This from the BBC:

Out of 33 keyboards swabbed, four were regarded as a potential health hazard and one harboured five times more germs than one of the office’s toilet seats.

Microbiologist Dr Peter Wilson said a keyboard was often “a reflection of what is in your nose and in your gut”.

During tests in January this year, a microbiologist deemed one of the office’s keyboards to be so dirty he ordered it to be removed, quarantined and cleaned.

It had 150 times the recommended limit for bacteria — five times as filthy as a lavatory seat tested at the same time, the research found.

Maybe everybody else knew this already, but I’m damned if I did. More good news on energy, brought to you by the agribusiness lobby and the quadrennial bad joke known as the Iowa caucuses:

Conventional gas delivers more energy than a gallon that contains ethanol. If it’s a gallon of E-10, which is a blend of 10 percent ethanol and conventional gas now widely available in the Kansas City area, there’s an energy difference of about 3.4 percent.

Now that may not seem like much when you’re topping off the tank this week. But over the course of a year of normal driving, it would take an additional 40 gallons of E-10 to go the same distance as conventional gas. If they were both priced the same, it would mean an extra $120.

If it’s E-85, a blend containing 85 percent ethanol that can be used in specially equipped vehicles, the energy loss soars and more than offsets its lower cost, even though E-85 is about 60 cents per gallon less at retail than conventional gas.

Mileage can suffer by about 25 percent with E-85, according to AAA. Over the course of a year, that amounts to an extra 300 gallons of E-85 to go the same distance as when using conventional gas. That means an average household, when the total cost of conventional gas and E-85 are compared, would spend nearly $100 more per year for E-85…

More of the Pigmy President’s legacy:

Despite more than 100 published studies by government scientists and university laboratories that have raised health concerns about a chemical compound that is central to the multibillion-dollar plastics industry, the Food and Drug Administration has deemed it safe largely because of two studies, both funded by an industry trade group.

The agency says it has relied on research backed by the American Plastics Council because it had input on its design, monitored its progress and reviewed the raw data.

The compound, bisphenol A (BPA), has been linked to breast and prostate cancer, behavioral disorders and reproductive health problems in laboratory animals.

This blog is named Bad Attitudes for a reason. Here’s one of them:

Monarch Butterflies at their winter home in Mexico.

Estimates put the number of monarchs at 4 million per acre in some of the butterfly reserves. Can you imagine?

“I have on many occasions seen Spaniards, Italians, Americans, Canadians, and Mexicans come into the butterfly colonies and literally weep,” said Lincoln Brower, a monarch expert at the University of Florida. “It’s such an overwhelming emotional experience to realize that you’re actually looking at these tens of millions of monarch butterflies that have come into this tiny, little area of Mexico.”

The eastern monarchs are the butterflies that winter in Mexico (the western monarchs stay in California) and they come to the exact same mountains every year. But the ones that arrive in the fall are not the ones that leave in the spring. After mating in Mexico (in March) and finding milkweed for their caterpillars, the females only live a few more weeks. It’s the next generation that migrates home. It can take up to four generations of butterflies to travel all the way back to New England, Canada, and the Great Lakes. In the fall, the robust autumn monarchs gain extra weight and live 12 times longer than the summer monarchs so they can survive the journey to their winter paradise.

Link

Establishing shot from Blade Runner? Close. Jim Fallows of The Atlantic Monthly is posted to Beijing, where he amuses himself by photographing the air outside his apartment.

Click image to enlarge

Excerpted from an Inter Press Service article:

NEW DELHI — The world's richest countries must drastically reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions to mitigate climate change impacts, says the lead author of a United Nations report, due for release later this month, that focuses on impacts of global warming on the developing world.

To have a realistic chance of avoiding dangerous climate change, rich countries need to make cuts of at least 80 percent by 2050, said Kevin Watkins, an author of the UN's Human Development Report 2007, during a climate change workshop for Asian journalists in the Indian capital, last week…

Unfortunately for the mother ship, however, Watkins’s realistic chance has no realistic chance. George W. Bush refused to ratify the Kyoto Protocol because rapidly developing countries such as China and India are exempt from its clean air requirements.

Fair is fair, Bush seemed to be saying — and most Americans seemed to agree, at least with this particular line of argument. Why give our competitors a get-out-of-jail card until they get to the point where they’re able to pump as much crap into the atmosphere as we do?

And this does indeed make sense to a species still genetically adapted to the tribal and territorial society of the hunter-gatherer. So I’m just talking to myself here, but let’s go ahead anyway.

This is not a zero-sum game, in which China and India win and we lose. Nobody breathes Chinese or Indian or American air. We all breathe the planet’s air. And if we cut down on greenhouse emissions but our economic competitors don’t, everybody’s air gets better. Or at least it gets worse more slowly.

Biologically, ecologically, medically, environmentally, climatologically, there are no losers. The human species wins. Even the polar bears do.

The war being waged by the major polluting nations is not against each other. It is against the planet and it's time we started losing it.

Texas, a perennial frontrunner in the stupidity stakes, is about to auction off a state wildlife preserve bordering Big Bend National Park:

The property, which could be sold as soon as Tuesday, is the Christmas Mountains Ranch, a 9,270-acre tract abutting Big Bend National Park near the Rio Grande. It was given to the state in 1991 and leased to the nonprofit association of local residents to patrol …

The dispute pits the donors of the land, the Conservation Fund and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, against a pistol-packing commissioner adamant about preserving hunting and firearms rights on the property, even at the cost of denying the land to the National Park Service, although Texas ranks 44th in park land.

…at least if you’re Coke ™ they do. Here’s Maude Barlow, an expert on the world’s water wars. These get very little coverage in the American press, although they are much more important to mankind than the Bush family’s oil wars. The thing is, you can’t drink oil.

When you dig deep into Coca-Cola’s practices, you see it’s really a bad company. They are using military satellite imagery to find clean sources of groundwater and then going in — often in poor tribal communities — and setting up a plant and just helping themselves to the water until the water is gone. I call it water mining.

We’re working with folks in the state of Kerala, India, who have taken the Coca-Cola company all the way to their Supreme Court to fight the way Coke comes in and sucks up massive amounts of groundwater, pollutes it with sweeteners and chemical additives, and then makes huge profits selling this nonnutritious drink to the public.

Seems to me there’s only two basic positions: either oil is being created as we speak at a pace rapid enough to supply our needs, or we’ll reach the peak of oil production at some point, the so-called Hubbert Peak.

Since we have sketchy data to infer from, we don’t know where we are on that curve with certainty. The Saudis, for instance, hold onto the best estimates for their remaining reserves like Bush holds onto information about torture memos and spying on Americans.

There are disagreements among the participants about when the oily dance will come to a finale. Oil companies naturally don’t want people to cut back on their use of oil. For example, Exxon Mobil recently reported a quarterly profit of $10.3 billion, in light of which the executives at Royal Dutch Shell might have been shamed by their measly $8.7 billion over the same period. Anything that tends to get people talking about conserving or switching to realistic methods of transportation is generally anathema to Big Oil.

We probably won’t recognize the actual peak until we’re a bit past it.

Some things, however, are clear. For instance, it’s uncontroversial that the cost of extracting oil goes up as more oil is pumped from that field, because the original pressure of compressed oil decreases and eventually must be supplemented by human ingenuity. It’s also well known that the world’s biggest oil fields are decades old and well into their useful lifecycle.

We’ve found most of the easy oil, says Michael Klare, and we’re headed into the era of tough oil. He cites one new project and two studies in support of his argument.

In the forty years since the discovery of oil in Alaska’s Prudhoe Bay, the largest field to be developed anywhere in the world is the Kashagan project in the Kazakh section of the Caspian Sea, currently estimated at 9-13 billion barrels. The project is big enough for Exxon Mobil, Shell, ConocoPhillips, Total (French), and Eni (Italian) to share interest. It was originally planned to be online in 2005 at a cost of $10 billion. The new estimate is 2010, for $19 billion. The government of Kazakhstan is threatening to take control of the project, but in fact it appears that the project faces a number of difficult issues.

The oil reservoir itself is buried beneath high-pressure strata of gas, making its extraction exceedingly tricky, and it contains abnormally high levels of deadly hydrogen sulfide; moreover, the entire field is located in a shallow area of the Caspian Sea that freezes over for five months of the year and is the breeding ground for rare seals and beluga sturgeon.

No doubt they’ll get that oil out, but it’ll be expensive.

Two new reports, one from the International Energy Agency, part of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and the other submitted by the National Petroleum Council to the US Department of Energy, add fuel to the fire. In fact they throw gasoline onto it with predictions of significant near-term dislocations worldwide.

The IEA report, according to Klare, points out that demand for oil is increasing rapidly, especially in surging Asian economies like China and India. High prices at US pumps have not kept Americans from setting new records for distances driven. The demand does not show any signs of decreasing anywhere. To keep up with current demand, new demand, and declining production from older fields requires the production of five million new barrels a day. Since the older fields, like those in the US, can’t increase production, those five million barrels must come from

…Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Angola, Libya, Nigeria, Venezuela, and one or two other countries. These are not places that exactly inspire investor confidence of a sort that could attract the many billions of dollars needed to ramp up production enough to satisfy global requirements.

Read between the lines and one quickly perceives a worst-case scenario in which the necessary investment is not forthcoming; OPEC production does not grow by five million barrels per day year after year; ethanol and other substitute-fuel production, along with alternate fuels of various sorts, do not grow fast enough to fill the gap; and, in the not-too-distant future, a substantial shortage of oil leads to a global economic meltdown.

If we’re lucky. Which major power would lay down its arms rather than go to war over the dregs of the oil its military machine requires?

The National Petroleum Council is a oil-industry association. Its recent report recommended, of course, more drilling in federal lands, but also increased fuel-efficiency standards.

Contributing to the buzz around its release was the identity of the report’s principal sponsor, former Exxon CEO Lee Raymond. Having previously expressed skepticism about global warming, he now embraced the report’s call for the taking of significant steps to curb carbon-dioxide emissions.

Like the IEA report, the NPC study does claim that — with the perfect mix of policies and an adequate level of investment — the energy industry would be capable of satisfying oil and gas demand for some years to come. “Fortunately, the world is not running out of energy resources,” the report bravely asserts. Read deep into the report, though, and these optimistic words begin to dissolve as its emphasis switches to the growing difficulties (and costs) of extracting oil and gas from less-than-favorable locations and the geopolitical risks associated with a growing global reliance on potentially hostile, unstable suppliers.

And the costs are significant. The NPC estimates that by 2030 the world will need to spend about $3,000 for each individual now alive, or $20 trillion, to ensure that enough oil exists to meet expected demand. Get out your wallet…

Another area of agreement between the two reports:

Both reports claim that with just the right menu of corrective policies and an unrealistic streak of pure luck — as in no set of major Katrina-like hurricanes barreling into oil fields or refineries, no new wars in Middle Eastern oil producing areas, no political collapse in Nigeria — we can somehow stagger through to 2012 and maybe just beyond without a global economic meltdown.

That’s right, five years. After that, it gets ugly.

More competition among buyers, more difficult places to drill and extract, less stable host countries, aging fields with declining production.

What would six-dollar-a-gallon gas mean to the American Dream?

Since I’ve never been very good at doing my part for the environment, I figure it’s about time to at least do something as a blogger, so I don’t have to feel guilty every time I see a hybrid automobile driving down the street or someone posts something that reminds me of my energy hogging ways. Over at Coding Horror, we are advised that not only can we do more to save the planet while sitting at our computers, but we can actually save money by doing it.

There are even some folks who recommend that you replace the energy hogging power supply on your computer to not only help save the planet, but save money as well. This sounds as sensible as buying any other more energy efficient appliance, perhaps more so. And for those of you looking for a computer program to help you do you part, the folks at Local Cooling,or alternatively, Co2 Saverexist to help you fight global warming at your desktop. They even have computer programs available that track how many trees you’ve saved or how much CO2 you've kept out the atmosphere, by getting your computer to make all the right moves that the programs are designed to facilitate. Right now the programs are only compatible with Windows XP or Vista. You folks using Ubuntu and Apple will have to keep track of the number in your head as I don't know of any similar programs for your computers, although our comments section is always open.

But buying that new power supply doesn’t sound like such a bad idea, although being the eternal skeptic, I’m always wondering why they want me to buy something to save the planet.

You might be happy to hear that the US is not included in the European Happy Planet Index, compiled by the New Economics Foundation and Friends of the Earth. They limited themselves to Europe, probably in consideration of our feelings.

The ratings don’t give Europe much to crow about. The Guardian considers that “Europe is now worse at creating well-being than it was 40 years ago.”

I went looking for details, and learned that conceptually the HPI is Life Satisfaction times Life Expectancy divided by Environmental Footprint.

The HPI reflects the average years of happy life produced by a given society, nation or group of nations, per unit of planetary resources consumed. Put another way, it represents the efficiency with which countries convert the earth’s finite resources into well-being experienced by their citizens.

Seems like a thing worth measuring, and a reasonable try at measuring it.

So it’s interesting to find the list that does include the US. (Here’s an interactive map of the world colored by HPI.) Of 178 countries, We’re Number One… Hundred and Fiftieth. The UK is 108th, Canada 111th, well ahead of us because of superior Environmental Footprints. The United Arab Emirates take the Worst-Of trophy in that area, with the US, Kuwait, and Qatar tied for second.

Certainly people will dispute the rankings, the definitions, the methods of calculation, and so on (possibly even including some folks not on an oil company payroll). To me the value of such a calculation is precisely that it generates controversy, which in areas such as environmental issues is often the only way that any conversation is allowed to take place.

And it’s not very hard to figure out why.

Andrew Simms, the foundation’s head of climate change, said countries with a strong market-led economic model fared least well. “What is the point if we burn vast quantities of fossil fuels to make, buy and consume ever more stuff, without noticeably benefiting our well-being?”

A rhetorical question, no doubt. Obviously, the point of capitalism is the concentration of capital.

State capitalism, at least. Chomsky talks about a continuum with completely centralized control at one extreme, and completely decentralized control at the other. (I believe a lot of this comes from Bakunin, but I’m not sure how much.) The first he calls “state” and the second “libertarian”.

Capitalism can be of the state variety, like ours, with massive market intervention. Subsidies of all sorts for the defense contractors, drug companies, and so on nudge most of the benefit of the common wealth to those already at the very top of the ladder.

Then there’s libertarian capitalism, which seeks to distribute capital much more widely. The first I remember hearing about such a batty scheme was watching Bill Moyers interview Louis Kelso, the inventor of the Employee Stock Ownership Plan (ESOP). He, along with Mortimer Adler, published The Capitalist Manifesto in 1975. It’s now out of print; Powell’s has no copies, eBay has one for $65, Amazon has three from $40 to $125, aLibris has two starting at $51. Oh, and the San Francisco Public Library does not have a copy, though I did get one through interlibrary loan. Apparently either Moyers interviewed a complete nobody who once had a beer with Mortimer Adler, or Kelso said something you’re not supposed to know about.

As I recall the interview, Kelso advocated a legal and enforced upper limit on the amount of capital that anyone could accumulate. He believed that it’s good to have a lot of well-off people, and as Greider says, capitalism is the greatest wealth-generation engine humanity has encountered. The question is, who ends up with the wealth? Our system concentrates it; Kelso wanted to distribute it.

As much as I believe that capitalism is based on some of the worst aspects of human character, I can imagine that we could make it respond to reality. It’s our construct, after all; it’s not part of nature, or it would have existed throughout history. It’ll be tricky, kind of like turning around a bunch of Bush administrations. But there are signs that we’re learning something about how to do that in the political realm; perhaps that expanded consciousness might transfer to the economic.

For example, in The Soul of Capitalism Bill Greider talks about the extent to which corporations are able externalize many of their costs while internalizing the profits. Whether through loopholes or lax enforcement or political pressure preventing relevant regulations, they can often avoid paying for environmental damage they cause. But you sure don’t hear them talking about sharing their profits with the people in the area that was damaged. Quite the opposite: those people are the ones who pay the cost, in money and health and future.

Capitalism might work if it was forced to include all the actual costs in its calculations. It does not work in the US today. In fact it’s destroying our common fantasy of the American Dream on physical, economic, and spiritual planes.

If we can force Congress to do something about Bush and Cheney, we might actually be able to force Congress to do something about the environment as well. As long as the US is in form a democracy, we have the theoretical power to pull it off.

Excerpted from today’s New York Times:

But officials said that it was unclear if at the end of that process Mr. Bush would take it upon himself to raise the gas mileage of the nation’s automobiles, which has not significantly increased in decades. And Mr. Bush, speaking in the Rose Garden on Monday afternoon, said nothing would be put into effect until the regulatory process was completed at the end of 2008, just weeks before the end of his term.

Tom Toles on global warming and Bush’s EPA…

One of my favorite Kronos Quartet tracks is the classic “A Door is Ajar”. And then, as always, there’s Bill Hicks.

One time me and three friends dropped acid drove around in my Dad’s car, he’s got one of those talking cars, we’re tripping, the car goes “the door is ajar”. We pulled over thought about that for 12 hours. “How can a door be a jar?” “Shit I don’t know but I see it, I see it. Why would they put a jar on a car man?” I’m proud of every moment in my life, alright?

So my question is, if a door can be a jar, can a bee be a canary?

You’ve probably heard about the big bee scare. Apparently they’re dropping like flies.

Worse, they’re not even dying where we can find their little bee bodies and try to figure out what the hell’s going on. They seem to have disappeared, leaving in many cases colonies full of honey, pollen, and larvae, and drunk somebody’s Kool-aid.

Naturally everyone in our enlighted community realizes the importance of bees in general. But did you know that their contribution to the American economy is reckoned at $14 billion a year? By a source as reputable as the New York Times? Of course that mostly represents the pollinating we get them to do for a pittance; the honey we have to pay for, so it isn’t as profitable.

Fortunately, and no doubt by chance, an international consortium of scientists recently published the sequence of the entire honey bee genome. So I guess this means we don’t have to care, we can just engineer some more. Right?

If it comes to a federal system for monitoring feral bees, though, we’re in deep doo-doo.

The Bush administration, through its wholly-owned subsidiary, the American Enterprise Institute, is offering $10,000 bribes to economists and scientists willing to Swift Boat a major United Nations study on climate change. Thanks to Peter from Germany for the link.

From the UK’s The Independent

Iraq’s massive oil reserves, the third-largest in the world, are about to be thrown open for large-scale exploitation by Western oil companies under a controversial law which is expected to come before the Iraqi parliament within days.

The US government has been involved in drawing up the law, a draft of which has been seen by The Independent on Sunday. It would give big oil companies such as BP, Shell and Exxon 30-year contracts to extract Iraqi crude and allow the first large-scale operation of foreign oil interests in the country since the industry was nationalised in 1972.

The huge potential prizes for Western firms will give ammunition to critics who say the Iraq war was fought for oil. They point to statements such as one from Vice-President Dick Cheney, who said in 1999, while he was still chief executive of the oil services company Halliburton, that the world would need an additional 50 million barrels of oil a day by 2010. “So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world’s oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies,” he said.

Oil industry executives and analysts say the law, which would permit Western companies to pocket up to three-quarters of profits in the early years, is the only way to get Iraq's oil industry back on its feet after years of sanctions, war and loss of expertise. But it will operate through “production-sharing agreements” (or PSAs) which are highly unusual in the Middle East, where the oil industry in Saudi Arabia and Iran, the world’s two largest producers, is state controlled.

Opponents say Iraq, where oil accounts for 95 per cent of the economy, is being forced to surrender an unacceptable degree of sovereignty.

James Paul, executive director at the Global Policy Forum, the international government watchdog, said: “It is not an exaggeration to say that the overwhelming majority of the population would be opposed to this.”

Peter, who keeps an eye on European developments for us, reports that certain omnivores in northern Spain, apparently having swallowed that whole global warming myth, no longer bother to hibernate.

Merry Christmas, everybody:

The change is affecting female bears with young cubs, which now find there are enough nuts, acorns, chestnuts and berries on the bleak mountainsides to make winter food-gathering sorties “energetically worthwhile,” scientists at the foundation, based in Santander, the Cantabrian capital, told El Pais newspaper.

Inversnaid is by Father Gerard Manley Hopkins, who was an environmentalist before the word existed.

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

My favorite type of person is the old crank. We’ve got one here in Silver Spring, with a 500-acre farm that’s been in his family for 250 years. Lester Miller is fed up with McMansion developments sprouting all around him, and by golly, they’re not getting his place.

He’s 80 now. Seeing the end coming, he’s put his and whatever adjacent land he can buy into a conservancy. Nothing but organic farming can be done on it hereafter. He was just outbid on 53 acres next door, which Bobby Essis is subdividing, and now Miller’s being sued over a trailer he parked on the property line, the first piece of equipment he’s bought for a new enterprise he’s considering, S.S. Hog Farm.

“I am going to put a hog farm here because I think it is the best way I can stop development. Nobody is going to want to spend $350,000 for a 10-acre piece of land to build a $1 million home looking at a pig farm,” Miller said.

UPDATE from the reporter: Actually, Miller was not outbid on the parcel Essis bought.

He never even knew it was for sale. Miller surmises that is because of his previous efforts to stop the former owner from building 50 homes there.

Usually, the proposed response to global warming is framed this way. We can fix global warming without any impact on the economy. What they mean by economy is that we can fix global warming and still grow forever. Anyone with the slightest understanding of the implications of exponential growth knows this is absurd, but it is absolutely critical that politicians urge or promise infinite growth at least until they leave office.

Al Gore is one of the most significant and well known proponents of this formula. It is generally understood that to advocate fighting global warming without at the same time saying it will not retard growth is suicidal. Even if you don’t believe it, you must pretend you believe it. While a few dare to challenge the tenets of fundamentalist, right wing religion, it is simply not possible to find a politician, whether right or left, who challenges the fundamental tenet of the American religion, growth for growth’s sake, and plenty of it. Growth is good, and for the right, even, and especially, if it does not trickle down below the rich.

I would call growth a cult, but it encompasses almost the entire body of the American citizenry. There are a lot of problems with the growth fetish, but the fundamental problem is that we equate growth with welfare, with well being. The other main problem is that growth describes the growth of gross domestic product, a number which, unfortunately, encompasses both all the goods and all the bads. Within this context, a hurricane can be a good thing, a very good thing, because it will require the expenditure of billions of dollars to clean up and reconstruct everything that was destroyed by the hurricane.

But I digress. Global warming will destroy the earth as we know it. Isn’t it rather odd that we only think we can get action to stop this menace if we promise that it won’t have any impact on the GDP? How about this? There is a meteor heading towards the earth which will destroy most of its inhabitants. The world marshals its resources to stop the meteor. But someone objects. What will happen to GDP if we spend all those resources trying to stop the meteor?

You see the problem. We are so psychotically twisted by greed that an abstract and not terribly meaningful number called the GDP has become more important than life itself. Goddamn it, right before I die, I want to be able to turn to the financial pages that day and see that the GDP increased over the last fiscal quarter.

Lolligolli at Kos brings us this delightfully depressing story about shrinking snakes — not only yours, but the one belonging to your pet alligator.

Renowned scientist Louis Guillette announced research today indicating that pesticide pollution is causing a reduction in penis size and increasing the numbers of male genital abnormalities due to chemical similarity to estrogen.

Surely some drug company will come out soon with a new pill to help us fix the problem. Just wondering though, could this lead us to the root of Curious George’s problem with little things like manliness? Is there a reason that Daddy Bush calls him “little George”? Was Barbara a lawn freak? Anybody know?

The Democrats are at it again. Pandering to the masses, that is. A key component of their current campaign strategy is to rail against high gas prices while also pummeling the oil companies and those sneaky Arabs. Part of their campaign does have a valid point, though. Why should be subsidize the oil companies when gas prices are sky high and they are making record profits? While Exxon is paying its retired CEO 400 million dollars in retirement benefits, we are paying near record prices for oil and gas.

The response by the Republicans, on the other hand, is pathetic. Republicans say they have spent years advocating policies that would reduce reliance on imported oil, largely by promoting more domestic energy production. This might be a good defense except for the fact that no amount of domestic production will make a dent in our oil imports.

Despite the fact that gas prices are much higher this year than they were last year, demand for gas in this country continues to increase and is at an all time high. I shudder to think what would happen if gas prices actually decreased. The Japanese, on the other hand, decreased their consumption of gas this year for the first time in decades.

While there are some aspects of the Democrats’ campaign that are positive, the main message seems to be that our first priority is to do something to bring down gas prices. This message is being offered in concert with a contradictory message that we need to conserve energy and develop alternative fuels.

My question is, if demand is increasing despite increases in gas prices, how much will be consume if the Democrats can magically bring down prices? The desired result shouldn’t be to bring down prices, but to bring down consumption. Bringing down consumption is good in itself, because it helps our planet, not because it brings down prices.

The hard truth is that we need to maintain high prices, not try to figure out ways to reduce them. The American people need to know that these prices will remain high and will get higher. As long as people perceive these high prices as a temporary phenomenon that can be magically attenuated by politics, beating up on the oil companies, or more drilling, they won’t take the necessary actions to ensure a long term commitment to conservation.

One approach is to impose a hefty gas tax. Although I would support that, I would propose an approach that takes on the level of consumption directly.

Determine the average number of gallons consumed per household and issue an electronic card to each household that allows it to consume the average number of gallons less 10%. Each year increase the reduction from the baseline by an additional 5% until we get to a 50% reduction. Establish a market much like the oil market whereby each household can trade portions of its quota at a price determined by the market. Those who conserve by cutting back on driving, moving closer to work, or buying a more efficient car could directly profit from their frugality. Those who chose to consume above their allotment would have to pay a price over and above the retail price of gasoline. Those without cars, which include a lot of the poor, could pick up some additional spending money.

Would this be fair? Well, is the current system fair? Under the current system, the rich get to consume as much as they want without any significant impact on their standard of living. As gas prices increase, the poor and the near poor will be unable to get around and the middle class may be significantly impacted. Under my system, actual gasoline prices will probably decrease with decreased consumption. However, unlike the current system, conservation will not be its own undoing. If we conserve under the current system, this also tends to drive down prices, which just encourages us to be profligate again, perpetuating the hopeless cycle.

Why won’t a system like this be implemented? It won’t be implemented because it would actually do something to decrease overall consumption. It is much easier for politicians to just rail against the oil companies without actually requiring any action or sacrifice on the part of their constituents.

Under the current crop of politicians, we will continue to stumble our way into the future, with a subsidy here, a credit there, and a congressional hearing over there. We will not set real goals that are attainable. To do so would require the recognition that we are actually running out of oil and we have met the enemy and he is us.

Are there better proposals out there? Probably. But regardless, almost anything is better than a situation where gas prices increase while consumption decreases at the same time. We need to recognize and overcome the inelasticity of demand for gas that seems to permeate our society.

The sky wasn’t yet dark when I came home from the Maundy Thursday covered dish supper, so it’s spring, friends, and time to clean up the homestead.

The hardest part is always figuring out what to do with all that stuff you have that’s too good to throw away. You know what I mean, those expensive New Balances that didn’t fit and you didn’t get around to taking them back to the store but they’re brand new, that Health-O-Meter seat scale and the crutches you acquired but never used when you had the bum leg a couple of years back, the home barbering kit you nearly cut off somebody’s ear with, the ceiling fixtures you replaced because they didn’t accommodate fluorescent bulbs? That’s all stuff I gave away to somebody who actually wanted the junk-to-me I was tripping over. That’s not mentioning the organ — the organ like a piano, not the organ like a liver — I Freecycled for a relative.

So I recommend freecycling for spring .

On the flip: What is Freecycling? How can I find these suckers who’ll take my banty rooster that my hens won’t have anything to do with or the infant outfits my teenager outgrew? What about all that gasoline that’s wasted driving around to pick up three bodice rippers or drop off an extra extension cord? What’s the downside of freecycling?

The underlying primary purpose of Freecycling is keeping stuff out of landfills. Every washing machine you give away or recliner you take is another cubic yard or so of stuff kept out of a landfill. Freecycling also stretches budgets for people who can’t otherwise afford the toys their kids want or furniture for a new addition to their household. And it develops community; I’ve met a lot of nice and/or interesting people (sometimes people only a couple of blocks away) and nobody truly dreadful, some of them obviously just barely scraping by and others just as obviously leading privileged lifestyles. Personally, I like rubbing elbows like that.

Worldwide, there are more than 2 million Freecyclers in 3,511 Freecycling e-communities, surely at least one of them near you.

All you do to get rid of that 6-foot-wide plush toy octopus (yes, I’ve seen offers like that) is post a message to the list describing the thing, including its condition. The subject line should read: OFFER: big octopus stuffed toy, [location]. You give your location because most everybody, including you, will drive to Hillview if that’s the town you live in but not 20 miles away to Riverview unless it’s an item you really, really want and need that will cost you a bundle at your local corner store.

Which brings up the problem of wasting ever-more-expensive gas and adding more crud to our polluted air. When gas prices were rising steadily last year, and still I saw Freecyclers giving and receiving modest goods like two pairs of size 6 girls’ shorts or a spice rack, I asked an e-list I moderate about the economics of it all. One listmate noted that in many suburban-exurban areas, all time not spent in the work cubicle or sleeping is spent driving around in circles, and the question wouldn’t arise. Another described quite a complicated setup, with Freecyclers picking up stuff for somebody else at the Sector A pickup point and dropping it off at the Sector C pickup point, where they’re picking up something left for them by somebody in Sector F. She ends with “Don’t forget about the energy being saved at the manufacturing end if many families are getting sequential use out of strollers and video games.” Not to say my neighbors are stupid, but I can’t visualize this functioning successfully in my neck of the woods. Overall, the best advice is to Freecycle as nearby as possible and to batch errands, as in pick up your Freecycle shower curtains after you stop off at the post office on your way to the dentist’s.

The danger of Freecycling is the likelihood that you’ll wind up with more not exactly vital stuff than you started with. Did I really need that console tube record player that some guy’s grandmother was getting rid of? Can I justify filling a bookcase with medieval history books someone didn’t want to yet again load on a moving van? (Well, she did say “a box,” which I was picturing as six or eight books, and that bookcase used to hold an encyclopedia I Freecycled away so I didn’t have to acquire yet another bookcase.) At least it’s different stuff to dust twice a year.

And I’ve love to hear your stories about Freecycling or your questions.

Let’s get controversial again.

For a while now I’ve been mouthing off to Mrs. Batard about the theory of “Peak Oil”. The theory of “Peak Oil” seemed to me to be the best propaganda that the oil industry could create to jack up prices. Until just now, I had never punched my personal theory into Google to see if others agree with me. WOW! I’m amazed. It looks to me like there are conspiracy theories run amok about my simple thought. Well, here’s just one link to a story that kind of halfway talks about my theory and then goes far beyond it. Beware of treading in this minefield. Conspiracy theories run amok. Maybe mine too, but I doubt it. Running up the price of a commodity (and running it back down to “knock out” competitors at the right time) has always been the hallmark of capitalism. Peak Oil fits the bill very nicely. Alright, I know I’m done for. Blast away.

They make the profits on creating artificial scarcity.

“Peak oil” is pure military-industrial-complex propaganda.

Publicly available CFR and Club of Rome strategy manuals from 30 years ago say that a global government needs to control the world population through neo-feudalism by creating artificial scarcity. Now that the social architects have de-industrialized the United States, they are going to blame our economic disintegration on lack of energy supplies.

Globalization is all about consolidation. Now that the world economy has become so centralized through the Globalists operations, they are going to continue to consolidate and blame it on the West’s “evil” overconsumption of fossil fuels, while at the same time blocking the development and integration of renewable clean technologies.

In other words, Peak oil is a scam to create artificial scarcity and drive prices up. Meanwhile, alternative fuel technologies which have been around for decades are intentionally suppressed.

Too bad the news media didn’t bother to tell us which restaurants, I guess that means all of them, but this should whet your appetite for another Coke at McDonalds — and we knew that kitty was actually living life better than we are.

Benito Middle School student Jasmine Roberts examined the amount of bacteria in ice served at fast food restaurants. The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling. “I thought there might be a little bacteria in the ice, but I never expected it to be this much,” she said. “And I never thought the toilet water would be cleaner.” Her discovery: Seventy percent of the time, the ice had more bacteria than the toilet water.

Evangelical leaders are getting on board to fight global warming, not only with their mouths but with their pocket books. The usual suspects, of course, are not on board.

These include Charles W. Colson, the founder of Prison Fellowship Ministries; James C. Dobson, founder of Focus on the Family; and Richard Land, president of the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention.

This latter group always has the rapture to fall back on. So, why worry? The rest of us can just stew in our juices.

Artist Mark Wilson, an Oregonian transplanted to Connecticut, passes along yet another instance of Bush’s contempt for science. Same-old, same-old: Feds fund research. Findings fluster timber barons. Feds pull plug.

“It’s totally without precedent as far as I can recollect,” said Jerry Franklin, a professor at the University of Washington who has studied Northwest forests for decades. “It says, ‘If we don’t like what you’re saying, we’ll cut off your money.’ “

My hero’s back: William Greider’s newest piece for The Nation has been, as they say, liberated by truthout.

The mass culture marinates American citizens in false triumphalism. [Damn! Wish I’d written that. — CED]

Events, nevertheless, have delivered a teachable moment — an opportunity to reframe and reargue many long-neglected matters. The wheels are coming off the right-wing bus. The President of Oil and War is no longer much believed. The vast suffering and physical destruction in New Orleans have made all too visible what ecologists and social critics have been trying to explain for years. Their warnings once seemed too abstract or remote to require public action. New Orleans announced, for those who will listen, that the future is now.

Oceans are warming, the Arctic ice cap is shrinking. The deep topsoil of Iowa is draining into the Mississippi River, leaving behind chemical swamps. Good drinking water, once freely available to all, has become a scarce commodity for commercial exploitation. Much of the population, dispersed farther and farther from urban centers, is pole-axed by soaring gasoline prices. Meanwhile, the gorgeous abundance of consumer goods continues to poison earth, air and water. This year, Americans will throw away something like 100 million cell phones, pagers, pocket PCs and portable music players, interring their toxic contents in the “dump” called nature.

He goes on to talk about the Apollo Alliance, whose name harks back to JFK’s project to land a man on the moon, regularly cited in world-wide opinion polls as the most impressive achievement of humanity. Apollo began as an alliance of environmental and labor groups, which have often found themselves on opposite sides, but in reality, taking everything into account, ought to be partners. The premise is that jobs and the environment are connected in positive rather than negative ways: that what’s good for the environment is good for jobs as well. The false dichotomy between the two has been exploited for too long.

When Washington State was enacting its green building code, the paper industry initially persuaded machinists and carpenters to oppose the higher standards for timbering as a threat to local jobs. But the unions reversed themselves when the alliance demonstrated that the industry’s job claims were false. (In fact, the legislation gives preference to regionally produced lumber.)

Of course, with what Greider calls “oil-based Republicans” in office, the federal government is hopeless in this, as in other, areas. But as the US increasingly falls behind other countries, especially the European Union, the difference grows harder to ignore. For instance, the EU is forcing industries to redesign their products, processes, and methods of packaging. Beginning next year, auto manufacturers in Europe must take back their old vehicles and re-use 85 percent of the materials in them, and consumer electronics, computers, and cell phones are next. Note that the onus here is on the companies, not the individuals who buy the products. It’s easy to see how such a requirement will cause rethinking by industry.

It’s also easy to imagine what would happen in the US right now if such a program were undertaken. But we can — we must — pursue similar goals if we wish the land we love to be habitable by our descendants.

This is not “new” news since it was included in a press release issued by the Swedish Government on October 1st, but I find it fascinating and, really, worth emulating. Sweden has announced that it is “setting a new policy target: the creation of the conditions necessary to break Sweden’s dependence on fossil fuels by 2020.”

Perhaps this is not completely realistic, but it is precisely the kind of the goal that the United States should have. I think we need to cut our fossil fuel use by at least 50%. Short of an as yet unforeseen technological breakthrough, the continued dependence upon fossil fuels will be the death of us and will lead to an unacceptable degradation of the planet.

President Bush has decided to sacrifice the planet. The planet is being sacrificed because he apparently doesn’t believe that one American job is worth the future of the planet.

Even if we cannot become completely independent of all fossil fuels, we could start with oil. This country is currently only producing about 4 million barrels of oil per day. This mean we are importing about 80% of our oil needs. At a minimum, putting aside the environmental consequences of oil consumption, we would benefit immeasurably from a security and balance of payments standpoint if we took steps to eliminate our oil dependence.

e/sb/d/3212/a/51058">press release issued by the Swedish Government on October 1st, but I find it fascinating and, really, worth emulating. Sweden has announced that it is “setting a new policy target: the creation of the conditions necessary to break Sweden's dependence on fossil fuels by 2020.”

Perhaps this is not completely realistic, but it is precisely the kind of the goal that the United States should have. I think we need to cut our fossil fuel use by at least 50%. Short of an as yet unforeseen technological breakthrough, the continued dependence upon fossil fuels will be the death of us and will lead to an unacceptable degradation of the planet.

President Bush has decided to sacrifice the planet. The planet is being sacrificed because he apparently doesn’t believe that one American job is worth the future of the planet.

Even if we cannot become completely independent of all fossil fuels, we could start with oil. This country is currently only producing about 4 million barrels of oil per day. This mean we are importing about 80% of our oil needs. At a minimum, putting aside the environmental consequences of oil consumption, we would benefit immeasurably from a security and balance of payments standpoint if we took steps to eliminate our oil dependence.

Richard Pombo, real estate millionaire and congressman from California’s Central Valley, has made it his business for 12 years to gut the Endangered Species Act. And according to Grist Magazine, this repellent specimen of the genus Republican is getting close:

In a big coup for property-rights activists, the legislation would also require the feds to pay landowners for lost profits if the presence of an endangered species limits their development options. Because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service lacks funding to make such payments, this could effectively eliminate regulatory restrictions on commercial developers, according to critics.

“It gives developers the right to say to the government, ‘You have two options: either grant me a permit to destroy sensitive habitat, or pay me market value not to,’” said Patrick Parenteau, director of the Environmental Law Clinic at Vermont Law School.