Oil oil everywhere and not a drop to drink... oh wait...

I read an article last year arguing that it is better for the environment to keep your clunker instead of turning it in for a new car. I can't find the exact article, but this is close: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/the-ultimate-pr/" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.wired.com/autopia/2008/05/the-ultimate-pr/</a> .

Compilation of images taken by NASA satellites over the last month: <a class="postlink" href="http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=14606692" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogal ... d=14606692</a>

 

See the term "greenwashing". There are a ton of companies guilty of doing this practice.

I mean in her defense, do you know a lot of people who are even attempting this? Personally I've started my own garden using the SFG method and with this small garden alone (a 4x4 area) I could feed myself on vegetables alone assuming they were growing all the time (a possibility since I live in good weather).

I burned 2 gallons of gas, generated 45lbs of C02 (not a big deal since plants respirate with this anyway), 1 pound of CO, < 1lb of NOx, 1gr of soot, and < 1lb of smog driving around to pickup the materials.

This is assuming I drove 40 miles to get all of my crap because I didn't have ANY tools, wood, or even basic materials such as nails or screws.

Total cost for me was roughly:

$7 gas
$105 wood (cedar), tacks, twine, screws, seeds, 4 kinds of compost, peatmoss, vermiculite (arguably the most expensive thing on here at $30 a bag)saw, nails.
$15 ladybugs (this cost could have been avoided had I just burned some wood and sprinkled the ashes on the fucking aphids chewing my snow peas and cucumbers)

Total $130.

When I lived in my old apartment I spent roughly $25 on vegetables a week alone. Assuming I'm eating stuff everyday from the garden, this pays for itself almost within a month. If you keep up with the garden, store bought seeds can last up to 5 years. If you're doing this, you're saving $1,000 a year. For a $130 initial investment you can save $5870 over five years. I'm just sayin man.

 

I'm perfectly fine with not junking a 7 year old SUV or gas guzzler to purchase a hybrid. However, we've known for a good 10 years that oil was becoming scarce, and that oil had very bad effect on our lives and our environment. The price of oil hasn't shot up in the past 2 years, we've known for some time that it's only going up, nobody thinks that it'll go back down under 50$.

So, instead of buying an SUV, you pick a more efficient car. The price tag is cheaper, and the maintenance is cheaper.

The cash for clunker program, or whatever it's called around the world was to boost the economy and the political rating of politicians, it had little to do with the environment.

 

Along similar lines the hosts on the UK version of Top Gear made a facetious yet valid point that the most environmentally friendly car in the world could be an Aston Martin http://www.astonmartin.com/eng/thecars

They are made using conventional technology .... fuel cells and batteries have a huge eco-footprint.
Comparative to other cars, not many of them are sold.
They are hardly ever driven and they are kept for upwards of 20 years.

 

You make a perfectly legitimate point (and way to grow alot), but I left something important out- she isn't tending to this thing like you'd need to in order to make that garden really grow a lot of produce. I used to have a garden at home for a few years and know how much they can produce if you tend to them, and I think her garden could very well fail unless she starts watering and caring more for the seedlings. She has refused to let me take care of it with her, however because she likes to bitch a lot about me behind my back, I'll mind my own business like she should and let her try to take care of the garden herself. That or give in and let her take the fine shavings from my workshop (against my advice) and use it as a mulch- it's mainly walnut shavings (a natural herbicide- they'd kill everything).

Now, while that certainly wouldn't help the issue at all, my biggest problem with the whole deal is my roommates not being intelligent enough to do the simplest things to cut down on the energy we use in the house. The same roommates that claimed to be the most "environmental" were also the ones who were most skeptical of me sealing up the seams around A/C units loosely stuck into windowsills, making sure all other windows and doors were shut while running them, and asking them not to use the oven and stove as often when it was hot out. I have to continually ask them to make sure the house is sealed up when we've got the A/C on and are actively trying to cool the house down. While they weren't proactive in the least about keeping out energy bill down during the warm and humid summer months, they still go out of their way to buy "green" and "organic" products. Fuck, I'm the one who didn't put an A/C unit in my own damn room for the sake of saving money. It just doesn't make sense.

I am very pessimistic regarding her garden, but it's simply because she's always going back and forth to Home Depot to buy plants and supplies and she just isn't taking much care of it when the thing is just new and needs to be watched the most. That and her planting choices... she's got twelve 1' square plots and isn't using them to really grow quality, sustaining vegetables. Two are unoccupied, two are for pumpkins (halloween, folks), and three are for herbs and they are turning yellow. If she had that thing loaded with carrots and high producing tomato plants and greens (lettuce, spinach) and other legit vegetables, hell I'd water and weed that thing behind her back to make sure they grew. But it really appears to me that she started the garden just for show and green cred... something I have less than respect for.

 

These are people of the worst sorts. I guess some want to mean well but most in reality come off just buying into the bullshit and want to feed their egos.

In full disclosure I should mention that some of my garden takes into account stuff that is home canned or that doesn't need preserving when mature (onions, certain herbs, potatoes etc). I also have seed catalogs that contain heirloom seeds in which I can take the seeds from flowering plants and still have them breed true. This saves me the trouble of running around like most people do. In my garden so far I've got 4 1ft squares with cucumbers, 1ft square of okra, 1ft square of banana peppers, 2ft square of strawberries, 1ft square of basil, 1ft square of oregano, 2 1ft squares of onions, and two empty squares which will contain 4 heads of romaine lettuce each when my sprouts start maturing a bit. I've also got tomatoes in another container on the side of the house.

This is getting a bit off topic so if you want, feel free to PM me.

Edit:Netdata brought up a good point via rep which I didn't really feel was relevant to my situation because I live in the city (unfortunately). If I didn't have a giant fence I could easily also attract a lot of tasty food such as rabbits, squirrels or fruit eating birds or even deer if I lived in some of the outer towns surrounding the suburbs.

 

I don't know where you heard this, but everything I've read says Goldman sold off 44% of their BP shares and they did it over the entire first quarter of 2010, not hours or days before everything went to hell. I'm also pretty sure we found out about the blowout as soon as it happened. Like when the rig blew up, sank and started pouring oil into the Gulf.

 

I wish BP would come out with a little tough love on this whole thing.

You people want your cars? This is where you get your gas.
McMansion in the burbs with a white picket fence, pool, and a 45 minute commute? Paint for your walls? Need BP's oil.
Fresh chocolate covered strawberries and cold champagne on Valentine's Day? Need BP's Oil.
Cheap plastic shit for your Rock Band video games and little dollies? Well kiddies, jump aboard the petroleum express.

This is an unprecedented disaster, but to act like these guys are villains is bullshit. Negligent? Very likely. Profit motivated? Of course! That's the point! The blowback they are getting for their "we're sorry" ads, and for paying their dividends is preposterous. They have a history of poor safety (ie: the blowup in the chemical plant in Texas a few years ago) and clearly need to undergo a governance restructuring and rebranding, but they are a for profit entity. They just need to become a more responsible one, and trust me, this thing is going to cost them big time. This disaster is a disaster for everyone.

OIL IS EVERYTHING to our modern way of life. Think unobtanium, but it's REAL. And you love it. You need it, and you want more of it without even realizing it. For cheap.

Don't want wars the middle east? Live in a tree house. Don't want to risk blown rigs and oil soaked animals? Throw out your iPhone, and shut the laptop screen on your internet porn and go back to the 1800's.

If this disaster was being met with a real conversation about quality of life and standard of living for the American consumer maybe it would cause us to all look in the mirror. Instead EVERYONE is pointing figures at everyone else (BP, Halliburton, Congress, the President, locals, local government), but no one has the balls to stand up and say it's not just about money, its about our entire way of life and place in power in the world.

Then again I'm the guy who probably would have supported the War in Iraq if the politicians had the guts to say "Yup it's about Oil, because Oil is the MOST IMPORTANT THING to your way of life as an American."

I personally am not willing to dramatically alter my lifestyle because of this event. Why? Because the system largely works. I barely drive, I live in a small and efficient apartment by American standards, and I fervently believe in investing in technology instead of turning our backs on 200 years of unprecedented improvement. Someday we will have the technology for clean fuel, but that won't happen til every dollar that can be made using Oil is made. Until then, the conversation should be about not only efficiently making money using Oil (From BP's perspective), but enforcing efficient incentives for safety and environmentalism for everyone else. That clearly failed here.

 

The thing that upsets me is that I doubt we'll see any significant punishment being dealt to BP. Sure the government might give them a fine but fines seem irrelevant for a company that's in such a heavily subsidized industry.

 

Problem solved.

 

If this shit is so toxic why is BP still spraying almost a million gallons of this stuff around?

<a class="postlink" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corexit</a>

If this stuff is just acting as an emulsifier and making the oil particles float to the bottom how the hell do they intend on cleaning it up? What about the rest of the people who's health is affected by this? If the EPA mandated they use one of the other alternatives on their site, any reason why they were allowed to use it anyway?

 

Seriously? You do realize that BP has to pay for EVERYTHING relating to this spill, right? They are the ones paying all the fisherman to use their boats to help contain/clean oil. They are the ones paying for all the workers and materials for all of the capping/plugging methods. They are the ones paying for all of the containment boom. They are the ones paying for the planes, pilots, and dispersant. They are the ones paying for all the cleanup efforts. They are the ones paying for all the damage claims that the government approves, including lost wages/productivity for the fishermen that are affected. They may very well end up paying to replace the ENTIRE FUCKING DRILLING RIG THAT SANK. They will end up paying out to the injured workers, and the families of those killed.

The US Government has named BP the responsible party. That means they are responsible for the spill, and HAVE TO PAY EVERY CENT OF ANY RELATED COSTS.

Compared to any fines the government can levy, it's HUGE.

Also, don't forget that ALL THEIR OTHER OFFSHORE OPERATIONS ARE SHUT DOWN. Maybe that isn't affecting them right now, but it will. Unfortunately, it's also going to effect all the other oil companies that operate offshore.

This thing is a PR nightmare as well. Their stock is trading at barely above 50% of what it was just before the explosion. A 50% drop in stock prices is probably worse than any penalty that could ever be placed against them. THEY'VE LOST AROUND 60 BILLION DOLLARS in total worth due to the fall of stock prices. That sounds like a pretty substantial penalty to me. Do you seriously think the government would ever fine them anywhere near that much?

Seriously, let's stop piling the blame and wishing punishment on BP, and let them focus on STOPPING THE FUCKING LEAK.

Oh, and the subsidies you're talking about? Roughly $4 Billion a year. How much US oil production does that relate to? About 11 days worth. US government subsidies amount to 3% of annual production. If you want to talk about a heavily subsidized industry, let's talk about American farmers.

 

They're not going to clean it up. It will sink to the bottom of the sea, and eventually bacteria that live down there will digest it all. Is it a great solution? Not at all. Is it better than the oil ending up on our shores, and in our wetlands? Absolutely. Unfortunately for the stuff that lives on the sea floor, it's not nearly as important to us as the shit that lives on shore, and near the surface. Granted, we haven't done a lot of exploring of the deep sea floor, but by most accounts the amount of life down there is far less than the amount that lives in the areas that would otherwise be affected. It's a "lesser of two evils" situation.

 

Just give them a mop and a bucket and tell them they can go home when it's all cleaned up.

I realise that's ludicrous. I'm still totally serious.