The APEX News Network on-line posted a short article titled, “Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill 2010 – Sparks Debates on Energy Production”.
http://apexnewsnetwork.com/2824/gulf-of-mexico-oil-spill-2010-sparks-debates-on-energy-production/
At the beginning of the article was a comment regarding politicians "driving gas guzzling SUV’s or traveling in private jets" while promoting clean energy. This seems to me to be the first of two key points in this article. It not only highlights politicians hypocrisy but as you will read later, it points to ours as well.
The second key point states that "As American politicians bicker about the proper policies, American citizens will continue to hope and pray for a solution that solves our country’s energy problems and protects our environment as well."
These two comments bring us to the apex of the problems we face. Hypocrisy versus hopes and prayers are in direct opposition to each other and doom all of us to repeating a never ending cycle of drilling, refining, burning and polluting indefinitely.
Hopes are good and it is healthy for us to all have a hopeful vision of the future. As a person of faith I believe prayer is never a bad thing either, but hope and prayer on their own without aggressive action relegate us to the dusty closet of sameness. For those familiar with the Christian faith the prime example is the lives of the disciples. They had more hope than most and I am sure they prayed a lot but they gave their entire lives in devotion to the actions necessary to spread the Gospel at the behest of the One they loved.
When we step back and objectively observe what is going on in modern times, the responsibility for the tragic events we are now witnessing in the Gulf of Mexico does not ultimately rest with a broken political system. Most of us know that system is corrupt, and in the end will never turn against the big money interest that keep its’ wholly owned politicians in power.
Waiting for a broken political system to fix things like oil spill disasters is like a solar manufacturing company counting on government subsidies to make solar technology profitable. That is madness in the real world of business and competition. Government policies constantly change between the blowing winds of populism and lobbyist manipulation. The solar industry found this to be painfully true when Germany and Spain reversed their generous solar subsidy programs at the beginning of the great recession. The industry has been trying to recover with varied results ever since. Solar does make sense as it's clean and limitless. Big coal and oil receive massive on-going, seemingly permanent subsidies in spite of the billions and billions of dollars in profits they make. For now solar does need subsidies but long term it must and should stand on its own.
When you really drill down on who is ultimately responsible for oil as the dominating, focal commodity in our world we must get brutally honest.
The responsibility to end our indefinite dependence on oil resides wholly with us, the consuming public. What is needed is not only a sea change in our thinking but a complete reversal of actions we have taken and continue to take, day after day for nearly a hundred years now.
Of course these mind sets and behavioral changes will never be easy as we are fighting trillion dollar multi-national corporations, but…. these corporations desperately need two things, money and millions, even billions of consumers to provide that steady flow of cash that keeps their record profits and polluting practices in constant motion.
That’s where we come in. We can change our minds and as a result there are actions we can take that when multiplied millions of times over can have a real positive impact on reducing our dependence on oil.
We have a bumper sticker our 15 year old Toyota Avalon that says, “My Next Car, No Plug, No Deal”. That bumper sticker has been there for years. Our Avalon has over 200,000 miles on it. It passes smog every time and still gets 30 miles per gallon because we faithfully and meticulously maintain it. Our ultimate goal is to pressure the auto companies to move away from their 100 year old internal combustion engine technology.
We are dead serious about not buying another car unless it is significantly cleaner than our existing one. The closer to zero emissions it is and the less oil it uses, the better.
Late last year we purchased a hybrid that is rated a Super Ultra Low Emissions Vehicle, (SULEV). Yes they really do have that designation. It exists to encourage people to think about what we drive and how we pollute. We plan to convert this car to a plug-in hybrid as soon as we can afford it, bringing it even closer to no gas and no emissions.
We are taking personal responsibility to eliminate old dirty polluting technologies from our lives overall. In March we installed solar panels on our home, (yes we did take advantage of government incentives while they are still available) and in December we are taking delivery of our Nissan LEAF all electric vehicle that we will someday charge with power directly from the sun.
It occurred to me after 9/11 just how personally responsible I was as a direct major contributor to the OPEC nations. I’m talking quite literally here. I sat down and started to add up just how much of my hard earned money goes into the pockets of people and nations who hate America. I was stunned to discover that if I lived an average lifespan, at least100,000.00 of my money was going to the Hugo Chavez’s’ and King Saud’s of the world.
Using every method I could think of I determined that’s a pretty accurate number and maybe even quite a bit lower than the actual amount.
Here’s the real stunner, multiply that by hundreds of millions of my fellow Americans and in our lifetimes the amount of wealth we directly transfer out of our Nation with our use of oil is beyond 23 trillion dollars.
Now I ask you, what businessman of any persuasion, honest or otherwise would not aggressively pursue that market?
So my next question is somewhat rhetorical. Whose fault is it really when the extraction of oil pollutes our planet?
Walk into your bathroom like I have and take a good long hard look into the mirror or better yet, look at yourself in your side view mirror the next time you are filling your car up with gas. Then turn around and walk or drive away with a commitment to do something about it. If we don’t, all of our descendants are going to have to.
Those who need big trucks can plan to replace them with hybrids, or natural gas burners. It doesn’t have to happen instantaneously but your mind can change and start to plan for a better future now. There is nothing wrong with using a more efficient or as some call it a “bridge fuel” vehicle until a more advanced technology comes along.
Most people don’t realize that diesel engine locomotives are actually giant hybrids that are not propelled by their diesel engines but instead by huge electric axle motors. The diesel engines are only there as weighs to keep the trains wheels from spinning when pulling incredible loads and as electricity generators. Train designers discovered a long time ago that you could not build a diesel engine big enough to fit in a locomotive that could pull a heavy train. They did find out electric motors have maximum torque at 1 rpm and up. If you don’t believe me, look it up. You will be as amazed as I was. This technology has been out there for 60 years. Do you really doubt that with American inventiveness we cannot do similar things for long haul truckers and people who need and prefer large format vehicles?
There are tons of exciting technologies out there today, like the 30 ton container hauler that the port of Los Angeles has been using for years. It’s all electric! Check it out.
http://www.portoflosangeles.org/newsroom/2008_releases/news_051608_et.asp
There is Smith Electrics producing electric trucks of all sizes. FedEx and UPS are already embracing these technologies. Not only do they reduce their pollution output, it just makes economic sense to try to lower their fuel cost as much as possible.
http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com/
I strongly encourage you not to be negative about these technologies. I have heard all the arguments. They don’t have enough range, they look like golf carts, they take forever to charge and on and on. Ranges are improving and electric cars and trucks are starting to hit the market that look every bit as good, if not better than their ICE counterparts. Don’t be fooled by the myth EV’s are underpowered and slow. Look at Tesla with their roadster hitting 60 miles per hour off the line in under 4 seconds? People who have driven the Nissan LEAF are always commenting on the quickness and power of the car. Rapid charging as quick as 10 minutes is becoming a reality. Battery swapping technologies are now out of the bag as evidenced by Project Better Places’ building of Israel’s’ nation wide battery swap infrastructure for the new Renault / Nissan cars coming out in 2011 and beyond. Israel gets it. Being dependant on the Middle East for oil simply does not make sense.
In spite of all the new technologies I still hear the detractors. Why? What happened to Americans saying we are going to swim against the tide and do what’s in our best interest? Why can’t we be inventors and innovators and builders again? You know the answer to that question and it is, absolutely we can!
Remember, in our time off after work in the evenings, we have been watching Auto Company and oil conglomerates marketing campaigns every few minutes for our entire lifetimes! Do you honestly think that has not biased you in any way? Please be honest with yourself. When it hits you like it did me, the freedom you experience from coming to know there is a better way is quite transformative.
One plus hundreds of millions can have an incredible impact. Let’s get serious and get this done. I don’t want our kids and grandkids to have to deal with a polluted Gulf or a polluted earth. I am going to follow my Fathers instructions to me when I was a kid. He used to say, “Kenny, when you use something, clean up after yourself and leave it better then you found it.” Good advise Dad, I’m going to do just that.
Saturday, May 15, 2010
Sunday, April 18, 2010
High Speed Rail - Moving Quietly into the Future
Rod Diridon is a legend and visionary who has inspired me to work to get High Speed Rail in California done. Rod came to my place of employment recently to show his remarkable presentation on the California High Speed Rail system. This is the second time I have seen Rod give this presentation. What strikes me the most is just how far behind America is in relation to the clean transportation sector. Whether it is electrifying our current rail system, producing electric vehicles or implementing High Speed Rail, especially in one of our most populist states, we are followers instead of leaders.
Some Americans seem to love to run around bragging to everyone how we live in the “greatest Country in the world” but it’s usually these same braggadocios who insist on holding us back into the dark ages of coal and oil as our main sources of power and transportation.
I am in Taiwan now on business working with two suppliers whose facilities are 100 - 200 meters from Taiwan's HSR. Do you know what you hear when they go by at 300 km/h /186 mph? Nothing if you are inside the building and whoosh, if you’re standing out front. That's it! Whoosh! No blaring diesel horns, no ding, ding, ding of road crossing barriers, no violent shaking of the earth like what happens when Caltrains goes by, just a whoosh.
All of California's High Speed Rail system will be what's called "grade separated". That means the trains will not cause cross traffic to stop ever again! The trains will either go over or under all intersections. Brilliant! The only place they will stop is in beautiful new stations.
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
In addition, the existing rail corridor on the peninsula will accommodate both HSR and a "converted to all electric" Caltrain. Imagine that, complete elimination of the existing pollution bellowing behemoths Caltrain currently operates, to the nearly silent version, and High Speed Rail running along side of it in the same corridor.
There is one big problem though. The same people who stopped BART from coming down the peninsula 40 years ago are once again fighting to stop HSR. The difference now is that they aren’t only depriving the millions of people of San Francisco and the South Bay from using clean rapid transit, they are now using their weapons of backwardness and ignorance to keep the entire State of California from building a clean energy, clean transportation future. They are the only ones in the entire State taking legal action to stop High Speed Rail operating between two of Northern California's biggest cities, San Francisco and San Jose.
These cities are Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto. My understanding is the majority of the folks living in these cities are for HSR and the Caltrain conversion, but there are a few very wealthy, very powerful, visionless, backward thinking people pulling out all the stops to ruin moving into the future for everyone in California.
Outside of complete and total disregard for their fellow Bay Area residents they steadfastly insist on keeping a noisy, dirty, diesel, inefficient, road blocking system in place. Why? All I can think of is, sheer ignorance and/or selfishness beyond imagination.
The new system will be cleaner, quieter, faster and more efficient. It will facilitate business growth in the Bay Area at levels not seen in 20 years. It will drastically reduce another one of the dirtiest forms of transportation, short hop air travel. It will reduce traffic on 101 and 280 running up and down the peninsula as well as far less traffic on Interstates 5 and 99.
When going to Southern California what appeals to you more, fighting the airports or the roadways or smoothly riding along High Speed Rail while visiting with your friends or family, reading a book or newspaper and getting to your destination in far less time than it takes to drive and even less time than it takes to fly when taking into consideration getting in and out of two airports.
So here is the challenge. Flood the cities of Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto with letters and emails. Show up at their City Council meetings and make them answer these questions. Demand that they give us real answers for their stubbornness so the light of day can be fully shinned on their darker more selfish motives.
Being the eternal optimist, I know in my heart High Speed Rail in California will not be stopped. Not this time. This is too important to turn back the clock and watch the rest of the world continue to speed ahead without us. It’s time we lead again. It’s time we show that we are still capable of innovating and building and making things better for future generations.
Some Americans seem to love to run around bragging to everyone how we live in the “greatest Country in the world” but it’s usually these same braggadocios who insist on holding us back into the dark ages of coal and oil as our main sources of power and transportation.
I am in Taiwan now on business working with two suppliers whose facilities are 100 - 200 meters from Taiwan's HSR. Do you know what you hear when they go by at 300 km/h /186 mph? Nothing if you are inside the building and whoosh, if you’re standing out front. That's it! Whoosh! No blaring diesel horns, no ding, ding, ding of road crossing barriers, no violent shaking of the earth like what happens when Caltrains goes by, just a whoosh.
All of California's High Speed Rail system will be what's called "grade separated". That means the trains will not cause cross traffic to stop ever again! The trains will either go over or under all intersections. Brilliant! The only place they will stop is in beautiful new stations.
http://www.cahighspeedrail.ca.gov/
In addition, the existing rail corridor on the peninsula will accommodate both HSR and a "converted to all electric" Caltrain. Imagine that, complete elimination of the existing pollution bellowing behemoths Caltrain currently operates, to the nearly silent version, and High Speed Rail running along side of it in the same corridor.
There is one big problem though. The same people who stopped BART from coming down the peninsula 40 years ago are once again fighting to stop HSR. The difference now is that they aren’t only depriving the millions of people of San Francisco and the South Bay from using clean rapid transit, they are now using their weapons of backwardness and ignorance to keep the entire State of California from building a clean energy, clean transportation future. They are the only ones in the entire State taking legal action to stop High Speed Rail operating between two of Northern California's biggest cities, San Francisco and San Jose.
These cities are Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto. My understanding is the majority of the folks living in these cities are for HSR and the Caltrain conversion, but there are a few very wealthy, very powerful, visionless, backward thinking people pulling out all the stops to ruin moving into the future for everyone in California.
Outside of complete and total disregard for their fellow Bay Area residents they steadfastly insist on keeping a noisy, dirty, diesel, inefficient, road blocking system in place. Why? All I can think of is, sheer ignorance and/or selfishness beyond imagination.
The new system will be cleaner, quieter, faster and more efficient. It will facilitate business growth in the Bay Area at levels not seen in 20 years. It will drastically reduce another one of the dirtiest forms of transportation, short hop air travel. It will reduce traffic on 101 and 280 running up and down the peninsula as well as far less traffic on Interstates 5 and 99.
When going to Southern California what appeals to you more, fighting the airports or the roadways or smoothly riding along High Speed Rail while visiting with your friends or family, reading a book or newspaper and getting to your destination in far less time than it takes to drive and even less time than it takes to fly when taking into consideration getting in and out of two airports.
So here is the challenge. Flood the cities of Atherton, Menlo Park and Palo Alto with letters and emails. Show up at their City Council meetings and make them answer these questions. Demand that they give us real answers for their stubbornness so the light of day can be fully shinned on their darker more selfish motives.
Being the eternal optimist, I know in my heart High Speed Rail in California will not be stopped. Not this time. This is too important to turn back the clock and watch the rest of the world continue to speed ahead without us. It’s time we lead again. It’s time we show that we are still capable of innovating and building and making things better for future generations.
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Feeding our Enemies - Ending the Madness
Feeding our Enemies – Ending the Madness
Kenneth Muir
Have you ever wondered what you can do to positively and dramatically change things for the better? After all, you are just one of 6,800,000,000 on this earth. The answer may be far simpler than you think but it involves thinking differently. It also involves taking your own simple actions and duplicating them over and over again to turn your “one drop” action into a massive wave that helps to quite literally leave this earth in better shape than we found it.
Of course you know that starting with the number one, who is you, and convincing another person to take the same simple actions you propose is astonishingly challenging. The secret is to make a simple, rational, reasoned case showing that what you propose is fully in the best interest of not only the person you are trying to convince, but also in the best interest of everyone else. If you were to convince one and the two of you were able to convince four and those four, eight and so on, you would only have to repeat that process 34 times to cover the population of the entire planet. This is very likely where every multi level marketer starts, and where a vast majority of people who have considered the MLM process stop dead in their tracks. It’s never easy convincing just one person, let alone billions. That’s why giant corporations spend billions of dollars every year on marketing and advertising. Appealing to the masses through saturation advertising is the best way to peddle what you’re selling, whether what you’re selling is good as in healthy food, or bad as in cigarettes.
My take is not unique as I am just another blogger with opinions like the rest of us. My hope is that my message will resonate with enough of you to encourage you to take the same actions I have, to make things better. There is simplicity in this message. My hope is that simplicity helps clear away all the muck that’s out there and allows you to see why what I am proposing makes so much sense. Here we go.
Think about this, there are close to a billion cars on earth today. Lined up end to end, that is a line of cars 2,462,121 miles long. That’s a solid string of cars stretching to the Moon and back 10 times. Every one of those cars has a tailpipe which is used to exhaust the pollution from the internal combustion engine it’s attached to. Imagine all those tailpipes put together. Is that a tailpipe you would want to live near? Now for the sad reality; you do, we all do. Those tailpipes and their engines are spread from coast to coast and beyond our borders all over the planet. Developing nations like India and China are adding them as fast as they can. Now remind me why that would not have a devastating effect on our planets breathable atmosphere?
I’m not talking climate change here because I am not a scientist, but seeing a picture in our minds of all those tailpipes surrounding the earth should give us cause to consider the incredible volume of pollution that would certainly seem to have more than just one negative outcome on our planets ecosystems, especially the air, and the water. Remember, the air pollution is washed onto the surface of the earth and into its oceans on a regular basis.
How can we possibly not see with just common sense alone, that we must take actions to begin to reverse this trend and come up with a better way to transport ourselves from point A to point B?
Now think about this. Every time you buy a car you have less than a day or so of driving before you start to have the feed that car with fuel and money to keep it moving. Try to look at it this way, the very first time you pull up to the pump, remove the gas cap, swipe your credit card, grab the hose and insert the gas nozzle into the tank, when you pull the trigger on the nozzle imagine the clicking sound on the pump meter also creating a negative clicking sound in your bank account. Of course you know this but take it a step further.
Picture the smiling face of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud while a refined product of his oil flows into your tank and your money flows directly from your bank account into his bank account. Of course the oil can be coming from many sources including Hugo Chavez and many others who would love to see the land you are standing on one day becoming theirs. The bottom line is the transfer may not be direct but having middle men getting a piece of your pie should not make you one bit feel better.
This is just the first time you will feed and invest in your shinny new internal combustion engine vehicle. You will repeat 30 to 50 times a year for the rest of the life of the vehicle. How much money is that and what are you really doing?
What you are really doing is spending 1 ½ to 2 times the cost of the vehicle over the life of the vehicle on gas, oil and maintenance alone. If you spent 25,000.00 to purchase that vehicle you will spend another 35,000.00 to 50,000.00 gassing it up, getting oil changes and maintaining it, making the total cost of operating your 100 year old technology internal combustion engine vehicle 65,000.00 to 75,000.00. What you are also really doing is literally burning what you are buying, complete with putting the emissions from that burned product permanently into the air you and your kids breath, then coming back for more when it’s gone and doing it all over again, time and time and time again on an indefinite basis.
We all know what we are doing, but we are lazy and afraid to think about it enough for it to change what we are doing. Filling the gas tank is easy, we think, but we are afraid to confront the increasingly costly ways we are bleeding ourselves dry. Paying for one tank at a time is fine because it’s only 40.00 – 80.00 a pop, then we don’t have to think about it for another week or so.
We never consider that each and every one of us who drives in America sends 100,000.00 dollars each during of our lifetimes to foreign lands that we are making wealthy beyond imagination. That’s money out of our pockets and out of our country, into the pockets of those who hate us and seek our demise. What do we have to show for it? Other than the pollution we’ve created, exactly nothing! We burned what we purchased, remember? They still have our money don’t they? They buy our banks and businesses, they lobby our politicians and work very hard to keep this madness going year after year while we stand at the fancy new gas pump and watch shorts and commercials on monitors while we do ourselves in. I almost hate to make you aware of this but in my generation; America will have sent over 23 trillion dollars to oil countries and oil companies to keep our little habit going. That’ almost as stunning as the giant one billion car exhaust pipe. The scale is stunning but the reality is, we must face it. Facing it together as a Nation united would be so much easier. Together we can bring about the required change as rapidly as possible.
We are not only fighting wars halfway around the world to make sure the oil keeps flowing, literally spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of young American lives, as well as countless lives lost by our allies and of the citizens of the countries we are fighting in, but we are actively participating in the most massive transfer of wealth from the most powerful nation on earth ever witnessed. We are responsible for our actions and it is far past time to put a stop to this madness. The next time you hear, “drill baby drill” go back to the numbers and realize the madness of a phrase like that.
We burn lots of things we buy. We burn natural gas or worse, oil to heat our homes. Some of us burn wood in our fireplaces or woodstoves and when that’s gone we go chop up more wood and burn some more. We burn coal for our electricity and do that on an indefinite basis as well. If you’d like to see how well mass implementation of coal fired power plants works I suggest you go to Shanghai, China. I was just there in March of 2010. It’s a city of 25 -30 million people. They are choking on their coal dust and now they’re adding millions of cars at an astonishing rate. China has seven of the most polluted rivers in the world, so polluted the water can’t even be used as non-potable. They now lead the world in respiratory illness and Shanghai is the new leader in lung cancers. It is very sad to see China did not learn from the West very painful lessons regarding unchecked industrialization. There is hope as they are now moving as quickly as possible to convert to sustainable forms of energy.
I say there is another way, a better way, a cleaner way and a more secure way to meet our energy needs. At some level every single one of us can start to move in that direction.
Believe me when I tell you, it is not easy, or cheap to start changing. My wife and I have been trying to buy an electric vehicle for over 10 years. For one reason or another we have just missed small windows of opportunity to join the small but growing number of people seeking to drive pollution and oil free.
These forward thinking EV drivers have a mantra; “charge baby charge”, and most of the folks we know are charging their cars with solar panels making them as efficient and clean a technology as possible.
In the long run it is the right thing to do and unlike what we are doing now, every one of these new actions do not have the perpetual madness of burning and paying for the rest of our lives. On the contrary these new things actually have many benefits. Near the top of that benefits list is that they provide what every businessman urgently seeks on a daily basis, return on investment.
Imagine a small company who installs solar panels on homes operating a fleet of trucks charged by solar power. The savings in not having to provide gas for a fleet of vehicles would be dramatic and would create a leg up on every one of their competitors. Their cost would be lower and their profits higher. Their competition would have to continue to adjust prices of installs every time gas prices spike. Just like the sun rising, you can count on gas prices spiking right during the time a business can afford it the least.
Now let’s look at a new way.
http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com/
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/03/fords-electric-transit-connect-purrs-for-drive-on/1
That’s right, electric trucks are real as in right now, today!
With electric the charging is cheap, (1 - 2 cents a mile to operate), and much cheaper when charging with solar. There is no internal combustion engine to maintain, (electric motors can last 1 million miles in Electric Vehicles), no oil changes, no transmission, no fuel system, no exhaust system and zero pollution! Even brakes last 5 - 10X longer because electric vehicles are designed to brake with the electric motors before you even have to touch the brake pedal. Even if the electric truck was twice or three times as much in initial coast, you are not pouring thousands of dollars into it over the life of the vehicle like you do with dirty internal combustion trucks. Plus, there are government incentives that help businesses cover the initial cost. Believe me, I have done the analysis and the money saved is dramatic. The first business that starts driving all electric vehicles around with no fuel or maintenance cost will catch the attention of their competitors very quickly and the whole thing will snowball.
So what are we doing to help make things better?
1. We have purchased a Hybrid that we hope to convert to a bio-fuel plug-in vehicle in the future. It will fun on electricity most of the time and when it needs to re-charge while driving it will use bio-fuel to do so.
2. We have had solar panels installed on our home to help reduce the load on the grid and help charge our cars. As solar technology improves and incentives grow, we may be able to upgrade this system to cover all our electricity needs for our home and our cars.
3. We hope to purchase an all electric Nissan LEAF in the fall of 2010 and use that car for our primary source of transportation.
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/?dcp=ppn.39666654.&dcc=0.216878497
4. We are installing super efficient LED lighting in our home to implement the conservation piece of this plan
5. We have committed to replacing all our appliances with the most efficient possible units as they fail. This way we can spread the cost over the years.
6. Our ultimate goal is to not burn oil, imported or otherwise. Electricity or bio-fuels only. Hopefully we will be able to completely phase bio-fuels out too as battery technologies continue to advance.
We feel these plans are the patriotic to do. Taking these actions not only benefits us in reducing our cost but helps our Neighbors, our Nation and our World by leaving less of an energy impact and getting our pollution output to as near to zero as possible.
We also feel these actions will help us with fixed cost during out retirement. We don’t want to have to deal with higher energy prices and skyrocketing gas prices when we can least afford it.
The bottom line is, we want to be able to look at our children and grandchildren and tell them we did the right thing, not just for us but for them too. We want to be able to tell them we had their health in mind when we made these decisions so we could be an example for them and their kids. We want to be able to sit with our family and watch a sunset over whatever city we are living near and enjoy a beautiful pollution free view.
Kenneth Muir
Have you ever wondered what you can do to positively and dramatically change things for the better? After all, you are just one of 6,800,000,000 on this earth. The answer may be far simpler than you think but it involves thinking differently. It also involves taking your own simple actions and duplicating them over and over again to turn your “one drop” action into a massive wave that helps to quite literally leave this earth in better shape than we found it.
Of course you know that starting with the number one, who is you, and convincing another person to take the same simple actions you propose is astonishingly challenging. The secret is to make a simple, rational, reasoned case showing that what you propose is fully in the best interest of not only the person you are trying to convince, but also in the best interest of everyone else. If you were to convince one and the two of you were able to convince four and those four, eight and so on, you would only have to repeat that process 34 times to cover the population of the entire planet. This is very likely where every multi level marketer starts, and where a vast majority of people who have considered the MLM process stop dead in their tracks. It’s never easy convincing just one person, let alone billions. That’s why giant corporations spend billions of dollars every year on marketing and advertising. Appealing to the masses through saturation advertising is the best way to peddle what you’re selling, whether what you’re selling is good as in healthy food, or bad as in cigarettes.
My take is not unique as I am just another blogger with opinions like the rest of us. My hope is that my message will resonate with enough of you to encourage you to take the same actions I have, to make things better. There is simplicity in this message. My hope is that simplicity helps clear away all the muck that’s out there and allows you to see why what I am proposing makes so much sense. Here we go.
Think about this, there are close to a billion cars on earth today. Lined up end to end, that is a line of cars 2,462,121 miles long. That’s a solid string of cars stretching to the Moon and back 10 times. Every one of those cars has a tailpipe which is used to exhaust the pollution from the internal combustion engine it’s attached to. Imagine all those tailpipes put together. Is that a tailpipe you would want to live near? Now for the sad reality; you do, we all do. Those tailpipes and their engines are spread from coast to coast and beyond our borders all over the planet. Developing nations like India and China are adding them as fast as they can. Now remind me why that would not have a devastating effect on our planets breathable atmosphere?
I’m not talking climate change here because I am not a scientist, but seeing a picture in our minds of all those tailpipes surrounding the earth should give us cause to consider the incredible volume of pollution that would certainly seem to have more than just one negative outcome on our planets ecosystems, especially the air, and the water. Remember, the air pollution is washed onto the surface of the earth and into its oceans on a regular basis.
How can we possibly not see with just common sense alone, that we must take actions to begin to reverse this trend and come up with a better way to transport ourselves from point A to point B?
Now think about this. Every time you buy a car you have less than a day or so of driving before you start to have the feed that car with fuel and money to keep it moving. Try to look at it this way, the very first time you pull up to the pump, remove the gas cap, swipe your credit card, grab the hose and insert the gas nozzle into the tank, when you pull the trigger on the nozzle imagine the clicking sound on the pump meter also creating a negative clicking sound in your bank account. Of course you know this but take it a step further.
Picture the smiling face of King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz al-Saud while a refined product of his oil flows into your tank and your money flows directly from your bank account into his bank account. Of course the oil can be coming from many sources including Hugo Chavez and many others who would love to see the land you are standing on one day becoming theirs. The bottom line is the transfer may not be direct but having middle men getting a piece of your pie should not make you one bit feel better.
This is just the first time you will feed and invest in your shinny new internal combustion engine vehicle. You will repeat 30 to 50 times a year for the rest of the life of the vehicle. How much money is that and what are you really doing?
What you are really doing is spending 1 ½ to 2 times the cost of the vehicle over the life of the vehicle on gas, oil and maintenance alone. If you spent 25,000.00 to purchase that vehicle you will spend another 35,000.00 to 50,000.00 gassing it up, getting oil changes and maintaining it, making the total cost of operating your 100 year old technology internal combustion engine vehicle 65,000.00 to 75,000.00. What you are also really doing is literally burning what you are buying, complete with putting the emissions from that burned product permanently into the air you and your kids breath, then coming back for more when it’s gone and doing it all over again, time and time and time again on an indefinite basis.
We all know what we are doing, but we are lazy and afraid to think about it enough for it to change what we are doing. Filling the gas tank is easy, we think, but we are afraid to confront the increasingly costly ways we are bleeding ourselves dry. Paying for one tank at a time is fine because it’s only 40.00 – 80.00 a pop, then we don’t have to think about it for another week or so.
We never consider that each and every one of us who drives in America sends 100,000.00 dollars each during of our lifetimes to foreign lands that we are making wealthy beyond imagination. That’s money out of our pockets and out of our country, into the pockets of those who hate us and seek our demise. What do we have to show for it? Other than the pollution we’ve created, exactly nothing! We burned what we purchased, remember? They still have our money don’t they? They buy our banks and businesses, they lobby our politicians and work very hard to keep this madness going year after year while we stand at the fancy new gas pump and watch shorts and commercials on monitors while we do ourselves in. I almost hate to make you aware of this but in my generation; America will have sent over 23 trillion dollars to oil countries and oil companies to keep our little habit going. That’ almost as stunning as the giant one billion car exhaust pipe. The scale is stunning but the reality is, we must face it. Facing it together as a Nation united would be so much easier. Together we can bring about the required change as rapidly as possible.
We are not only fighting wars halfway around the world to make sure the oil keeps flowing, literally spending trillions of dollars and wasting thousands of young American lives, as well as countless lives lost by our allies and of the citizens of the countries we are fighting in, but we are actively participating in the most massive transfer of wealth from the most powerful nation on earth ever witnessed. We are responsible for our actions and it is far past time to put a stop to this madness. The next time you hear, “drill baby drill” go back to the numbers and realize the madness of a phrase like that.
We burn lots of things we buy. We burn natural gas or worse, oil to heat our homes. Some of us burn wood in our fireplaces or woodstoves and when that’s gone we go chop up more wood and burn some more. We burn coal for our electricity and do that on an indefinite basis as well. If you’d like to see how well mass implementation of coal fired power plants works I suggest you go to Shanghai, China. I was just there in March of 2010. It’s a city of 25 -30 million people. They are choking on their coal dust and now they’re adding millions of cars at an astonishing rate. China has seven of the most polluted rivers in the world, so polluted the water can’t even be used as non-potable. They now lead the world in respiratory illness and Shanghai is the new leader in lung cancers. It is very sad to see China did not learn from the West very painful lessons regarding unchecked industrialization. There is hope as they are now moving as quickly as possible to convert to sustainable forms of energy.
I say there is another way, a better way, a cleaner way and a more secure way to meet our energy needs. At some level every single one of us can start to move in that direction.
Believe me when I tell you, it is not easy, or cheap to start changing. My wife and I have been trying to buy an electric vehicle for over 10 years. For one reason or another we have just missed small windows of opportunity to join the small but growing number of people seeking to drive pollution and oil free.
These forward thinking EV drivers have a mantra; “charge baby charge”, and most of the folks we know are charging their cars with solar panels making them as efficient and clean a technology as possible.
In the long run it is the right thing to do and unlike what we are doing now, every one of these new actions do not have the perpetual madness of burning and paying for the rest of our lives. On the contrary these new things actually have many benefits. Near the top of that benefits list is that they provide what every businessman urgently seeks on a daily basis, return on investment.
Imagine a small company who installs solar panels on homes operating a fleet of trucks charged by solar power. The savings in not having to provide gas for a fleet of vehicles would be dramatic and would create a leg up on every one of their competitors. Their cost would be lower and their profits higher. Their competition would have to continue to adjust prices of installs every time gas prices spike. Just like the sun rising, you can count on gas prices spiking right during the time a business can afford it the least.
Now let’s look at a new way.
http://www.smithelectricvehicles.com/
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/driveon/post/2010/03/fords-electric-transit-connect-purrs-for-drive-on/1
That’s right, electric trucks are real as in right now, today!
With electric the charging is cheap, (1 - 2 cents a mile to operate), and much cheaper when charging with solar. There is no internal combustion engine to maintain, (electric motors can last 1 million miles in Electric Vehicles), no oil changes, no transmission, no fuel system, no exhaust system and zero pollution! Even brakes last 5 - 10X longer because electric vehicles are designed to brake with the electric motors before you even have to touch the brake pedal. Even if the electric truck was twice or three times as much in initial coast, you are not pouring thousands of dollars into it over the life of the vehicle like you do with dirty internal combustion trucks. Plus, there are government incentives that help businesses cover the initial cost. Believe me, I have done the analysis and the money saved is dramatic. The first business that starts driving all electric vehicles around with no fuel or maintenance cost will catch the attention of their competitors very quickly and the whole thing will snowball.
So what are we doing to help make things better?
1. We have purchased a Hybrid that we hope to convert to a bio-fuel plug-in vehicle in the future. It will fun on electricity most of the time and when it needs to re-charge while driving it will use bio-fuel to do so.
2. We have had solar panels installed on our home to help reduce the load on the grid and help charge our cars. As solar technology improves and incentives grow, we may be able to upgrade this system to cover all our electricity needs for our home and our cars.
3. We hope to purchase an all electric Nissan LEAF in the fall of 2010 and use that car for our primary source of transportation.
http://www.nissanusa.com/leaf-electric-car/?dcp=ppn.39666654.&dcc=0.216878497
4. We are installing super efficient LED lighting in our home to implement the conservation piece of this plan
5. We have committed to replacing all our appliances with the most efficient possible units as they fail. This way we can spread the cost over the years.
6. Our ultimate goal is to not burn oil, imported or otherwise. Electricity or bio-fuels only. Hopefully we will be able to completely phase bio-fuels out too as battery technologies continue to advance.
We feel these plans are the patriotic to do. Taking these actions not only benefits us in reducing our cost but helps our Neighbors, our Nation and our World by leaving less of an energy impact and getting our pollution output to as near to zero as possible.
We also feel these actions will help us with fixed cost during out retirement. We don’t want to have to deal with higher energy prices and skyrocketing gas prices when we can least afford it.
The bottom line is, we want to be able to look at our children and grandchildren and tell them we did the right thing, not just for us but for them too. We want to be able to tell them we had their health in mind when we made these decisions so we could be an example for them and their kids. We want to be able to sit with our family and watch a sunset over whatever city we are living near and enjoy a beautiful pollution free view.
Sunday, February 7, 2010
Divided America works for GOP but not for the sick
Watching opponents of health care revel in their ability to stall reform is troubling and heart breaking. I am totally puzzled how so many can stand so aggressively and with such callousness against helping their fellow citizens.
We all know people who are hurting these days and many of us have seen friends die because of lack of, or poor health care. It is confounding to me to see a segment of our population rail against assisting the sick amongst us, while they bellow out in their healthy state, how doing so would bring an end to democracy as we know it. They lecture us all about the evils of socialism while a huge percentage of them are on, or soon will be on Social Security and Medicare. They have the nerve to call those of us who have seen friends denied health care and die as a result, “un-American”.
I was raised to believe that helping the less fortunate was the right thing, and yes, even the most American thing you could do. That is who we are as a people. We answer the call when people need us, and yet now we hear if we were to do what is in our National DNA, help the less fortunate, we are going to destroy the Country.
Here is my challenge to all you who fear health care for your fellow citizen because it represents the next great “Red scare” in your paranoid minds. If you really believe your cruel rhetoric, do not drive on another road or highway because it’s the evil government who builds and maintains these thoroughfares for you to travel on. Do not board another train as most are subsidized by local, state and federal government. Do not ever take another plane flight anywhere, as every single airport built in this nation has been built by the government for the peoples use. Bet you never realized you were stepping into a government building every time you took a plane flight did you? While you’re exercising your resistance to “socialism, do not use another National Park, as we decided a long time ago the U.S. Government was the keeper of vast lands that would have otherwise been destroyed by your loving corporations.
I have discovered how difficult it is to watch healthy people complain about sick people getting care. I refuse to let those without compassion walk all over the rights of our fellow citizens who need us the most in their time of illness. Yes that is correct, we all have the right to live and suffer if needed, and eventually die absent from the shame of lack of care. In this modern age with the technology we have available to us, it is unthinkable some of us would have access to the wonders of modern medicine and others would not, simply because they are poor, or unemployed, or dropped from coverage because they got sick or denied altogether because of what some insurance executive void of conscience came up with called, a “pre-existing condition”. Such a phase denies the absolute fact we all suffer from this horrid malady. It’s called mortally.
Let’s face it, at some point all us will eventually have a pre-existing condition of some sort as that is part of the natural aging process Many would be shocked to know just how early in life that applied to them. They have been walking around for years completely clueless they are one of the millions who have already joined those ranks but have just not had it applied to them by the insurance companies.
If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position many in our Country have, with out health care, that will be a shame. If you would like to be left alone to suffer and die because you don’t want any help from a “socialist” like me, that will be sad, but do not expect me to ignore those who want and need help, to go without it at my hand. By the way, me and my fellow “liberals” will lovingly care for you too because after all, you are one of us, and that’s what we do, we care for each other.
We all know people who are hurting these days and many of us have seen friends die because of lack of, or poor health care. It is confounding to me to see a segment of our population rail against assisting the sick amongst us, while they bellow out in their healthy state, how doing so would bring an end to democracy as we know it. They lecture us all about the evils of socialism while a huge percentage of them are on, or soon will be on Social Security and Medicare. They have the nerve to call those of us who have seen friends denied health care and die as a result, “un-American”.
I was raised to believe that helping the less fortunate was the right thing, and yes, even the most American thing you could do. That is who we are as a people. We answer the call when people need us, and yet now we hear if we were to do what is in our National DNA, help the less fortunate, we are going to destroy the Country.
Here is my challenge to all you who fear health care for your fellow citizen because it represents the next great “Red scare” in your paranoid minds. If you really believe your cruel rhetoric, do not drive on another road or highway because it’s the evil government who builds and maintains these thoroughfares for you to travel on. Do not board another train as most are subsidized by local, state and federal government. Do not ever take another plane flight anywhere, as every single airport built in this nation has been built by the government for the peoples use. Bet you never realized you were stepping into a government building every time you took a plane flight did you? While you’re exercising your resistance to “socialism, do not use another National Park, as we decided a long time ago the U.S. Government was the keeper of vast lands that would have otherwise been destroyed by your loving corporations.
I have discovered how difficult it is to watch healthy people complain about sick people getting care. I refuse to let those without compassion walk all over the rights of our fellow citizens who need us the most in their time of illness. Yes that is correct, we all have the right to live and suffer if needed, and eventually die absent from the shame of lack of care. In this modern age with the technology we have available to us, it is unthinkable some of us would have access to the wonders of modern medicine and others would not, simply because they are poor, or unemployed, or dropped from coverage because they got sick or denied altogether because of what some insurance executive void of conscience came up with called, a “pre-existing condition”. Such a phase denies the absolute fact we all suffer from this horrid malady. It’s called mortally.
Let’s face it, at some point all us will eventually have a pre-existing condition of some sort as that is part of the natural aging process Many would be shocked to know just how early in life that applied to them. They have been walking around for years completely clueless they are one of the millions who have already joined those ranks but have just not had it applied to them by the insurance companies.
If you ever find yourself in the unfortunate position many in our Country have, with out health care, that will be a shame. If you would like to be left alone to suffer and die because you don’t want any help from a “socialist” like me, that will be sad, but do not expect me to ignore those who want and need help, to go without it at my hand. By the way, me and my fellow “liberals” will lovingly care for you too because after all, you are one of us, and that’s what we do, we care for each other.
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