Monday, October 6, 2008

Get off the fossil fuel drug

The journal featured a discussion of carbon footprints which most green groups also tend to get wrong. In WSJ.com - Six Products, Six Carbon Footprints Ball starts with the wrong assumptions and then backs into the foretold conclusion.
1- That the fossil fuel economy can be adapted to a low carbon future.
2- that a style of green consumption can reduce carbon sufficient for 350ppm future.

Lead to the foretold conclusion that small incremental steps to correct global warming are unclear, insufficient,and risk carrying the stigma of greenwashing.

The library is filled with millions of dust collecting solutions to each aspect of the fossil fuel economy because the constitution sees nature as property and gives rights over it to the corporations that deliver consumable desires. Cap and trade is an example of the constitution selling rights to the biosphere which rent our lungs out for asthma and cancer.

Seeking to spread confusion from his wrong assumptions and conclusion Ball writes: So far, these efforts raise as many questions as they answer. Different companies are counting their products' carbon footprints differently, making it all but impossible for shoppers to compare goods. And even if consumers come to understand the numbers, they might not like what they find out.

Rather we need to be slower and smarter, meaning disengaged from consumerism as the primary avenue of experience. Get more from less- reuse existing streets to increase zero CO2 mobility. Ball instead is mired in the other paradigm.

Why slower? I can deliver a truck load, 1400 cubic feet, of fava beans from Half Moon Bay to Belmont every half hour. On a bicycle I can maybe deliver 20 cubic foot in eight hours- 30 if I pushed myself. But fossil fuels also mean I can build houses in Belmont and leave the agriculture to HMB and Chile. HMB meanwhile chafes under the property prices for agriculture versus growing homes and can't wait for the road to come through. The established solution to green house gases is to go slower allowing an economy to develop around the bicycle and horse and burro and walking and the golf cart.

The silver bullet of SB375 and electric trucks and hydrogen cars can still come on line later. We don't have the time to wait for the silver bullet to work and to get enacted and to deliver results. Species are going extinct now, oceans are collapsing, food riots are spreading. Hyping the silver bullet is just another way of saying lets do nothing. We need to get of the toxin of going faster with fossil fuels now.

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