press because new more efficient ways of burning the radioactive fuel are being developed. Even the new super efficient nuclear power plants claim to burn only about 10-15% of the fuel. The rest has to be buried very deep underground. All that and it still boils down to heating water to the boiling point to power a steam turbine.

Just to put things in perspective, I wonder how much power could be produced by paying people minimum wage for a year to pedal bike generators on 8 hour rotating shifts with a government subsidized budget of a few billion a year. Seems like an instant solution to unemployment. Sure they would burn fuel too, but the human body is a lot more efficient than 10-15% of our fuel intake. Plus we get healthier and healthier the more we work, up to our physical limits, then we need a nap.

Why is it so difficult to let go of that old system while we find it so easy to let go of so many other things when improvements are found? I think it's a matter of scale. We have huge centralized power distribution systems in this country and they are hard to shut down. We could however take a hint from our European neighbors and start building small single block or even just single city power plants using renewable systems to augment the central power grid. As soon as we have enough redundant systems and every city has its own we can turn off the coal fires. We can stop mining uranium. We can live lives of quality instead of living the lives of dying smokers, groping in the air for a bit of untainted oxygen.

Ok, admittedly most of what I'm doing falls into the category of "in the works", but it's a start and every start has to start somewhere.

1. I've planted bamboo. Not very impressed are you? Well here's some stats for ya. I have 65 acres to be inherited at some future time. I'm starting to work on it now in preparation. Bamboo recovers 7 times more CO2 than trees by weight. I've planted Moso bamboo which is the largest variety on average and well suited for my climate zone. One culm can weigh 800lbs. Hundreds of culms can get to that size in one season. So 7x the carbon capture and like 1000x the growth rate. I think that will greatly offset my carbon footprint and the rest of my family's forever.

2. There's more. I recycle like a madman. I work construction. I pick up all that scrap that plumbers and electricians don't bend over to get themselves. I recycle the beer cans from the guys who drink after work. I recycle a lot of the wood too when I have a project I want to do. I take home the extra cabinets that were changed after being built. I may sell them, I may put them in my own house. I am running out of room now so I usually sell them hehe. I'm also a blacksmith. Any piece of decent steel is a new project. Even tiny pieces can be forge welded together to make a new piece of high dollar damascus pattern welded knife blade material. I even take home sawdust from work and till it into my garden or compost it at the shop or at home. I hate seeing things go to waste if I can do something about it.

3. I buy organic or sustainably produced whenever I can. I'm not rich so this isn't an obsessive thing for me. Organic is as you know, expensive.

4. I use the cloth bags my local grocery sells to offset their cost for plastic bags.

5. I compost... everything. I'm a vegetarian so just about everything I don't eat I feed to worms or dogs. Junk mail, extra phone books, bills, cardboard. All that stuff is worm food.

6. Oh yeah, back to the in the works stuff. That 65 acres I mentioned has dreams of becoming an eco-village. I know it does. I can hear it calling to me.