Environment

April Fools protest (works as a verb and a noun)

I caption this photo: “Give me a job.” A group of layabouts chained themselves to a Bank of America branch in Boston today, in what they ironically described as an “April Fool” protest. Talk about truth in advertising.

They were protesting the bank’s investment in coal-powered electricity-generating plants. I suppose once Mummy and Daddy make bail for them out of the gardener’s begonia fund, they’ll head home to their apartments, turn on their electric-powered lights, grab a nice cool beverage out of the electric-powered fridge, and plop down in front of the electric-powered TV to watch themselves on the 11 o’clock news.

However, Melanie points out that I may be too harsh. She says they may not be hypocrites, but could be squatting in abandoned warehouses, living off the grid and fighting rats for scraps out of Dumpsters. We can only hope.

The ridiculousness of their position is that they offer no workable alternatives. You can’t build windmills, you can’t build nuclear power plants, you can’t build coal- or oil-fired plants. For groups like this, the solution is de-population, of course. Get rid of all those inconvenient people—besides wonderful me—and there’ll be plenty of resources to go around
for the privileged few who remain and nary a concern for the environment. Right.

[Photo credit: George Rizer/Globe Staff. Used without permission but for purposes of mockery and parody on April Fool Day and that makes it all better, right?]

Balancing organic against affordable

Since we’ve only one salary to live on, Melanie and I have made a resolution to get our budget into shape. A major part of that budget, of course, is food and because we love cooking and good food, we’re learning to be creative. It’s not like beef tenderloin was a regular entree (like never!), but we often pay more for every day items that are higher quality.

For example, we buy organic milk mainly because it is certified free of bovine growth hormones (BGH) and other additives that some say are harmful to developing children. I feel better knowing that Isabella and Melanie, who’s carrying Sophie now, aren’t ingesting it, however safe the government and the dairy industry say it is. Not to mention that it tastes better: 2 percent milk tastes like whole milk and even skim tastes like 1 percent.

Unfortunately, we pay about twice as much or even more per gallon for the privilege of being free of these additives. And it seems we’ll soon be forced to pay even more.

The forces that have driven grocery prices up sharply over the past year - growing demand for food in China and a global biofuels boom - have had an impact on the organic food market as well. Meanwhile, US farmers haven’t kept pace with demand for organic food, sales of which shot up 21 percent in 2006, and that has also sent prices soaring. And supplies of organic soybeans and grains are squeezed - not only are they needed for human consumption, they serve as feed for the animals that will be sent to market as certified organic beef, chicken, and pork.

In addition to those aforementioned reasons, the process for going organic is extremely costly and time-consuming. For one thing it takes three years of no pesticides or any of the other materials before the organic label can be applied and all your resources have to be organic too, such as water and animal feed. The farmers just can’t go organic faster than the consumers do it and so demand outstrips supply and prices rise.

I don’t know if we’ll go without our organic milk or if we’ll just have more bean-and-rice dinners to compensate, but it’s not easy or cheap to do the right thing nutritionally for your family.

Life After People misses the mark, but still entertaining

We watched the History Channel special called Life After People. It’s supposed to be a realistic image of what the world would be like in the years and centuries after us if we all just disappeared one day.

And that’s where my first annoyance came from. It’s supposed to be based on science and fact, but they start with a completely unscientific scenario. Setting aside supernatural scenarios, the end of man would not come with a disappearance. Six and a half billion people do not just disappear. Yet the entire show was based on the premise.

So rather than having to deal with the effects of six billion corpses—say from a pandemic—on the ecosystem, creating food sources for pests who would then feed animals higher up the food chain, instead we’re told that rats and cockroaches and dogs would initially starve.

Then there was the whole anthropomorphication of nature and the treatment of humankind as a sort of parasite on Mother Earth whose loss would be a boon to “Gaia”. Give me a break. For a show with such a materialist outlook on the world, there was an awful lot of spiritualism and faith.

However, there were many good nuggets to be found in the hard sciences, which give us an appreciation for the fact that despite all our technological advancements, it will be the achievements of our ancestors that will outlast our own. When the last skyscraper is a moldering pile of iron oxide, the Great Pyramids of Egypt will still be standing. And when the biggest football stadium has been replaced by forest, the concrete works of the Romans will be a mute testament to their engineering. In fact, two artifacts of modernity that they suggest will remain for millennia are Mount Rushmore, carved as it is out solid granite in an ecologically stable environment with the only element of erosion being pellets of rain, and the Hoover Dam, which is so massive that 70 years after the last concrete was poured, some of the deepest bits of concrete were still curing.

And long after the last book is moldering dust and the last CD-ROM is useless plastic, the carved hieroglyphics and stone tablets and animal-hide scrolls of the Middle East will remain. Then again, if there’s no one left, do we really care what legacy of our civilization remains? Who will be around the appreciate it?

Of course, this is all bunk. This is not how the world will end and we will be around for a long tim—an eternity in fact. Because there is a God, a loving, personal Father who has gifted us with the possibility of eternal life, not in this world, but in the next and who has decreed that this world is finite and time-limited.

Why I don’t listen to global warming zealots.

Here’s why I don’t take the global warming zealots seriously. Because they don’t take it seriously. They predict dire consequences if we all don’t stop using electricity yet they offer no solutions.

If things were as bad as they claim, they’d demand that half of all cars get pulled off the road and half the coal-power plants be shut down immediately. Instead the hoi polloi drive their Priuses while their celebrity leaders fly coast to coast and buy carbon offsets which are, at best, energy neutral. Instead they block all attempts at building electricity generating capacity that doesn’t produce hydrocarbons.

Wind power? Forget it. Blocks the view and chews up birds. Hydroelectric? No way. Dams up river ecosystems. Nuclear power? Now you’re just crazy, man. Like, ain’t you never heard of the “China syndrome”, man, or Chernobyl?

So what’s the alternative?

As I said, I’ll consider taking it seriously when they do. They can have my internal combustion engine and electric-powered appliances, when Al Gore ditches his fancy mansion for pre-Industrial Age digs. In other words, never.

Oh, and I still haven’t received an explanation for why the same scientists warning about global warming today were all claiming back in the 1970s that we faced a new ice age.

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