RoadDave

I’ve spent a few enjoyable hours watching the Tour de France on the magical picture box.  The Tour de France, for those who don’t know it, consists of a couple of hundred maniacally fit young men riding bicycles around France.  Not just Paris, or Lyon, but on roads to little villages like St-Michel-de Maurienne, or Tignes.  You’ve never heard of those little places and neither have I. 

Often enough the roads are in the French Alps and go straight up the side of a 6,000 foot high mountain, then plummet down the other side at a 50 degree angle.  There are crashes, pedals entangled in spokes, riders flying off over the guardrails and multi-cycle pileups that seem to go on for hours, in a tumbling collection of arms, elbows, legs, knees, heads, spokes and wheels.  You can’t quite hear it, but you know there is extensive swearing, in several languages, going on as well. 

Not that I’m watching for the crashes, as I have fallen off my share of bicycles and still have some little pebbles of gravel that come to the surface of my skin from time to time.  What I am watching is not the cyclists or the race. 

There are two fascinating sidebars to the Tour de France.  The first is the cameraperson who is standing on the back seat of a motorcycle, trolling along beside the cyclists, taking closeups of the sweat pouring off the riders as their leg tendons and muscles bulge like a collection of snakes in spandex and sponsor logos.

The second sidebar are the fans.  Apparently people take their vacations to drive for a day and half to camp at the side of an obscure road, near an unremarkable village, to watch two hundred sweaty men cycle by them once.  Some fans have their favourite team or rider and insist on painting the entire bodies and camper trailers in the colours of Rabobank or Discovery Channel, as a tribute to their heroes. 

The cameraperson, I am certain, is insane.  If you would like to simulate what he or she is doing, find a big, hard ball, like a softball.  Put the ball on a kitchen chair.  Place a short wood board across the ball.  Put a fourteen pound weight on your right shoulder and close your left eye.   Climb up on the chair, balance on the board on the ball and try to aim the weight on your shoulder at one corner of the TV and leave it there. 

Just to add to the fun, be on your cellphone at the same time, talking to someone who has consumed too much coffee and is chain-smoking Gitanes in a control room in Paris.  Now, make the kitchen chair go 45 kilometers an hour, mere inches from a group of cyclists while going down an 8% grade.  Oh, there will be helicopters flying just a few meters away to deafen you.  You have to trust the motorcycle driver is not drunk, depressed, high or getting over a particularly nasty love affair gone bad, with the unprotected, thousand-foot alpine drops looking so appealing.

Now add five dozen tiny European cars, with seventy-five bicycles lashed to each of their roofs, dodging in an out of the two hundred cyclists, honking their horns, screaming in a dozen languages and passing lunch to the riders, who glibly throw their empty water bottles at the heads of the spectators.  Meanwhile your brokenhearted motorcycle driver is sobbing at the sorrow of losing his love Pauline to a macon from Vierville who quotes Sartre and makes passionate love to her on the dining room table Sunday mornings after a meaningful repas of bread, cheese and eggs lightly fried in olive oil.

Then there are the spectators who ebb and flow off the side of the road, trying to touch the riders, flying their flags and colours, proffering water, while waving, screaming and taking pictures with their cellphones.  Your motorcycle driver, Jean-Etienne, must weave between them, while you perch in the air pointing a camera at the riders.

Then you are on the downhill descent, watching the speeds climb to 70 or 80 kilometers an hour, feeling the wind from the speed and the nearby helicopters pushing you left, right, back and forward, as the heavy, overbalanced motorcycle must squirt around a 180 degree bend on a road that is half-gravel, half pavement, coated with paper cups and water bottles, at 60 kilometers an hour, while dodging cyclists, spectators and signage.

At the end of a stage, the cyclists look like spent tissues, crumpled and wet.  The cameraperson, I suspect is taken to a padded room and allowed a forty-five minute soundless howl of soul-scarifying terror that makes Munch’s The Scream, look like a child’s birthday card, complete with cartoon puppy.  After he or she stops twitching, they are injected with something to calm them for a week or two. 

Jean-Etienne, the camera motorcycle driver, disappears to a shadowy corner of the media pen with a bottle, his memories of the vivacious Pauline and sad Johnny Halliday songs on his iPod.

The spectators?  They pack up their tents, lawn chairs and caravans and fight the endless kilometers of traffic away from the Tour de France.  Each driver hunched over his or her cellphone reviewing the blurry, poorly framed snaps of George Hincapie or Michel Rasmussen in the maillot jaune.  You can just see the shoulder of the leader, behind fourteen other riders, dressed in all the colours of the rainbow, including a fine mist of refined, high-performance athlete sweat.

And you think NASCAR is madness?  Bill France and stock car boys have nothing on these folks who cover, participate and spectate in, on and around the Tour de France.

For those of you south of the border, this might come as news.  Canada has had troops fighting in Afghanistan since April 2002.  Remember Afghanistan?  The first blow the US struck after 9-11?  (Oh yeah, Afghanistan.  The Taliban, and the guy with the furry peaked hat and beard, um, Karzoo?  Right?)

When the US opened up the Shock and Awe taps in Iraq, most of the US forces went south to the Big Show, leaving NATO troops, including Canada, to pick up the slack.  Since then, it hasn’t gone particularly well for our side.  Despite best efforts, we’ve managed to get a lot of our folks killed in the same kind of grinding insurgent fight going on in Iraq.

There are some differences, in that Canada tends to win the hearts and minds by actually doing things for the locals and keeping the peace so the locals can get on with life.  However, when various insurgent groups decided to fight, our folks know how to put rounds on target too.  Just as true, our people bleed and die.  Sixty-seven of them so far.

I was in the convenience store in the apartment building last week when I noticed a person standing next to me.  He had a high and tight haircut, a deep tan and was wearing a blue sweatshirt listing the ops of the Princess Patricia Canadian Light Infantry in Afghanistan.  The jump pants and the heavy boots suggested some military service, but the giveaways were the huge shoulders, massive arms and very calm demeanor.

Every fighting soldier I’ve ever met exudes an aura of personal responsibility, confidence and honour in a perfect sphere that extends about three meters around the person. 

I have a history of working with the military.  2 Circus, 8CH, 2 Commando, PPCLI and the Sherbrookes.  There was even a few days spent in the company of the Watch and the Vandoos, as well as 427 Sqn.  To a person, all good people.  But then there is this war thing.  I don’t care for the reasons Canada is in Afghanistan.  Our commitment was a simple "Kiss Dubya’s Ass" decision and was made in an afternoon of deep, intellectual, moral and political consideration:  "You comin?  Sure, whatever. Can we hitch a lift?"

That doesn’t mean I don’t support our fighting folks.  I have the utmost respect for them doing a difficult job, far away, without a lot of logistical, or physical support from home.  There are very few jobs that start the description with "You can be killed in the normal performance of your daily duties."

Here’s the conundrum:  I support our troops: All The Way.  I don’t support the War.

So, I asked the large shouldered gentleman what I should do?  His response was perfect.  "You don’t have to support the war to support the troops.  We’re fighting so you can have the luxury of a different opinion over here."

For that, I shook his hand, said thank you and asked him to pass on my thanks to the rest of his unit.  He said that he would and knowing the kind of person who was shaking my hand, I’m fairly certain he will. 

I can live with the conundrum now.  We shouldn’t be in Afghanistan, but if we are there, then the soldiers on the ground need us to say thank you once in a while.  They deserve to hear from us, who have the luxury of not agreeing with the war, at least recognizing the soldiers’ contribution.

To that, I can, wholeheartedly, unequivocally, without reservation, say Thank You.

If you want to say Thank You too, this link: http://www.forces.gc.ca/site/Community/Messageboard/addresses-2_e.asp will show you how.

The jury has spoken with a unanimous voice regarding Conrad Black.  Guilty on four of thirteen charges.  Of course, Lord Black of Crossharbour will be appealing the conviction, but as of right now, he’s been adjudged guilty of mail fraud, two counts of mail and wire fraud and one obstruction of justice. 

The racketeering charge didn’t stick, nor did aiding or assisting in preparation of false tax returns but enough of the manure storm is clinging to his vestments that it makes no difference.  As Conrad is reapplying for his Canadian citizenship, I do believe one of the major disqualifiers for consideration as a citizen is a conviction for major felonies.  Mail Fraud and Obstruction of Justice, would perhaps, constitute major felonies by even those who suffer from closed head brain injuries.  Technically, Conrad Black cannot become a citizen of Canada again, as a recognized court, meaning a US Federal court, not some third-world guerrilla tribunal, has found him guilty.

This brings up some interesting possibilities.  We know that Lord Tubby isn’t going to serve the maximum sentence for the four charges, which would be 35 years.  Face it, rich folks don’t do that kind of jail time and it isn’t like he went on a spree robbing 14 banks, waving guns around and shooting up the place.  He didn’t even have the decency to resist arrest and get Tasered by the cops. 

Which gives me a vivid mental image of Conrad Black in a torn, soiled wife-beater undershirt and pair of sweatpants, unshaven, covered in dirt and sweat after running through a trailer court and over a fence, being flung like a sack of potatoes into the back of a police cruiser, cursing and yelling at the "MotherBEEP BEEP BEEP son of a BEEP vultures!" with the camera equipment, then trying to kick out the side window of the cruiser. 

All that would be missing would be his wife, Barbara Amiel, in a pink tube top and white hot pants, clutching a pack of third rate economy brand smokes and screeching at the cops who have arrested her man:  "Let him up you BEEP BEEP cops!  He didn’t hit me none, but I’m gonna crush your BEEP in a bag of BEEP you GodBEEP BEEP!"  Close the scene as the female officer pushes Barbara Amiel across the hood of another cruiser and slaps the cuffs on.  We hear Amiel disintegrate in a pile of tears about "her babies" and yelling for "Mama!"  Fade to (pun intended) Black.

What the jury has done and the judge will do on November 30th of the this year, is send a message to those who figure they are above the law by their position, wealth and power, that we’re not going to take it anymore.  There is nothing wrong with being, rich, or aggressive in business, or even living a lavish lifestyle, but don’t behave like a demented Roman Emperor.

This brings us back to the concept of Noblesse Oblige.  Ed Mirvish, who died this week, came from a dirt-poor background, worked his way up in business, became a theatre impresario, a great philanthropist and was recognized as an all around good guy.  Many of you have never been to Honest Ed’s, but Honest Ed’s is a Toronto institution that makes any discount store or dollar store you’ve ever seen, look like a chi-chi Rodeo Drive, Beverly Hills boutique. 

Mirvish made a pile of money and gave a good chunk of it away to hospitals, libraries and foundations.

Conrad Black, his favourite charity was Conrad Black.  Ed Mirvish knew that noblesse oblige meant sharing with those less fortunate.  Conrad Black was all noblesse and no oblige, so we don’t mind seeing him go down.  Streets around the synagogue for Ed Mirvish’s funeral are packed with people who want to say goodbye and thank you. 

Now, as for what to do with Conrad Black.  I have two concepts I have previously floated:  One, he be forced to work at a Hamilton Wal-Mart as a greeter for the next three years less a day, and be made to live on a Wal-Mart salary in a one-bedroom, third floor walkup apartment near the Stelco slag tip. 

My second concept is to ankle chain him at the 150 yard mark at a local golf range and charge $15 a bucket, proceeds to charity for anyone who wants to practice their game, rain or shine.  I’d say run that one every weekend until the season closes in November.  It would raise some money for various charities and teach Conrad Black a hopefully non-fatal lesson about being a greed head and a bully.

There’s nothing wrong with making a ton of money in business.  Look at Sir Richard Branson, or Bill Gates.  Those are two very sharp, some would say aggressive, businesspeople who have made a mammoth amount of money.  Both do good works with their wealth and power:  Noblesse Oblige.

Then there is Dennis Kozlowski, Bernie Ebbers and Michael Milliken.  Greed heads of the first order, who also made a mammoth amount of money and whose good works consisted of exactly nothing.  All Noblesse, and no Oblige.

Which also sounds like President Jo Jo The Idiot Boy, Shotgun Dick Cheney and Kousin Karl Rove.

I got this lovely email the other day, that I am going to reproduce here, as sent:

Dear Gentleman,
   I have many years experience south China(Shanghai)
in trading producks, since long ago grasps very many domains
 the production factory information, moreover has the good
 relation with the Chinese massive many companies. I can find
 cheaper producks with good quantity.If you want to establish
the initial relation with the Chinese company or and the more
 Chinese company carry on the relation, more opportunities and
the Chinese production merchant carry on the trade, we are willing
 to provide the corresponding help. You only need the product
 which tells us you to need, the request and the idea. We can
 in the Chinese with all one’s strength help, you at your service,
 the loyal hope can become the your firm forever friends.

Best regards!
Mr. Lu

Now, I’m overlooking his grammar and spelling, as it much better than mine or yours would be in Cantonese or Mandarin, so cut Mr. Lu some slack.  English is damn hard language to learn and I don’t have my tongue in my cheek.

It brings us to the more recent news of all kinds of counterfeits and knockoffs being imported into Canada, the US, Europe and elsewhere.  The most recent one is counterfeit Colgate Toothpaste being sold in Canada.  The toothpaste looks for all the world like your conventional tube of the well known brand.  With a couple of exceptions.  First, it says it is made in South Africa, spelled Arfica and it happens to contain very bad bacteria could make you very sick, or kill you. 

Second, there is no Canadian DIN number on the tube.  The DIN, or Drug Identification Number is the proof that the product making any health claims, or classified as one by Health Canada, has passed various tests.  For example, Life Brand Psyllium Husks for Fiber Therapy carries a DIN of 02247435.  It is in excruciatingly small type, but it’s there.

Remember the Melamine in Pet Food scare of a few months ago?  The reason melamine showed up in pet food, was that pet food makers were looking for sources of protein that were cheap.  China produces a number of things that go into food, like the various powders, chemicals and additives that are needed to manufacture foods.  China can produce them at insanely cheap prices, so any business with a half a lick of sense would consider sourcing some of them from China.

Surmising here, the potential buyer said "We need wheat gluten concentrate powder at X% protein/ per gram, per this test."  The supplier looked at the test and figured out a way to fudge the results using melamine to jack the apparent protein content up past the requirement.

Like any business, the buyer looked at the price per kilogram, added in the shipping and said "Hot Damn!  Fill us a half dozen containers full of bags of that stuff and get it on a boat!  Here’s the cash!"  The buyer started rubbing his hands together, knowing they saved a lot of money and could increase their profits very nicely.

The seller dutifully shipped it and took the money.  The buyer did a cursory test and yes, it met the standard for % of protein per gram, then dropped into the production process to make pet food. 

As Fluffy and Rover started getting horrendously sick and dying, someone decided to look the components that went into the pet food.  Through an amazing miracle, the wheat gluten powder was contaminated with melamine.  Melamine, combined with formaldehyde makes melamine resin, that indestructible dinnerware you have up at the cottage, or at the camp.  It is also used in counter tops, fabrics, glues and flame retardants. 

We all know what followed after that.  There were massive recalls, several hundred housepets got sick, some died and others will never be the same again.  But the two essential reasons it happened in the first place were these:  Blind Greed.  No Rules or Repercussions.

China’s definition of repercussions has some lattitude:  Generally, it’s a ‘tsk, tsk’ and a press release stating that their standards are as good as any. 

The other side of the repercussions is this:  On July 10th, the Chinese government executed Zheng Xiaoyu, the former head of the food and pharmaceutical safety agency.  He was convicted of taking bribes from various companies and, one would surmise, not sharing.

Today, this nugget came via the Xinhgua new agency:  "From today onwards, toothpaste manufacturers are not allowed to use diethylene glycol as an ingredient," the General Administration of Quality Supervision, Inspection and Quarantine said in a notice posted late Wednesday on its Web site."  Oh.  Good to know now.  How about piss?  Is piss allowed in Chinese toothpaste?

We come back to the issue that truly drives it:  Blind Greed.  Manufacturers are willing to cut any corners possible to make a buck.  China is willing to produce stuff that manufacturers want at any price, so they can make a buck.  You and I, merrily trusting manufacturers to do their jobs properly, pay the price.  

I’m not saying China is the sole source of badness here. Some mouth-breathers are calling for labeling laws and No China content boycotts.  That’s just dumb, semi-racist, knee-jerk badness.  China isn’t bad, nor is India, or any other country that is trying to crawl up the chain to first world status:  They’ll do what they have to do.   

The real culprit is the North American business person who moves his or her lips to the "Quality in Everything We Do" and "Our People Are Our Greatest Resource" mantras.  Meanwhile they’re trying to find a way to squeeze the last cent out of their people, suppliers and products, while simultaneously screwing their competitors. 

If they could find a way to get pulverized human skulls into their product, instead of proper ingredients, they would start looking at countries with really bad human rights records and trying to cut a deal.  Hey, Buy Low, Sell High and Let The Buyer Beware. 

Or, to quote Mr. Lu, I can have a firm, forever friend with the Chinese massive many companies.

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!

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.