Please say 'Sustainable'... not "Green"

Tonight FlatTires, Ingrid-the-Dog, and I went for a quick, cold, ride up the hill. Along the way we were chatting about stuff, and the topic touched on the State of the Union address. Yes, Chimpy did mention renewables, biodiesel and ethanol, which is a start. Unfortunately, there is no way that we have enough land to grow enough renewables to sustain the current average American's way of life. Growing corn to guilt-lessly burn up in SUVs to go to MalWart is just ridiculous. We need to start talking about conservation before new sources of fuel.... but i'm getting ahead of myself. Make a difference tomorrow Chimpy, raise the CAFE standards to something meaningful, or even better, eliminate the BILLIONS in subsidies to the oil companies.

I've found that except for a few on the fringes of mainstream America, not too many of are willing to do what it would take to make any real difference in global warming and our energy problem.

So... the key word in this discussion isn't just renewables or... omg... 'Green' (That word is being embraced by marketing types and hipsters everywhere and it is hereby banned from posts on Pandapas except rants... bah!)

The word is.... wait for it....

Sustainable.

Meaning, being able to do something today, tomorrow, and forever with the same resource you started with. Example, if you had an acre of woods, you could cut down say, 10 cords today, but would have to wait 50 years for the trees to mature enough to do it again. If you gathered just ONE cord this year, you could get a cord next year, and the next, etc. So, you could say "One cord per acre is sustainable forever". (For those of you playing along at home, that's the equivalent to 215 gallons of heating oil PER ACRE)

For years now I've been working in a company that has been in the energy industry for decades, yet I can barely get anyone to utter the word in the cafeteria.

Here it is: All energy we use came from the sun. It was and is the only source of fuel on earth, period. Coal, oil, natural gas, propane... all of it is the product of decomposed biomass. A million years ago forests used C02, water, and sunlight to grow, capturing carbon, hydrogen, amd releasing oxygen. All that carbon and hydrogen got turned into Hydro-Carbons which can be burned up in all sorts of machines to release that million year old energy. Yes, (this is going to sound crazy) but start thinking about oil as an extremely dense form of a million years worth of stored ancient Sunlight.

The problem we're having now is the lifecycle of all that dead biomass captured all kinds of Carbon from the atmosphere, and in a little over a few hundred years, we've released enough of it to f up the climate. Seriously. We're past the peak of oil production, from here on out it's downhill. Seems everything in our society is based on oil. Oil based fertilizer supports our agriculture, oil transports it to your Mal-Wart, Oil keeps those french fries frozen, oil fuels your car to go get it. Don't wait for politicians to save you... do something about it on your own. Here are some ideas to get you started:

Ten energy projects with a One Year Payback

Mother Earth News Archive (Those hippies figured this all out 20 years ago, go read about their crazy ideas. This magazine is *full* of DIY projects that you can build today!)

and

Homepower Magazine

That's more than enough babble for tonight. -40