Tag Archives: energy

Usual Rubbish

Spring Chills.

2000 Years to Christmas

Throw another log on the fire. What’s that? No more logs? What the hell. Then break up one of those lobster traps. We haven’t caught a single lobster in twenty years of squatting in this mill – can’t understand it. Stupid trap!

Oh, hi. Yeah, you caught us looking for alternative sources of fuel again. It’s pretty much a full time job for the likes of us here at the abandoned Cheney Hammer Mill. It takes a lot of fuel to heat a big old barn of a place like this, even with the entire west wing collapsed and the north wing taken over by lunatic neighbors. In this current cold snap, we’ve resorted to burning whatever wood we can get both hands on. Brother anti-Lincoln has even started pulling up the floorboards in his personal apartment. Inasmuch as it’s on the third floor, this is making navigating around his living space more and more of a challenge. (He’s devised a system of ropes, but I believe he’s thinking of throwing those into the fire as well.)

Now, plenty of people have asked us, “Hey, Big Green …. since your name is Big Green, why don’t you install some solar panels on the roof of the Cheney Hammer Mill?” To that I respond, good question, plenty of people. We resort to something like passive solar energy – opening the blinds on sunny days and rubbing our hands together furiously. And sure, we could ask our mad science advisor, Mitch Macaphee, to fashion some kind of perpetual energy machine, but our Mitch is a temperamental artist – if he invents a perpetual energy machine, it’s because he saw a hole in the world shaped like such a machine, then carved something out to plug that hole. Selfish human concerns, like avoiding hypothermia, are of no interest to him. He’s looking at the BIG picture … and that picture is big enough to block his view of yours truly.

Pedal faster?

We tried to get in touch with our cousin, Rick Perry, former Energy Secretary and Governor of Texas, as well as subject of our third album, Cowboy Scat: Songs in the Key of Rick, but he hasn’t taken any of our calls. So much for pulling strings. (Hey …. maybe we can pull strings to generate electricity … ) There is another option besides resorting to the assistance of celebrity relatives – getting one of those energy generating recumbent bike thingies. Just hook that thing up and go. We could get Marvin (my personal robot assistant) to pedal the thing, and that would produce enough juice to power a block of space heaters as long as your arm and thick as your ass. For the record, Marvin’s not crazy about the idea, and suggested I might consider doing it myself as a way of shedding some of the COVID pounds I’ve put on over the past year. Still, it’s one way of getting through March without ending up having to be picked up with a pair of ice tongs.

This will be easy. Just set up the bike, plug it into the wall, and pedal backwards. I don’t know why everyone doesn’t do it.

Political Rants

Power.

A year ago this time, on the eve of Earth day, millions of barrels of oil began spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, accompanied by millions of gallons of a toxic dispersant banned for use in the U.K. (but still, apparently, okay to use over here). Both substances were disastrous by-products of a rush to profit by multinational corporations tied to our seemingly unbreakable addiction to fossil fuels. As was pointed out at the time and many times since, such catastrophic events are inevitable at this stage in the depletion of global energy resources. All of the easy-to-get oil is gone or spoken for, so expanding this highly profitable extraction industry requires brinkmanship of the type that has soured the waters of the Gulf beyond the sorry point to which they had sunk previously.

This is generally true of the extractive energy industries. Oil is being sought from ocean depths far more profound than either drilling or safety technologies can facilitate. It is being rendered from the tar sands of western Canada, where the very earth is being ground to squeeze every ounce of the precious fluid for export to the U.S., mainly. (As a result, Canada was recently our single largest source of oil.) The volume of global reserves is calculated based upon those deposits that are economically feasible to extract – as the price per barrel rises, more reserves enter the equation. The trouble is, the very act of extracting them from an exhausted mother earth causes as much environmental degradation as burning the oil in generators and vehicles.

Last year’s spill did teach us one valuable lesson: the energy companies fear nothing more than public opinion. Before the Deepwater Horizon explosion, cable television was choked with ads about “America’s Gas and Oil Industry” and all the jobs they were creating, not to mention BP and other oil companies touting their commitment to the preservation our environment and the development of renewables. When the rig blew, they vanished – Poof! No ads until well after the hole was plugged. Now they’re back again, though a bit more muted than before the disaster. They know their limits … and they know that they can only push the public so far. The real power is with us, if we can manage to use it.

We have an opportunity, right here in my backyard. Local landowners are preparing to play host to hydrofracking – another post-peak energy extraction method now destroying water resources in Pennsylvania and elsewhere. We need to make our voices heard now, before the industry gets a foothold and destroys New York the way the coal industry has riddled West Virginia.

luv u,

jp

Political Rants

Hammered.

Now, I try not to rant too hard on Krauthammer, but he’s leaving me no choice. A couple of weeks ago it was the oil spill in the Gulf. That was the fault of environmentalists, by the way. (You didn’t know there were environmentalists working at B.P. or in the Minerals Management Service, did you?) Krauthammer’s argument on that score was essentially, shit happens – oil drilling is risky, get used to it. Moreover, those pesky greens made the government prohibit “safe” drilling on land and in remote places like the Alaska Wildlife Reserve, forcing those poor oil companies far out to sea and into deep water drilling in the Gulf. They couldn’t help it – the greens made them do it!  How else are they going to make piles of money other than by weaseling their way around our porous minerals management regulations and knowingly putting the entire southern coastline of the United States at risk? Oh, the awesome power of environmentalists! How the government and the oil industry cowers in their shadow! 

That was the last dose of goofiness. The most recent one was on Israel’s attack on a Turkish relief ship heading for Gaza, during which the IDF killed 9 people on board. Of course, in Krauthammer’s view, the attack was completely justified, taking up the usual line that the Israeli government has been following – Hamas has fired 6,000 or 7,000 rockets into Israel. Leaving aside the omission of any accounting of Israeli munitions fired at Gazans over a comparable period (with much greater human effect), Krauthammer proceeded to defend not only Israel’s blockade, but its occupation of all of the territories it seized in 1967 (including the Sinai) and its occupation of southern Lebanon for almost twenty years. You see, these were not occupations but forward defensive positions. Even long after anything that might be realistically termed a standoff or state of war existed between Israel and its immediate neighbors Egypt, Jordan, or Lebanon. So that should clear THAT up.

Also…  there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza. This is one claim that is practically beyond comment. I suppose from his perspective – one of an individual who does not see Palestinians as human beings – the misery in Gaza probably wouldn’t seem like a humanitarian disaster. (What humans, right?) He also equates the blockade to that used by the allies against Nazi Germany and Japan during World War II. This is a comparison worthy of the fevered imagination of Glenn Beck – equating a powerless, virtually weaponless rump state like Gaza with two of the most powerful imperial military machines of the 1930s. In fact, a Nazi comparison would be much more appropriate for Krauthammer’s own comments. I imagine, for instance, that Goebbels would have no problem describing the invasion of Czechoslovakia as “forward-based defense.”

I’ve said it before, and it’s worth saying again. How the hell is it that a guy who’s been so bloody wrong over the years remains a published commentator in newspapers across the country, on television, and on the web? Send your answers here, friends.

luv u,

jp