opinion: carbon calculator, week 10

 

Week 10, and the last, in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

 

STOP HAVING KIDS, or at least so many

The Vatican released a statement recently that the birth control pill does more harm to the environment because of all the hormones being secreted out of female urine.  This is laughable, especially when you consider all the damage done by the things listed above.

Interestingly, what can help the environment the most is being more responsible for the amount of children you are having.  You have a certain eco-footprint.  When you have a child, consider that your footprint just doubled.  You are using more water, more electricity, and buying more things.  You may use the television as a babysitter.  You are doing more laundry.  You may even be drinking more coffee.  Your home has gotten bigger.  Your car has gotten bigger.  And, your waist has gotten bigger.

I know this is something that many people do not want to hear.  I am not saying that your child isn’t fantastic and doesn’t deserve the best.  I have children in my life (not my own) that I love and think the world is better for them being here.  But that is not to say if you have four kids, I think you are irresponsible… because I do. 

Especially, if you consider yourself an environmentalist.  Because those two things do not go hand in hand. 

opinion: carbon calculator, week 8

 

 

Week 8 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

 

DRINKING SODA

The way this simple drink impacts our lives is incredible.  

There are the obvious things like the emissions produced from the production, marketing and transportation of the cola.  But, what about the not so obvious things.

The can is made out of aluminum.  While most of us recycle, it doesn’t change the fact that the raw material, or resource, was taken from the Earth in the first place, never to be returned.  Also, the recycling process does not have a 100% reclamation rate.  There are residual losses that have to be made up for by taking from the resource, again.  In other words, lets say you need 100 cans, so you recycle 100 cans.  However, that process only makes 80 cans, so you need to obtain 20 cans worth of raw material.  But now, you need 200 cans because sales have increased this year.  Now, you need to obtain 120 cans worth of raw material.  

The cans, until the FDA issues a ban, contains Bisphenol-A.  This is a chemical that is used in the synthesis of making the cans or plastic bottles.  Most research indicates that this is an environmental hazard, in that it is toxin in our bodies that acts as a hormone mimicker, creating cancers and deformities on vast scales.

The biggest culprit to making sodas an environmental cesspool… the high fructose corn syrup.  In the last 50 years, corn has become the largest commodity crop in the world, but mainly the United States.  It now accounts for 80% of our agriculture, althought 0% of it is edible to humans.  Unless, of course, it goes through a chemical process altering it into HFCS.  Despite what the commercials say, this stuff is NOT as natural as sugar.  

How does this hurt the environment?  There are many, but the biggest issue: pollution.  Commodity corn is very different than the corn you grill during the summer.  Commodity corn is the corn that is used to sweeten everything in your cupboard, feed our livestock, makes the cereal you eat in the morning, and even makes the boxes that the cereal comes in.  Commodity corn is 100% genetically modified.  

This means that a farm that used to only be able to produce 10 bales of corn, can now produce 200 bales of corn.  The plant has been genetically engineered to not mind close quarters.  However, the problem with this is that because of how much corn is being grown and lack of little else, it has sucked up anything good from the soil and left it barren.  Currently, for every American there is considered to be 4 acres of food available to them.  In ten years (!), that number is expected to decrease by 50%.  A major part of this is because some of the land has to be taken out of the equation because it is dead.  In order to grow all that corn you need fertilizer and pesticides.  And, not the stuff that used to be available to us.  As we have gotten stronger and stronger pesticides, we have gotten stronger and stronger pests.  There is one weed that has proliferated across 22 states, and the only thing that will kill it is Agent Orange.  Want to know how they found that out?  The same company that made the GMO corn, well, they make Agent Orange.

So we have barren land, we have weeds and bugs that won’t die and are killing every crop that is not corn, and we also have dead zones in the ocean.  All the poisons we are putting on the corn to make it usable, are getting washed off the plant and that water is making its way into the ocean.  In fact, like clock work, at harvest time, there is a plume of dead in the Gulf of Mexico because of fertilizer and pesticide runoff that traveled down the Mississippi.  Therefore, our fish are dying and the ones that are alive are pumped full of these awful chemicals that we are then grilling up to eat with the corn!  

Lastly, your soda is making you fat.  The science can be explained, point by point.  However it is interesting to note that as our intake of HFCS has gone up, our waste lines have increased.  But, the point that is necessary from this… the heavier you are the more likely you are going to turn up the air conditioning, stick to a commute in your car, buy more clothes because your size is going up, and so on.

The heavier you are the more of a drain on the environment you are.

opinion: carbon calculator, week 7…. a little delayed

Week 7 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

SHOPPING…..

the activity the United States economy is entirely built on.  

The biggest problem with magazines and films and television is that they encourage you to buy.  Literally.  When we see ads that reflect a type of life we would like to emulate, an area of our brain is fired up and our craving centers are ignited.  The only satiation is to feed that craving.

There are so many issues with unnecessary consumption.  First off, your money could be better spent in other areas.  In this country, we have created the belief that buying something is more important than having the money for what we want to buy.  As we have seen in the last few months, that has been disastrous for this country, and may be something we cannot recover from.  

Secondly, there is all the emissions created from making whatever it is you are buying.  Just the games that are made in China account for 25.7 metric tons of CO2.  That is just the games.  Think of the clothes, and the electronics, and the appliances, and the shoes, and the beddings, and the cookware, and the list can go on and on, supplying 300 million people with a handful of useless things.  

Third, there is the impact of transportation.  Who knows how much CO2 is emitted because the goods had to travel from where they were made to a distribution center in the United States.  From there they had to travel to the individual stores.  Or, if you are shopping online, to your home and however many other homes, depending on the popularity of the product.  How close do you live to the mall?  Do you want the item so badly that you will travel as far as you need to to get it? After you are done using it, there is the trip to Goodwill, if you are a charitable person.  And, if not, the trip from your dumpster to the landfill.  Where the item that was in your life for the greater part of 12 months, sits on our planet for a very, VERY long time.  In some cases, much longer than your life.

This may be the greatest damage done by your shopping habit.  Most of what we have in our homes are made with products that do not go away.  Plastic never decomposes.  You think you are doing so well because you have moved away from that plastic water bottle.  But, look around.  Look at the paneling in your car.  What about the container your moisterizer comes in.  Or the shampoo, dish soap, laundry soap, the new cd or dvd, the soles of your shoes, and I could keep going.  If it is not made of plastic, maybe its metal, which could be melted down and used again.  But not if it were a battery.  Not if you are one of the millions of people that takes their pots and pans to the dump.  What happens to your car when you are done with it? We have created such ease and effortless in our lives that we never take the next steps to figure out what happens after we are done the item.

Unless the item you buy is 100% biodegradable, that item has a life span much longer than your grandchildren.  I know this because much of what’s in my house belonged to my grandparents, and it will be around much longer after I am gone, as well.  We look at these items as things we need, when in reality we are calming down some electrical activity in our brains brought on by a campaign created by a man on Madison Avenue.

Why is it we get so upset when others try to control our lives in mundane ways, but give them carte blanche when it comes to how we spend money that we worked really hard for?

opinion: carbon calculator, week 4

 

Week 4 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

GARDENING

What a pretty yard you have!  

Gardening… this can be a trap disguised behind an ecologically friendly mask.  How many times a week do you water? At what time of day do you water?  Are the plants drought resistant and require less water?  Are you using fertilizers and pesticides?  What do you do with your clippings after pruning and mowing?  Are you growing things you can eat or just things that look pretty, but have no value?  Have you utilized your roof space?  Do you have a gardener and does he (or she) use a gasoline powered blower for your leaves?

These are questions many people do not ask.  It is true that all plants are carbon sinks and so something is better than nothing.  However, who cares how much carbon the plants trap if in return you are using more water than you should?  It can sometimes be a drag, believe me, but unfortunately the state of the planet requires that everything we do be considered and evaluated.

Take the time to consider what types of plants you want to put in your yard?  Do you have the ability to have a vegetable garden?  Consider a low flow water system and ensure you are watering in allowable times, per DWP.  Look at your gardener… is he using a gas powered blower?  You aren’t his only client and he isn’t the only gardener out there.  Imagine the millions of blowers out there contaminating the air.

How about this… since you gave up the gym and freed some time by not reading magazines… get outside and deal with your garden yourself.  It connects you back to the Earth, which is what we are all fighting for in the first place, you burn calories, you don’t have exhaust contaminating your airspace, and you can start providing some of your own food instead of going to the mega-mart every day, and the list of benefits goes on and on.

opinion: carbon calculators, week 2

Week 2 in the continuing series of what is missing from Carbon Calculators.  

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

GYM MEMBERSHIP

 

Here are all the reasons that going to a gym increases your footprint.

- Electrically powered equipment which are operating continually.

- Lights are left on when rooms are empty.

- Air-conditioning set too low and running continuously

- TVs in the workout rooms operate when no one is watching.

- Most lights  including table lamps and pot lights are incandescent.

- Fluorescent lights are probably the older inefficient models.

- Battery operated equipment use non-rechargeable batteries.

- Showers use high-flow shower heads.

- Many members take long showers with water running continuously.

- Equipment may be left operating overnight.

- Soda vending machines left operating continuously. (A soda machine, which runs 24/7, uses a lot of energy, about 10 times the electricity of a home refrigerator)

- Hot water usage. Whirlpools etc. Laundry facilities.

You are going to argue that YOU don’t create all the waste associated with a gym. Which is true.  However, if you aren’t part of the solution, you are part of the problem.

There is no reason to belong to a gym.  Go outside.  First off, it is free.  Secondly, it connects you to where you came from: nature.  You can go outside and have the pleasure of seeing the sun, and getting it’s valuable nutrients (instead of getting them from a $50/month supplement.)  You are exposed to fresh air, instead of the recycled stuff, filled with the chemicals and toxins that came from the other members cosmetic products, that gets pumped through the air conditioning.  (And, no matter what you think, what is coming off your neighbor is more dangerous than what you might be exposed to outside.)

Most people go to the gym for the community.  To meet people they may not encounter otherwise.  But, how can you be so certain that someone you meet there is going to have the same belief system and philosophy as you do.  In fact, the only thing you have in common may be that you like to workout.  Narrow that playing field down some more.  If you like going outside, and you are outside, you will meet someone else who likes being outside.  See how that works?

Get on a bike, on a trail in the local mountains, the ocean or a lake, or whatever else you can find.  You have reduced your carbon footprint, automatically, and are still getting the workout you want.  And, who knows what other benefit you might get…

For earlier articles in this series: COFFEE

opinion: carbon calculators

This is the start of a weekly series exploring the areas that carbon calculators don’t consider.

Each and everyone of us at some point in our movement towards being green has computed their carbon footprint using some online carbon calculator. Some of us were excited exclaiming “I am only three Earths!” And, if you think about that statement, you see the ridiculousness.

However, there is a problem with those calculators. They do not get to the root of the eco-footprint issues. They are a racket to have us believe we are doing a good job, therefore, not altering our behaviors, or they highlight areas that we can adjust which are, in reality, not worth the time nor the effort. How would reducing the amount of trips I take by plane affect the 49,000 flights per day? If I change every lightbulb to a CFL, would that counter the commercial building that has their lights on, all day and night?

In truth, all they have really done has created a sales push for carbon offsets. An industry which allows you to continue being wasteful, guilt-free, because you have put a wad of cash in someone else’s pocket to “fix” it all.

There is a list of the things that those calculators don’t ask, thereby eliminating them from their algorithm. These are the things that are sometimes the meat of the matter, so to speak. By altering these things, you could affect your true footprint in ways unimaginable and truly make our planet sustainable.

COFFEE

Good Morning! Did you go grab a cup of coffee this morning? Did you get it from your local coffee stop? It’s not mentioned in the traditional calculators but if you answered yes, you increased your carbon footprint.

Let’s take a deeper look at that morning cup of coffee. Did you know that coffee is the second most traded commodity after oil. Changing how you drink coffee is one of the easiest things you can do to change the environment. (THE easiest is coming up…!)

a.) Land is needed. You have the land to grow the coffee beans. The land needed for processing and distribution operations. The land for corporate management, and other affiliates like advertisers, cup producers, and napkin makers. The individual stores. The forest that was needed to make all the paper products that your coffee came in. And, if we are talking about forests, the additional forest land is needed to absord the resulting CO2 from all the energy needed to harvest, process and ship the coffee. There is the land needed to make all the machinery used. The land to make the chemicals used in pesticides and fertilizers. And so on, and so on.

b.) Water. Globally it requires 140 billion cubic meters of water per year to be able to drink coffee and tea. That’s 140 TRILLION liters of water. It is also the equivalent to 880 BILLION barrels of oil.

c.) Other utilities. All that land mentioned above, at least the building part of it, has to have utilities keeping it functioning. This means electricity and water that is supplied to each location for an indeterminate amount of time. What is the footprint of each employee; do they drive to work and in what kind of car. Did they have the air conditioning running because it was a sweltering 80 degree day?

d.) Waste generated. One Starbucks can generate 40,000 cups of coffee per month. There are roughly 14,000 Starbucks internationally. That is the potential of 560 Billion paper cups, per month, finding their way to our landfills. And that is just one coffee chain.

e.) Was your coffee shade grown or fair trade? Was it purchased from a farm that is as close to your hometown as possible? If you just ordered the coffee at the counter without any specifications… it probably wasn’t. And, by the way, even if you were to ask for your coffee to be made with a fair trade blend, they couldn’t and wouldn’t honor your request.

Global climate change presents a very large problem for coffee growers. Coffee is a fragile plant requiring a specific climate in which to thrive; even a slight change of temperature or rain can decrease coffee yields, quality or even threaten an entire country’s crop. And, when large, native forests are cut down to provide more area for sun-grown coffee, this deforestation causes carbon emissions and destroys natural carbon sinks decreasing our ability to stop climate change.

I hope it was a very, VERY good cup of joe.