I ran across a website that visually represented how much money BP lost due to the oil spill.   I was incredulous.  That much money exists?  It is a loss they plan to recoup.  How do you suppose they will make up the loss?

They have convinced us to drive bigger cars, drink our water from a bottle, use more plastic and carry on with war, any war.  Oil men love war.  War is what truly feeds Seymour.  You remember the insatiable plant from “Little Shop of Horrors”.  I liken the oil (and coal) industry to Seymour’s need to keep his plant alive.  In the beginning it was a nice fun little plant.  Harmless, at least relatively.  The plant like the oil industry has gotten so big it is devouring the planet through wars and plastic and large ships and cruise liners that carry us and our crap across oceans.

We are convinced that if we all pile on a giant boat together life will be more fun.  We are convinced that the stuff we have is not good enough.  It all needs to be replaced by better stuff.  Most of the stuff is plastic and plastic is made from oil and the plastic is brought to us on giant boats that require massive amounts of oil.  This insatiable need has been brought to you by the oil industry.

We can’t blame oil entirely.  Coal is what fuels this nations heat and air and lights.  The current grid was set up by the coal industry and subsidized by the US government.  It was harmless and useful in its beginnings.  What a blessing to have heat and air and light due to the fabulous grid work that traverses the nation.  Except, now it too is like Seymour’s plant.  Dividing and devouring and convincing us that nothing else will do.

So let me share the website that prompted this blog…

http://www.visualeconomics.com/what-bp-could-have-bought-with-all-the-money-they-lost/

I wrote to my smart friend Fred who gave me this reply…

So you see in the world of business BP’s loss isn’t so much. Don’t feel sorry for them. Don’t think how much good this money could have done because it pales in comparison to the money we waste on wars. Iraq I believe was $1,000 billion. That’s 112 times what BP wasted.

When you look at it this way — it isn’t oil and coal that feeds Seymour’s plant.  Economics feeds the plant.  How often does economic advantage take precedence over doing good?  Goodness faces doom when it gets in the way of the economy.

What truly amazed me is that 3.4 billion dollars would buy an ice cream sandwich for everyone in the world and yahoo is worth 20 billion.  Wouldn’t it be cool if yahoo bought an ice cream sandwich for everyone in the world?  There is probably a soy version for the lactose intolerant.

The Swiss bankers and the Roman Catholic Church were complicit in the Nazi regime. These were not terrible people. They were normal people. They closed their eyes to evil or justified it, for the sake of peace or gain or national loyalty. I sometimes wonder (and fear) whether I would have done the same if I had been in that society at that time. It is so easy not to see, not to hear, not to understand, when one’s own peace or prosperity is involved. There have been times, after all, when I have allowed blatantly racist statements to pass unchallenged in the name of good manners, or of just keeping the peace. For so little of one’s soul, or at least a little piece of it, is on the auction block.”

The Reverend Kathleen Damewood Korb

I have been distressed lately by the volatile nature of conversations, especially conversations involving our president.  Some of us, did not vote for him or voted for him reluctantly, some wholeheartedly, and some voted for him due to his apparent superiority over his opponent.  I find myself defending him and a few friendships have been strained.  I cherish those friendships and find that coming here is often the needed release.   So what is the right thing to do?  Stop talking, stop listening, stop reading, stop caring?

Cap and Trade is one issue that causes heated exchanges to surface.  If manufacturing moves to another country that values economy more so than the planet, then what we have achieved is a worsening of the global warming process.  Those giant ships that bring our stuff across the oceans are spewing more toxins than the plants that made the stuff in the first place.  What is the solution?  Some believe we need to drive a stake into our evil president’s heart.  I believe we need to stop subsidizing fossil fuels and instead subsidize the retooling of manufacturing plants so they’ll stay here and get green and give tax incentives for doing so. Even if you don’t believe that climate change is caused by human intervention, the climate is changing and we need to keep this little planet as clean and pristine as possible.

Certain persons in the media have made Mephistophelean bargains for power and fame using fear and greed as their catalyst.  A few of them have marketed themselves as chosen.  Chosen to teach us what God wants us to do.  People blindly believe their utterances and it is becoming impossible to sit idly by or “close my eyes for the sake of peace”.

My mother raised us to never talk politics or religion at the dinner table.  I have adhered to that rule and have enjoyed many a peaceful dinner with friends who I know don’t agree with my politics or my religion.  Once the plates are cleared and the wine and chocolates or coffee and cheesecake starts a few fists have pounded the table. There are times when it needs to be talked about though.  Not informing ourselves, not talking at all is useful for the “owners”, as George Carlin referred to the media and the companies that pay them to tell us what they want us to know.

The economy and what is best for the economy isn’t always the best solution, still, it is the solution “the owners” love.  They create or enhance or close their eyes to hate in order to improve their own economy.

It is always important to challenge hate; challenge it’s source and find it’s solution. When you don’t like the way things are, there is always a chance for a different outcome.  Our conversations need to look at all sides and possible outcomes. Are we better off doing nothing vs doing things differently?

When fists are pounding or all capital letters are being typed, chances are a point is being made.  Hopefully the point is to liberate us from hate.

While drinking my hot beverage made from the beans of a tree and paying my water bill I started thinking more about water.  Coffee bean trees grow because of water and my coffee is brewed in water.

Water keeps our exquisite Earth alive.  It saves us and our earth from being lifeless mineral globs.  Of course, we nor the earth would be alive long if all the earths water was contaminated.  I wonder why we care more about oil,  than clean water?

The critter above seems to be savoring that little orb of clean water the way I am savoring my coffee right now.  I am a lifeless mineral glob without my Java.

Water plus carbon and a few other minerals makes us.  To give anything life, to keep anything alive it must have water. Someone came up with a way for cars to run on water.  Who would interfere with that technology and why, someone devilish?

Water is so life giving that I think maybe God is water and we are drilling for –> well,  you get my point?

Did you know that Monsanto (the same company that brought us agent orange) together with Syngenta, Dupont and Bayer controls almost all agriculture in the World?  They are like drug suppliers except they are in the seed business.  Ever wonder why the fruits and vegetables at grocery stores are so big and plump and colorful compared to the fruits and veggies at farmers markets?  Monsanto adds stuff, pesticides and they have created hybrid seeds that the farmers have to buy.  They have a contract. Small farmers have been successfully sued by Monsanto when they violate any terms of the contract.  Drug suppliers send out heavies that break your arms and Monsanto sends out heavies in the form of lawyers that break your family.

Independently owned farms are actually corporate farms as long as they use Monsanto seeds.  This is a fact of life in the US and we have grown accustomed to our giant red and yellow produce. Literature tells us to eat colorful food to be healthy.  Many Americans are wising up and going to farmers markets and food co-ops to avoid the pesticides and antibiotics and fungicides like Thiram that are added to Monsanto seeds to make stuff look better.  We have hospitals full of antibiotic resistant diseases and cancer.  Do you think there is any relation?

I had my own garden many years ago when I was pregnant with my son.  We had the good fortune of renting a little Wisconsin farmette that had been abandoned for many years after the owners died.  We washed the house and painted it.  We took the 10 year old cow crap that was in the barn and put a little clump at the bottom of every hole and put seeds and starter plants in the bottom.  It was a small town and people took pride in their gardens.  This garden was my first and my neighbors were full of wonderful advice.  I wrapped my tomato plants with newspaper to prevent pests, I picked off the little sucker growths, and I planted as they advised to make sure the tallness of the corn didn’t block out the sunlight to the lower plants.  We had a pear tree, an apple tree, and a concord grape vine.

Ken (my husband at the time) shot deer and traded the meat for pork and beef.  He fixed an old wringer washer he found somewhere on the farmette and I washed our clothes with that thing.  We heated with the wood he cut up from old dead trees on our property and our neighbors properties.  We had to open a window in the dead of winter sometimes to cool the place off.  It stayed toasty warm with that wood burning stove.  I felt like Harriet Homesteader, but, I wish I still had that old wringer washer it was the coolest ever.

yep it looked just like this

and our stove was very similar to this

OK, back on subject…

I had a basement full of potatoes, giant red tomatos, squash, peppers, melon and everything was huge and colorful.  My take on all of this is we buy the cow poop from organic ranchers and pay Wisconsin farm wives to teach us how to grow stuff.   Then we won’t need seeds with scary additives.

Meantime, I was reading an article in “Yes” magazine…

Monsanto has donated to Haiti some of their hybrid corn seeds.  These seeds are treated with the fungicide Maxim XO, and the calypso tomato seeds are treated with thiram. [ The EPA determined that EBDC-treated plants are so dangerous to agricultural workers that they must wear special protective clothing when handling them. The EPA also ruled that pesticides containing thiram must contain a special warning label. The EPA also barred marketing of the chemicals for many home garden products, based on the assumption that most gardeners do not have adequately protective clothing. Dress like an astronaut to do your gardening?

Vía Campesina, the world’s largest confederation of farmers with member organizations in more than 60 countries, has called Monsanto one of the “principal enemies of peasant sustainable agriculture and food sovereignty for all peoples.” [In the United States –>The Center for Food Safety has led a four-year legal challenge against Monsanto that has just made it to the U.S. Supreme Court. After successful litigation against Monsanto and the U.S. Department of Agriculture for illegal promotion of Roundup Ready Alfalfa, the court heard the Center for Food Safety’s case on April 27. A decision on this first-ever Supreme Court case about GMOs is now pending. [14]

Go to

http://www.yesmagazine.org/blogs/beverly-bell-in-haiti/haitian-farmers-refuse-monsanto-hybrid-seeds

and

http://www.yesmagazine.org/issues/food-for-everyone/food-rebellions-7-steps-to-solving-the-food-crisis

if you’d like to read the entire article and others like it.

China loves plastic because they make it and sell it to us.

Petroleum plastic, a material designed to last forever, yet used for products that we then throw away. This throwaway mentality is a relatively recent phenomenon. Just a generation ago, we packaged our stuff in glass, metals, and paper, and designed products that would last. Today, our landfills and beaches are awash in plastic packaging.

much of it remains “unaccounted for”, lost in the environment where it ultimately washes out to sea.

Sunlight and wave action cause these floating plastics to fragment, breaking into increasingly smaller particles, but never completely disappearing.

coupled with wind and the earth’s rotation, create “ocean gyres”, massive, slow rotating whirlpools in which plastic trash accumulates are being researched.

Plastic pollution is not a benign material in the ocean. Scientists are studying whether these persistent pollutants, transfer to the marine organisms that mistakingly consume them.

consider borrowing a  small research trawl from Algalita Marine Research Center  to collect scientific samples. Our new “Suitcase Manta Trawl” and “Winged Trawl” include easy protocols, which can be used by anyone to get valuable data. The objectives and methods are simple:

Step 1. We send you a trawl with easy instructions
Step 2. You sail, collect samples and dry them out according to our protocols
Step 3. You mail the trawl to the next sailor somewhere in the world
Step 4. We process the samples and import data to 5gyres.org

PR Inquiries

Zan Dubin Scott
(310) 392-1130
http://zdscommunications.com

Website Inquiries

Brennan Novak
(503) 662-2442
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So next time you’re out sailing about, perhaps you could help these people with their research and do some trash trawling.  I only have a kayak that I use in the bays, rivers, and back waters down here in Florida.  When I see floating plastic stuff I try to fish it out of the water and dispose of it after I get home.  Sometimes there is just too much to bring it all home and sometimes I celebrate just being able to enjoy my paddle without encountering trash. Can you imagine walking, biking or paddling and not finding trash?

please visit their site at –> http://www.5gyres.org/

.

eco-aqua-apocalyptic-phobia (the sudden, overwhelming sense that the world is coming to an end because every once-tranquil biosphere where land meets water has been developed or drilled or trashed).

Where do you go when trying to escape ecoaqua-Apocalyptic-phobia; the Gulf, the Arctic, where?

Do you think that an otherworldly influence is trying to get a message to us?   Or am I reading too much in to all the earthquakes and volcanoes.  Religious extremists say that bad things happen because of our heathen ways and disregard for our maker.  George Carlin said the earth is going to shake us off like a bad case of fleas.  I look at these pictures and that is one pissed off volcano wreaking havoc and causing millions to just stop.  Maybe the message is we need to stop for awhile and hang out on cots and talk about stuff with strangers in large rooms.

or else…

See more volcano images and havoc at –> http://blogs.tampabay.com/photo/2010/04/iceland-volcano.html

PS:  this woman and her daughters were highlighted in a blog I did in December.  Well…

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.

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.

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.

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, and Oregon) prove is that Americans are willing to invest in their own energy independence if state regulations would only let them.

Why don’t legislators like it?    —     Oil and coal put them in their place of power and can take them down as well.

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

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.

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.