Labels: 7th UU principle, Capitalism, ecology, environment, readings, renewable energy, sacred texts

Labels: ecology, environment, homelessness, housing, personal bookmarks, renewable energy, sustenance

Labels: economics, environment, politics, restorative justice, universal health care, USA, Women's Rights

Labels: economics, environment, interconnected web, renewable energy, sacred texts

Just another bookmark. Too busy with life to blog today.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: bicycles, environment, personal bookmarks, politics, renewable energy

I've been thinking that if the Gulf of Mexico gets so very contaminated with oil and dispersants and toxins--or if the leak cannot be successfully plugged--the Gulf may need to be quarantined off from the rest of Earth's oceans.

I introduced this thusly on Facebook:

[Me] wonders how quickly a causeway could be built from the tip of Florida to Cuba, and another from Cuba to the Eastern Mexican peninsula at Cancun, in order to close off the Gulf of Mexico, if need be. Also wondering about the environmental impact of doing that, versus not doing it.

Friend: It would have to be one hell of a causeway as parts of those routes are very deep. Then, we could extract the oil caught there, process it, and open it back up?

Me: My reason for bringing it up is to protect the rest of the world's oceans, and limiting the damage from that area. If it were to continue gushing for several years or heaven forbid the leak grows in size, there's the potential that the oceans could die [and us all with them].

Me: Here's a view of what I was thinking (map (c) 2010 by Google Maps: TerraMetrics, Google, INEGI, and LeadDog Consulting).

I guess that's kind of suggesting an oceanic amputation of sorts. I'm morbidly fascinated by the logistics of the endeavor and I wonder at the idea of what this would do to weather patterns, habitats, and oceanic currents. The reason for building the causeway(s) would be trying to make the best of a potentially globally-catastrophic situation.

It would require an astonishing amount of Earth to do it. Assuming a height-width ratio of at only 1-2, of a trapezoidal prism-type shape where the top is steadily 100 meters wide, and the depth varies from about 20 meters at the coasts to 1850 meters at the deepest parts of the Florida Strait and the Yucatan Channel. Also assuming that the causeways would total about 430km (270 miles), doing a little math gives a rough estimate of the rock mass required would be to take a simple triangular prism 1850m deep, 430,000m long and 3700m wide at the base.

1.85km^2 x 430km => 1472 cubic kilometers of rock.

To put that number in perspective, that much would be the equivalent of digging out a section of Earth about the size of a major metropolis (including its suburbs) to a depth of a kilometer deep. But that estimate is a little in the high side, because we used a simple triangular prism instead of trying to work out the volume of a trapezoidal prism with varying depth, plus it's all an estimate, since I can't seem to find the proper bathymetric mapping online (Would it be too difficult to have oceanic topography freely accessible to anyone with an internet connection?). I studied math at University, but I forgot how to do double-integrals sometime around the time I received my diploma. Also, I estimated on the high side, because I doubt that the causeway could be built so steep and have integrity, so likely a causeway would need to have a lower rise/run ratio.

I realize digging up that much earth and rock would have a tremendous impact on the sources, the rock-mining sites, so we'd need to be really careful where we dig from. My guess for the Florida Strait is there's some land in Cuba, and some of the southernmost Appalachians. Though nobody really wants to hear the news that you need to tear down their mountain and toss it bit by bit into the ocean. We could get some of the finer Earth and sand from Florida to fill in between the boulders.

It would require new thinking and new scales of labor--I envision an army of solar-powered Earth-moving robots, specialized into miners and movers. The former dig it up, and the latter haul it like lorry trucks--in fact, you could haul them in electric trucks with human drivers as well. (Hooray for creating jobs!) Alternately, there could be underwater solar-powered Earth-moving robots that could mine and scour up some of the Earth below the waters of the Gulf, most notably the continental shelf just north of Cancun.

This page shows how amazingly complicated all this is because the entire Mississippi River basin flows into the gulf, yet the gulf is not large enough to dissipate off that much water into the air, so it would want to flow out from the causeway, which would essentially work like a dam unless we can find a way to use up most of the freshwater that flows through the Mississippi....

So obviously before we go into a plan like this, we need to get an honest assessment of the possible environmental impacts from the gulf leak. And the environmental impact of a big drastic change like this, plus the impact of actually implementing it. In addition, perhaps there are ways to do this other than a causeway. Perhaps the Dutch could come in and help build some serious dams.

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: environment, globalism, indifferent corporations, renewable energy, salvation, sci-fi, technology, water justice

.
Plastic is problematic for many reasons.

First, it's made from oil, which might well be usable in other ways in the future that we haven't even thought of yet, but we're running through at a breakneck pace.
Second, it doesn't biodegrade.
Third, it's polluting our oceans and killing them. Here is some important recent information about the garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean, along with their effects.

In short, we need to:

• Discontinue using nonbiodegradable plastic, and switch to other materials for our bags, our products, and our drinking/storage vessels.
• Gather up all of the plastic on land and store it safely, or put it to good use where it won't go missing in the ocean, killing untolled wildlife populations.
• Design some type of swimming robots that can identify and capture plastic in our oceans, and return it back to land.
• Educate everybody about plastics, and find new ways of living where plastic plays a dramatically different role in our lives.

lyrics:
"Tried to save the trees
Bought a plastic bag
The bottom fell out
It was a piece of crap"
From Piece of Crap, by Neil Young

colors: color of clear plastic 6-pack can ring containers. (I always cut them up so they don't get caught on the birds' necks if they get into the wild, but really that's nowhere near enough.)


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, indifferent corporations, interconnected web, paradigm shift

Something has been on my mind for the last few years, and I'm finally doing a little research. Fortunately, it's easy.

I wanted to know how much water does it take to make certain products, so that I can make better decisions when choosing. Here are a few that I want to know:

1. How much to make a computer, desktop or laptop? Or even just how much to make a circuit board or chip...
2. How much to make a 1 Liter plastic bottle to put a liter of water into?
3. How much to make a 500 sheet ream of paper from scratch? And from recycled materials? And therefore, how much water to make a single sheet of paper?
4. How much water to make a hammer, or a saw?
5. How much water to make all sorts of plastic doo-dads?
6. How much to make clothes from natural fabrics? From synthetics?
7. How much for a paper bag or plastic bag at the grocery store?
   

Let's see what comes up.
Here's a quiz.

Here's the answers to the quiz, because they make you go through heck and high water just to get this important information.

Water required to make one pair of jeans: 1800 gallons
Water required to make one loaf of store bought bread: 1000 gallons
Water required to make one cotton T-shirt: 400 gallons
Water required to make one ounce glass of milk: 48 gallons
Water required to make one pound of plastic: 24 gallons
Water required to make one keg of beer: 1500 gallons
Water required to make one new car: 39,090 gallons


Here's another little one, to figure out how much fresh water it actually takes to make your FOOD.

chant/prayer/mantra: I think Blogger lost my most recent edits for this post. I had some more answers, but here's a picture of some...



Song Lyrics:
From "Story of my life" by Mary Livermore, p. 254

Oh, brethren pray, for cloudy is my way;
Go send dem angels down!
Dere's a fire in de East, an' a fire in de West;
Go send dem angels down!
Ole Satan's mad, an' I am glad;
Go send dem angels down!
He'll miss one soul he t'ought he had;
Go send dem angels down!
I tell yo' now, as I told yo' befo';
Go send dem angels down!
T' de promi' lan' I'm boun' t' go;
Go send dem angels down!

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, interconnected web, salvation, water justice

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Here is a satellite's eye view of the deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest.

I just thought I'd leave a note here on my blog that I saw it. It looks like one helluva scar, 100 miles wide by 400 miles long. One big scar, about the size of Kentucky!



And another view of an area called Ruropolis (I wonder who named it that?)


Where does all that wood GO TO??? Is the land usable after it's been clear-cut?

chant/prayer/mantra: For our home, Earth. May we see fit to bless it and save it and all its creatures from ourselves, before it pays us back.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, interconnected web, theological sources, Universalism

Multithetical Manifesto: Hardcore Angel Power

There is a practice in Unitarian Universalism where the youths spend a year studying a wide variety of religious beliefs. Then they get an opportunity to get up in front of the congregation and make their individual statements of belief. Not having grown up in the tradition, I'd like to now share my faith statement, after a fashion. And yes, I do still plan for it to fit within the parameters of the actual assignment of preaching prophetically.

Here, now, please let’s take a quick journey out into the solar system. It takes about 8 minutes for light to travel from the Sun to the Earth. And it actually takes over 100,000 years for the photons produced in the sun's core to travel the 700,000 kilometers John 3:17, metaphor, Multitheticalism, personal religion, renewable energy, salvation, theology, sefrom the core to its surface, and then for those final eight minutes, it travels to Earth at the speed of light. This parallels how our ideas and communication work. Our collective ideas gestate for a long time before they're ready. Then we communicate them orally and they are delivered at the speed of sound, or we can type them and they end up halfway across the world in seconds.

Growing up, math, along with spelling, was always my favorite subject. Now, it informs my theology in fundamental ways. One primary way is through set theory. For example, imagine the set of whole numbers between 1 and 5, inclusive. The subset of all odd numbers is 1, 3, and 5. The subset of all even numbers is 2 and 4. 1 by itself is a subset. So is 2 by itself, and on and on. The largest “subset” is all five numbers, and then there is the empty set, which includes nothing at all, but still qualifies as a set.

I wonder: Do you see where I'm going with this, theologically? To put a word to it, I'm a multitheticalist. That means I'm an atheist, including Buddhism and Humanism – either a system of religious belief that doesn't consider any god, or a religious belief that specifically denies that a god exists. And I'm a theist. And a monotheist at that – including each of the various descriptions of “the one God” written by leaders such as Moses, Zoroaster, Jesus, Paul of Tarsus, and Mohammad. And I’m a polytheist, to the degree that I can learn about the many Hindu gods, and the pantheons of Greek and Roman deities. And I'm a pantheist, a panentheist, and even an animist.

“But which of those do you believe,” I hear my 20 year old fundamentalist self demand of me. “You have to believe something!” And I do. I believe that it's impossible to know anything about the divine, so that might lead one to label me as an agnostic. But agnostic is too simple a term, without sufficient examination of the complexity of meaning at play here.

In a fluid bedrock kind of way, I've come to appreciate that anything carried with words is metaphor – it's meaning attributed to physical happenings and existences. But in telling stories about the world, by necessity, we are mapping from the ultimate reality into stories that we believe, to help us make sense of the world. That mapping simplifies complex things however. It distorts events to fit into recognizable frameworks. This mapping deletes things because telling the whole truth in all its complexity would mean recreating the whole universe. And the mapping that accompanies systems of belief also generalizes things, turning them into archetypes, stereotypes, and symbols within our stories.

Knowing all that, choosing just one belief is like being stranded on an island and choosing only one book, or one album, or one type of food. Or one thing for my mind and spirit to ingest. Therefore, I'm a multitheticalist (from “multi-thesis”) – or holding several theses in balance all at once, and keeping them open for critical evaluation. My free and responsible search for truth and meaning demands this of me.

But it's not just about belief. It's about the heart. When I first got into this, God told me that it was going to be my heart on the line. But like Jonah, I escaped for a while. I escaped into concepts and theories, and reveled in wonderment at the opportunity to examine the “Big Picture,” (whatever size that actually is). But going beyond means coming back. That's the responsible part of the search. Even with all the angels and demons I’ve collected along my journey, I still feel inadequate to tell my prophetic story. All I know is that for everyone out there with messages (either to deliver from your mind through your voice, or to your mind from your senses), we're cut from the same cloth as those other prophets, especially when we can see beyond the boundaries of our cultural contexts. With all my agnosticism, that is a story I do know.

But what's a prophet to tell? Ideally, I'd light up a cigarette, strap on a guitar, and sing for you, about you, and with you. Why use this gracious gift of breath just to expound on so much theology, or to craft something that compels people to action, but what action? There are SO MANY of them!

There's the age-old practice of taking moral stances on issues:

• The ERA still hasn't passed. What gives?
• The construction of race, and how racism undergirds so many other justice issues
• LGBTIQ – an alphabet soup that simply says “equal rights to all regardless of gender or sexual expression”
• The creation and continuance of class structures, and ownership, and workers' rights.
• Earth justice and animal rights
• Abortion issues
• Drug policies

Or budgetary concerns like:

• Putting money toward wars and failed prison systems and
• Laws to ensure certain economic controls and property rights are secured,
• Instead of putting resources to Education, Energy policies, Scientific research, and Health care

I feel like I could (and very well might) speak to these things from the pulpit every week. It just goes round and round, like wheels in icy slush in March in Minnesota. I want to put sand down under the tires. I want to dig out to the concrete below the ice and get some traction! I want to be primal, to recognize it's not just about squeezing out words as breath flows out past my vocal cords. Text and speech is necessary, but so insufficient. I want to put out that all-too-necessary barbaric “yop” -- I'm ALIVE!!!!! And I hope you do too.

I have to do that. When my God speaks (all of them, and none of them, and one of them), it's through me. See, I'm one of those Multithetical Universalists who believes in radical uncertainty. Our salvation is all tied up together in this boat named Earth, and there is no fate but that which we make. This world is so beautiful, and yet so fragile. One of my versions of God is where I am the creator born into creation to walk upon this beautiful blue-green planet I have made, and I weep and marvel all at once at the horror and the beauty of the upside-downness side by side with the right-side-upness. Because like it or not, humanity has declared dominion here. Now, they/we will get credit or blame for whatever is to come. The blame or credit goes not to God, or ancient prophecies – only to humanity's insistence in those gods and prophecies. Demanding that theirs be the true version, and arguing over details in their stories of divinity and prophecy.

Because we have a preponderance of new prophets, telling the story clearly and honestly, from really recent and accurate knowledge about this world and our relationship within it. Yet there is almost no need for prophets now. The story of the condition of our cultures and our planet now comes to us ever more clearly. Humans have to close their ears, eyes, and minds to avoid the trumpets call. In Zoroastrianism, the job of the Saoshyant, or final judge at the end of the age or world, is simply to point that out. In essence saying “Open your eyes. Look around you! There is your prophecy, and my work is done here.” But its not as easy as that, since peoples' frames mask the full truth, until truth's complexities start to pull open the frames. But the process is soooo slow. After all, wasn't it 2000 years ago that Jesus said, “Those who have ears, let them hear...”? It's slow, but it's coming.

There's more to the story. In my rear-view mirror, I have all these memories of the heavens and hells my mind has visited, to bring me here. In my dreams, I've seen chariots and thrones, and so many apocalyptic futures, like the beatific utopian heaven-on-earth that my inner voice compels me to co-create. I do hope one day to write a utopian sci-fi drama. On the other hand, some of those memories of potential futures are outright hellish. I won't go into detail, but those dreams had people in the grayest darkest cavernous pits, stepping on those below them to try to climb out, but always being stepped on from above by someone else. Even those highest up were still in the pit. With nobody ever reaching down to lend a hand. And then there's the bittersweet end, somewhere in between. Where the world plods through, suffering for centuries or millennia because of the damage we've done to our planet and each other.

So, what saves us? Our actions do. Which are influenced by the thoughts and words that compose our world-views. Our actions influenced by our beliefs, with all their tendencies to distort, delete, and generalize. That is why I'm preaching multitheticalism today. It seeks to open wide to any possibility, evaluating it while finding ways to enrich worldviews. But it has one big drawback. It takes a lot of time. It's heavy, and it's slow to come into the light.

It's slow, like the photons inside the sun.

chant/prayer/mantra: For energy to deliver this well.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Atheism, Christianity, drug war, environment, guitar, inter-faith, Islam, John 3:17, metaphor, Multitheticalism, personal religion, renewable energy, salvation, sermons, theology

OK, I'm really not much of an organizer, but I just had an idea, and I hope an organizer picks up on this one. I have been reflecting on the nature of labor, investment, and reward in the U.S. culture, and have come up with this. The people who do the work get the least reward. The people who own the resources upon/with which the workers work get first dibs on the reward.

That is nothing new, and it takes a fool not to notice that. That is not the idea I am speaking of.

The idea I am speaking of is the direct application of the above when it comes to today's situation. It comes from seeing what happened with Enron, and seeing what happened with that Madoff guy recently and his execution of the latest Ponzi/pyramid scheme. With the U.S. government pouring tons of borrowed/taxed dollars into banks and such, where it is not fully accountable and being siphoned off, the government is looking to be the greater fool.

And ultimately, that leaves the people holding the bag. The taxes we paid, and the money borrowed that we will have to pay to God knows who, are being invested in the pockets of pillagers. These pillagers include those at the top/inside/beginning of the stock market game, and the CEO's still receiving exorbitant sums, after their companies received a part of the $700 billion bank bailout.

In short, any government money that is being borrowed from the future, and not being invested in our future -- in the infrastructures of:

• good mass transit (trains, ferries, and electric busses)
• clean and renewable electricity (solar (both centralized and decentralized), wind, tidal, etc)
• a system of refueling stations for electric cars
• r & d for clean battery technologies
• an intelligent and extensible educational system, using both democratically-influenced mass media and community involvement in local schools and recreation centers
  
• desalinization and fresh water control systems
• sustainable agricultural systems and a return to healthy environmental practices and a re-empowered EPA system of oversight
  
• overhauling failed systems such as the abhorrently wastrel military budget and the prison complex
  
• healthy families, living at or above poverty
• i'm sure i missed a few, but the above are all very important and should be near the top of the list...
  

Any money being invested elsewhere, further afield than that related to our real well-being, and the people who are putting it there are criminal. We the common citizens of the U.S. will be left holding the bag, without real investment in our country's future, while the folks in the Senate with a country club sensibility and nary a clue of what it's like to be out in the cold, and those with the tightest connections -- they will be (are) the first to cash in on the economy as the true value of this U.S. company becomes more clear. With our tax dollars ending up in somebody's pockets, it will be really difficult to get it back.

We the people had our money invested over the last eight years (and many prior) by "mutual fund managers" who did not have our interests in mind, or had the singular interest of maximizing money, not in responsible investment. When their investments failed because of unsane monetary policies such as the outrageous overextended ratio allowed (or unregulated) for fractional-reserve banking newly-constructed credit default swap market, the investment (put into things that had low value anyway) has gone sour.

One REAL rule for investors: Put your money in things that you want to see saved/thrive. It's not difficult. It's only difficult if you treat investments as if it's gambling. Put your money in what needs to thrive, and you will see it pay you back in ways well beyond those seen in dividends, stock options and monetary ROI's.



lyrics: No his mind is not for rent to any god or government.
-Tom Sawyer, by Rush

colors: green, as in money. and green, as in environment.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Capitalism, changing the prison paradigm, desalinization, economics, environment, paradigm shift, politics, USA

Now this is the kind of thing I"m talking about. It's passive solar technology done intelligently.

Consider that large bodies of water (and earth) can hold heat for quite a while, and consider the daily rhythm in which the earth heats up and cools down. In cool times, if you heat the water up during the day by having the water uncovered, then at night cover them, the heat from the water can warm the house. In warm times, you have the water uncovered at night and then it will help keep your house cool during the day.

The most interesting quote I came across was this: “One of the reasons he hasn’t had more success is that the entire solar industry, with few exceptions, has been undercapitalized.” If you check out the stats from this post, you'll note that the Bush admin requested less than a pittance for renewable energy research and development. The Obama administration MUST make energy production and conservation a priority. This is one way to do it.

lyrics: "low, low, low." R.E.M.

colors: color of the sun in the night time.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, renewable energy, sustenance

Apparently, somebody has placed a "No on Prop 8" sign at the city of Megiddo in Israel, the supposed site of Armageddon. This is a response to the fact that there are Christians from all over the United States pouring their money and effort into a "Yes on Prop 8" campaign in California, and some of them are saying that the right to same sex marriage is a cultural armageddon. The actual wording of California Proposition 8 includes these exact words: "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California."

i rarely use caps, but feel the need to press the Caps Lock key today... WHO ARE THESE PEOPLE??? WHY DO THEY FEEL ENTITLED TO CALL THEMSELVES CHRISTIANS AT ALL?? NOT IN MY BACKYARD, NOT IN MY STATE, AND NOT ON MY PLANET. Christians are supposed to be intelligent, thoughtful, and according to Jesus' one big command, they are supposed to love their neighbor. Is denying rights to your neighbors some new way of expressing your love for them?

What does it take to see that this proposition is simply denying rights to a certain minority of people? Why would somebody see fit to act out a hurtful ideology against a group of mostly kind and loving people in the name of CHRIST? That is just the worst thing imaginable. I suppose this could be explained by some convoluted logic which ties same-sex love to sin, and cares that people don't go to hell when they die, and therefore a measure like this keeps them safe from sinning. But that neglects the fact that being disallowed to love freely is a real form of hell for any people while they're alive.

Further, in addition to the fact that this effort is trying to limit rights for people, it is also EXTREMELY IMMORAL to be devoting energy to something like this when there are AMAZINGLY LARGE AND SERIOUS PROBLEMS GOING ON IN THE WORLD WITHOUT HAVING TO GRANDSTAND AGAINST SOMETHING LIKE THIS. When this is all said and done, this will be seen akin to tilting at windmills in the middle of a hurricane. A genuine fools' errand, and there are millions of American sucked into doing it through religious ideology.

IMO, it's about time for the rest of humanity to come around to a more quaker way of thinking.

It looks like I'm going to be spending my birthday working against this effort, and perhaps even performing a wedding.

To those who are so concerned about gay marriage that they are devoting this much time and effort into preventing it, I'll say simply that my prayers are with you, but I will not stand with you, and your effort will fail because it is unloving and against what Christ wants for the world.

lyrics: "There's more to love than boy meets girl." - Communards

colors: Solid Rainbow.

mood: Exasperated, yet hopeful.

chant/prayer/mantra: May there be world community one day, with an overflowing amount of love, where no love is denied. Amen.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: anti-oppression, Christianity, environment, equal rights, LGBT, renewable energy

Oh my. This article on the demise of our monetary system by visionary writer Charles Eisenstein is a goldmine of cogent sanity. It tells the story so clearly, it is almost unethical to provide a link to it. But according to whose ethic?

I hope all my friends get a chance to read it. I'll comment more on this article later.

"In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good."

"In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money."

Here's another good article from realitysandwich.com, talking about the end of our current global economic system. This is some serious stuff.

lyrics: My dog is running in her dreams. I know, 'cause she's kicking her feet. I've been having dreams about earthquakes, and doves, and things.

colors: the color of war is the color of blood is the color of money. money, money, money, money. oink, oink, oink, oink. -god bullies, off of some song from the album war on everybody.

mood: stressed out and procrastinating

chant/prayer/mantra: a deep prayer for a transition through the coming crisis.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Capitalism, environment, paradigm shift, pax hominibus/bright shiny future

This article is about why San Francisco is having difficulty becoming more green. Bicycle advocates have been working really hard to get more bike lanes and bicycle corridors in the city. And now one guy is saying that bicycles on the roads cause traffic jams, causing cars to idle and waste gas. That is simply so myopic.

If not now, then when?

lyrics: Hillary saying "sisterhood of the travelling pant-suits."

chant/prayer/mantra: Praying for a kinder and greener future in America.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: bicycles, environment, freedom versus freedom, pax hominibus/bright shiny future

Al Gore just delivered a landmark speech this week.

In this speech, he challenges the U.S. to use 100% renewable energy by 2018.

A classic quote from his speech:

"We're borrowing money from China to buy oil from the Persian Gulf to burn it in ways that destroy the planet. Every bit of that's got to change..."

Energy Policy is going to be key for the upcoming election, because it affects the economy, the environment, and our nation's/planet's security. Mobilizing our unemployed workforce toward creating and implementing systems of renewable energy would be a stunningly effective boost to our sagging economy.

Mr. Gore, thank you for your intitiative.


chant/prayer/mantra: One planet of people, whole.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Capitalism, economics, environment, globalism, paradigm shift, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, politics, renewable energy, USA

Here is an item of interest I've been thinking on, and want to briefly share my chagrin.

At this Onion link, we have the following statement by a fictional person:

Lynn Fitzpatrick, Florist, "Giving money to institutions that failed at their only job, which was to have money, may not be the best strategy."
I read a few months back now about how congress was voting to add $168 billion to stimulate the economy. And the cynical part of me was wondering, "Which part of the economy are they stimulating?" I say this because the U.S. governmental budget stimulates the military-industrial complex part of the economy every year now to the tune of ~$600 billion, and yet the renewable energy part of the economy gets stimulated by the government to the tune of $210 million. That's a factor well over 2000 times as much going to the military for oil-based interests than to research on better energy sources that would provide us with real security.

EOM.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, renewable energy, war and peace

.
I just saw this from CNBC that shows a simple slideshow (courtesy of the National Priorities Project) of how federal tax dollars are actually spent. I'm going to say this and try not to express any outrage. Simply by the numbers.

Out of every dollar, here is how much goes toward the following expenditures:

BUDGET CATEGORY	CENTS PER DOLLAR
Military:	42.2 cents
Health Care:	22.1 cents
Interest on Debt:	10.2 cents
Anti-Poverty Programs:	8.7 cents
Education:	4.4 cents
Government and Law Enforcement: :	3.9 cents
Housing and Community Development:	3.3 cents
Environment, Energy, and Science:	2.6 cents
Agriculture, Commerce, and Transportation:	1.5 cents
International Affairs:	1.0 cents

The US government spends:

• about five times more for war than for helping the poor.
• about nine times more for war than for educating its youth.
• over 2600 times more for war than for research on renewable energy.

And from here, regarding funding for solar energy development, the Bush administration requested from Congress $11,068,000 LESS in 2008 than was enacted in 2007. Likewise, he requested over $9 million less for wind energy, $5 million less for geothermal (actually requesting zero dollars!), the exact same amount for and even asking for $20 million less for biomass research (which I find less inspiring than the first three anyway).

Excluding the biomass, all of these combined (<$210 million) are slightly more than 1/3 of their budget request for fossil fuel R&D ($567 million), and about 1/4 of the budget request for nuclear power ($802 million) That says something about energy priorities. What do we say about a president who works against a positive trend? I haven't had words for a long time, but they wouldn't be words I'd use in front of my mother. I'm always uncomfortable using negative words around my mother. I want her to see me finding the positive things and praising them. Go, solar! Hooray for wind! Go, geothermal, go tidal power!

lyrics: "Jesus would never forgive what you do." from Masters of War, by Bob Dylan

colors: pick a pie chart color theme

mood: tired

chant/prayer/mantra: love your neighbor


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, renewable energy, war and peace

I am currently reading the print version of this article entitled "Science and Technology for Sustainable Well-Being". In it, he talks candidly about the state of the world (mainly from a human-centric viewpoint), and the role Science and Technology can play to help restore it. The article is surprisingly concise and brief, considering how much key information it has on the leading causes of mortality, the state of our water supply (and the feasibility of getting desalination up and running), our use of the world's resources, and the importance of developing and maintaining sustainable economic and political systems to complement a sustainable ecological practice.

chant/prayer/mantra: For the Earth, our home, may we live always in such as way as to bless it.

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: environment, politics