The Sustainability Factor – What Sustainability Really Is Posted on October 13th, 2009
Lately, I have done a lot of research. That research is now culminating into a new white paper I’m penning titled The Sustainability Factor: What Sustainability Means and Why You Need to Know. The following is the introductory chapter of that paper. It lays out the gist of the piece and what it hopes to accomplish.
I’m including it here to show you this because this is the core issue behind this entire blog’s existence. When The Sustainability Factor is finished, I will be putting it up on the site for download, free of charge. You’ll note the addition of a “donate” button to the left. Please go to my About Me page to find out what that’s all about.
So, without further ado, here’s the introduction to my new paper. It should be complete and available here on the site in the next few days. The paper itself will have sources and a bibliography, of course.
What Sustainability Really Is
The term “sustainability” or “sustainable” is used a lot these days, almost always in relation to something that’s considered green (ecologically non-impacting, or at least more so than the alternative). It’s often used wrongly, especially when it’s used to tout products or services.
The problem with the word “sustainable” is that while it’s easily defined, it is hard to quantify with so many things in today’s consumerist world.
By definition, sustainable goods and practices are those that can be perpetuated almost indefinitely without lowering the future potential production of the good or practice. Until recently, the term was used most often to describe an agricultural method or technology. It is often used by economists to describe an economic trend or practice as well.
Using nearly any measurement, the sustainability of our current technologies and lifestyles is not feasible. While Al Gore and the other global warming hypsters go on about our pending doom with the planet’s atmosphere, they ignore something more fundamental and far more seriously threatening. They ignore peak production and extraction models.
This idea has been around, generally on the fringe, for a long time. We’ve heard about Peak Oil and Water Shortages, and all the rest. These are almost always laughed off by the main stream because they are, to put it bluntly, impossible to really quantify and come to grips with.
Those two issues are deservedly on the fringe. Peak Oil will not be an issue so long as we are willing to go to great lengths to get the crude. Including warfare and monetary disaster. Peak Water, similarly, will only be an issue in the foreseeable future in those areas that we don’t generally worry about (meaning: somewhere that’s not right here).
The problem with reaching peaks in any resource is that the individual resource is often not likely to reach a peak. Oil, for instance, can be infinitely available for as far into the future as we wish to project, provided the other resources that make it possible to get the oil are still easy to extract. Conversely, so long as we have cheap energy (oil), we can raise the amount of our reserves for any other resource because it becomes possible to extract it indefinitely.
Eventually, however, we’re going to hit a synergy where we won’t have one or the other to rely on for supplying our usage. We’ll eventually reach a point where oil is too hard to get because we just can’t afford the cost in oil to extract the metals required to make the machinery for extracting the oil. Or the phosphorous for fertilizing our fields to make the food to supply the workers to get the oil.
All of our resources are not in a chain, but a web. Just like the synergy between foods, markets, economics, and so forth the resources of our planet are also tied into a web. Each affects the other either directly or through a chain of connections.
Currently, we are seeing two major changes in that web that are affecting everything else: economic upheavals are changing the landscape of oil’s availability as the largest purchaser on the market is replaced by another, who stands on slightly firmer economic ground. This upheaval is causing big changes in other market sectors as food production, which requires a large influx of oil to power its machinery, shifts towards using food as a fuel. This shift causes the food itself to become a hotter commodity on the market, making it more expensive to get. In turn, other markets are being affected as the economics all bump into one another vying for their new position in the web.
It’s my belief that long before the claims of doom and destruction from Al Gore and the global warming parade come to pass, we’re going to face something much more sinister and much more telling. We’re going to see the collapse of our industrial agriculture and thus will be facing starvation on a planetary scale.
I know that sounds extreme, but the evidence is all there if we just look for it. We’re reaching a “tipping point,” to steal one of the favorite climate change phrases, wherein we will not only reach Peak Oil, we’ll reach Peak Everything.
In this discussion, we’ll look at the various aspects of the resource web and how they’re changing and beginning to play against each other. Rather than supporting each other in a balanced web of usefulness, they are now pulling against one another and will eventually collapse—likely nearly all at once.
We will like at peak water, minerals, fertilizers, petroleum, etc. Then we’ll talk about what needs to change and how it can be done. That change won’t come from where you likely believe it would.
That’s getting ahead of ourselves, so let’s first look at how these various resources are beginning to waver.
The Ultimate Re-Usable Grocery Bags: 4ever Bags Posted on September 22nd, 2009
At the Rocky Mountain Sustainable Living Far this past weekend, we stopped at a booth run by Rodney Cyr who represents 4ever Bags. We weren’t sure what these were, but while at the booth next to him looking at natural baby products, I’d overheard the sales pitch and conversation he’d had with a couple of ladies and got interested.
Looking at the products, I was amazed at the simple idea that was definitely a winner in many ways.
The idea is plain: take the same kind of light and extremely durable and strong triple-thick poly-nylon, the bags are in threes collected on a carrying handle made of a large caribiner clip with a soft coating on the upper handle. The bags are capable of carrying pretty heavy loads without trouble and the clip makes it easy to group them for easy carrying.
Getting to know them better, while talking, I learned that the bags are made from 40% recycled materials–the most they could use without compromising the longevity and strength of the bags. The carbiners are also from recycled materials and are capable of bearing 150 pounds of weight. The bags are triple-stitched and have no bottom seam, which ads to their strength and carrying capacity.
Other cool features include the built-in bag pouches each bag has, making it store easily (just roughly fold it and stuff it into its own pouch). This also makes it so that if you take all three to the store in your pocket (the carrying handle and three bags in their pouches easily fit into a cargo or jacket pocket) and you only need to get the bag(s) you’ll need out of their pouches for easy carrying back home or even around the store while you shop.
We bought a set of these (I now wish I’d bought 2 or 3) and instantly found use for it to put all of the vegetables (mostly squash) we’d bought from a farmer’s booth earlier. This made carrying much easier. By the time we’d left the fair, my little carrying case (with all of the brochures and copied information from vendors I wanted to check out and write about for various websites) was in another bag along with more stuff we’d acquired. The single handle supporting both bags made it really easy to carry.
The bags come off the handle, of course, for single use if you’d like. We used one just last night to clear out our green tomatoes and what’s left of the cucumber crop from our garden as last night was our first killing frost here in Wyoming. The bag was STUFFED and did just fine.
These bags are very lightweight, water resistant, machine washable, and can carry about sixty pounds each regularly. They come with a “forever” warranty, so if you don’t abuse them, you can always return them for a replacement. We have the normal nylon grocery bags you can buy or get from businesses as a promotion and while those are great, they have nothing on these 4ever Bags.
The poly-nylon is water repellent and bacteria-resistant, non-toxic, non-corrosive, and non-allergenic too. They’re made locally in Greenwood Village, Colorado and 4ever Bags are part of The Environmental Coalition.
Totally awesome!
Plus, I found these just in time to help do our part to participate in this Saturday’s (September 26) Ban the Bag event, a world-wide movement to ban plastic shopping bags. Go here for more information on how you can participate.
Obama’s involvement in Chicago Climate Exchange–the rest of the story Posted on August 10th, 2009
by Judi McLeod, Canada Free Press
Good news to know that the truth will always out–even when you’re Barack Obama.
“Obama Years Ago Helped Fund Carbon Program He Is Now Pushing Through Congress” is a FOXNews story by Ed Barnes. In short, “While on the board of a Chicago-based charity, Barack Obama helped fund a carbon trading exchange that will likely play a critical role in the cap-and-trade carbon reduction program he is now trying to push through Congress as president.”
The charity was the Joyce Foundation on whose board of directors Obama served and which gave nearly $1.1 million in two separate grants that were “instrumental in developing and launching the privately-owned Chicago Climate Exchange, which now calls itself “North America’s only cap and trade system for all six greenhouse gases, with global affiliates and projects worldwide.”
And that’s only the beginning of this tawdry tale, Mr. Barnes.
The “privately-owned” Chicago Climate Exchange is heavily influenced by Obama cohorts Al Gore and Maurice Strong.
For years now Strong and Gore have been cashing in on that lucrative cottage industry known as man-made global warming.
Strong is on the board of directors of the Chicago Climate Exchange, Wikipedia-described as “the world’s first and North America’s only legally binding greenhouse gas emission registry reduction system for emission sources and offset projects in North America and Brazil.”
Gore, self-proclaimed Patron Saint of the Environment, buys his carbon off-sets from himself–the Generation Investment Management LLP, “an independent, private, owner-managed partnership established in 2004 with offices in London and Washington, D.C., of which he is both chairman and founding partner. The Generation Investment Management business has considerable influence over the major carbon credit trading firms that currently exist, including the Chicago Climate Exchange.
Strong, the silent partner, is a man whose name often draws a blank on the Washington cocktail circuit. Even though a former Secretary General of the 1992 United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (the much hyped Rio Earth Summit) and Under-Secretary General of the United Nations in the days of an Oil-for-Food beleaguered Kofi Annan, the Canadian born Strong is little known in the United States. That’s because he spends most of his time in China where he he has been working to make the communist country the world’s next superpower. The nondescript Strong, nonetheless is the big cheese in the underworld of climate change and is one of the main architects of the failing Kyoto Protocol.
Full credit for the expose on the business partnership of Strong and Gore in the cap-and-trade reduction scheme should go to the investigative acumen of the Executive Intelligence Review (EIR).
The tawdry tale of the top two global warming gurus in the business world goes all the way back to Earth Day, April 17, 1995 when the future author of “An Inconvenient Truth” travelled to Fall River, Massachusetts, to deliver a green sermon at the headquarters of Molten Metal Technology Inc. (MMTI). MMTI was a firm that proclaimed to have invented a process for recycling metals from waste. Gore praised the Molten Metal firm as a pioneer in the kind of innovative technology that can save the environment, and make money for investors at the same time.
“Gore left a few facts out of his speech that day,” wrote EIR.
Read the rest of this tawdry tale here.
No Cash for Clunkers is an Overwhelming “Success!” Posted on August 1st, 2009
This morning I reported that the government’s ‘Cash for Clunkers’ program ran out of cash, meaning that people had to keep their clunkers and give up the cash. Congress just voted to refill the ‘Cash for Clunkers’ trough. The Wall Street Journal just reported:
The House voted 316-109 to approve the transfer of $2 billion in emergency funding from the $787 billion economic-stimulus plan to the “Cash for Clunkers” program, ensuring it has sufficient funds to continue. The Senate won’t consider an extension until next week. At a news conference Friday afternoon, President Obama praised lawmakers for moving quickly to rescue the popular program, which he said has succeeded beyond expectations.
The move follows a scramble Thursday after news emerged that the initial $1 billion in funding may have been close to exhausted after just one week. The National Auto Dealers Association said it was given “specific assurances” by the Obama administration that all deals secured on Friday will be honored, though the NADA’s chairman reiterated concerns that some dealers might not be reimbursed for rebates extended to customer.
It seems that Congress is stealing stolen money from some energy programs to honor its clunker promises, so now House Chief Nancy Pelosi is concerned about how they will steal additional money to reimburse the stolen money from the energy program. Let the steal-o-rama begin.
For those new to libertarian ideas, notice the multitude of comments in this story regarding the “success” of a failed, centrally-planned policy that needed emergency funding to keep its failure successful. Whereas businesses within the free market gauge success and failure through the means of profit and loss, here’s how a government determines success.
“Both sides of the aisle, people acknowledge the effectiveness of this initiative,” Ms. Pelosi said on the House floor, adding that early evidence showed that the program was exceeding its environmental targets.
How is this “effectiveness” quantified? “Exceeding” its environmental targets? How is that determined? There’s more…
Government Monopsony Distorts Climate Science says SPPI Posted on July 26th, 2009
Government monopsony distorts climate science, says SPPI The climate industry is costing taxpayers $79 billion and counting The Science and Public Policy Institute announces the publication of Climate Money, a study by Joanne Nova revealing that the federal Government has a near-monopsony on climate science funding. This distorts the science towards self-serving alarmism.
Key findings:
The US Government has spent more than $79 billion of taxpayers’ money since 1989 on policies related to climate change, including science and technology research, administration, propaganda campaigns, foreign aid, and tax breaks. Most of this spending was unnecessary.
Despite the billions wasted, audits of the science are left to unpaid volunteers. A dedicated but largely uncoordinated grassroots movement of scientists has sprung up around the globe to test the integrity of “global warming” theory and to compete with a lavishly-funded, highlyorganized climate monopsony. Major errors have been exposed again and again.
Carbon trading worldwide reached $126 billion in 2008. Banks, which profit most, are calling for more. Experts are predicting the carbon market will reach $2 – $10 trillion in the near future. Hot air will soon be the largest single commodity traded on global exchanges. Meanwhile, in a distracting sideshow, Exxon-Mobil Corp is repeatedly attacked for paying just $23 million to skeptics—less than a thousandth of what the US government spends on alarmists, and less than one five-thousandth of the value of carbon trading in 2008 alone.
The large expenditure designed to prove the non-existent connection between carbon and climate has created a powerful alliance of self-serving vested interests. By pouring so much money into pushing a single, scientifically-baseless agenda, the Government has created not an unbiased investigation but a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Sound science cannot easily survive the vice-like grip of politics and finance. Says Nova, “For the first time, the numbers from government documents have been compiled in one place. It’s time to start talking of “Monopolistic Science”. It’s time to expose the lie that those who claim “to save the planet” are the underdogs. And it’s time to get serious about auditing science, especially when it comes to pronouncements that are used to justify giant government programs andmassivemovements of money.”
Robert Ferguson, SPPI’s president, says: “This study counts the cost of years of wasted Federal spending on the ‘global warming’ non-problem. Government bodies, big businesses and environmental NGOs have behaved like big tobacco: recruiting, controlling and rewarding their own “group-think” scientists who bend climatemodeling to justify the State’s near-maniacal quest for power, control, wealth and forced population reduction.
“Joanne Nova, who wrote our study, speaks for thousands of scientists in questioning whether a clique of taxpayer-funded climate modelers are getting the data right, or just getting the “right” data. Are politicians paying out billions of our dollars for evidence-driven policy-making, or policy-driven evidence-making? The truth is more crucial than ever, because American lives, property and constitutional liberties are at risk.”
Read the full report here (PDF)
