Twittering Machine

is not just a great name for a painting.

e At one hundred years old, this watercolor and ink drawing, with few lines, expresses all the whimsy of mobiles, the frenetic action, some say even sounds of a man-made mehanical whirleygig, and invites the viewer to turn the crank as it were. In other words, it remains as relevant now as when it was created. It contanis and fully expresses the concept of the Rene' Magritte classic, The Treachery of Images aka "This is not as pipe" or as the painting expresses itself in French, "Ceci est pas une pipe." Twittering machine also calls us diagramatically to participate, turn the crank, to animate the two-dimensional work. This image is a plaything of the impossible, the matrushka doll within the matrushka doll and down to the kernel of the tiniest hope within that this machine can work. Frenzy echoes through the playful and inexplicably active quality of the lines, the deft use of color and the personality of each emblematic mechanical creatures. Are they birds reminiscent of a cuckoo clock? This image creates virtual sound. Notes on paper are the preferred method of doing that! Not with mechanical birds.
The language that Twittering Machine uses to convey its message is as timeless as drawings in caves around the globe, on rock walls and outcrops, in the most primitive art we have yet to "discover". It holds the viewer spellbound just long enough to imagine how the machine must work and to have the delight, wash over us imagining the working device. The thrill of it working draws us in like a fractal, yet for most viewers, we will be able to return to the image a hundred times and still wish that we could play with the model the drawing hints at. It has the immersive effect of earlier noitions of figure/ground, adding atmosphere, a hedge or tree-line for depth, by throwing those cares to the wind, perhaps a hundred lines conspire to carve out a rotating globe of mayhem. Sound familiar? After a hundred years, the Authoritarians are still playing their tricks on the public mind, convincing us that a well-entrenched line drawing can substitute for a living organism. The ultra-wealthy continue to fund systems that define our words for us, telling us what we meant, what to be offended by, telling us we can play, but only following the rules and alternate physical reality one must "believe in" to interact with their impossible device. An extreme minority has perfected the art of capturing the imagination of the majority. Perhaps the twenty-first century schitzoid-man is the only one capaple of turning the crank on this old device, this relic, our "culture" that they have fancifully spun, of candyfloss and angst presented at random intervals.
STEP RIGHT UP! GET YOUR ALTERNATE REALITY! TIME IS RUNNING OUT! LIMITED SUPPLY! TODAY ONLY! As the wheels continue to come off our society, we are beginning to understand that by necessity, we are at the end of the age of fossil energy, Renewables and efficient use of energy needs to be the rule, world-wide. The need for forward thinking, grappling with physics and strategically planning for positive changes now and into the future is undeniably necessary. Sadly, Fascists continue to attempt to remove the important parts of society, like humanity and compassion, while the rest of us are moving toward something better. The small strides we have made toward truth, equality and justice over the past hundred years are being screamed down by a paltry few in an effort to hold on to their perspectives and perceived power. In democratic societies, the goal of the majority need not ever be to oppress the losers, attack the minorities among them or ignore those who cannot hope to win; but to lift everyone to a better place. If we revert back to behaving like rats trying to push one another down to stay alfloat, in a bucket of water, we will most surely squander our most fundasmental humanity and compassion in the process.
Remaining playful in the face of these so-called freedom-lovers and their empty partiotic slogans, laughing in the face of nationalists who deem any difference as an assault on their sensibilities or comfy place, is the corrollary to "If you don't laugh, you will cry." We the people, have all this potential, if we would only reach out and turn the crank. This work has been designed to draw you out. I "see" you there, standing, hands in pockets. Some of you blinking slowly, like deer in headlights. Whatever twittering machine is threatening to go off in your head, please, take a few really deep breaths, ask oyurself what you are willing to put sustained energy into and strike out. Grab the handle and give it a tug. Get into good trouble, raise a ruckus, run for office, fill a need that you see around you, not to be an agitation, but to help heal the wounds inflicted by those bullies who would steal our nation because they didn't like the results of a single election. Seriously. Seriously? Seriously! The majority has always spoken as one. Most of us want these seditionists, the forces who would pray for Armageddon, those who want to take us back a hundred years, or claim they are fighting for their own freedoms while taking the rest of ours away, to just sit down, step off or at least stop fighting what we know works. We've got things to do. We need to get on with them. We just want the oppressors, the big money guys and their willfully ignorant footsoldiers to get out of the way! We don't want to oppress the rich, old, White, males (as they have done to the rest of us for centuries)we just need them to be quiet, step aside and let us graciously take the reins.

Reading The Crawl

I am amazed at the news that never passes the lips of the newscasters, but that makes the crawl. I know it sounds odd, but whether there is a large breasted blonde or a handsome dark-haired man delivering the news, my eyes are often on the crawl. I cannot count the number of times that the words, scrolling across the bottom of the screen mimic the words coming from the mouths of the "talent". The really bizarre thing is that inexplicably, some of the best (or worst) news never rises to the level of spoken word. Somehow in the infinitely wise judgement of the producers, it is quite acceptable to let the small percentage of readers in on some of the greatest secrets ever kept, as long as those who are interested in the heavily make-uped, moveable reflective surfaces pay no attention to those persnickety letters racing across the footer.

Yesterday, I was reading along and caught a snippet that surely warrants a serious bit of coverage, but in a flash it was gone, never to come around again. This happened again today and it left me wondering what gives? How do these tiny bits of real information make it onscreen in the first place if they are nearly immediately removed from the feed?

Today, I saw that the American Psychiatric Association deemed therapies intended to "cure gayness" as malpractice. Not that I place much stock in psychiatrists, I certainly wouldn't want one raising any child of mine, but the fact that the leader of the largest religiously-based "reprogramming" organization in the world (Exodus International) has admitted that no amount of prayer can change our "god-given" sexuality should be enough to convince even the staunchest anti-gay lobby that they are flying in the face of reality. This was one of those interesting tidbits that never passed the lips of the good-looking newscasters. Perhaps this is an attempt to sanitize the news for those who would be made to feel uncomfortable if they had to change their worldview, perhaps it is an innocent oversight.

I frequently lobby for higher levels of truth being made available for public consumption and seeing this sort of thing in print, if only briefly, is a start. In this case, however, we need to integrate a more humane discussion of this subject into our schools, homes, churches and indeed our government. This week we are seeing a flap in the U.S. House of Representatives because a majority of our representatives there want to extend the same protections from workplace discrimination based on sexual orientation or status that we have for many other groups, but the Speaker of the House, John Boehner, will not call for a vote. The Senate has already passed the legislation and the President is ready to sign it into law, but the one guy who has the power to let the people be heard is holding up the show, presumably because his "morality" dictates that it be easy to remain bigoted and full of hate for a segment of the population that have exactly the same rights as everyone else, but who have been ostracized, made fun of, and shut out of many of the benefits that he himself has enjoyed as a citizen of our country. The truth is hard to determine exactly, but actions speak far louder than words and further inaction on this issue speak volumes about the character of this single and solitary man. They say that absolute power corrupts absolutely.

The second and perhaps more terrifying blurb that came through, again only once, is that Saudi Arabia has sent millions to Pakistan for ramping up that country's nuclear weapons manufacturing capacity. Those who stay up on U.S. policies regarding nuclear proliferation know that our leaders are currently in a tizzy about Iran's supposed pursuit of weapons-grade uranium, but any country that seriously took on this challenge was able to do so within three years. Our representatives to congress and the last several administrations have been spouting this bullshit for decades. Recognizing that one cannot prove a negative, it seems counter-intuitive that a nation, hell bent on getting "the bomb" would release with great fanfare, a year or so ago, that they were finally able to create medical grade isotopes, which by the way, are much easier and far less costly to refine.

I can't tell you what to think and I certainly don't want to lead you down a primrose path to ruin like so many seem to be doing in the media, but I can tell you that reading the crawl can yield a bit more fullness to your understanding of issues. They may not give you the full story, but they definitely can spark a line of inquiry that lets us begin the process of discovery. The media used to have the self-imposed job of creating an informed public, but in my short half century, it has turned more and more into entertainment. In my humble opinion, this is for the good of only the oligarchs. I will continue to speak truth to power and I appreciate the fact that so many people worldwide take the time to read my posts. I continue to study and pay attention and hope that you all do the same. Great change often comes in a flash and when enough people hear and understand that the great imbalance in power that the world is being subjected to cannot be sustained without catastrophic results, perhaps we will step away from he escalating demise of the planet and her people for the enrichment of an elite that has never known want, never thirsted for anything but the finest quality everything and who have no qualms about grinding the rest of us to dust under their oppression.

Denial Of Basic Fact

Truth is often far stranger than fiction and this is exquisitely so regarding the folks that make their way to powerful positions. This week we have been hearing a lot about two such anachronisms. Senator Ron Johnson who supposedly represents the great state of Wisconsin and the media personality Glenn Beck have both come to the attention of the public, not for what they stand for or believe in, but what they continue to deny. Contrary to the overwhelming preponderance of information regarding anthropogenic climate change, these two individuals choose to claim that it is all a hoax. I am seriously disturbed by the fact that instead of relegating the two of them to convalescent homes or mental institutions, we continue to give them huge salaries and bonuses for their utter ignorance.

You too could be a Senator in these United States, if you are willing to parrot back the tired old line of the oligarchs. This week, our illustrious Senator was called to task over his big huge foot in the mouth about how climate change has been trumped up by the rabble rousers who have implemented an "ecological jihad" against the benevolent "makers". The words that get used amongst politicians are even more bizarre than the code words for sex used in the cheapest dime store novels. fifty thousand signatures were delivered to our senator, calling for him to come clean about climate change and reluctantly he did speak to the subject, but only in the weakest of terms, clarifying his belief that the scientific community is still not sure what is causing the ice caps to melt and the oceans to become warmer.

Along with this aberrant perspective, Mr. Beck was quoted as telling his staffers that if they installed energy efficient light bulbs, they would be summarily dismissed. Now, I can empathize with folks who don't want to change, just because someone is telling them that they have to, but this is not yet the case. Incandescent bulbs are still available and will be for the foreseeable future. Perhaps I am odd, but I have been an early adopter of several cutting edge technologies. Not every tech gadget appeals to me, but when something works well, saves money and outlasts the item that it is meant to replace, I jump right in and buy it. this says quite a lot about me I guess because I tend to not like buying anything if it is not necessary. It just so happens to be the same day that we installed our first six LED bulbs.

In addition to being mercury free, these bulbs are instant on, energy efficient and cool to the touch. The compact fluorescent bulbs that they replaced  require 17 watts and their replacements produce a more even and brighter light for just 7.5 watts. Over the life of these bulbs, they would have saved over five hundred dollars in energy costs had I been using forty watt incandescent bulbs. Since I was already using CFL (Compact Fluorescent Lighting) my savings will be around half of that. However, after looking carefully at the facts, I was sold on the CFL technology twenty years ago. The primary "reason" people give for not liking CFL technology is that the bulbs contain mercury and require special disposal. In fact, the amount of mercury that is in a CFL bulb is less than the amount that would be spewed into the atmosphere by the wasted electricity required to get the same amount of light from an incandescent bulb. I do have to save the bulbs up to make sure they make it to the proper disposal facility, but that is a small price to pay for protecting the environment.

Just as many cities are requiring people to use composting facilities for their yard waste, it is becoming more important to make sure all of our "waste" gets tot he proper place so that it can be recycled or reused. compost is even better because it gets waste to transform into a useable product without the addition of hardly any energy and only a tiny bit of water. I have been composting for most of my life and the amount of dirt that I have created through this process would fill most houses. This soil is home to billions of creatures and even the enrichment of soils that I no longer live near makes me feel good and helps others to grow better vegetables. In time, we may be able to teach the idiots that are rich and powerful, but I'm not waiting around for that day. Instead, I share what I have come to know with whoever is willing to pay attention.

Thank you for being part of the process of building a better world. Do what you can to bring truth to the halls of politics. Encourage others to find solutions amongst the sea of problems that they tell us about on the news and above all, think long and hard about what each of us can do the heal the schism between humankind and nature. It may be the only way that we have to leave something for our children that they will be proud to call home.

Getting Our Bearings

When we took our first tentative steps into the information age, we brought along with us the baggage and predispositions of a by-gone age. We assumed that knowledge was power and that human beings would do the right thing with the information that was being collected and distributed about us. Although we had no idea of the size and extent of data that would be at our fingertips, we thought we knew everything we needed to know about information. We had a relationship with the press, textbook publishers and the libraries of the world that allowed us to assume that some sort of due diligence and thorough fact check had been performed on the information that was available. Many of us had forgotten about the dark ages, the library at Alexandria and tried not to think of the data collected by the FBI. We also considered that editorial staff would have ejected the lunacy, tightened up the grasp of fact and elucidated ideas that had merit. Many of us assumed that history was correct and that there had been, once upon a time, such a thing as a just war. What has taken place in the information age is that none of these processes are operating and the sieve that we had hoped to capture the most important ideas for distribution has been removed, allowing falsehood and speculation to proliferate. 

I have shared memes that I did not research exhaustively on facebook, but I have worked hard to only re-post things that I am reasonably certain are true. The idea of reasonable certainty has morphed into something quite different over the last forty years and there may be little we can do to get our footing in the flow of current information overload. My concern here is about the rampant use of powerful information management and retrieval systems to bolster our fictional account of the world around us. I have watched hours of footage that supposedly "proves" that 9-11 was an inside job. What I have come to understand is that it was more likely pure incompetence that allowed the structures to be brought down. The possibility of the series of events going utterly perfectly for legions of munitions guys, who supposedly set the explosives for the demolition, seems far fetched, but not inconceivable. That is the foot in the door that is required for uncertainty to get a foothold.

Stories swirl around us as if they are a very part of the air that we breathe. They often obscure more fact than they are based on and the murky waters seem to never be allowed to settle. Before we can take the time required to dispel one myth, several more have come into existence. Often it is better to follow ancient wisdom like, "A stitch, in time, saves nine." If we can get to the bottom of a single modern myth, perhaps we can begin to break the chain of hearsay and contempt that seem to be alive and well within our culture. When working to break the stranglehold that bad information has over our societies, it is well to attack the weakest link in the chain of events that allows us to be taken in by whatever the conspiracy theory of the day is. I have heard hundreds of people dismiss it all as lunacy, but the grotesque and unsubstantiated things they purport to believe dwarf the ones they deny. 

Case in point, the climate change deniers. It has been my experience that scientists do sometimes get things wrong, to be sure. Looking at allopathic medicine we have more than enough fallacies to question the whole assumption that our bodies are like a battlefield and that waging war on "germs" can make us healthy. It has been my experience that our health is a lot more like a good cocktail, it depends on a majority of things we do not normally think of as good by themselves and a small portion of poison just to give them the desired kick. Okay, I'll stop being flip, but don't miss my message here. Just because some scientists initially thought that the greenhouse effect would heat the whole planet evenly, and that has not been the case is no reason to throw the baby out with the bathwater. The deniers blame the whole warming of our planet on things like sunspot activity or a "conspiracy of the left". I have even heard that scientists are "making the whole thing up to secure research dollars from the government." The fact that the ozone layer that protects us from incoming radiation has been slowly stripped away by a chemical process proven to be caused by chlorofluorocarbons (man-mad chemicals) in the atmosphere seems to have gone in one ear and out the other with these folks. The fact that we have reintroduced into the atmosphere more CO2 in just the last fifty years than it took hundreds of thousands of years to store up in the geologic deposits that we are trying desperately to eliminate seem to be lost on these powerfully stupid individuals and groups.

It seems that some conspiracy theories pop up like mushrooms, almost of their own volition. Unfunded and as if by magic, they bloom in an instant virtually from thin air. others are continually propped up by well-funded think tanks and almost religious zeal by a few well-heeled interests. It is interesting that in some cases, like those who claim that global warming is not real, we can follow a glut of money, corporate welfare, fortune 500 companies and political might to the perpetrators of the myth. The public is not being told that for every BTU, kilo-calorie or ounce of fuel that is produced from fracking, four are expended to wrest the oil from the tar sands or shale. The massive wasteland that is being produced by these sorts of activities is every bit as grotesque as the deforestation of the rainforest with the added twist of (lime that accompanies great drinks) a toxic legacy to go with the annihilation of native flora and fauna. This past month, the petroleum council, a public relations and industry mouthpiece for the industry has said that of all the gasoline sold in both Wisconsin and Minnesota, 50-80% of it comes from tar sands oil. The irony here is that when a person pulls up to a gas pump, there is no way to know the source of the oil used to make the fuel. Most people do not even understand that for the convenience of fueling up, a series of not so wonderful things have to have happened  to allow that luxury.

This first image is just a portion of the existing Midwest pipelines and refineries. The image is dastardly incomplete because I have personally been to at least one other refinery in Midland, Michigan near Saginaw and Bay City. Also missing from this schematic diagram is the pipeline running into the heart of my city, Green Bay, Wisconsin. The irony of these lies perpetrated by map makers is that petroleum and the petroleum industry itself has special status as a result of the fact that it is a feedstock for the machines of war and has been allowed nearly military intelligence status. we are supposed to remain ignorant about the levels of subsidy, the health threats posed by it and the exact toll that is being placed on the environment by our pursuit of this black gooey gold.

I heard an excellent perspective about the energy contained in a gallon of regular gasoline. Imagine the energy equivalent of 100 people working for eight hours a day for a week. Yes, 4,000 human hours of actual work, that is the amount of energy in a single gallon of petrol. It is nearly unbelievable until you start to do the math. Over half of the energy is squandered as heat. Even the most efficient transportation device, the bicycle can only allow a human to produce about three quarters of a horsepower. Add to these facts the effort of punching a car-sized hole in the atmosphere, pushing half a ton or more of steel along surfaces with bumps and potholes perhaps on under-inflated tires and you begin to see the truth of the matter a little more clearly.

When we add the energy required for our vehicles, imagining every gallon of fuel as an extra hundred people just hanging out for a week, one can see the problem of global warming a little more clearly. Just having that many extra people would choke the air with carbon dioxide from them breathing, but instead of a waste gas that feeds trees, shrubs and plants of all types, these tools that we use to move about the earth exhale poison gas that can kill. We have the tools needed to stop, look around, follow the money and make up our own minds about what is right and good. The time has come for us to use every tolls in our arsenal to wage peace, speak truth to power and to teach the next generation what it truly means to be human. I throw down the challenge to everyone to be the best we can be in the face of the tumult and turmoil that we have foisted upon us each and every day. Be strong, hold tight to your soul, for there are those who would estrange you from it for money out there and they feed on fear and hate. Love them as you would yourself and perhaps we can heal their wounds as well as our own.  

Dare I Say It?

The time has come for action. I know that the vast majority of "Americans" shun any mention of responsibility for the supposed freedoms that they love to claim. I also know that the major media sources that feed our country information try like the devil to strangle public discourse rather than encourage it. Considerable experience has also taught me that no matter what obvious path to a better way of life that I mention, probably because they all require hard work and sacrifice in the short run, are ruthlessly rejected out of hand. There is little excuse for the way we have treated one another, no justification for the raping of the planet and no cogent argument for saddling future generations with the lasting effects of war, extractive economic methods that foist boom and bust burdens on those who do not benefit from the boom times, but are crippled by the bust, poverty, ignorance and debt, but I fear, chances are that we will continue to do all of these things if we do not take a stand now for what is right and good in our civilization. Believe me, we are not, as we are told, isolated pawns in a rich man's game, unless we let ourselves be. Taking our civil rights back will be an extremely hard road and there may be more blood shed on freedom's path. Rest assured that there will be sweat, toil and sacrifice, but the change must come at whatever the price. If we continue to let the powers that be railroad us in the directions of their choosing, we are going to fall deeper and deeper into the chasm of ruthlessness and hate, remain at odds with planet Earth and succumb to the evil that drives the ultra rich to pick the pockets of our elderly, ransack the stores of knowledge that we have developed over centuries to pass on to our children and continue to exploit and confound both mothers and fathers who, after all, made a commitment to the future just by having children.

Frequently, when people ask what I do for a living, I say, "I am a living manifestation of the infinite." I say it not so much to enlighten them, because, let's face it, most folks don't have the background or level of understanding to decipher that truth, but for myself, to help remind me of what I do for a living. We are all facing terribly complex ciphers. The puzzles themselves are usually manufactured by various different interests and the pieces rarely seem to fit or have distinct information on them to give us clues about where they go or even whether they "fit" with the puzzle that we may be working on at the time. Recognizing that we are part of a centuries long struggle and that our responsibility is to the next seven generations seems to be a good place to start for many. With this basic starting point, it is easy to see that atomic energy, whether for electric power generation or war, cannot stand the basic test for safety over future generations. The radioactivity that results from our need in this moment will be a dangerous legacy for thousands of generations. One of the pieces of the puzzle will be finding our way to generating energy that does not kill, maim or saddle future generations with the cost of providing us comfort.

Transportation, as well, needs to be transformed. As we learn to reestablish connections to the locations in which we live, produce more of our food locally and begin to re-think the last generations decision to separate people from capital, goods and services, we will have to use triage in dealing with the empty suburbs. When I was a child, even tiny towns had bakeries, medium sized ones had several and it was rare to find a neighborhood that didn't have fresh bread within walking distance. Try that today and chances are you would be wearing out a lot of shoes. The right wingers seem to be overjoyed with their own voices chanting the mantra of "mass transit can't work", yet in truth, it is the greed of folks who live on the city edge that forces us to expand every other service to the point of recklessness and whatever the opposite of thrift is. The properties that lie beyond city services are going for inflated prices because everyone seems to want their little piece of heaven, but then the trash needs to be picked up, eventually hey want curb and gutter and fresh clean water like the rest of us, so we pay for their wants by sacrificing our own needs. Them subsidization of suburban fringe communities is at once a greedy money grab for the outlying communities, hoping for increased revenues from taxes and a multi-generational sentence for those who cannot afford to flee the cities. It has been frequently pointed out by people far smarter than I that the ultra-rich only call it class warfare when we fight back. I am somewhat resolved to the fact that I may forever be a city mouse, but I should not bear the burden of contaminated air, water and soil left behind by the wealthy exploiters of planet earth. We need their wealth and education to help us solve the pressing problems of the city, not having them squander their money and time mowing acre and a half lots that used to produce food.

It is hard to tell a farmer who has struggled all their life that they are not entitled to millions in retirement because they sell their land to Target, Costco or Wal-mart, only to have it paved over and ruined for ever, but one can look back just a few generations and find people who went into farming because of a deep connection to the earth and a desire to do what was right for their communities. Now, many have been kow towed into thinking that it is every person for themselves and if their greed is not as over the top as the next guy, they will end up losing everything. Some say that growing population will inevitably force the further degradation of the planet, but improving the efficiency with which we do business and increasing quality of life for all people, our needs will become much easier to meet and with far less environmental damage as well. We need to stand up and let local decision makers know that we will not tolerate another back room deal to sell out the towns and cities of our great nation for he sake of another get rich quick scheme that only benefits the few at the expense of the many. All of this is hard work that needs doing if we are to leave our children anything worthwhile.

We have been told that the generation gap is inevitable, but that is another popular lie foisted upon us by those who really don't care about us. If your children see you working for a better world, and you explain to them that all of your efforts are to salvage a liveable world for them, you will be surprised at how quickly they will respond to the great and pressing needs as well. if they see you buying into the lies and deception that "business as usual" wants to sell you, they will see what you are made of and hate you to the core. Fortunately, there are more voices joined in the cry for justice than ever. With a bit of work and taking some time to get involved, we are making change happen. It comes at a time when the inertia of bad decision making has all but overwhelmed us, but there are those all across the globe who realize that we must take one last gaps and fight our way back to shore, or we will surely perish. This is truly a fight for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, not only for ourselves, but for the coming generations as well. The time has come to stop standing idly by and "waiting for the world to change". We have every right and the responsibility to take charge, not only of our own lives, but the direction of the governments that we supposedly elect and the discourse about what will make this a better place and time to live in. Get involved, become agents of change and remember, the hardest part is starting. Once you resolve to give your life to the betterment of others, the rewards are nearly infinite and the difficulties along the way transform from boogey men into temporary hiccups and gems along our spiral path.

Nuclear Power Dirty, Dangerous, Expensive

Reproduced with permission, in fact encouragement of beyondnulear.org (301) 270-2209 Very tiny changes have been made for brevity, but I will attempt to refrain from editorializing or from changing the content for the sake of my readers.
DIRTY
FUEL:
Nuclear reactors use uranium. Therefore, they release radioactive waste into the environment at every stage of the fuel cycle-starting at the mines, then at mills, where enormous piles of tailings are left behind, and during chemical conversion, enrichment and fuel fabrication. Radioactive radon gas that escapes in the West can float across the the U.S., over the Atlantic, and beyond.
Valid concerns exist about climate change caused by carbon dioxide from coal fired power stations. Yet, production of uranium fuel also results in "greenhouse gas" emissions. Indeed, uranium mining and milling are among the most carbon dioxide-intensive industrial operations.
Nuclear reactors use uranium to power turbines by releasing intense heat and radiation through a process called fission. Old fuel rods must be replaced periodically with fresh ones. The irradiated rods rods are stored in water-filled pools within the reactor building or in an adjacent building. After a few years, rods may be placed in steel-lined concrete casks outside to a still-nonexistent permanent repository.
Because no such repository has been built anywhere in the world, the nuclear industry would like to reprocess the irradiated rods. The rods would be cut up, soaked in acid and reprocessed so that residues of plutonium and uranium could be extracted and turned into usable reactor fuel. However, the leftover radioactive fission products, liberated from the fuel rods, remain a containment problem for many thousands of years. Reprocessing is extremely hazardous for workers and to the public downstream and downwind. It produces it's own massive wastes and releases of radioactive CO2 as well as other radioactive materials into the environment.
ROUTINE RELEASES:
Nuclear power facilities don't have to blow up or melt down to release their radioactive poisons. During routine operation, they release pollutants to the atmosphere and into rivers, lakes and oceans that provide cooling water.
It is impossible to run a reactor without these routine releases. No economically feasible technology exists to filter out all the radioactive isotopes, including tritium (radioactive hydrogen) and radioactive krypton and xenon gasses, some of which convert to radioactive strontium and cesium.
No one knows how much radioactivity is released. Some radioactive wastes are released into the environment from a nuclear power system whenever the level of radioactivity in the waste water is below the level that the monitoring equipment is set to detect. The U.S. government has approved this level to be "permissible." But,"permissible" does not mean safe. It means "as low as reasonably achievable"-that is, as low as the nuclear industry claims it can afford to achieve.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) relies on the reactor owner's self-reporting and computer modeling to estimate a facility's radioactive releases. A significant portion of the data is extrapolated-so it is virtual, not real. Therefore, no one really knows how much radioactive poison is released. Radioactive gasses, liquids and soils spread near and far.
No permanent repository exists for the irradiated fuel rods (termed high-level waste), and may never exist. In fact no facility exists for so-called "low level" waste either- that is, for the radioactive sludges and saturated air-and water-filters, as well as pipes, pumps and other components that must be replaced as they wear out and malfunction. Much of this "low-level" waste is so highly radioactive that it must be handled by remote-control equipment. The longer the facility operates, the greater accumulation of radioactive waste.
LETHAL LEGACY:
Radioactive waste is dangerous not only now, but some remains dangerous virtually forever. Each type of radioactive isotope emits appreciable radiation for over ten times it's half-life (After one half-life, half the radioactivity is gone. After two half-lives, three quarters is gone. After three half-lives three quarters is gone. But even after ten half lives, some radioactivity remains) This means that some radioisotopes,like plutonium-239 with its 24,000 year half-life, will be dangerous much longer than modern humans have walked the Earth.
DANGEROUS
ACCIDENTS HAPPEN:
An article in an MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) publication describes an unfortunate fact: "Human factors and the effectiveness of people determine success or failure at every stage, from the design of a facility and its equipment, through manufacture, construction, installation and calibration, to testing, maintenance, repair and management." ("Human Error in Nuclear Power Plants," Technology Review, February 1980, page 28)
Every nuclear facility is extremely complex, with thousands of pumps, valves, motors and miles of electric circuits. Therefore, human error, design flaws and equipment malfunctions are common.
"All nuclear-power-plant systems, structures, components, procedures and personnel are potential sources of failures and malfunctions. Problems can arise from defects in design, manufacturing, installation and construction; from testing, operational and maintenance errors; from explosions and fires; from excessive corrosion, vibration, stress, heating, cooling, radiation damage and other physical phenomena; from deterioration due to component aging and from externally initiated events such as floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and sabotage." (Daniel F. Ford: Three Mile Island 1982 page 29)
Because many experienced workers have retired or are nearing retirement age, the industry is faced with a serious shortage of qualified personnel, including some who have important memories of past facility problems.
An average reactor contains equivalent long-lived radioactivity of at least 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. An accident can be catastrophic, causing the release of tremendous amounts of radioactivity.
Few, if any, communities have adequate emergency plans, including reliable warning systems and emergency responders who are trained and equipped to deal with radiological devastation on this scale. They lack isolated hospital space for the treatment of irradiated victims. It is unrealistic to assume that a large, panicked population could be evacuated safely. No emergency plan addresses the permanent relocation of people from their homes and communities because of long-term radioactive contamination.
HEALTH HAZARDS:
Exposure to ionizing radiation increases the risk of damaging cells, tissues and DNA, potentially causing mutations, cancer, birth defects and reproductive, immune, cardiovascular and endocrine disorders.
Radioactive hydrogen and carbon, produced in great quantities, can be incorporated into protein, carbohydrate and fat molecules throughout the body. Fetuses and children are especially susceptible to radiation injury because of the rapid and abundant cell division in their bodies during growth.
According to the national Research Council's BEIR VII report ("Health Risks from Exposure to Low Levels of Ionizing Radiation," 2005) no level of radiation exposure is harmless.
WORKPLACE RISKS:
The nuclear industry depends on workers who are allowed to be exposed to much more radiation than members of the public. Many of the aging metal components and even just the rust, in nuclear facilities give off penetrating gamma rays. When clogged or leaking pipes must be repaired or replaced, a worker can receive a maximum permissible annual dose of radiation in mere minutes while making even a minor repair.
TERRORISTS:
A typical commercial reactor produces enough plutonium every year to make at least forty nuclear bombs. If irradiated fuel rods are reprocessed, the extracted plutonium can be diverted to make nuclear bombs. The remaining radioactive materials can be used with conventional explosives to make "dirty bombs", capable of dispersing radioactivity.
Every nuclear facility is a potential candidate for a terrorist attack-by land, water and air, as well as by persons employed within the facility or outsiders who gain access. Terrorists could attack a reactor, the fuel storage pools or other critical components, causing the release of vast amounts of radioactivity. No existing U.S. nuclear power generating station was built to withstand deliberate attack by a jumbo jet.
RADIOACTIVE ROADS, RAILS AND NEIGHBORHOODS:
If a permanent disposal facility for irradiated fuel rods were ever built, transport of the waste on trains, trucks and barges would put countless communities at risk. If a site were chosen in a Western state, long-distance transport would be required because 77 of the 104 operating reactors are East of the Mississippi River.
The potential for an accident, terrorist attack or theft of nuclear materials during this transit is real.
EXPENSIVE
A CONTINUING FINANCIAL BURDEN:
Nuclear power cannot survive in a market economy without massive subsidies.
Federal subsidies include loan guarantees for construction and funds for research and development, including the search for a solution to the problem of radioactive waste.
In the event of a major disaster, the Price-Anderson Act requires the nuclear industry to pay for only the first $10 billlion-for deaths, injuries and property damage-a mere fraction of the liability costs federal taxpayers would have to cover. According to the 1982 NRC CRAC2 report, damages could run as high as $314 billion, depending on a reactor's surrounding population density and other factors. That would be approximately a trillion dollars today.
If a new reactor were to be built, state regulators would have to be willing to boost electric rates.

Without assurance of such state and federal handouts, private investors would refuse to finance construction of new nuclear reactors.

CONSTRUCTION COSTS:
Because nuclear power facilities are so complicated and dangerous, construction costs are extremely high; lengthy delays are common. Because of a shortage of certified "nuclear grade" parts manufacturers, substandard or counterfeit components from domestic or foreign vendors may be installed, increasing reactor hazards.
OPERATING COSTS:
From the start, nuclear stations become radioactively contaminated. Large and small components and whole buildings get "hot." Therefore, operation is expensive. As reactors age and become more radioactive, operation becomes even more expensive. Repair or replacement of defective, obsolete or worn-out equipment requires shielding for workers as well as protective clothing, monitors and respirators. Far more workers, time and money are required to fix a nuclear generating system than a coal-or gas-fired power facility, wind-or solar farm.
As high-quality uranium becomes more scarce, it's use as a reactor fuel will become even more expensive and its manufacture will into fuel will increase the emission of greenhouse gasses.
PERPETUAL COSTS:
Dismantling a decommissioned nuclear facility would also be expensive. Because no disposal site exists for most radioactive wastes from most states, contaminated buildings and equipment may remain on site for many years. Because of the dangers, environmental monitoring and armed guards will be needed indefinitely.

NUCLEAR POWER CAN AND SHOULD BE PHASED OUT AND REPLACED WITH CLEAN, SAFE AND ECONOMICALLY SUSTAINABLE ENERGY ALTERNATIVES. SPREAD THE WORD: NUCLEAR POWER IS BASED ON FALSE PROMISES AND REAL DANGERS.

for information on clean, safe, sustainable electrical power generation, check out themrea.org

 

Climate Change

Granted, this is what climate does. Change. But is certainly doesn't change at the rate which we have pushed it to. In a myriad of ways, we accelerate the speed at which air moves. over-riding some and perturbing most of the natural flows and cycles that were formerly responsible for climate. Not weather, which we all recognize, but climate, long term trends that lead to ecological regions, ecology and individual niches. Most of our activities speed the air, creating impingement on natural flows and movements of air. Energy laden air tends to move upward, carrying particles with it into higher levels within the atmosphere.

When a house burns, air coming out has six times the volume than when it was at room temperature. Consequently, the weight of the air mass is considerably less, causing the bolus of air to rise, like an invisible balloon. Similarly, the air that flows through our internal combustion engines does the same, expanding greatly and carrying particles up and out in all directions. People may say, "My engine only displaces a small volume of air." which is true until you multiply it by a thousand or more revolutions per minute. I drive a small, efficient auto, getting 50MPG hwy. 45MPG city. I think it has a displacement of 1.2 liters per revolution of the engine. The engine inhales that much about fifteen hundred to twenty two hundred times per minute. That translates to emissions of at least 300 to 440 gallons of air every minute which "wants" to rise up, carrying dust, hazardous chemicals, carbon and debris with it.

Most people have heard of inversions, created when cold dense air lies atop a warmer level, preventing the dirty bolus of air from rising. In this case the energy embedded in the air changes from potential energy to kinetic energy as the upwelling spreads out and creates vortices along the horizontal boundary where the rising air meets much colder, dense air.

We have a winter weather pattern that persists over the Fox Valley in Northeast Wisconsin that is a giant oscillation. During the day, the Bay of Green Bay warms the air above it, and combining with the prevailing winds, slowly carry a contaminated bolus of air out over the Bay. At night, the winds reverse sucking the same air back over the city of Green Bay, the Fox Cities, Lake Winnebago, it's pool lakes and along the Niagra Escarpment beyond Fond du Lac. I have seen this daily cycle go on for over a week, creating a toxic soup of air that contains vast quantities of carbon, dust, debris and toxic compounds. The air is held down by extremely cold dense air. This single interaction between natural cycles and the human factor should prove that we are having a devastating effect on climate. This air, normally would have had a tiny fraction of the carbon added that it has today.Ignoring for a moment the toxic compounds, this thick air that we create actually captures more energy from the sun than it did just a few generations ago. Remember, as well, climate normally operates on a time scale of many many years, perhaps being stable for 1,000 years or more. Think of the 10,000 years that it took after the last glaciation to achieve climax forests that covered Wisconsin in trees. We pretty nearly eliminated forest cover in two generations and have expanded from under one million residents in the entire state, to over one million in just the Fox River Valley.

The combined impacts of our lifestyles have the ability to create catastrophic inversions as well as giant mushroom clouds of warm air from our communities. The destabilization of the atmosphere occurs any time that conditions are not right for inversions. As we burn fossil fuels that took millions of years to form, we release not only all of their stored energy, but hazardous chemicals as well. Because we will burn in hundreds of years, what it took thousands to lay down in the earth's crust, it has an effect equivalent to ten suns, just not all neatly spaced at regular intervals across the planet. Most are focused on cement kilns, cities, industry, mines, agri-business land and transportation corridors. These unevenly heated areas, especially like where I live in the Fox River Valley, give rise to rivers of rising air that act as giant walls of upwelling. If the source is small enough, it will take the form of a single mushroom cloud, but a million people strung out over 100 miles, blend into a giant high pressure ridge that can't help but influence climate in negative ways.

We are causing change. The change is several orders of magnitude greater than the Earth changes by itself. This effect can be documented worldwide, especially in developed and developing nations. It is happening now, so the time to curtail the bad habits we have learned in the last several generations must end. Multiply even a tiny number by a very large number and you will get an immense number. Our nation alone is 1/3 Billion people, using the majority of the Earth's resources. There is enough of everything to sustain us all but there are limits to what we can expect the planet to abide. The greed that it takes to justify the sense of entitlement that we have is the only thing that I can imagine motivating the naysayers. We cannot wait until every ignorant person becomes enlightened. We must act. We must require investment in proven technologies that decrease or carbon footprint. We must not be mislead by massive corporate interests who benefit most from our current trajectory. We must begin to look more critically at our way of life that taxes people around the globe for our opulence and comfort. We certainly can't allow developing nations to make all the same mistakes that we have. Many billions are looking to us for guidance in reaching their own better futures. If we want to remain an influential participant on the world stage, we need to be able to come to terms with the fact that what we tried worked for a while, but it has come back to bite us in the ass. We are dying off at higher rates from more diseases that stem from our affluent lifestyle than ever before. Change is afoot, let's not ignore it until it becomes too late!

Gulf Oil Distraction

I'm not a conspiracy theorist. That makes it all the more difficult for me to understand why our leaders continue to practice crisis management. We know what the result of doing nothing is and we have seen what is possible if we would just reflect the will of the people in action. For over forty years there has been a public outcry that continues to plead for responsible energy policies, pollution elimination strategy and more humane policies regarding our place on the world stage. Frequently there are protests, boycotts and direct actions to change the course of our government officials, their corporate keepers and the constabulary who are used as tools of their oppression. The problem is that the changes are never enough, and always too late to effect necessary change. When you grow up seeing the farce behind our involvement in Southeast Asia, the fallacious claims about how environmental ethics demand our collective return to caves, that the peace movement is being fomented by criminals or communists and the complete inaction demonstrated by our leaders on pollution and energy issues, it becomes hard to understand what the motivation is to cling to policies and procedures that have yet to solve a single one of these pressing problems. Amelioration of problems after they have occurred is not only less effective and more costly than solving them before they reach crisis proportions, but it shows that you don't care enough, and are not smart enough to reason out what might happen if nothing is done.
As long as our "leaders" refrain from taking action, the forces of greed, expediency and abuse will continue to flex their proverbial muscle. Until we demand that their cycle of power and control be broken, we will have to continue to live with the degraded environment, insane energy policy and "terror" from those who hate us for our "way of life", not to mention the real and present terror of not knowing what part of our infrastructure will catastrophically break down next. Our flagging educational system is failing our students, the air where many of us live is not fit to breathe, the water that many of us drink now contains dilute anti-depressants heart medication and "penis pills". The land in many areas has been so thoroughly sterilized that they are biologically dead. The health care debate has been framed so as to not even mention health, or care. If you believed the BS about how legalizing pot would fund more terror, what do you think our continued addiction to oil does? Just because people who have advocated change often looked like hippies and sounded like intellectuals is no reason to believe that they were not right. We should have all seen, by now, the images of Earth from space that led to the coining of the term Spaceship Earth. There is no "away", we need to find a path to peace. True security depends on making our way forward to a future in which our children are not burdened by childhood cancer, developmental disabilities, and reduced quality of life. The same things that angered me as a child have persisted and intensified. Our mindless destruction of the planet has grown exponentially. As emissions from vehicles have been reduced, we drive more cars more miles. As we take actions to reduce water pollution from point sources, we eliminate more native forest cover, drain wetlands and pave over rich farmland, spreading ever more toxins and persistent chemicals on the land.
How can we respect the system that allows these abuses to continue? How can we facilitate the change necessary to encourage sustainability? How can we ask others to bear the costs of our affluence? By seriously studying and understanding the nature of our shortsightedness, perhaps we can bring public opinion to bear on leaders to help create a more reasonable course forward. There are cars of the future in existence today. Cars that will not rust away, that can be fueled with renewable energy, and that will leave oil behind, but our government will not require them to be produced by publicly held, corpulent corporations feeding at the trough of current policy. Similarly, proven technology exists to make every new home a net energy production facility. Where are the regulations requiring that it be done? Why are there no taxes levied on the giant agricultural water pumpers who drain our aquifers or those who spew carcinogenic compounds on the earth? When something is the "right" thing to do, we should be able to agree that it should be done. As things stand, we introduce ambiguity into every topic, call up Fox "news", have them put their cameras on a gut-wrenching effect whose image cannot, in and of itself, tell us anything about the nature or scope of the problem, then they will find two "experts" on any subject imaginable to fight over the hows and whys of whatever the issue may be. In the end we are either stymied into inaction by the realization that we are stuck between a rock and a hard place, or righteously indignant about how wrong-headed the opposition is.
I am not a conspiracy theorist, but it is getting ever harder to fathom why we have sunk to this level of depravity. Is there anyone at the helm? If there is, they have to know that things are not working. Oh, wait, they must be working. The rich continue to get richer and every loyal Calvinist knows that the poor deserve everything they get as well as what they don't, and for the new age mind over matter folks, they certainly do not deserve the things they can't even dream of. Theories cannot, by definition, be proven. This conspiracy of thought seems very well proven to me and countless others who have been demanding real and meaningful change for generations.

Wisconsin's Legislature Stimies Clean Energy Bill

Once again, Wisconsin Manufacturers and Commerce has had their way with Wisconsin's leaders. They claim that the potential rise in electric rates that Wisconsin's Clean Energy Legislation might bring would have a chilling effect on Wisconsin businesses. These are the same lobbyists who have opposed every significant environmental regulation that Wisconsin has attempted to pass as far back as my memory serves. The 16 Billion that Wisconsin shells out for imported energy each year was swept under the carpet by WMC and the people who want to continue business as usual. These dollars that we pay, for fossil fuel based energy, go away for good, creating jobs in far off regions, destroying the foundation of our quality of life. Renewable energy sources are all around us. If our business leaders can't see the damage that energy costs have on our daily life now, they are too well paid to understand the reality of the situation. Shame on our leaders who have once again knuckled under to the most powerful interests in the state, the few, the ignorant and the wealthy.

Every single person that sees renewable energy sources, in place and working is impressed by the quiet, clean and logical approach to harvesting available energy. As an energy producer, who uses a solar furnace to supplement about forty percent of one of my houses heat budget, I have begun to realize cost savings after only two winters. Of course, with more expensive production facilities, the pay off might take longer, but the solar furnace I own was built in 1972 and has only four moving parts, two automatic dampers, a thermostat and a fan. It continues to provide heat, and will for years to come. What is required to make positive changes that effect the future is will. "You can't get something for nothing" the old saying goes, but when what you have no longer meets your needs, it is time to look elsewhere for better ways of getting them met.

What Wisconsin's leaders fail to realize is that the time to act has come. Leaders can only be called that when they lead. Letting a special interest kill legislation that will create jobs, limit energy production costs and create a new infrastructure that will allow Wisconsin residents to keep more dollars inside our borders is criminal. Each and every one of us deserves to have our say in the direction our state is headed, not just the most wealthy among us. These are the same folks who opposed every piece of clean air legislation that was proposed for the state, clean water regulation, and recycling efforts. Even though,in the end, the regulations that passed helped rather than hurt their members. I'm sure that many of the folks who oppose any government oversight or leadership feel that government has grown too large. However, when we all work together to do what is right, it makes the job easier, more cost effective and stands as a testament to our cooperative spirit. Fighting the inevitable is Quixotic but Don Quixote was only a hero in a play! Tilting at windmills is not only dangerous, counter productive and futile but also just plain naiive.

Earthday at 40

I remember my parents not allowing me to attend the first Earthday. They said it was part of the conspiracy to placate the masses and distract the public from what was really going on. The river in our backyard was a colloidal suspension, (like mixing milk and orange juice, but it was green) After forty years, dredging toxic compounds that accumulated all those years ago has begun. The fish are still not safe to eat, nor the waters to swim. I have seen a vast improvement in the look, but not the smell of our river. As a child I wondered how large must the Great Lakes be, to be able to handle the incredible volume of toxic waste that flowed past our door.

In 1987, I got a chance to ride bicycle around all five Great Lakes and all I can say is that they are not very big! Even now the water that we drink contains prescription drugs. We didn't even know about the possibility of these contaminants being able to "make it" into the environment back then. I was able to get the message of sustainability , though we called it living better for less back then, to about ten million people. Six million on a single day through CBC radio during a morning commute. Cheap and simple ways to "Go Green" like substituting baking soda for chlorine tainted cleansers, combining trips, carpooling or bicycling rather than firing up the old fossil fuel burner unnecessarily. Back then, a family could save about seven thousand dollars per year by going from two cars down to one.

The air when I was a child was terrible, and is no better today, in spite of effectively cutting new lead emissions, sulfur dioxide and dry cleaning compounds many other contaminants have increased. We did score a noteworthy victory when the local electric generating station wanted to raise their smoke stack to "protect local air quality". Public interest groups said in court that the air farther away should not be negatively impacted to keep our air cleaner, so the stack raising project was put on hold. The courts interpreted the clean air act rules to mean that pollution should be reduced, not just diluted and to this day, the stack remains unfinished.

Burning of fossil fuels has increased exponentially at times in the last forty years. Each time we increase mileage standards, we increase the fleet size to offset any ecological gains. Infrastructure improvements have created millions more miles upon which people can now drive. Current government incentives go to larger and larger interests who more and more people drive farther to patronize.

Soils are still under attack. Mega-farm agribusiness is not concerned at all about naturally stable and ecologically diverse micro-climates. Drive through any agricultural land and you will see the stark reality that nearly every farmer has sterilized the soils and tilled wet and /or erosion prone areas to the point of having only dirt where a complex relationship of organisms once existed.

I truly hope that in forty more years my children won't say "Things are as bad as they ever were." At least when the first Earthday happened, there were still old timers who had not given up the old ways of farming that respected the earth, understood stewardship and at least rotated crops and left fallow land that "needed a rest." Farmers are under such pressure today that they can't possibly do what is best for their land. It would cost billions to reestablish hedgerows, intersperse forest cover to protect the fields from the ravages of wind and extremes of hot and cold as well as wet and dry.

We have had forty years to make a difference, but have mostly chosen to look the other way. If you are a child reading this, hold your parents to a higher standard. If nothing changes, protest like we did against the Vietnam War. If you are adults, hold your elected officials to the task of cleaning up the mess, stabilizing the cities and allowing local areas to support themselves. No one is served when the cities collapse. Before the next Wal-mart is subsidized, we need to make sure the urban core has decent food, water, shelter and air. If that means mass transit, so be it. If that means high speed rail, lets step up. We are living in a country whose people were told that the Erie Canal was just a pipe dream, The Mississippi could not be tamed, that they would never be able to lay railroad track over the Rockies, that a Trans-Atlantic cable was impossible, and other things that could have limited us, or what we could do. If anyone can reclaim a mutually beneficial relationship with Earth, it only makes sense that it should be us.

We have been lucky to have people looking out for us through the last forty years, but the lack of effective action to reign in the destruction of our planet has been staggering. Our efforts need to be more than redoubled. Effective action is much more than fair-trade coffee and reuse-able shopping bags. It lies in a complex matrix of relationships with one another, with community and with resources. As we learned as children about the water cycle, we need to look at the cycles of capital, of energy, of nutrients and of all the gifts that the natural world provides each discreet location. The give back needs to be reintegrated into our daily lives. That is what enriches community and raises our quality of life while reducing costs.

Climate Change 202

The logical step, once Heat Islands are seen and understood, is to get a picture of large scale impacts of the hundreds of thousands of towns, transportation corridors, energy transmission corridors, etc. each belching up an energized bolus, carrying toxic compounds and particulate matter aloft. Again, perhaps a volcano would be more intense, and concentrated, but we are creating heat islands virtually everywhere. Like a child learning shades of red, we need to understand what we do to our atmosphere. Using the volcano as "out-of-the-box red" from the kindergarten set of Crayons. Perhaps what we are seeing on the global climate change scale is brick red, or terracotta. Still, undeniably "red" once we have matured and understand the range of color that makes up red. The amalgamation of these updrafts, which create nearly invisible columns of upwelling air, here in Northeast Wisconsin, have created a dense and stationary mass of heated air, so large, as to shunt winter weather as far south as Texas!
We see ever more heat, more drought, and wildly fluctuating diurnal (daily) temperature change, combined with heavier, and more prolonged wind, high rain events, etc. Two new types of rain events have now been seen in Wisconsin. One stalls normally, fast moving thunderstorms, (Which get their energy from superheated air blasting into the Stratosphere.) When vast amounts of energy are being released on still summer nights, the phenomenon can dump several times the monthly average, of rain, overnight. The second phenomenon is "training", where a series of nodes of heavy rain, travel perpendicularly along a storm's front, inundating a small area as it's parent air mass runs into these "bubbles", or "columns" of heated air which act as major atmospheric mountain ranges along urban/suburban corridors. I have seen as much as can be seen from the earth, and have integrated information gathered by flying as well. Most of the problem with these phenomena is that they are too small to be considered "weather" in and of themselves, they change weather. Yet, they are usually far too large scale for individuals to detect, perceive, or grasp without an understanding of the heat island concept.
In essence, we each have an atmospheric change map of our entire existence. It has mostly been lost to the scale of time, but we can imagine it quite easily once given tools to "see" this kind of process. At rest, we "contaminate" the air with carbon dioxide, this however is useful to plants, mosquitoes and a plethora of microbes. Because our body heat creates a tiny updraft, the CO2 tries to fall and the effect is of creating two counter spiraling vortecies. This can be imagined as a sort of doughnut shape. Along the inner surface of the bottom of the doughnut, air would be moving aloft, spinning the doughnut, and the CO2 would be curling out and down the outside of the doughnut. To help visualize this phenomenon, hold your right hand out and spin it clockwise, hold your left hand out and spin it counterclockwise. Now, move your hands from front to the sides. This gives you some sense of your "energetic addition" to the world when you are at rest. As you travel through life, you also bring with you a series of these doughnuts, spinning off like a nautilus through time-space. (please don't write this off as Metaphysics) If we exercise, our bodies, we actually make more CO2, and stir up the air more. Although we still make the generalized "doughnut effect", it is overwhelmed by fluid dynamics and eddy currents behind our moving mass.
Similarly, but without the counteracting CO2 is the car or truck at rest after use. It has the spiraling upward energy, but all it has to give back are the gasses and fumes borne up by the heat of the engine. When the car is running far more heat and fumes are created, borne upward by the energy of the heat. It sounds tiny, but we have hundreds of millions of cars operating every day!
Many of us remember the childhood banking lesson. Two sisters got a choice of having their annual allowance allocated in one of two ways. One chose to get ten dollars every month. She liked money and was very happy. Her sister chose a penny plus another penny every day, compounded for the entire year. The sister who picked the first payment plan thought ten dollars was a lot of money compared to a penny, and it is. However, a small change compounded over a long time has substantially more impact. "Penny Girl" has nearly seven hundred dollars by the end of three hundred and sixty five days, whereas the girl getting ten dollars per month only nets one-hundred and twenty.
Similarly, we need to look at long-term incremental changes that yield the biggest bang over the long term. Not everyone can go from a car using fuel at a rate of 25 MPG to one using it at a rate of 50MPG as I was able to do. This cut my transportation emissions by half. I could cut them by half again by always having one passenger, and by half again driving the car with three friends along. Carpooling could drastically the energy use we all have to use for transport. With four people riding in my car, we effectively get 200 MPG!
By using a solar furnace, frequently called a "scorched air" solar heater, I reduced my space heating bill by 1/3. This is only a few hundred dollars per year, but I am expecting the system to pay itself off in year three. From then on, that money saved stays in my bank, rather than flowing to a utility company. Perhaps, all one can afford to do is slow down a few miles per hour to save fuel, or check the air in their tires more frequently. Even keeping them two pounds psi harder can improve mileage without affecting handling. These small changes add up over time and complement one another in unique ways.
Find out if it is possible to ride share to work or the grocery, you may be surprised at how rich your life becomes while simultaneously saving resources! Imaging also, what life would be like if you just spent more time sitting and thinking, letting your CO2 cycle through the natural world the way God/ess intended.

What Be the Rewards?

A little over two years ago, I purchased a solar panel. It is the most low tech device that I know of. Imagine a large box low and flat, like the shirt boxes that will be found under the Christmas Tree in a few days. Of course, mine is larger, (seven feet by twenty) and air tight, except for a small inlet and a small outlet. The side of the box that faces South is covered with fiberglass, relatively clear. The rest of the box is covered with insulation. People who sell more high tech devices often call this type of collector "Scorched Air" because it removes air from the house, warms it up, and brings it back into the living space. Inside the box is a bi-metal thermostat that automatically turns on the fan that blows air into the device when the temperature inside the box reaches a predetermined temperature. To keep cold air from cycling back into the house when the fan stops, two automatic dampers close when the fan is off.

Yesterday, I spent a few minutes brushing the snow off the panel and was rewarded by the soothing hum of the fan. Even though our high temp was only twelve degrees, the panel was able to bring one-hundred degree air into the house. Warmed by the sun, powered by a twenty-two watt squirrel cage fan. The entire system paid itself off in under two years. In year one, the panel provided about twenty percent of the home's heat budget. Now, due to creatively changing just a couple things, the panel is making up about forty percent of our heating needs. Rather than using unheated basement air and pressurizing the living space as I did at first, we now use air from the living space to feed the panel, increasing the efficiency and increasing the hours that the fan runs each day.

I am saving money that would otherwise be spent on energy, but this is not what makes me happiest. Knowing that with no major upkeep, this panel should last another thirty years or more makes me feel pretty good. Keeping the place comfortable without burdening the furnace feels pretty good as well. My favorite part is knowing that the sun really will come out tomorrow. During the coldest spells we get during the winter, it is usually crystal clear and the panel works all day long. In the spring and early fall, we use the extra dry and warm air to dry clothes, veggies and herbs. When it gets too hot in the house, we just unplug the entire system.

The most curious thing is that this whole system was created back in the early seventies and has been providing heat ever since. I bought the system used when trees grew up in front of the panel for a second time. The former owner installed it outside his home that was in a suburban area. When trees grew too large to let the sunshine in, he moved to a different home further out in the suburbs. Trees there grew up there too and shaded the panel again, so I bought the thirty-five year old system for about what it cost to build back in the seventies. Where I placed it, in an older neighborhood, the trees are all mature, and there is still plenty of sun, so I won't have the problems that he did.

Why do we continue to deny the fact that solar is a good way to go? Why is the focus on producing electricity, which is more difficult and expensive? I am stumped by the inability of people to see the benefit that would come from requiring similar systems on all new construction in areas that need heat in the winter.

While our elected officials talk about making progress toward energy efficiency, hoping for a seventeen percent reduction in energy use over the next two decades, or by increasing efficiency over the next generation, I have done more than twice as much with virtually no funding, in less than two months. Those who make their money on things staying the same will never get behind the changes that will require them to live on less, or to re-educate themselves. Corporados want to talk about costs, the displacement, the turmoil that they hype as the "result" of doing the right thing. My belief is that doing things wrong because they benefit business as usual is both short-sighted and irresponsible. The workers that will be displaced when we change our goal to sustainability will have to get jobs that support and enhance our planet, and her people, rather than raping it, and them. No talking heads have cogent arguments for environmental degradation. The "powers that be" are, and have always been afraid of change. We must drag them kicking and screaming into the future that we can plainly see is possible. Corporate Welfare recipients will not let go of their billions without a fight.

I hope and pray that you too will one day know the beautiful sound of "free" heat coming from the sun. This is just one tiny piece of the puzzle of how to live in harmony with the planet. There are millions of answers to the question, what can one person do to make positive change in the world. "Take your time, think a lot, why think of everything you've got, for you will still be here tomorrow, but your dreams may not."- Cat Stevens. When we finally figure out how to mimic nature, creating no waste, living in community, with respect for all beings, we will be well on our way to solving many of the problems that plague humanity. We Believed in change. We voted for Barack. We even made him the President. Now we have to fight for him. Show the Corporate Outlaws that we mean business. Remember, The Constitution says: "One person one vote", not one dollar one vote.