Doing what is right is not always easy. I am not talking about any moral debates over the good of the many outweighing the good of the one no matter whether the argument is attributed to John Stewart Mill or to Mister Spock. Sometimes it is just hard to know what is right.
One quick example of this is the compact fluorescent light bulb. We all know that we are supposed to use them because they are good for the environment. There is a commercial that plays quite often. I do not know what there are advertising but there is a happy smiling woman who tells us that doing something simple like changing a light bulb gives us a feeling of empowerment over our lives. I changed my own light bulbs over to the fluorescent kind two years ago. The problem is – when these bulbs die and we throw them away, they are full of toxic mercury. Suddenly they are very bad for the environment.
A bigger and more pressing issue is ethanol. It is a popularly accepted belief that ethanol is good for the environment. I believe that it is true that corn burns cleaner than oil. However, corn burns a lot less efficiently than oil. You use more ethanol fuel to go somewhere than you do oil. It also takes more energy to turn corn into fuel than it does to turn oil into fuel. Ethanol is also corrosive. Fuel made from oil can be pumped through a pipeline. Ethanol would eat through the pipeline so it needs to be trucked to where it’s going. To burn a gallon of ethanol turns out more pollution than a gallon of oil based fuel.
This is not to say that there is no place for ethanol within the whole. Even with all of the new oil being pumped out of the ground, it is not going to be here forever. I remember the predictions that it would be gone by 1990. While that was wrong, it is true that is a finite resource that everyone wants and this takes power and control away from us (the users) and gives it to people who have radically different feelings about life and death (the producers). We need to find better ways to make ethanol and better ways to use it.
The biggest problem with ethanol is that it reduces the food supply. I have to give credit to Fidel Castro, he had this right. Because the industrialized world is concerned with how much we need to spend to fill our gas tanks, food is being removed from the third world. A sizable chunk of the world population spends seventy-five percent or more of their assets on food. Any increase in food prices is devastating to them. We are beginning to see food riots in places like Egypt and the Philippines. The famines in Africa look to be the worst they have been in generations.
Back here in the states, we are seeing price increases that dwarf what happens at the pump. Whether we are shopping in the cereal aisle or ordering a thick crust pizza, the price is going up because the food supply is being tampered with. Anything with corn or wheat or flour in it is affected. Over the last few decades, we have seen the phenomenon of low cost food being less healthy than more expensive food and low cost food is loaded with corn syrup and corn starch.
Ethanol is a quick fix that we can do so that we feel better about ourselves, but the reality is that it causes pollution and drives millions to starvation. We were better served to find ways to replace petroleum wherever possible.
Sunday, April 20, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
080413 Atop Trash Mountain
There was a time when Albany, New York appeared to be cutting edge in taking a forward thinking approach to waste removal. Remarkably bad planning and thirty years worth of surrender to the status quo have brought the city the edge of ecological and financial catastrophe. In the depths of the nightmare that was the Carter years and with energy crisis of the seventies still in the news, Albany came up with the ANSWERs plant. Its purpose was to take the solid waste from the cities of Albany, Cohoes, Rensselaer, and Watervliet, the towns of Berne, Bethlehem, Guilderland, Knox, New Scotland (including the Village of Voorheesville) and Westerlo and the villages of Green Island and Altamont. It would then cleanly incinerate the waste and produce energy to power the expansive Empire State Plaza.
To place the plant close to the state offices and to keep real estate costs down, the plant was sited in the poorest neighborhood in the city inhabited almost exclusively by a minority population. Then, rather than use the newest technology, expenses were saved by using older incineration techniques. This of course resulted in a polluting, possibly cancer causing burning facility sitting amid the housing for the region’s most disadvantaged. There was, of course, a public outcry – and rightly so. The plant was doomed to a relatively short life.
West of the city lies the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. It is, I believe, the last pristine inland pine barrens in the world. Adjacent to this ecological treasure is the Rapp Road Landfill which the city has operated since 1969. With the closing of the incinerator, ANSWERs went into the landfill business in a big way. The Rapp Road Landfill has expanded and grown in every direction including up. Now operating under the name “The Capital Region Solid Waste Management Partnership”, it covers two hundred and fifty –five acres and takes in approximately one thousand fifty tons of garbage a day. That is two million one hundred thousand pounds of garbage or seven hundred sixty-six million, five hundred thousand pounds a year. Albany is only a small city.
The Rapp Road Landfill has run out of ways to expand. Sometime next year it will be full. ANSWERs has come up with proposals to try and maintain its existence. These have met lawsuits. The fact of the matter is, the city needs to rethink its position on what to do with garbage. The city, however, is addicted. The government is addicted to the cash the landfill generates. The people are addicted to living in a disposable world.
The result of living in a society which creates so much trash is obvious by taking a walk though the pine barrens and veering off of the approved trails. Over the hill, plastic shopping bags fly from every branch of each of the scrub pines like flags to Wal-Mart and target. The ground is buried in waste. The landfill itself is a towering mountain dwarfing everything around it and it fails to contain so much of what is carted in.
As a people, we need to look at the type of lifestyle we lead that creates so much trash. Do we really need to pre-slice fake processed cheese and individually wrap each of the slices? Not to tip my hand, but that is the stuff of another blog.
The power needs that Albany has have done nothing but increase. The energy that this mountain of trash could generate is needed more than ever. If built properly, an incinerator need not be a polluter. It can certainly create less pollution than the coal plants that currently generate the power bring about. It is time to uncover the mountain and shovel the rotting trash into the fires of industry, or use it to power my laptop. After threatening the Pine Bush for the last twenty years, it’s time its land was reclaimed and made part of the preserve.
To place the plant close to the state offices and to keep real estate costs down, the plant was sited in the poorest neighborhood in the city inhabited almost exclusively by a minority population. Then, rather than use the newest technology, expenses were saved by using older incineration techniques. This of course resulted in a polluting, possibly cancer causing burning facility sitting amid the housing for the region’s most disadvantaged. There was, of course, a public outcry – and rightly so. The plant was doomed to a relatively short life.
West of the city lies the Albany Pine Bush Preserve. It is, I believe, the last pristine inland pine barrens in the world. Adjacent to this ecological treasure is the Rapp Road Landfill which the city has operated since 1969. With the closing of the incinerator, ANSWERs went into the landfill business in a big way. The Rapp Road Landfill has expanded and grown in every direction including up. Now operating under the name “The Capital Region Solid Waste Management Partnership”, it covers two hundred and fifty –five acres and takes in approximately one thousand fifty tons of garbage a day. That is two million one hundred thousand pounds of garbage or seven hundred sixty-six million, five hundred thousand pounds a year. Albany is only a small city.
The Rapp Road Landfill has run out of ways to expand. Sometime next year it will be full. ANSWERs has come up with proposals to try and maintain its existence. These have met lawsuits. The fact of the matter is, the city needs to rethink its position on what to do with garbage. The city, however, is addicted. The government is addicted to the cash the landfill generates. The people are addicted to living in a disposable world.
The result of living in a society which creates so much trash is obvious by taking a walk though the pine barrens and veering off of the approved trails. Over the hill, plastic shopping bags fly from every branch of each of the scrub pines like flags to Wal-Mart and target. The ground is buried in waste. The landfill itself is a towering mountain dwarfing everything around it and it fails to contain so much of what is carted in.
As a people, we need to look at the type of lifestyle we lead that creates so much trash. Do we really need to pre-slice fake processed cheese and individually wrap each of the slices? Not to tip my hand, but that is the stuff of another blog.
The power needs that Albany has have done nothing but increase. The energy that this mountain of trash could generate is needed more than ever. If built properly, an incinerator need not be a polluter. It can certainly create less pollution than the coal plants that currently generate the power bring about. It is time to uncover the mountain and shovel the rotting trash into the fires of industry, or use it to power my laptop. After threatening the Pine Bush for the last twenty years, it’s time its land was reclaimed and made part of the preserve.
Monday, April 7, 2008
080406 Manure Day
It has been an exciting and hectic day here at the Red Lodge. After a winter that was fairly easy (a couple of storms had me busy with the shovel and my neighbor plowed my driveway twice, but I never started the engine on the snow blower), spring has been slow to materialize. The ten day forecasts continually keep sixty degree weather just out of reach. We anxiously watch those days in their sixties draw close and then evaporate into another day when it never budges out of the fifties. Today, however, we crossed the hump. Night time lows will not get below freezing again. I can feel it. Springtime is bound to come in a meaningful way any day now.
We celebrated here by putting six five gallon buckets in the back of the Chevy Maxx and driving down to the free manure sign by the side of the state highway and loading up. Brandi was only there for moral support. She makes a point of not getting too involved on manure day.
Back at the Red Lodge, she carried a folding chair and a puzzle book down to the bottom flat so that she could be on hand for manure day festivities without getting her hands dirty so to speak. Today I learned the lesson that I believe I learned last year and perhaps the year before – six five gallon pails of horse manure makes a thin cover over less than one quarter of the garden.
Attentive readers from way back in the before time when I set up the first overly ambitious website while learning HTML might remember the dimensions of my garden. It is not big. I will venture a guess at fourteen feet by fourteen feet. When I bought the Red Lodge, I discovered a couple of rolls of six foot tall chain link fence discarded in a pile beside the mighty Tassawassa Creek and the garden is exactly as big an area as that fence would enclose and protect from the marauding gangs of deer who roam these streets freely.
The garden has the advantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that it barely needs to be watered. The ground water is right there. In fact, when the first spring thaws send water gushing out of Dunham Hollow, the garden is on the bank of the Tassawassa and half the lower flat disappears. The garden also has the disadvantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that trees shade the southern half much of the day.
The garden was a mess after being neglected most of last year. In 2006, when I should have been planting, I was writing to my readers from sunny Citrus County Florida where my father winters. After driving him back to Dutchess Count, New York, I lost two days a week of the summer driving down to keep up his house and arrange the sale of the house where I grew up. When I needed to be paying close attention to bring my into harvest, I was driving Dad back to Florida and setting up his place. I came back to tomatoes rotting on the vine and broccoli that had shot up to seed and that’s how I let it sit.
So today I went down and raked off the leaves, pulled out the old, brittle cutworm guards that used to be juice containers, turned the soil, shifted out the plant matter and spread my manure. I topped it off by laying the old window sashes I pried out of the walls last year when I got ambitious and bought low-E replacement windows for the living room. They should give me nice warm manure. One quarter of my garden is now visible as a dark brown mass as I gaze out the kitchen window. The rest waits to see if Brandi wants to make another manure run tomorrow.
Coming this summer: The Earth Box Experiment.
We celebrated here by putting six five gallon buckets in the back of the Chevy Maxx and driving down to the free manure sign by the side of the state highway and loading up. Brandi was only there for moral support. She makes a point of not getting too involved on manure day.
Back at the Red Lodge, she carried a folding chair and a puzzle book down to the bottom flat so that she could be on hand for manure day festivities without getting her hands dirty so to speak. Today I learned the lesson that I believe I learned last year and perhaps the year before – six five gallon pails of horse manure makes a thin cover over less than one quarter of the garden.
Attentive readers from way back in the before time when I set up the first overly ambitious website while learning HTML might remember the dimensions of my garden. It is not big. I will venture a guess at fourteen feet by fourteen feet. When I bought the Red Lodge, I discovered a couple of rolls of six foot tall chain link fence discarded in a pile beside the mighty Tassawassa Creek and the garden is exactly as big an area as that fence would enclose and protect from the marauding gangs of deer who roam these streets freely.
The garden has the advantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that it barely needs to be watered. The ground water is right there. In fact, when the first spring thaws send water gushing out of Dunham Hollow, the garden is on the bank of the Tassawassa and half the lower flat disappears. The garden also has the disadvantage of being so close to the Tassawassa that trees shade the southern half much of the day.
The garden was a mess after being neglected most of last year. In 2006, when I should have been planting, I was writing to my readers from sunny Citrus County Florida where my father winters. After driving him back to Dutchess Count, New York, I lost two days a week of the summer driving down to keep up his house and arrange the sale of the house where I grew up. When I needed to be paying close attention to bring my into harvest, I was driving Dad back to Florida and setting up his place. I came back to tomatoes rotting on the vine and broccoli that had shot up to seed and that’s how I let it sit.
So today I went down and raked off the leaves, pulled out the old, brittle cutworm guards that used to be juice containers, turned the soil, shifted out the plant matter and spread my manure. I topped it off by laying the old window sashes I pried out of the walls last year when I got ambitious and bought low-E replacement windows for the living room. They should give me nice warm manure. One quarter of my garden is now visible as a dark brown mass as I gaze out the kitchen window. The rest waits to see if Brandi wants to make another manure run tomorrow.
Coming this summer: The Earth Box Experiment.
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