Wrong Dog's Life Chest

I just got back from a two week trip: one week in Georgia and one week in Florida. I had a great time both weeks, the first visiting family and the second hitting the theme parks with my wife and kids. In fact, it was one of the most enjoyable periods of time I have had in years.

I looked st the stars from my deck tonight and realized that I had not really seen them in two weeks. The small town I grew up in is so croweded with large canopy hardwoods that the part of the sky you can actually see is very narrow. There are just too many lights in Orlando.

I swear, this is the most amazing place.

After about ten days my first step towards efficiency has been going quiet well. I have been drinking a lot of ice tea and water. Over all, I sleep and feel a little better and have conserved 30 cans as well as all the shipping and so forth that go with that. Now it is time for step 2.

A nicest thing about Montana is that it is not only cold in the winter but it's hot as hell in the summer too. Talk about an uncomfortable state. Geesh. Generally, July is the time of year that we put the window unit in and cool the place off. As efficiency step two, my wife and I have decided that we will leave the window unit under the steps this year.

Lets do some math. If I run my 900 BTU window unit for 8 hours a day (12:00am to 8:00pm), it will use 223 kilowatt hours per month. Most years we run it from July to the middle of September, so about 558 kilowatt hours per year. That is enough electricity to run a compact fluorescent bulb 24 hours a day for 42 months.

Some afternoons will be uncomfortable, but there are plenty of ways to keep yourself cool. Considering that Northwest energy charges the highest rates in the region, 20% higher in fact, we pay 10.2 cents per kilowatt hour, meaning I will save about $56 total. The total amount of money saved is not really worth the discomfort, but there are larger things at stake. In the grand scheme of things, this is a small sacrifice.

Anyone who has seen the various aluminum cans scattered around my desk at work knows that I have a problem. A very real problem. I drink at least one energy drink and two or more other pops each and every day. I am not alone on this, according to Earth 911 an average worker consumes 2.5 beverages per work day.

The amount of energy required to produce an aluminum can is staggering. Between the mining, smeltering, transportation and packaging, this is a supply chain with far reaching effects. Some of this can be mitigated through recycling, but only about 50% of cans are recycled. This means direct solid waste. It takes about 94,000 BTUs to produce one pound of virgin aluminum.

Let's do some math. I drink three or more drinks from an aluminum can each and every day, totaling 1095 cans a year. Assuming that I meet the average recycling rate, I send 548 aluminum cans (over 17 pounds) to the dump each year.

Lets also assume that 50% of all the cans I drink from have been recycled and 50% are new. It takes about 94,000 BTUs to produce one pound of virgin aluminum and there are about 125,000 BTUs in a gallon of gasoline. It takes roughly 10% of the energy to recycle aluminum as to produce virgin aluminum, so 9400 BTUs per pound. Since an aluminum can weighs 1/2 ounce, that means that I consume over 17 pounds of virgin aluminum and over 17 pounds of recycled aluminum per year. In other terms, 1,607,400 BTUs in virgin aluminum and 160,740 in recycled aluminum, which is roughly equivalent to the BTUs in 14 gallons of gasoline or 218 pounds of coal.

There is a bigger story here too. What about the amount of energy and wastes that go into the production and transportation of the liquids inside of the cans? Who knows what goes into the average energy drink? I can only assume that they have roughly the same ingredients as your average red acid car battery. We know that they contain copious amounts of cane sugar, which brings on a host of problems itself.

Like I said, I have a serious problem. None of this can be good for me or the environment. Since this is part 1 of my series chronicling my effort to reduce my families environmental impact, you probably know where I am going with all of this. I will no longer purchase beverages packaged in aluminum cans. Like I said though, the solution can not be worse than the problem, so it makes no sense to replace these drinks with ones packaged in plastic or paper. I will instead replace them with (shock!) water and iced tea (preferably sun brewed). While the reduction in consumption and waste of aluminum and bi-products will be a good enough reason to effect this change, the biggest impact will come from the fact that I will not be making those 4 mile round trips to Bob's Valley Market for a stupid energy drink.

I am an addict, so it wont be easy but there is no doubt in my mind that it will be worth it. While I can only make a small difference, consider what it would be like if we all got on board:

1. Between 1990 and 2000, Americans wasted a total of 7.1 million tons of cans: enough to manufacture 316,000 Boeing 737 airplanes—or enough to reproduce the world’s entire commercial airfleet 25 times.

2. Had the 50.7 billion cans wasted in 2001 been recycled, they would have saved the energy equivalent of 16 million barrels of crude oil: enough energy to generate electricity for 2.7 million U.S. homes for a year, or enough to supply over a million cars with gasoline for a year.

3. From 1986 to 2000, about 9.6 million tons of cans with a market value of over $10 billion were wasted

Though I am choosing to end consumption altogether, look what we could do by simply recycling.

In a recent post at Montana Netroots I outlined my goals of drastically cutting my families consumption and waste. Essentially, I would like to reduce our foot print by half over the next year. I have a lot of ideas on how to do this and I will be detailing them here. I will make regular updates on how this is progressing. One of the major problems with reducing efficiency is that actions that seem to increase efficiency sometimes have hidden consequences. I hope that by detailing plans and attempting to quantify their impact, the right decisions will be made. I welcome your input and look forward to living a bit more responsibly.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so to make a few objects beautiful; but it is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look, which morally we can do. To affect the quality of the day, that is the highest of arts. Every man is tasked to make his life, even in its details, worthy of the contemplation of his most elevated and critical hour. If we refused, or rather used up, such paltry information as we get, the oracles would distinctly inform us how this might be done.

I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion. For most men, it appears to me, are in a strange uncertainty about it, whether it is of the devil or of God, and have somewhat hastily concluded that it is the chief end of man here to "glorify God and enjoy him forever."

Why should we live with such hurry and waste of life? We are determined to be starved before we are hungry. Men say that a stitch in time saves nine, and so they take a thousand stitches today to save nine tomorrow.

-Henry David Thoreau

Johnny Cash is one of my favorite musicians of all time. I like it all, from Ring of Fire and Field Of Stone to I Walk The Line. There is something about the stuff that he did at the end of his career that haunts me. There is a raw power and haunting that can only come from a man that has lived long and knows that his twilight is come.

I was talking to a new friend at the Obama returns party Tuesday night. I was talking about some of the 'covers' that Johnny did at the end of his life, and she said that she had not heard them. Thinking about that, I thought that it would be worthwhile to share some of my favorites here.

Rusty Cage was originally performed by Soundgarden. By any standard, it is a powerful song with some sort of hidden message. As a point of reference, here is Soundgarden's version:

and Johnny's version:

Depeche Mode's Personal Jesus

And Johnny

Nine Inch Nail's Hurt has always been one of my favorite songs. It has such passion and

I'll let Johnny speak for himself.

In case you have been living under a rock, you might not have noticed that Portishead has released a new album called 'Silence'. I am listening to it right now on Rhapsody and so far it is everything that I have wanted it to be.  I think that Rhapsody's description of the new album is pretty much straight up:

Morbid, sleeping-pill club music for people to dance on your grave to. Absolutely uncompromising. Absolutely brilliant. Portishead returns. 

 

Beth's vocals are as strong as ever and the band is still as tight as ever. How cool is this!

 

 

[NOTE: If you are asking yourself 'What The Hell is a Portishead?', see this: Glory Box, by Portishead

Or this slightly scaled back: Wandering Stars, by Portishead 

 

Sooo. I am sure that we all do something a little interesting every day. I think that I actually do some pretty cool stuff from time to time. You might even find it interesting too, but I don't think that you would want to sit on your couch after dinner and watch a show about it.

Enter Discovery channel's new show 'Verminators' wherein exterminators are followed around on their day to day. I happened to catch the last five minutes of the series premiere, and I can't see me regularily tuning in to watch some dude vacuum spiders. As if spending a few hours with camera's following you around a house vacuuming up balck widows wasn't bad enough, while thanking him the lady said "I would shake your hand but its gross." My first thought was 'how insulting!' My second thought was 'She's probably right.'

I am going to call this one short lived. TV is supposed to be better than real life, or at least better than the average life.

It cost over $20,000 to make. You would think that they could have spent $50 and run it past someone with the mindset of a 12 year old boy, like myself. Seems that they didn't notice until the unveiling.

It cost £14,000 to create, but clearly no-one at the smart London design outfit that came up with the new logo for HM Treasury thought to turn it on its side.

The logo, for the Office of Government Commerce, was intended to signify a bold commitment to the body’s aim of “improving value for money by driving up standards and capability in procurement”.

Instead, it has generated howls of mirth and what is likely to be a barrage of teasing emails from mandarins in other departments.

 

 

I was busy writing the third part of my candidate website review over at the netroots when I came across a most peculiar thing. All of the other MT-AL congressional candidates were compelled to add sections to their websites explaining their positions, backgrounds and qualifications, I was shocked to see that our Congressman Dennis Rehberg does not feel that he need to do any such thing. If you visit his website, there is a video, a short letter and nothing more. The only link to demonstrate his priorities, accomplishments and qualifications is labeled "Donate". To add insult to injury, the video starts playing automatically and has no visible controls to turn it off.

 

 

 

What are we to make of this? Are campaign donations the only issue important to Rehberg? Does he not feel the need to share his positions and accomplishments with us? Perhaps we are just supposed to accept that the job is his birth right and move the hell on? Who are we to ask these questions anyway? What was i thinking?

A visit to Jim Hunt's site at http://huntforchange.com shows a candidate that is interested in letting you know his positions on issues important to Montana. in fact, it has one of the most complete Issues sections I have seen in a candidate site. I suppose you could just head over there and read about Rehberg's positions if you are really interested.