To explain the Middle East for you

Hot potato!!! Comin' through!!!

US pressures allies to take Libya mission now (AP)

enjoy your evening, y'all

Some simple solutions

There is an article in The New York Times today, pointing out that the people of a small town in Italy--Lecco, to be specific--have decided to fight obesity in their children, along with automobile traffic and global warming (I would add pollution) by having their children walk to school.

Now, mind you, it's not a solution most American communities could easily adopt but it proves a different point to me.

It reinforces what I said here, some time ago, about our oil/Middle East/Middle East war/pollution/climate change problems, all with one really big push.

That is, if we switch as quickly as possible to solar electricity for our homes, businesses and cars, we could do the following:

1) Get out of the Middle East

2) Stop polluting our country and the world

3) Reduce climate change and global warming and the resultant ill effects those cause

4) Stop the transfer of wealth from us and our country to the Middle East

5) Add stability to the world's socio-economic structure

6) Add stability to the world's political structures

That's a lot right there.

It's what we need to do.

It won't be easy--or cheap--but it's rather simple.

And obvious.

Link to article in NYT:
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/27/world/europe/27bus.html?ref=world

The George W. Bush Administration vs. The American People

Did you hear this today on NPR? Yeah, more proof of just how great a job George W. Bush and his pals are doing for--no, to--the American People.

You know? When I was younger, I knew there was a part of the government that was fighting for us. There was the part regulating big business. There was the part having corporations to keep pollution to a minimum.

No more.

Not since George Bush got elected in 2000.

Check this out.

In December, 2000, the Enron Corporation--yeah, no kidding, THOSE GUYS--recommended that the Bush Administration DEREGULATE the oil speculation markets. It is now, technically considered a "dark" market. That is, we don't know who's speculating on or in the oil markets, we don't know how, we don't know what they're doing, nothing. All thanks to those geniuses at Enron. Oh, and the White House. Dick Cheney. George Walker Bush. All of 'em. et al.

Prior to 2000 and this "Enron Clause", as it is now referred to, THE UNITED STATES REGULATED THE OIL INDUSTRY AND THIS SPECULATION FOR 78 YEARS. No kidding. For all that time, it was that important. Once we put the foxes in charge of the chicken house, it was all over.

Now does it make any sense why oil is over $130.00 a barrel?

In this same radio show, it was speculated that oil would likely fall to between $60.00 to $80.00 per barrel WITHIN A MONTH if we again regulated the oil speculation markets.

So the question was, do you want to do this with a deep, painful recession, that hurts millions of people around the globe, over time, to reduce the price of oil or do you want to do this more logically, with regulation, over about a month?

Tough question, eh?

Simple, elegant solutions to 4 of the world's biggest problems

Yes, that's what I said.

There are, in fact, simple and elegant solutions to 4 of our world's largest problems and the list isn't long. The problems I'm speaking of are:

1) Dependency on fossil fuels
2) Global climate change
3) War in the Middle East
4) Pollution

The 2 solutions to these "Big 4" problems are to invest in solar technologies--as I've said here before--and LED lighting. These 2 changes alone would do the following:

1) Reduce--and eventually, possibly quickly, eliminate--our use of oil for transportation, a huge help to mankind around the world;
2) Reduce--and, again, eventially eliminate--our use of hydro-electric power--and power companies--around the world. This would have the added benefit of returning our world's waterways to their natural states, in short order, so the plants and animals that grow from them could and would thrive again. Like salmon? Like fish? The world need them. This would help them return to healthier states;
3) Reduce pollution. 'Nuff said;
4) Reduce carbon that is put into our environment,thus reducing our "carbon footprint", globally, and therefore, decrease our forced changes in the environment;
5) Take the United States and, indeed, the world, out of the Middle East and it's archaic, millenia-old religious wars.

Solar power, both through passive solar collectors and photovoltaic cells are truly, completely non-polluting and so, absolutely green and non-polluting. Once you've gotten over the price of purchasing the cells, there is almost no other cost for them or for electric generation from then on, unless and until they should need to be replaced. Unlike nuclear power--which drives me crazy--we don't have to concern oursleves or worry about where we're going to store the radioactive waste for thousands of years, at huge cost, financially, and the additonal cost--which we ignore--of the possible threat to our ecology, should the radiation in some way effect underground waterways or other aspects of nature.

LED lights, alone, use tiny amounts of power and have, already, if you saw the CBS Sunday Morning show today, shown to be used with solar collectors so there is NO EXPENSE at creating light. The technology already exists. It's available now. The only prohibition, so far, is cost, and this is reported to be going down at a rate of 20% per year now. If we throw financial, tax incentives at the problem, it could go lower than that.

Solar power could, in fact, power our transportation. The big obstacle here is our battery technology. It is too cumbersome and expensive. It works already, though, so this is not a "pie in the sky" offer at a solution. With tax incentives and a push for better technologies, perhaps this revolution could come about quicker than it would otherwise. I feel sure that history, technology and need shows that it would.

If we could make this happen sooner, can you imagine how much improved our lives would be? So much less pollution. The emphasis of the Middle East, with all it's thousands of year old tensions and animosities could be left in the desert, to be ignored.

There are so many technologies, like these, that make the way we've always assumed the way the world works, obsolete.

We should stop printig newspapers on paper. Yes, let's read them, online.

We should stop paying power companies to create electricity--we'd be making our own, on our rooftops, with photovoltaic cells.

We should abandon the internal combustion engine. It's killing us.

We can do this. As a people. As a world.

We can do it. We have to. We already have the capabilities. We already have the solutions and they are simple, elegant and, frankly, obvious. We just have to make these changes.

And the sooner the better.

It's enough to give a person hope.



And ending, side note: Did you see today where the President is loosening Clean Air Act rules again? It's your government, folks.