Sarx

I filled up the car today (32 mpg) and gas cost $3.40 a gallon. Allowing for dollar exchange and litres/gallons conversion, that’s only 85¢ less than Canadian gas… which is, basically, taxes. Thus gas is now pretty damn near close to the same in both countries.

And yet I just heard, today, of a twenty-lane highway being built in Houston. The USA is damn near delusional, now. It’s official.

Here comes this talk about Suburbs from TED.

An interesting talk with a friend over breakfast, about why I *don’t* want to live out in the country someplace, but rather an urban or semi-urban commune… and why I don’t think the rest of us need to live out there either. Unless we want to walk a lot. Meanwhile he’s looking at a house that would make his daily commute more than 70 miles roundtrip. In my car that’s two gallons of gas a day - $7. That’s an hour of his pay (after taxes) each day just to get to afford the travel! I don’t want to imagine what it might cost in his SUV. What’s he say? “I don’t care how expensive gas is, I will buy it.”

Fr E sends me a link to this story in the International Herald Tribune:

Almost all biofuels used today cause more greenhouse gas emissions than conventional fuels if the pollution caused by producing these “green” fuels is taken into account, two studies published Thursday have concluded.

The benefits of biofuels have come under increasing attack in recent months as scientists have evaluated the global environmental cost of their production. The new studies, published by the journal Science, are likely to add to the controversy.

My reply was:

Green folks know biofuels are not green enough: it’s long been a discussion. The point of biofuels was twofold: to avoid using too much oil and to avoid dumping cooking grease in the ground. The Asheville fuel station that sells bio fuels only sells recycled grease.

The main thing wrong with the Biofuel movement is that it’s driving up the cost of corn - which, in the USA, is used in nearly everything (in the form of Corn Syrup) but it was at the point of actually *producing* Biofuel - instead of recycling it - and converting farms that we realise it’s not Greens who are doing it, but Megafarmers who have simply found a new way to make money and screw the rest of us.

The ultimate goal (read “Ecotopia” and “Ecotopia Emerging”) is to make us realise we use too much damn petroleum to build our little suburban dystopia. We (mostly Americans and W. Europeans) use too many resources per capita. And we put nothing back. Nothing wrong with driving a car (Gas or biofuel) once or twice a week for major errands, walking to work, keeping your house warm and composting. Ultimately that puts more back into the enviornment than it takes out. If you use a renewable resource you are doing better… but if you just grow corn (and rob the food chain) to help everyone go 70 miles per hour in their 90 hours of travel every week… you’ve done nothing.

The latest Agribusiness does just as much damage as the old agribusiness - not news.

CBC broadcasts a call-in show on Thursday. Ironically, I was in the car listening. New Brunswick (I think?) is getting ready to institute a tax on gasoline, paid at the pump by the consumer. It’s going to start at 2.5%, I think. And, over time, increase. NB has agreed that this carbon tax will go towards tax-relief in other ways: as the amount collected goes up, the money will be used to pay for items in the budget and then credited back to the taxpaying community by lowering other taxes.

The point is not a new source of income: the point is to punish people for destroying the world.

And Brother, you should have heard the Canadians calling up to whine and insist they had the right to drive wherever they wanted when they wanted. It got more interesting when the presenter announced that other provinces were considering the same idea. And the guest - there to answer questions about carbon tax - said he was worried the tax wasn’t high enough.

Again, the goal is not to use a different means to the same ends. The goal is to have different ends. We can’t keep building superhighways. We can’t keep driving food - gwon on the backs of the poor and fertilised with petroleum products - thousands of miles in trucks powered by petroleum. We cannot keep rendering virtual homogeneity via big-boxes that only destroy the half of the world we don’t see. We can’t keep going to war to sustain our addiction to petroleum: because we’re creating an American that ain’t worth dying for, let alone caring about.

We (and it is, largely US - but a car dealer tells me that Wealthy Russians and Europeans are playing right along) are screwing up. And we don’t seem to care - I’d suggest the rest of the world just ignore us, and let us go to hell in a hand-basket but we’re screwing them in the process.