Jul 31 2007
>Photo by cantc on Flickr
According to an article on The Sydney Morning Herald, laser printers are putting out clouds of fine particulate matter that can get embedded deep into your lungs. Also, the article states that such ultra-fine particles attract other toxins that adhere to them.
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Jul 31 2007
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This post is inspired by Sharon at Casaubon’s Book. If you haven’t stumbled upon her site via the Riot for Austerity it is full of extremely well thought out and well written posts. A word of caution…be prepared to spend a lot of time there!
In Sharon’s recent post she talks about something I have been trying to do for awhile now…using half as much. Using half as much quite literally translates into half as much pollution, half as much waste, half as much money spent, half as much STUFF in our lives. What a simple way to reduce our consumption and have a positive impact on our environment.
True we cannot cut everything in half, however, for many things (like detergents) using half the manufacturers recommended amount will still get your clothes, dishes, toilet just as clean. In fact the product will last twice as long and chances are you won’t notice the difference. I took Sharon’s advice and watered down my dish soap and have been really conscious of using less shampoo when I wash my hair and less laundry soap when I put a load of clothes in. Just for the record my dishes, hair and clothes are all coming up clean.
With the lovely summer weather I have been hanging more and more of our laundry outside to dry and reducing our dryer use by much more than half. In fact for the month of August I have challenged myself to see if I can go without the dryer. Going without a dryer won’t work for us all year (we live in very damp Vancouver, BC) but could we go without the dryer for half the year?
What about the clothes in our closets? Could we cut that in half? Toys? Books? You get the idea. Sara at Walk Slowly, Live Wildly had a great post recently about STUFF. It got me looking more closely around our place and resulted in a purge of STUFF. The amazing thing is I can hardly notice that I cleared out 2 full garbage bags of clothing, toys and books.
The other area I am trying to cut is my use of the car. I have committed myself to riding my bike to the office one day a week…not an easy task as it involves a 10km ride with numerous hills and going over one of the scariest bridge I’ve ever ridden across. But One Day can and will make a difference.
What can you halve?
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Jul 31 2007
Ok, so remember I said before I couldn’t stand tofu.
But then I tried
And there are all these different flavors to try… Teryaki… Indian… Thai… Ah… a world of possibilities has just opened itself to me.
I admit that the crumbly kind still scares me a bit… But, we’ll get to that. Baby steps, it’s all about baby steps…
So if you excuse me, I gotta go eat my tofu now 
Tofu prepared by DeathByBokeh, on Flickr.
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Jul 31 2007
July 31, 2007, with information from Minnesota National Public Radio
Reserve Mining Company was found dumping its asbestos-contaminated waste rock into Lake Superior thirty years ago. The courts forced Reserve to build an on-land disposal site for its waste rock, and set a standard for how many fibers the company could let dump on the surrounding towns through airborne emissions.
Asbestos is the carcinogenic, Class A poison responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths in this country, and the cause of America’s largest ever public health disaster
“Based on the measurements that were done in the early ’80s, and the fact that the agency quit monitoring for 25 years, we believe we satisfied the requirement in the fiber levels,” company spokeswoman LaTisha Gietzen was quoted as saying. “We continue to do our part, and they’ve [levels] continued to drop, and they’re at the lowest levels they’ve been in 30 years.”
However, since the standard for acceptable emissions is the quantity of fibers in St. Paul, where asbestos levels have also dropped, the company is out of compliance. Rather than meet the strict requirements, the company has sought an end-run around the regulations by trying to overturn the original court ruling.
Lee Lind, from the Save Lake Superior Association, originally formed his group 30 years ago to fight Reserve’s dumping in Lake Superior. Now the group has teamed with the Sierra Club. “Fibers are falling every day on Beaver Bay, Silver Bay, on the harbor down there,” Lind says. “It’s not like this problem has gone away, and these fibers, according the EPA, are considered dangerous.”
It’s time for corporate polluters like Reserve to follow the rules, not change them.
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Here’s the Grist/Outside interview with the off-beat, outspoken and (as he will tell you) untainted-by-special-interests candidate, Dennis Kucinich. Good reading, if only for the joy of seeing a political official take controversial positions without apology and do so with a dash of humor (if not hubris).
Meanwhile, the Grist columnist Umbra gives the good and bad news on ocean wave power.
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Movie due out this month about London getting flooded. Read more over at The Coffee House.
I have often had the feeling when walking under the Turcot Interchange that I am in a dried up riverbed - optical illusion?
Jul 31 2007
In this country, just about anyone can own property. As long as they have the money. But if I were president, or some other politico with the ability to create broad, sweeping laws, I’d make a law that not everyone can own land. First, they’d have to pass a series of tests to make sure they would never do this. ÂÂ
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Jul 31 2007
An inspiring and elevating experience of an interview with William Kambkwamba: it is communication that transcends language!
PS: There are three more talks on Africa by others here.
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Jul 31 2007
BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Asias brown clouds warm planet
Clouds of pollution over the Indian Ocean appear to cause as much warming as greenhouse gases released by human activity, a study has suggested. US researchers used unmanned aircraft to measure the effects of the “brown clouds” on the surrounding area. Writing in Nature, they said the tiny particles increased the solar heating of the lower atmosphere by about 50%.
The warming could be enough to explain the retreat of glaciers in the Himalayas, the scientists proposed. The clouds contain a mixture of light absorbing aerosols and light scattering aerosols, which cause the atmosphere to warm and the surface of the Earth to cool.
Wow, I’ll have to read the paper later today to confirm, but when I was doing aerosol work in India back in the mid ’90s, the Indian Ocean cloud was unknown. 1995 through 1998, there was an experiment called INDOEX (my thesis advisor in Bombay participated in the later phases) which first observed this brown cloud. At that time, it was assumed that the light scattering (hence “cooling”) effects of this aerosol would dominate the absorbing (or “heating”) effects, and initial model estimates seemed to agree.
Turns out that it has a significant warming effect because the soot particles (dark, therefore heat absorbing) predominate. And, you had to measure it.
The crafts flew over the polluted region of the Indian Ocean at varying heights between 500m (1,640ft) and 3,000m (9,840ft).
“During 18 flight missions, the three unmanned aerial vehicles were flown with a separation of tens of metres or less and less than 10 seconds (apart), which made it possible to measure the atmospheric solar heating rates directly,” they wrote.
If true, we can reduce the size of this “cloud” by reducing biomass combustion, installing particle controls on power plants, cleaning up other combustion sources, etc, and reduce global warming effects without worrying that this cloud was somehow mitigating temperature rise as previously thought. So, a win-win!
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Jul 31 2007
Thanks to David Adam of the Guardian below is one of the most reasonable, and clearly written, question and answer series I have read recently on climate change. It provides a good quick overview of today’s situation, in my humble view. I am delighted to say his piece is easy for older kids to read and understand too, so could provide a good starting point for school projects.
Many millions of words are typed on the topic of global warming aka climate change every day. Unfortunately, plenty of blog comments, posts, newspaper articles and popular books turn out to be (by design or accident) either confusing, misleading, misinforming, or too technical for members of the public (MoPs), and especially younger MoPs, to understand.
My own three children have each had middle school projects that included ‘Internet Research’ at home and school. Although the information that often appears at the top of simple searches on ‘climate change’ has improved considerably in the past year, there are still too many cautious descriptions implying too much uncertainty in scientific areas where we actually do now have enough information upon which to act. (Here’s one from the Q&A: Climate change
Earlier springs are one of the signs that the climate is changing. Continue Reading »
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