This is the last part of the series of four. Sensibly Green can be thousands of things depending on your ability and desire for change. I’ve identified a few easy, cheap things you should consider doing as part of your day to day existence to help the Green movement along.
If you did a bit of thinking along the way, you’ll see that Green, however you define it, is the mantra of Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. I’ll add "Do some creative bitching too" as part of the concept.
I’m fortunate that I live in a city that does get the concept, at least part the way. A lot of cities don’t have recycling for apartment buildings, or Green box programs for houses. Mississauga does and it works well.
Even the garbage trucks have two compactors. One is for landfill-destined garbage and the other is for compostable garbage. Yes, it costs more for a truck with that kind of technology, but the Region has done the math and it works out over the life of the truck. To me, that’s a fair use of my municipal tax dollars that I pay as a segment of my rent. Perfect? No, but reasonable.
The problem is that the payback on Green is rarely obvious. By recycling more and reducing the use of landfill, you, as a citizen, postpone the inevitable tax hit when the existing landfill is full and the municipal government has to buy another site, usually further away, at a higher cost. It’s not like you get a cheque every year as a thank you. There is no Green Star you can hang on your front door.
By not using as much electricity as you might, you see a smaller electricity bill and that’s about it: A few cents a month. However that does mean the Electricity Company doesn’t have to build new generation capacity as soon as predicted, which defers rate increases.
Using less water means less burden on the existing infrastructure of water treatment and sewage, an infrastructure that consumes energy, but is absolutely critical to our continued existence. You can save a few cents on the water bill and that’s about it.
Less energy use, means less oil use, but that area has the iron-grip of the oil companies around the cullions of you and I. If we use less oil, then they complain that demand is down, so they have to raise their prices to keep their profit positions and of course (sound effect of heavenly choir) The Shareholders.
If demand goes up, they complain that they can’t produce enough, so the ‘free market’ comes into play and they raise their prices. If a refinery technician in Yemen gets a hangnail, they have to shut the whole refinery down for ‘ maintenance and safety issues’ which reduces production.
Notice there is no situation where oil prices can actually go down. Even if the oil companies suddenly discovered 8,000 years’s supply of easy to get to oil, sitting in a warehouse, already refined and packaged for distribution, they would find a reason ("The shipping costs to move it eleven feet to our pipeline is very expensive") to charge us more for it.
That whole system has been gamed for years exclusively for the benefit of oil companies and government. Oil is generally taxed on a basis called Ad Valorem meaning, based on the value of the goods. If the price of gasoline is $1.05 per liter, the government takes a fixed percentage of that price. In Ontario, it’s about 14 percent. The Feds also take a slice; an Excise Tax on gasoline, which out of the $1.05 means the governments get, roughly a quarter. Then, they have the temerity to tax us again on it, as the Goods and Services Tax and Provincial Sales Tax are calculated in as well.
Needless to say the oil companies charge that expense of collecting the taxes and sending in cheques, as part of their distribution costs that seem to always rise. And the costs of all the tax lawyers they have to have on staff to try to navigate the various tax acts. Some fuel is tax-exempt, some is excise exempt and some is taxed based on the alcohol or lead content. Your head starts to spin if you read the various tax laws. That whole system needs an overhaul.
Then there is the whole fuel from food issue. Using food to make fuel is Stupid. We need the food, not the fuel, as people starve to death on this planet every day for no good reason.
Oil companies, doing the greenwash, say that they’re ‘researching future fuels from corn’ What needs to be researched? Humans have been making moonshine for a few thousand years, since we found the pleasant and beneficial effects of beverages that contain 5 to 40 percent alcohol. Ask around in South Carolina if you have to. The reason they want to research it, is they get a tax credit from you and I to perform research on how to make booze.
Oil companies like corn ethanol fuel, as it is the easiest to make. Where the oil companies should be forced to focus is on making fuel out of waste vegetation, like wheat stalks, switchgrass or dandelions. That stuff also ferments and makes alcohol, but it isn’t as easy as a big kettle of sugar-rich corn.
Every cow, chicken, pig, sheep, duck, goose or turkey I’ve met takes a crap at least once a day and every farm I’ve been on has a manure lagoon. Farmers use some of the manure after maturing as fertilizer, but you get into the reality that animals crap more than you can use on the fields. Take that excess, which still contains plenty of undigested carbohydrates from the feed and straw and make fuel out of that.
Trap the naturally occurring heat from the fermentation and generate some hot water or electricity for the farm. Burn the naturally occurring methane from decaying manure to run a generator, or a pump. Sell what is left after fertilizing the fields to oil companies who will run it through a process to break down the carbohydrates, adding enzymes to convert the carbs to sugar, then ferment it and make moonshine. What is left over can be used as compost, or pressed into bricks of growing medium for newly planted trees.
Oh. We can’t do that as the oil companies don’t want to. They want the easy way out: Fuel from Food.
This is where "Do some creative bitching too" comes into play. The technology for heat exchangers and fermentation is very well understood. There is not a lot of magic technology involved, like hydrogen fuel cells or storage batteries made from Unobtainium and Expensivium. It is simple stuff.
Remind your elected representatives that Fuel from Food is Stupid. Remind them that Green = Vote. Not Green = No Vote. No Vote = Politician must get a real job.
The real reason it won’t happen soon is it is decentralized. If every farm generated some of their own heat, electricity and fuel, then the market for the oil and electricity companies would be reduced.
If every home or apartment generated a bit of their power needs, then the electricity demands would go down and that hits the oil companies in the wallet.
If we use more public transit, then our cars will last longer, as we’re not putting as many miles on them. Less car use means less oil use.
Recycling more, means less need for virgin plastic feedstock chemistry. Less plastic means less oil being used.
Recycled metal takes less energy to remake into other stuff and it’s cheaper than digging ore out of the ground. Less energy needed at the smelter, means less oil use.
Recycled paper fibres take less energy to make into things, than starting with raw trees in forests that need oil to ship the logs to the mill.
Food that only travels a few miles uses less energy than a cucumber from Costa Rica. Cucumbers grown in a sustainable, organic way use less oil for fertilizes and pesticides. This will mean you can’t have a BLT with Mayo in February unless you are willing to buy from a hydroponic greenhouse grower nearby and pay a lot more for them. OK, I can live with that.
Are you seeing the trend here? Big Oil doesn’t want to see the Green change happen, as it decentralizes all the ways they make money under a highly regulated, highly centralized, highly controlled system that does not allow for innovation and localization.
Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. And get even with the oil companies. Now that’s a payback!
RoadDave 