Montgomery County, MD Green Party Blog

Ken Sain has posted a call for help from Romi Elnagar, the acting secretary of the Louisiana Greens. The party had just last week presented the papers to become recognized as a major party. About half of the newly registered Greens were in New Orleans, some in the poorer neighborhoods. Whether they all got out is unkonwn.

Along with her request for help, Romi has asked that the party publicize the cuts to the emergency preparedness budget for New Orleans that the Bush administration has made.

The second task I am asking the national Party to help us with is to publicize the actions of President Bush regarding hurricane preparedness, actions taken prior to Hurricane Katrina. According to Citizens for Legitimate Government, Bush recently REDUCED federal funding for hurricane preparedness by more than $70 Million dollars. People need to be made aware of this fact, especially as I am sure that he will try to “make political hay” out of our catastrophe. I hope that the national Green Party will consider make a press release concerning this fact and publicizing it as much as possible, even though attention of many Greens may be focused–and rightly so–on Iraq.

In fact, for the last two years, efforts to shore up the levees and pumps in order to prepare for an event like Katrina have been gutted due to the every growing demands of the Iraq war. This disaster might not have been so bad had plans been allowed to continue to prepare for the storm everyone knew was comng sooner or later.

Gasoline futures prices are up 30 cents a gallon today on top of a 10 cent a gallon rise yesterday. Looks like the traders think there was more damage than first thought. I think we can get ready for another round of heafty price increases at the pump.

In The Right Nation: Conservative Power In America Adrian Woolridge and John Mickelwaite argue — among other things — that the conservative movement does a much better job of publicizing it’s ideas than the left does. Therefore, I urge the reader to click on this link and read a New Yorker article (”The Moral Hazard Myth”) on the uninsured in the U. S.

He metions Tim Willard’s entry about a D.C. event.

Click here for link.

Back in the 1940s, when Robert Tamblyn was working at Toronto’s Eaton Centre department store, he noticed that it had tapped the city’s water main — illegally — to rig up a system that fanned the chilly water through a network of pipes to cool the women’s evening-wear department.

It was years before the city’s water commissioner wised up. And years more before Tamblyn had the idea of applying the same concept in a bigger way.

“Air conditioning was a whole new word up here in the 1940s,” says Tamblyn, the engineer many credit with developing an alternative technology — lake-source cooling — in North America.

He has helped devise large-scale, energy-efficient cooling systems for the city of Toronto and Cornell University’s Ithaca campus. The city system, the largest of its kind, began operating last summer.

The first successful citywide venture was set up in Stockholm in 1995, but its capacity is less than half of Toronto’s.

Click here for link.

Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, commander of the Army Corps, told Bunnatine H. Greenhouse last month that she was being removed from the senior executive service, the top rank of civilian government employees, because of poor performance reviews. Greenhouse’s attorney, Michael D. Kohn, appealed the decision Friday in a letter to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, saying it broke an earlier commitment to suspend the demotion until a “sufficient record” was available to address her allegations.

Click here for link.

Since January, governors have signed several dozen antiabortion measures ranging from parental consent requirements to an outright ban looming in South Dakota. Not since 1999, when a wave of laws banning late-term abortions swept the legislatures, have states imposed so many and so varied a menu of regulations on reproductive health care.

Click here for link.

By way of Sustainablog, comes word of a report by Greenpeace, U.K’ Decentalizing power: An Energy Revolution for the 21st Century.

More than half the electricity generated today is used just to get the power through the wires; it is an enormously inefficient system. Greenpeace proposes a decentralised energy system that would see everyday buildings playing host to devices such as solar panels, small wind turbines and combined heat and power boilers, which generate electricity as well as providing heat and hot water. The electricity created would be used directly by the house or workplace, and the surplus would be fed into a local network. This electricity would then be locally distributed, avoiding the significant loss that occurs when electricity is transported long distances.

As Greenpeace points out, decentralizing energy would also democratize energy, providing real opportunities for local political leadership on climate change, and curbing the influence of the centralized industry’s powerful vested interests. By enabling local action and empowering individuals and communities as producers, decentralisation has the potential to bring about a massive cultural change in our attitude to and use of energy.

A Green future is not only possible and within our reach, but it may be the only way to survive declining supplies of hydrocarbons.

But the corporate mentality, that knows nothing but huge, centralized solutions will be difficult to overcome. Already they are spending billions attempting to consruct the “hydrogen economy” even though huge, inordinantly difficult technical problems remain unsolved. An efficient, community based economy will have to be built from the ground up.

Austin is a blue dot in a sea of red. First they signed the pledge by U.S. cities to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, now they have launched their own campain to get cities across the country to promote plug in hybrid technology.

According to an increasing number of policy makers, industry analysts, and environmental groups, there is a growing awareness of a Perfect Storm of conditions that may change how we drive and what we drive.

This perfect storm of strategic, economic, and environmental conditions compels us to find ways, within a relatively short period of time, to dramatically reduce oil consumption.

Plug in hybrids combine a bigger battery with existing hybrid technology so that the cars can run 40 or 50 miles on the battery alone and then switch to the hybrid engine. Recharging the battery would cost an equivilent of 70-80 cents a gallon. With studies showing 78 percent of Americans living within 20 miles of their jobs, the potential for gasoline savings is enormous.

The U.S. now consumes one quarter of all the world’s oil, and more than half of the oil we used is burned up in internal combustion engines. This is a tremendous waste that must be cut to survive tighter oil markeets.

Austin Energy has pledged $1 million to help local businesses, governments and citizens purchase an initial round of plug ins. They hope to spread the campaign to the 50 largest cities in the country.

Baltimore is on their list; but it seems to me that Montgomery County is an equally good target. There are now more jobs in the Rockville-Bethedsa corridor than in Baltimore, and there is already a high tech corridor running along 270 (including a BP Solar building.)

I plan on sending this literature to the Montgomery County Council to see if there is any interest. Also, I’d like to add a petition drive to my other petitioning activities.

With oil prices rising and no end in sight, I think this could be an important issue for the MCGP to follow up on.

Information from OPEC’s August monthly report indicates that world wide production of light sweet crude, the most sought after kind because it can be easily refined and because it is low in sulfer, is now in decline. Although overall production of oil is still rising, the shift to heavier grades is helping cause bottlenecks that are driving up gas prices because there is limited refinery capacity for these heavier grades of crude.

Chris Vernon’s webpage, Vital Trivia ferreted out this conclusion from the OPEC report;

The key point is that non-OPEC light sweet crude went from 41% of 66 mb/d to 34% of 70 mb/d from 2000 to 2004, a drop of 3.26 mb/d. OPEC added 1 mb/d of light sweet crude over the same period resulting in a global reduction of light sweet crude of over 2mb/d showing that global light sweet crude has peaked and is now in decline.

Previously, Chris had reported numbers showing that all major western oil companies, except for BP, had rolled over into decline by 2005.

The numbers are coming in very much the way many peak oil writers had predicted. The relentless upward drive of prices will continue until we can develope renewable alternatives, redesign our living and working patterns to be less reliant on oil, and abandon the idea of constant growth in material wealth.

If anyone hasn’t seen “The End of Suburbia” it is a must see. It not only outlines the problem but offers solutions as well. Copies are available from the MCGP local.