Monthly Archives: July 2007

This is the part I’m looking forward to:  Food. 

Humans need to eat food, usually a few times a day.  The food must be healthy, clean, safe and nutritious.  Humans do not live long on a diet of gravel and sawdust, washed down with a cup of kerosene. 

Since we need food and the Earth has a fair amount of it, this is good place to stay.  Now, I’m going to let you in on a secret:  Don’t tell anyone. 

Humans eat other living things, including animals.  Lettuce is a living thing until the farmer yanks it out of the ground and tomatoes are alive until twisted off the vine.  Wheat is a living grass until swathed, husked, ground into flour and baked into bread. 

Take two slices of bread, apply heat from electricity to caramelize the sugars in the bread, then smear on a little congealed milk fat from a pregnant bovine.  At the same time, take two slices of raw, fatty, salted, pig flesh from the side or belly of a pig (You do have to kill the whole pig) apply heat to render out the fat, then solidify and caramelize the remaining proteins. 

Slice the tomatoes, the reproductive organ of the tomato plant, add a leaf of the until-recently alive lettuce, two slices of that cooked pig belly and a bit of dried, ground up fruit from the piper nigrum vine. 

Perhaps you want to add an emulsion of undeveloped chicken fetuses torn from their shells, whisked with spoiled white wine and some fruit from an olive tree that have been pressed until oil squirts out. 

You get a Toasted BLT with Mayo.  Now, I am being silly, but just the same…

The healthier the living things we eat, the healthier we humans are.  Lettuce is something you could grow yourself, so you would know exactly how healthy it is.  Same with tomatoes, corn, or papayas, if you can can grown papayas where you live.  

Most urban North Americans don’t grow their own food.  We go to supermarkets and trust that everyone else involved in making our food did things right.  Most of the time the system works well enough.  It is most often when basic, simple foods are messed with that we get into problems.

Read the side of a box of just about any prepared food.  If you can’t pronounce or recognize the names of the ingredients, then there are too many things in there:  The food is over-processed.  

That isn’t to say that it is bad for you, in fact, vitamin fortified milk is actually good for you, but is Polysorbate 80?  Is Xanthan Gum really necessary?  Does artificial flavor do anything for the essential nutrition of what you are putting in your mouth?

Good food is food that is as natural as feasible.  A chicken raised on untreated grains and allowed to run around without being jammed full of vitamins and antibiotics is a fairly natural product. 

Cows, in a natural state, are ruminants who eat grass or grains and drink a lot of water.  If the grass is clean and free of pesticides and the water is pure, then you get a healthy cow.  Feeding a cow ‘bone meal’ increases the calcium in the milk, which is good for us.  However, bone meal is dead cow parts ground up and dried, which is not good.  

Kreutzfeld-Jacobs disease, or Mad Cow disease was a direct result of agricultural businesses making animals become cannibals.  Very few animals eat others of the same species.  Lobsters come to mind and that’s about it.

The less number of ingredients in your food is good, but then there is the Green side of it. 

Papaya does not grow in Ontario, but I can get papayas, mangoes, star fruit, taro, yucca and all kinds of weird produce at my local store, all year long.  Almost all of it is trucked or flown in, which costs energy to do, as well as the energy to store it before it gets to the supermarket.  Tomatoes from Chile, Bananas from Ecuador, Cucumbers from Costa Rica, Oranges from the US, all takes trucks, trains, ships and planes to get that stuff to us.

There is a concept called the "100 Mile Diet" in which you try to eat or consume things that are grown, harvested, slaughtered, made, woven, or wrought within 100 miles of where you live.  The idea is that you support local farmers, local businesses, local craftspeople and local manufacturing.  It costs less energy to get the stuff to you and the sources being closer, you can see how organic, or sustainable, or Green the producer really is.

It is a good idea.  However, it also means that in February you might be living on salt pork, sauerkraut, onions, storage potatoes, and home-canned fruit.  It is do-able but not rating high on the fun scale without a lot of work.  For me, the various pharmaceuticals I have to take to keep from dying, come from more than 100 miles away.  Some come from Indianapolis, others from Richmond Hill and some from Montreal.

But the concept is sound.  Buy local as much as you can.  The Mississauga Farmer’s Market is about two blocks away from here.  You can walk up to the grower, ask questions about how they grow their food and even taste it before you buy it.  I’d rather give a local farmer my money, directly, than a produce broker in New Jersey who sells it to a distributor, to a middleman, to a store, then on the shelves. 

The less hands and fingers involved with my food, the potentially healthier it will be and the greater potential that there was the least amount of non-renewable energy expended to get me to the point of cleaning up crumbs after eating a BLT with Mayo. 

Which brings us to water. 

Humans are about 90% water.  We need to drink clean, fresh, uncontaminated water to live. For that matter, all the things we eat need clean, fresh, uncontaminated water too.  Bad water applied to things we eat, means we get sick, sometimes quickly, like E. Coli tainted spinach, sometimes slowly, like mercury in tuna, or fire retardant in breast milk.   

Using the Great Lakes as a toilet is Stupid.  Running a dishwasher for three cups, two plates a handful of utensils and a cutting board is also Stupid.  Allowing businesses to dump manufacturing effluent into a body of water is Stupid.  Using water to keep a lawn green is Stupid, especially in a desert.

Potable water, the stuff that comes out of your tap, most often called ‘city’ water is generally clean, pure and healthful to drink.  Rain water, the stuff that falls from the sky, is not, legally, potable water.  However, it works just fine to irrigate crops, water the lawn, wash the car, or to hose down the family dachshund.  I am assuming your roof isn’t covered with diseased carrion or nuclear waste. 

Collecting rainwater is sensible and Green, reducing your use of potable water, but there are improvements that could be made.  By law, all the water that comes into a house must be drinkable by humans.  The water in the tank of your toilet is perfectly safe, potable water.  The water that departs after you flush, is not.  We must be protected from sewage and that makes sense.  But the water from your shower, or from the dishes is, aside from being soapy, or greasy, or tainted with crumbs from a BLT with Mayo, is perfectly fine for the garden.

What we need is a way going forward to keep potable water, greywater and sewage separate.  Sewage we all agree needs thorough treatment.  Greywater, like the shower, the laundry or the dishes needs a little treatment.  Potable water is already clean.  Ideally there would be two sewer pipes coming out of the house.  One for the sewage and one for greywater.

Following on, trying to be even more Green, one would go over to a composting toilet and use composted human waste as fertilizer.  However, it doesn’t quite work in an urban highrise apartment building.  The retrofit costs are too high and the payback is too nebulous for a landlord.  There is also the "ick!" factor of using composted human waste products in a garden that is hard to get over, but is done in a number of countries, quite safely.

Reducing the amount of water you use is easy.  Make sure the dishwasher is full before you run it.  Use biodegradable soap and laundry detergent, as it takes less energy to clean the waste water.  Don’t spend forty-five minutes under the shower, unless there is some very strong, compelling medical reason why.  Use water restricting shower heads and taps.  Put a bucket in the shower and use that water on the petunias or the impatiens.  If you can, get a rain barrel and hook it up to your downspout to water the lawn.  Capturing rain water means you can screw the Water Company out of a few dollars, which always feels good. 

And the last two?  Fix leaky taps.  Hire someone, or learn how to do it yourself. The final one is this ditty:  "If it’s yellow, let it mellow.  If it’s brown, send it down."  

The industrial side of it is a little harder to fix.  Perhaps a law that the CEO of every company that uses water in their processes, must drink a liter of their wastewater every month.  That would ensure that the water leaving a factory would be just as clean as the water going in.

A test. Remember our three core facts from the first post?

1) Oil is a finite resource.  We don’t know how much is left.

2) Food is important.  If you don’t eat, you don’t shit.  If you don’t shit, you die.

3) Stupidity and Hydrogen are two constants in the Universe and I’m not convinced about Hydrogen.

Electricity comes from coal, natural gas, oil, nuclear or hydroelectric generation, with a percentage from solar, geothermal or wind.  All the good rivers for hydroelectric generation are taken, so that leaves mostly oil-based and nuclear-based:  Things burning to make heat.

Making electricity most often means making heat to make steam to turn turbines to generate the electricity.  A nuclear reactor is a way to make heat to make steam.  The downside of nuclear generation is the waste will kill you and we don’t quite have a handle on how to keep the waste safe for five thousand years, despite what the commercials say. 

We can’t uninvent nuclear and we haven’t figured out how to make it go away safely.  Let’s just leave nuclear generation of electricity at the level where it is and not make any more problems for ourselves.  As the nuclear plants age out, shut them down. 

That leaves oil-based generation and the percentage of renewable energy generation.  Coal and natural gas are for our purposes, oil-based.  Wind works well enough but solar has issues, as we have clouds on this planet and solar doesn’t work at night.  Geothermal is not widely available, like in Iceland where almost all their electricity comes from geothermal sources.  Maybe there is an active volcano in Mississauga, but I haven’t found it yet.  I think the city would tell us if there was. 

The issue is only partially how we make electricity.  The underlying issue is the storage of electricity.  You can’t store it, except in batteries (or the energy potential in a dam, but those are all taken) and batteries aren’t enough for cities or businesses. 

Just to make it harder, you have to make electricity near where the users of electricity live, as those pesky electrons don’t like to travel very far.  Lazy buggers those electrons. 

Which leads us to:  Reducing the use of electricity means using less oil-based generation.  How do you reduce your personal use of electricity?

Compact fluorescent (CF) bulbs last longer, generate less heat and provide significant energy saving over the course of a year.  I have exactly two conventional incandescent lights now.  One in the stove and one in the fridge.  The rest are CF or low-voltage halogen.  I’m saving my landlord money, but the concept is the same:  Not using as much electricity as I could.

Living in a highrise apartment, I face north, so I don’t use as much air conditioning as a south facing apartment, however, when I go to work, I close the drapes and reset the thermostat to not cool the apartment, unless the temperature gets over 90 F, or 30 C. 

When I get home, I turn the AC on, if things are too muggy and turn if off at night.  In the winter, the heat might come on five times a day, as a twenty-floor concrete building is a fabulous heat sink.  Every unit around me is heated, so the only thing I technically heat are the windows.  I would, if I could, put all this on an electronic thermostat, to do it automatically for me, in case I forget. 

Yes, the fridge runs all the time.  So does this computer, the router and the cable modem.  There is the usual leakage of what are called vampires.  The cable box, the microwave, or anything that could be blinking 12:00 -12:00 – 12:00 uses some electricity to keep the clock running and the electronics warm. 

For example, your TV never really turns all the way ‘off’, despite what the button on the remote says.  If you hook an ammeter up to a TV, you’ll see it still draws electricity to keep the power supply and the picture tube idling.  When you press ‘on’, the electron guns in the picture tube are ready to show you Dr. Phil in about a second. 

Otherwise it is like the Ye Olde Days Of Television where you would power up the mighty Philco or Electrohome and wait 30 to 60 seconds for the tubes to come up to temperature before you could see the Indian Head Test Pattern on WWNY-TV from Watertown, NY.  Captain Kangaroo is going to be on soon!

Ideally, you should unplug those culprits. However, the geek in me is deeply offended by electronics that blink 12:00 – 12:00 – 12:00, so I don’t.  I offset that by physically turning off the computer monitor at the power switch, which on an LCD display, actually stops power draw.

By the way, if you have an older computer monitor, the big tube-type conventional display, you might think you’re using less power by using a screen saver.  You would be wrong. 

Look at the monitor, running the ‘blank’ screen saver in a dark room.  You’ll see the electron guns in the picture tube are actually painting ‘black’ on the screen, which means they’re using electricity.  Hit the power switch for the display and see what ‘off’ really looks like.  Leave the computer itself running if you want to, but turn the display off with the power button and you have reduced the electricity demand by about 70 percent for that computer.  Or, break down and buy an LCD display that uses significantly less electricity.

Rule of Thumb?  If it is electronic and feels warm, it is probably using electricity.  Don’t unplug hospital equipment please.  There are some things that should be running all the time and Grandpa Hubert’s ventilator is one of them. 

Using less electricity means using less oil, coal, natural gas or other stuff that burns and we can’t replace. 

There are Green electricity sources.  Wind power is one I like, as the technology is very simple and simple is usually very Green.  In my perfect world, there would be a modest, self contained electricity generating wind turbine on the top of any building more than three stories high.  Everyone would generate a bit of wind power and that which the building didn’t use would go back into the grid. 

This would mean that the electrical meter on your house would have to spin in two directions.  One way when you’re using electricity that you aren’t generating yourself and costing you money. The meter would spin the other way when you are generating more electricity than you are using, saving you money, deducting from your bill. 

Theoretically, you could be getting a cheque from the Electrical utility and not paying for any of your energy use, as you are generating enough for your own needs and then some.  Needless to say, the electricity companies are not keen on this, as the centralized, metered and highly regulat
ed generation of electricity is how they make grotesque amounts of money. 

Until a government with a set of big attachments orders a change, all we can realistically do is use less electricity.  We can always yell at the government, but we’ve seen how well that works most of the time.

When it comes to Green electricity, there are some excellent things going on with wind power.  Germany is the leader in using a highly distributed grid of wind turbines to supplement their conventional generation.  You find small clumps of wind turbines all over the countryside in Germany, turning gently, rolling out a few more kilowatts of power.  Multiply that times thousands of individual turbines and you cut back on the amount of stuff that gets burned to power your Nintendo Wii, xBox360 or electronic garlic press.

In the Bruce Peninsula, towards Owen Sound, there are several modest sized wind power farms that add some more electrons to the bucket.  There are people who consider them a blight on the landscape and others who are vitally concerned about the rare species of innocent Pileated Monk Gulls that die horrible deaths flying into the whirling Blades Of Death at a wind farm. 

Both sides are right, but both are also being stupid.  If we don’t reduce our consumption of oil-based electricity, then the Pileated Monk Gull (I made it up, don’t bother searching for Pileated Monk Gull) and the rest of us are going to die because the atmosphere will be unbreathable.  The clouds of pollution will make it impossible to see the landscape anyways.  Objections to wind farms as aesthetic blights or as a Bird Cuisinart are not looking at the larger good, over a longer term. 

There are some nifty technologies.  The Peel Region Algonquin Power program burns material that will not compost to generate heat, to make steam to make electricity.  This also includes the international airline garbage, that must, by law, be incinerated for safety reasons.  The system burns it twice, the second time in a high temperature (+1,000 F) oxygen-rich environment to make sure all the little bits are sterilized. 

The fly ash is captured, the exhaust heat is recirculated to extract as much energy as possible, then scrubbed with water, catalysts and activated carbon to clean it.  The dregs are scanned with a big magnet to collect any ferrous metals that might have melted out, then the final bits are used as part of the daily landfill cover.  Peel has several kilometers of roads paved with a mix of asphalt and bottom ash from the incinerator and so far, it seems to work fine. 

Incineration doesn’t mean we can throw everything into the trash and forget about it.  The Peel Region program however, does show that if you must incinerate stuff, you should suck every last erg of energy out of it using all the technology you can to make it as safe as you can, to make electricity and find a way to use the leftovers too.

Geothermal is a superb idea.  The inside of our planet is very hot, molten rock.  Stick a tube into it and pump the heat up to a boiler to make steam, to make electricity.  Except the hot molten rock is five to ten miles below the surface of the earth and is nearly impossible to get at, unless you live on, or near volcanoes or geothermal hot spots.  In those locations, the hot rock from the interior of our planet are much closer to the surface. 

Iceland is is far along the process of using almost no oil to generate their electricity and Iceland gets dang cold in the winter too.  It is one answer, but is dependent upon having an active geothermal hotspot nearby.  This doesn’t quite work for most major cities.

That leaves us with solar:  Solar power has been around for more than 50 years and works well for cottages and travel trailers.  The two problems with solar are that it doesn’t scale up to feeding a business or town, and it doesn’t work at night.  You get caught in the storage issue of batteries, which works for individual houses, but doesn’t scale to a town of 25,000 people. 

It can also be argued that solar cells contain poisonous heavy metals like Cadmium Telluride, Copper Indium Selenide and Gallium Arsenide.  Solar cells are basically light sensitive transistors and most folks can’t whip up a batch in the bathtub over a weekend, paint it on the roof, hook up some wires and be done with the commercial grid.  Not to say that solar isn’t good, as it is very good, but as a percentage of renewable energy, not the whole answer.

The Whole Answer is a bit of everything.  Some wind, some solar, some super high efficiency burning of waste that would be going to a landfill anyways, with what ever we have left from hydroelectric sources and a declining amount of nuclear.           

The Rule of Thumb?  Burning things to make electricity is not good for the planet, as a general guideline.  If we must burn stuff, then have the sense to extract all the energy out of it and make sure that what is left is safe, benign, and reusable in something else that we need. 

Ideally, all electricity should be produced by falling water, blowing wind, or solar cells, as those are things don’t have a lot of footprint, are self-sustaining and we don’t have to technologize it too much.  

The easiest fix is to use less electricity in the first place.  Conservation.

Conservation is inexpensive to do.  It is easy to do, as long as you know how to screw in a lightbulb.  (I mean ‘screw in a lightbulb’ as in remove the current one and put a new one in, you dirty-minded jokesters)  Turn off lights and appliances you aren’t actively using.  Use less air conditioning or heating.  An electronic setback thermostat is cheap (about $50) and easy to install if you’re the forgetful type. 

Get a modern, high efficiency fridge, stove, washer, dryer or dishwasher the next time you have to replace a major appliance.  For those of us who have landlords, ask the direct question of them:  May I please have a new, Energy-Star certified Fridge and Stove?  It will save you, Mr. Landlord, a bunch of money on the electricity for the building and pay for itself in about five years.

There are some ‘activist’ things you can do, that are very simple.  If you shop at a store that is lit up like Christmas when we’re short of energy, ask the manager, very politely and nicely, if he or she would be so kind as to turn off about half the display lights in the store. 

If they can’t (and some corporations don’t give their store managers that kind of latitude) ask politely if the manager would be so kind as to tell head office that it would be good corporate citizenship for the business to cut back on their electricity use.  Leave it at that. 

You’ll be amazed what happens with anecdotal requests from customers that get passed up the corporate foodchain.  Retail is so cutthroat competitive that you might just be listened to.  Or fill out a customer comment card and ask them to cut back on the lights, please.  

As for the politicians.  Hmmm.  We can’t burn them for heat, as the laws discourage that.  We can’t harness the unmitigated manure that falls out of their mouths as a source of bio-fuel energy. 

About all we can do is remind them that conservation is much cheaper and faster than building new coal or nuclear plants.  Conservation can happen over a few months:  A new power plant takes about 5 years to bring online.  A new nuclear plant takes close to 15 years until it starts spitting out electrons. 

Five years from now might as well be 11,000 years from now to a politician, so bring your timeline down to months and use their unmedicated ADD to your advantage.  Green Now = Votes Now.  Use a colourful handpuppet and a funny voice if you have to. 

If they say they ‘have to study the implications and economic paradigms for transparency and efficacy’ you have a Stepford Candidate and should in all decency run away, taking your vote with you.  Let the colourful handpuppet tell them that, as you get the hell out of the constituency office. 

In the next installment, we’ll talk about Food.

President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, while in deep discussions with Vladimir Putin at the Cradle Of Idiocy in Kennebunkport, Maine, took time out to commute the sentence of Irving Lewis ‘Scooter" Libby just a few minutes ago.

Irving, if you remember, was looking at a couple of years federal time for being a lying sack of waste products, while working for Shotgun Dick Cheney.  Shotgun Dick and Kousin Karl knew that if Irv went to the Crowbar Hotel, the likelihood of him telling the whole truth when he got out, was very high, so they distracted President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy with the shiny side of a DVD and handed him a last-minute press release, commuting Scooter’s sentence.

Meanwhile, over at the Kennebunkport guest house, Vladimir Putin was cooling his heels, doing Sudokus with the Secret Service, waiting for the Jo Jo The Idiot Boy to come back from the meeting. 

Their conversations picked up where they left off, Putin talking about the downside of moving any Patriot Missile installations to Europe, while Dubya was daydreaming out loud about the Spice Girls getting back together and its impact on the Twins.

Putin left a few second later, saying he had an urgent appointment and he’d be back in a while.  Putin’s comment, "возьмите дерьмо" or "зажмите регистрацию" depending on how you interpret it, could mean closer ties in the lumber and building materials sectors, or, Putin was going to "pinch a log".

Meanwhile the conventional media is in a flat spin.  The White House has now officially jumped the shark and the media feel duty-bound to nail someone to the floor for the most flagrant abuse of Presidential Power since Gerald Ford gave a Kiss and a Hug to Richard Nixon after Watergate.

The political subtlety of the act of commuting Irving Libby’s sentence is on par with a Tasering and baton beating of The Constitution.  Which means it is beyond the mental ability of Jo Jo The Idiot Boy and can only be dumped on the desk of Cheney and Rove as the parties responsible.

Vladimir Putin meanwhile, after taking the sports section of Pravda with him on his mission, returned to a darkened meeting room.  Jo Jo had left the building.