The text of the article (and all it’s links) are totally, logical, of course. It was the attitudes of our ancestors (littering all the way back to the Stone Age) that brought us where we are.
What’s better, the risk of Nukulur Energy or the cost of coal? Both, it must be pointed out, use natural materials. Where do we go?
According to online-sources (and I recognise that gasbuddy may be biased), the petrol can be had in Canada for about CAD1.18/litre, which, with the currency conversion, comes out to USD4.42/gallon. When I first visited a year ago, using the conversion rate from then, gas cost approximately USD4.33/gallon: Canadian gas has increased by about ten US cents in the last 12 months. American gas, however, has gone up over ten times as much.
Why?
Analysts are projecting the possibility of USD7-10 a gallon by the time this is over.
Royal Dutch Shell PLC beat all forecasts on Tuesday with a 12 per cent rise in first-quarter current cost of supply (CCS) net income, helped by record oil prices which broke $100 (U.S.) a barrel in the period.
Excluding non-operating items, which amounted to a net charge of $77-million, the CCS result, which strips out the impact of changes in the value of fuel inventories, was $7.85-billion.
A Reuters poll of 11 analysts gave an average forecast of $6.84-billion for Shell’s first quarter CCS earnings, excluding non-operating items. The highest forecast was $6.99-billion.
“They look like blow-away numbers. Surprising across all divisions at this time,” said Jason Kenney, analyst at ING. “I can’t see anything in particular that is unusual, they’ve just done well.”
Shell and other oil companies are benefiting from surging oil prices, which topped $100 a barrel in January and have since climbed towards $120. Earnings at Shell’s rival BP PLC also beat forecasts.
While American politicians are entertaining us with their dickering over an 18¢ tax that may, possibly save the average American USD30 over the course of the summer, capitalists are raping American voters - and no one is talking about how we need to control or even punish the companies that are doing this. It matters not if this is foreign or domestic oil: the companies are the same. But, misled by the media (who are, in many cases, funded by the same companies) American voters will continue to believe that wars and Arabs are responsible for their problems. And they will soon imagine they need to rape the Arctic just to keep prices stuck at this artificially created high.
I just purchased the entire first season (1976) of Wonderwoman off of the iTunes Music Store. 14 hours of Classic TV for $24 isn’t too bad. Lynda Carter… in her satin tights, fighting for our rights. I was a devout watcher of this show when I was in Jr High School. We won’t get into the True Confessions aspect but suffice to say that in 1976, everyone should have known.
A Desktop image for your amusement:
A writer once theorised that gay kids preferred Bewitched to I Dream of Jeannie. Strangely enough nearly everyone on Bewitched was either queer or involved in queer-activism in the 80s and 90s. I liked the Jeannie show too because it involved Astronauts - I wanted to be one when I grew up.
Anyway, I digress. I think all my friends, gay and straight, had an attachment to Lynda Carter. (And yes, Lyle Waggoner was pretty hot.)
A standard joke for the Orthodox is that they get to buy their Easter Candy at a discount price. My first Pascha at Holy Trinity Cathedral, I cleaned out the local Walgreens supply of remaindered Cadbury Eggs. The only problem being that most of the upscale goodies were gone.
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.
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.
At 5:30 p.m. Eastern time today, all 7,100 Starbucks locations in the United States will close their doors for three hours.
Immediate ramifications stretch far beyond the lack of strong coffee in dozens of permutations, though that was certainly the most important - the late shift may be running slower tonight.
(Point of order, NYT: “The Late Shift” is at midnight. You’re talking about Second Shift - which starts at 4pm and so should have lots of time to get coffee. Get your classism down, ok?)
Is anyone else just getting bored by our (meaning Jews, meaning Americans, meaning Israelis etc.) collective ignorance and/or defiance about how the animals that give their lives to feed us are treated?
Think of it in terms not of “kosher” or not. Think rather in terms of cruelty. Farmed fish in tight nets. Cattle slaughtered with much blood and pain. Is this what the Holy One intended when he gave us “stewardship”?
On Monday, the New York Times‘ Andrew Revkin blogged the end of the 1950s - or at least he blogged a movie preview about the topic: The End of Suburbia
Revkin promises to blog attempts to “uninvent” Suburbia. The movies to which he links, which are now on my “must see” list, seem very clear about the idea. But I’m rather certain Americans don’t, generally, want to hear it. Mrs Obama said the other night, the only answer our Republican Overlords have given us to the current crisis is “shop”. The only people making sacrifices are our men and women in green - and we’re not even paying them back. We’re not asked to save canned goods or darn socks or even to buy war bonds. We’re just told to shop more.
This isn’t working - our American Greed is draining the rest of the world of peace. And we’re killing ourselves in the process: I’ve been told that Buffalo has 20,000 houses for sale - 10,000 of them boarded up and ready to be bulldozed. One person leaves western New York every 30 seconds. Nature is taking over the eastern side of Lake Erie - and yet we are building here: row on row of little houses made of ticky tacky. I’m currently living in the first generation of those: people fleeing down down urban Buffalo. And the outward flight continues.
So what are the options?
Resources like Ernest Callenbach’s ecotopia books and other advocates for high density urbanism, point toward something that isn’t normal for us at all: sharing, common ground, a decrease in “private” property concepts (although not an elimination of them) and more of a community-oriented, communal model.
Today’s news, (coincidentally?) brings us word of Israeli-style Urban Kibutzes imported to the US. (Props to nextbook.) At the same time that the USA was selling the gluttonous lifestyle of suburbia, Israel was building a new nation using Kibbutzes - collectivist farms. These new folks focus less on the collectivist farming of their elder brothers and sisters and more on social activism, but collectivism still plays a part.
Instead of abandoning the communal model embodied by the kibbutz movement and idealized by the Zionist youth groups, one Israeli youth group determined to adapt the kibbutz to the modern age. That group, called Noar Oved ve’Lomed, began to send its graduates to found small urban kibbutzim, called kvutzot, throughout Israel. Instead of a connection to the land, these kvutzot organized themselves around addressing specific social problems.
Imagine that energy tuned to the artist/social activist communities found in Buffalo and other places, seeking to bring to urban areas new life and a financial fecundity that has long since left the city centre to move out to the strip malls and Wal*marts.
This is not an appeal to gentrify: many cities (eg, San Francisco) come back to life with artist(/etc) collectives and then promptly destroy the life those folks built by bringing in huge amounts of money from the outside to buy up and destroy what has been built. On the other hand, other cities (eg, Asheville) get all fetishistic about their “cool” revitalised centre, and force the strip malls up the sides of mountains.
In modern Israeli society, the challenge of pioneering is no longer draining swamps, clearing land of rocks, bringing produce to market and building roads. The swamps that must be drained are swamps of urban poverty. The “produce” that must be generated is often hi-tech solutions that are marketed abroad. The roads that must be paved are roads of understanding between different communities in Israel. (Source.)
So to it is here, the need is not to homestead in isolated communities across the prairie or to isolate within our mega-houses, mega-churches and hummers, but rather to work in our cities to heal and renew what we have broken. And to work with those people we would leave behind - usually abandoning peoples of other races the same way we abandon slums and boarded up storefronts.
This seems to me a Jewish parallel to the New Monasticism movement within the emergent communities where the focus is to colonise the “urban Desert” with the Kingdom of Heaven. (Although, I think many of the kvuzot folks would avoid such overtly religious language.) I see this kvutzot movement as sort of a middle ground - encouraging the advancement of sustainable development within cities while, at the same time, avoiding the extremes of pure socialism and pure capitalism. Perhaps, given the lack of either of those extremes in the world, this is a more realistic approach?
This is the self-ruled blog of an Christian attempting to follow God in the Way of Jesus... sometimes. I most identify with the Anglican and Liberal Catholic flavours.
I who have written this story, or rather this fable, give no credence to the various incidents related in it. For some things in it are the deceptions of demons, other poetic figments; some are probable, others improbable; while still others are intended for the delectation of foolish men. (Closing lines of the Táin Bó Cúalnge)
