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Copenhagen looks like it is going to be a bust.  The only way folks are going to change the way they do things is if it creates jobs and saves money and makes money.  Net metering seems to be the answer in my mind.  We need to get our state legislatures to make it possible for factories, stores and private homes to create their own energy with solar and wind and contribute to a central grid through net metering.

Manufacturers may actually come back to the USA if it is more cost effective through net metering.  Jobs will be created through installation of these systems, and hopefully job opportunities returning to the USA.  Manufacturers love saving money, their profits improve so then their stock holders are happy too.  Making money is the central purpose to life on this planet.  With net metering we can save the planet and make money.  Everybody is happy.

Why don’t legislators like it?

Here is the easiest explanation I could find regarding Net Metering.

Imagine the simplest possible metering arrangement: a single, 1960s-standard electromechanical meter. Now imagine that a residential customer, Ray McSolar, added a rooftop photovoltaic (PV) system (also known as a solar-electric system) to his home, on his side of this meter. Ray wakes up early for his job; on most days, he is out of the house before sunrise. In these dark morning hours, Ray makes his coffee and breakfast while watching the morning news on TV. The electric meter spins forward as Ray is consuming electricity from the grid.

Determined not to waste a bit of electricity, Ray shuts off all of his appliances as he heads off to work. Ray’s solar panels now start churning out electricity as the sun rises—electricity Ray sends back to the overstressed grid. His meter now spins in reverse.

When Ray returns at night to cook dinner and relax in front of the TV, the meter spins forward again as he consumes more electricity than his system generates. The result? Ray’s bill will show only his net consumption of electricity from the grid. Should it be a hot sunny month (when the grid needs the most help), or a month in which Ray’s electricity use is low, any excess electricity his system generates is rolled over to his next bill, just as he might rollover excess cell phone minutes.

Utilities should not have a divine right to charge for electricity that customers can otherwise generate more efficiently and more cleanly on their own.

Congress realized the vast potential of net metering when it mandated in the 2005 Energy Bill that every state consider adopting or expanding net metering programs by the end of 2007.

Indiana and Arkansas, utilities successfully undermined state legislators by convincing the state utility commissions to adopt minor rule changes that destroyed the entire program. As a result, Arkansas registered no participating customers in the first two years of its program. And by 2004, Indiana only had six participating customers in the entire state.

Participation in New Jersey has skyrocketed by over 30,000 percent since 2002. It’s amazing. The state utility commission is literally drowning in new applications. Because they embraced the net-metering concept and new business applications soared because of the savings on their bottom line from providing their own energy. What New Jersey and other states (like Montana, California and Oregon) prove is that Americans are willing to invest in their own energy independence if regulations would only let them. 

I live in Arkansas and this state can definitely piss me off pretty regularly.  (When I lived in Florida I had the same problem, but, with over-development.  Now Floridians are crying in their mortgage debt muck and their association dues mire.  Developers didn’t give two flying figs about the beautiful banyans they chopped down to build a Blockbuster video store or the eagles nests that fell to the ground to build another strip mall.)

Arkansas and their electric co-ops are advocating for another coal fired power plant and are trying to convince Arkansans that they are poorer than other states so “we can’t do what they do”. That is total bunk! Arkansas has water, wind and sunshine.  Utility fat cats easily scare the Arkansas public in to thinking we will have no electricity if  net metering is embraced.  Participating in clean energy is a foreign concept and we Arkansans don’t take kindly to foreigners.  At first.  But we warm up and smile when you show us the money.

No one would have followed Martin Luther King if he had said “I have a nightmare”, as mentioned by energy secretary Ed Miliband.

We have to be careful that we don’t scare off would be joiners with too much hyperbole.  Admittedly, I am an extreme advocate of climate change.  We need to unite in being good to this earth.  It has been so good to all of us.  I am  hopeful that the decision makers representing the world in Copenhagen are uniting in the dream — and not denying the nightmare.

Side note and a bit of irony –> more than 1200 limos are being called in from all over Europe to meet the delegates, officials and presidential demands of the Copenhagen climate summit.  Too cold to ride bikes I guess.  The “economic growth” advocates ie: Republicans for continued pollution, will be represented by US Senator, Jim Inhofe

We all know the nightmare –> So many pictures of people riding bikes in China through polluted air with face masks.  Stories of asthmatic children in the Bronx breathing diesel fumes.  Photos of decapitated mountains in West Virginia and the subsequent coal muck escaping in to small towns.  Growth was so big and so fast that sewage spilled in to drinking water in Florida.  Many fists pound many tables when you suggest that things need to change.

Polluters love muddling the facts, and making fun of the nightmarish scenarios.  Some scientists  actually feed the machine that is profiting currently.  The collaborative machine of industry, shipping, air flights, hospitals, manufacturers, and on and on are horrified by the idea of changing energy production and usage. We have evolved to need stuff, rather than just water, food, shelter and coffee.

Many of them don’t think of themselves as polluters but as providers of jobs.  Many of them simply don’t care as long as stock holder profits are improving.  No such thing as a sustainable status quo in the stock market.   We just need to make change less horrifying and point out the advantages to health and stocks.

So lets describe the dream… Andrew Gilligan wrote an article for the telegraph.co.uk…” Copenhagen is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilized pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism”.

Costa Rica produces 99% of its energy from renewable sources, reversed deforestation and is aiming to become a carbon-neutral country by 2021 by combining its ministries of energy and environment, and abolishing its army.  Ok abolishing armies will probably never happen world wide, there will always be bad guys to fight.  We can dream though.  Other small island nations such as the Dominican Republic and Jamaica are also fairing well in levels of health and a very low footprint.

Enough said?

Well, maybe I’ll just add this…

Just 16 of the world’s largest container ships can produce more pollution more than all the cars on the planet.

In an editorial report in Britain’s Daily Mail, an award-winning science writer Fred Pearce, author of Confessions of an Eco Sinner, writes that the super-ships that keep the West in everything from Christmas gifts to computers pump out killer chemicals linked to thousands of deaths because of the filthy fuel they use.
”As ships get bigger, the pollution is getting worse. The most staggering statistic of all is that just 16 of the world’s largest ships can produce as much lung-clogging sulphur pollution as all the world’s cars.”

In today’s world ships are used to transfer everything from oil to electronics and as the demand for cheap consumer goods increase, so does the number of ships needed to transport goods around the world.

There are about 100,000 commercial ships at sea, importing and exporting goods all over the world. Many of them burn marine heavy fuel, or “bunker fuel”, that is high in sulphur content – the result is that the ships’ fuel is extremely dirty and polluting.

Thanks to the International Maritime Organization (IMO) rules, the largest ships can each emit as much as 5,000 tons of sulfur in a year — the same as 50 million typical cars, each emitting an average of 100 grams of sulfur a year.

With an estimated 800 million cars driving around the planet, that means 16 super-ships can emit as much sulphur as the world fleet of cars.

Ship emissions expert James Corbett of the University of Delaware calculates a worldwide death toll of about 64,000 a year. He expects that figure to rise to 87,000 deaths a year by 2012.

There is evidence that a student of Aristotle noticed and documented how human activities disrupted the climate back in 300 BC. Now, I’m not sure how anyone is sure about what was said in 300 BC, but, I am sure that my fifth grade teacher taught us (many years ago) how human activity disrupts the climate.

I wasn’t a student as long ago as Aristotle, but, science has recognized and studied the problem for long enough. My weekly reader explained the effects burning coal and petroleum has on the atmosphere. I was apparently dismayed by this information because I remember it vividly. I remember feeling worried.

In 1965 U.S. President Lyndon Johnson told Congress: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through…a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.”

We know that this planet is pretty small as far as planets go and extremely unique as far as being inhabitable. Since we know good planets are hard to find, you would think the world would find that taking care of this one is much more important than pretty much anything else. Why then would senators boycott a meeting designed to protect the climate of our planet.

We heeded the advice of British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher after she explained to the United Nations: “The problem of global climate change is one that affects us all and action will only be effective if it is taken at the international level. It is no good squabbling over who is responsible or who should pay;” The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was created in 1995.   They concluded that humans are causing global warming, saying: “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.”

The world is finally deciding we need to do something and our senators are boycotting meetings. Why!!

The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee tried to overcome a Republican boycott of a major climate bill. Only one Republican senator even showed up for the meeting, and he stayed just long enough to ask for a five-week delay and more study. (I won’t go as far back as Aristotle, but, it’s been studied) Senator Bernie Sanders lamented the obstruction tactics by what he called “the party of no.” The stalling strategy has so far blocked action on critical issues ranging from health care to global warming. The country, Sanders added, has gone from electing a new president one year ago whose uplifting promise was “yes we can” to the spectacle of a small but stubborn rump group of senators whose motto is “no we won’t.”

http://sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/photos/gallery/?id=b862022d-95b1-4625-963d-34a3a69ac839

So in 2009 our President, along with the other – Group of Eight leaders agreed industrialized nations should cut emissions on average by 80 percent by 2050 and limit warming to a maximum of 2 Celsius above pre-industrial times. The 8 leaders went home to their various congresses and parliaments so we could get it together for our unique planet.

Our senators are so busy disliking our President that they are forgetting what their job is. I guess the citizens who vote for these senators are so busy disliking our President that they are ignoring scientific facts. I just want to jab my eyes out when I read about crap like this! What would happen to you or me if we didn’t go to work because we didn’t like our boss.  Come to think of it the American public is their boss and we should be outraged.

I read about the folks who are against healthcare reform they seem to belong to the same pile of people who are against cleaning up the environment.  The common denominator seems to be they don’t like the costs of these humanitarian interventions.  Talk about jab my eyes out and WTF!  Is it that they figure some people and places are just expendable?  They are poor and uneducated and someone has to clean up our shit and make our chemicals.  Look at these pictures from China.  This would seem to exemplify the cost of not caring.

So when you are shopping for a toy for your favorite tot and you notice that it was made in China.  Remember this picture of plastic factory waste going in to what was once a beautiful river.

Next time you buy an Iphone, computer or various other electronics and some jewelry remember this titanium plant.

Without rules a nations people are allowed to suffer.  Without activism the suffering continues.  Our country allows activism and yet some refer to those activists as socialists.  I don’t get it.

Don’t blame this horridness on the people of China.  Just like here there are good people trying to do good things to advocate for the health and happiness of all people.  Not just those who can afford good health and happiness.  Please see the entire article and all the photos at

http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/amazing-pictures-pollution-in-china/

Tim Gummer says:

If it wasn’t already obvious, then it is surely clear here that our Stuff is made in a Mordor of this very earth, by a people in slavery. In a globalized world, our complicity in their deaths and suffering is no less than those who stood by in the towns of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. These workers’ horrors may be marginally less, but unlike the deathcamps’ neighbours, we cannot pretend we have not seen.

Did you know styrofoam AKA polystyrene is manufactured using benzene, from coal; styrene, from petroleum; and ethylene, a “blowing agent”.  Dow Chemical is the world’s largest producer with a total capacity of 1.8 million metric tonnes in the USA, Canada, and Europe (1996 figures). The main manufacturing route to styrene is the direct catalytic dehydrogenation of ethylbenzene: If you understand that and want more detail go to…
http://www.epa.gov/ttn/atw/hlthef/styrene.html

Short term exposure in humans results in mucous membrane and eye irritation, and gastrointestinal effects.   long-term exposure to styrene (like drinking coffee in styrofoam cups every day or working in the factory where it is made) in humans results in effects on the central nervous system (CNS), such as headache, fatigue, weakness, and depression, CNS dysfunction, hearing loss, and peripheral neuropathy. This only happens after long term exposure, so if you live long enough you’ll be a deaf, unbalanced, dummyhead with tremors and restless leg syndrome. Know anyone like that?

Now, when your drinking your coffee from a styrofoam cup and throwing your cigarette butt out the window of your Excursion, you might think to yourself…  Somethings gotta kill me, I’m not gonna worry about monomers of styrene.  Try thinking of this.  It takes 500 years for the chemical components of styrofoam to dissolve and it’s foreverness accounts for 25% of landfill waste.

While Styrofoam is recyclable, most recycling programs don’t.  I found one in Florida called Blue Earth Solutions. http://www.blueearthsolutions.com/index.php

Burning styrofoam releases all the stuff its made of into the air;  including dioxin, and carbon monoxide.  yeah, run a search engine on dioxin and see what you find out.

So what do you think?  Wouldn’t you like to get styrofoam out of your house, your place of business, your town, your world?