Green Sham and More

Ernest Thoughts

By Ernest ⋅ January 29, 2009 ⋅

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Tags: environment, fashions, green, ocean temperature, Sustainable, Wall Street

Green Sham & Green Wash

Now that “green is good” in the popular mind and in the popular media, there is a lot of false green out there: good words with no substance. Besides being in the newspaper, we received an ad for electric room heaters, with faux fireplaces. They promise to save 20% on heating costs. Yes, if you put them in the room where your thermostat is located, that room will be at its usual temperature, and the rest of the house will be somewhat cooler. If you turn your thermostat down, and put it in another room, the whole house will be cooler, except for the room with the heater. In reality, these are just low wattage electric heaters, and you pay for the heat they put out at ordinary electric rates. In terms of heat output, you can get as much warmth from a few old-fashioned incandescent bulbs. But the ads read well to the scientifically unsophisticated.

Similarly, I picked up promotional material for a device which also promised huge savings in electric bills, as well as protecting all your electronic devices from power surges. When I checked it out with an experienced Electrical Engineer, he noted that the power surge protection was marginal, and the rest of the device was a power factor corrector. I won’t explain power factor here, but it is important to companies that generate and transmit electric power. It doesn’t show up on your watt-hour meter, which measures your consumption of electric power for billing purposes, and it is not real power. Another case of green sham. And, of course, there are many, many companies which put out good words about “how green they are”, but haven’t changed a single thing about how they do business. Green Wash!

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A Letter printed in the December 24, 2008 Philadelphia Inquirer
The issue of increased fuel taxes is a political hot potato, but it is essential if America is going to both maintain its transportation infrastructure and reduce dependence on imported petroleum. Fuel taxes should be imposed on all forms of transportation: highway, airway, railroad, waterway, pipeline, and even electric transmission. In addition to funding government transportation expenditures, these taxes would encourage the most energy-efficient transportation modes.

Environmental Fashions

Too many people, who want to save the environment and reduce their “carbon footprint” don’t realize the complexity of the problem. They look for simple answers, and don’t see the larger picture. For example, we know of one family that “lives off the grid”, but drives over 100 miles each day to work. Does that make environmental or sustainability sense? Are they saving fossil fuel?

Other such simple answer fashions are the “hydrogen economy” and bio-fuels. Yes, cooking oil and fermentation alcohol can be used to power road vehicles, but in a world of increasing population, should millions of people starve so that affluent others can drive cars? How much forest habitat for threatened species should be destroyed to grow palm oil as a motor fuel? Should we continue to fight nuclear power, when the real alternative is burning more fossil fuel? What would be the environmental effects of a massive construction program for wind power, and solar power? We don’t usually think about it, but the production of steel and concrete releases lots of carbon dioxide, the chief greenhouse gas.

But in the near future, it is not the carbon foot print and climate change that may do in our high technology, affluent society; it will be the availability of energy, primarily oil and natural gas.

The Wall Street Mind
Dave Tillotson – November 3, 2008 – Lake Mills, Wisconsin
Where did we get the idea that after our time there is no time? Some say that “time shall be no more.” That is surely the inference we can draw from our frantic effort to extract all the oil and gas from the earth right now. Drill, drill, drill, pump, pump, pump, untroubled by the thought that the future earthlings deserve more than table scraps. Why is conservation of oil, of water, of forests, of farm land off the table? Where is the idea of interdependence? One explanation might be that Wall Street, and its world view, seems to rule the world and we all have been captured by the greed Wall Street personifies. Unbridled greed was part of the economic model and only now can Alan Greenspan, ex Federal Reserve Chairman, say that he finds himself in a “state of shocked disbelief.” I’m shocked I tell you – shocked, shocked, shocked! Greenspan thought that self interest would keep banks from lending money without sufficient collateral. Like his mentor, Milton Friedman, Greenspan believed that “the market” had and has the answer to everything.

There is more “flawed thinking” yet to be divulged by the Friedman/Greenspan analysis and that has to do with the plunder of natural resources that provided the fodder for the myopic “grow forever” world view of these two great minds. Libertarians like Prof. Friedman and Mr. Greenspan never took into account the environmental imperative. There is a blind spot. George Orwell, Eric Hoffer, James Burnham, Solzhenitsyn too, warned us time and again of the peril posed by a type of great mind, the “management elites.” And the dangerous proclivity of we the people behaving like a flock of sheep or suicidal lemmings.

The “Wall Street Mind” could be called the libertarian mind or the Ayn Randian mind. Regulations by government, as they see it, clog the arteries of proper commerce. And all we are, apparently is consumer animals. My late friend Bill Law proudly called himself an “anarcho capitalist.” You do your thing, your business, and government should get out of the way. Now that the Bulls of Wall Street have run us into a box canyon I think Bill would favor some regulation to salvage an economic system he admired.

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OTEC: In the current issue of Invention & Technology (volume 23, Number 4, pp 24 – 35) there is an article on “The Other Renewable Energy”, Ocean Temperature Energy Conversion. This concept powers a turbine from the temperature difference between surface water in the tropics and deep water offshore. The French inventor, Georges Claude, tried to build a demonstration model in the early 30s, but storms repeatedly destroyed the project, and Claude ran out of money. OTEC is now being considered again, for a Hawaiian site.

Local Action: The “Upper Darby Farmers Market Coalition” (UDFM) is a grass roots group trying to establish farmers market(s) in Upper Darby Township. The two Cohens helped with a proposal for a feasibility study. Other people in the group have started cleaning up the Delaware County side of Cobbs Creek Park, and remove invasive plant species. They are now seeking a grant from the Philadelphia Zoo to expand this work, and to add environmental education. Bottom-up activity to evolve a sustainable future is just as important as top-down, government and industry, action. Neither will succeed without the other.

Ernest & Elaine Cohen

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