Eco & Energy

Most of us take showers every day.  Clean shower water is much more important than you may think.  When we shower, we are exposing our largest organ - our skin -  to about 25   gallons of chlorinated water during the   shower.  The   American Journal of Public Health  has determined that up to two-thirds of harmful chlorine exposure can be due to skin absorption and inhalation while showering.  The Journal also links chlorine to “significant increases in certain  types of cancer , asthma and skin irritations…”  The steam inhaled during a shower can contain up to 20 times the concentration of chlorine (and other synthetic chemicals) as tap water.  One can absorb as many  toxins  in one shower as you would drinking chlorinated tap water for an entire week.  Studies show that after a 10-minute shower in chlorinated water, your blood levels of THMs*  (common D isinfection B y P roduct – DBP )...

I was at  P aul Hawken’s SF Commonwealth Club presentation   last week  (April 26, 2018)  –  exactly one year f rom his pre-release launch in Oakland.  You’ve come a long way baby!   Here’s a link to the podcast quick summary:   Hawken has launched  Project Drawdown,  which he calls the most comprehensive plan ever proposed to reverse global warming.  Hawken gathered a diverse group of researchers from around the world to identify, research and model the 100 most substantive, existing solutions to address climate change, something never done before, even though climate change has been in the public and academic sphere for over 40 years. What was uncovered is a path forward that might begin to reverse global emissions within 30 years. Gone were the attributes for specific solutions.  Front and center was the beseeching us to adapt a new language, a new behavior, a new thinking.    Just in time...

The dirty little secret about diesel engines is out thanks to VW's dieselgate.   Most health scientists knew about this for years and kept quiet about it.  Many european cities have passed legislation banning ALL diesel cars from their inner cities.  If we don't all do this, we'll be back to an LA or London type air for 100+ years ago. ----------------------------------------------------------------- I turn my car’s fan OFF whenever I am behind a belching diesel truck or bus  ( especially if their muffler is located down low – like school buses )  and for good reason:  diesel exhaust fumes. I’m overly sensitive to chemical smells, and whenever I smell diesel aldehydes I hold my breath and wait for cleaner air. According to wikipedia  diesel exhaust contaminants include substances listed as human carcinogens by the International Agency for Research on Cancer  of the  U.N. ‘s  World Health Organization . It made me very, ...

…with another consumer scam sponsored by ‘Profits-R-Us’ corporate food greedies. BUT this time it’s a bit different: WE  HAVE A CHOICE.   Please pass this on to your friends… IGNORE ‘non-GMO’ food labels.   Please, it’s good for you. the story behind the story… Consumers are starting to focus on buying non-GMO labeled products. This trend may decimate the organic industry.  Consumers unwittingly think that ‘non GMO’ is also organic.  It is not.  The dirty secret is non-GMO certified products have nothing to do with organic, and can freely use all industrial farming and heavy pesticide practices among other things. Consumers are ‘eating up’  (pun intended)  the non-GMO label more than the ‘organic’ label and are unwittingly increasing sales of industrial food conglomerates that use pesticides, …. other non-organic practices here…. It gets crazier: non-GMO labels are appearing on dairy and meat products.  This is meaningless! ...

Rarely do I find anything original in the 'sustainability noise'   worthwhile sharing or blogging about.   This NYT article has some fresh, interesting information. I hope you find it motivational.   It will be driving my behaviors. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ There are two things that caught my 'cautiously optimistic' curious brain:  'beyond environmentalism'  which purports to impact consumerism, materialism and an ever increasing GDP requirement  of nations.    WOW, finally.   That only took 40+ years, to spiral down to one of the root causes behind our runaway industrial freight train. Stay tuned for a future blog about this wonderful new direction.    And then there's this article. NYTimes article link - click here What You Can Do About Climate Change By  JOSH KATZ  and  JENNIFER DANIEL   DEC. 2, 2015 Seven Simple Guide...

Over the last 20 years I've watched too many people, (including myself) get sidetracked from this thing called 'sustainable' behavior. - so I decided to start a conversation:  here's a starting statement : Everyone claims to be sustainable, few are. Our beliefs and behaviors are disconnected: cognitive dissonance. What does it mean to actually do sustainable things in everyday life – especially in community? How does one change embedded, unconscious behavioral patterns we learned as children? Let's start with definitions: what is sustainable behavior?   By it's very nature, behavior is sustainable. If you're not behaving (bad or good), you're probably sleeping – and even that is called 'sleeping behavior'. You can't escape behavior: maybe we should add it to death + taxes. Sustainable behavior is doing good for the environment, our health, and social justice. It's a bit easier to define it from a negative side: doing no harm, not tak...

A  recent NYTimes article   talks about 'issues'.  Seems we're turning benign things into issues and turning those into problems that divide us.  Here's an excerpt: "...this is what makes ‘‘issues’’ the perfect word for the current moment. It is a word that acknowledges problems without actually addressing them, that minimizes them in hopes that they’ll just drift away. It’s a hedge and a dodge, at once overly punctilious and contemptuously dismissive;  it’s contingent, euphemistic, underhanded and easily weaponized . Our culture has all kinds of prohibitions against plain speech, but we’ve long treated  agenda-driven spin as just business. " Likes and dislikes on social media are indicative of this.   We rarely state why we've done this, we just put thumbs up or thumbs down, as if each one of us was a Roman emperor feeding the christians to the lions without so much as giving a reason.... just because. More fundamentally, I think it centers ar...

There’s an industry that’s getting a free pass from everyone and it’s behind just about everything we have in our modern society.   Most people don’t realize the oil industry doesn't really produce gasoline directly from a barrel of crude.  Gasoline is a byproduct of the distillery cracking processes  after all the chemicals are ‘broken’ out of it. These chemicals supply all our plastics, cosmetics, and a whole bunch of other stuff.  A common illustration in the eco/sustainability world is to trace a product’s supply chain from the very start to its disposal.  An excellent example is the 'story of stuff - how cosmetics are made' https://youtu.be/D2W7wQf4QPo Another example I commonly used in university lectures was  How  Tropicana orange juice is made and what's its largest footprint?  The Orange Juice supply chain goes from the oranges grown on a tree to the refrigerator in your home. The in between steps includ...