My roll is almost ½ way gone, and truth be told, I believe I purchased them in early 2007. That tells you how little I have used them, and mostly for emergencies. Like the time my buddy brought his dog over, and the pooch left me a little ‘gift’ on my carpeting. I may have used 3 or 4 to clean that up. Or when the neighborhood kid tried to do a grind on the railing, but he face planted on my concrete porch instead. I thought it prudent to send a couple of paper towels along with his teeth inside as he rode in the ambulance. In my opinion, those were emergencies.

For just about everything else though, I use a cloth. For washing dishes: a cloth. For wiping up spills: a cloth. For napkins, cleaning my stove, wiping down appliances, washing windows, I use a cloth. And, I alternate these cloths to wash dishes with, so I never have to use extra soap and water to keep them clean.

That’s how I’ve done away with paper towels and the whole pollution laden manufacturing process while keeping them out of the landfills, and you can do it too! We can all find ways to replace paper towels with more environmentally friendly ways of cleaning and drying.

Li-ion Hybrid Battery

The internal combustion engine has been with us in a practical form since about the late 1800’s, or thereabouts. After that, almost our entire industrial culture has been built around it in some form or another, most recognizable as a means of transportation for the supply of goods, as a personal way to travel, and as a fundamental element in the waging of war. Without the internal combustion engine, each and every one of us would be living in an Amish paradise.

Now, for all of its wonderful advantages, the internal combustion engine has some serious drawbacks that human-kind has been willing to put up with. The first one is that it pollutes the air. This has never been that big of a deal until scientists began to see that our atmosphere began to become effected by all the garbage spewing out of the worlds tailpipes. The second is that we are slowly running out of the oil needed to make gasoline to run our internal combustion engines. Oil is not infinite, and there is going to come a time when it runs dry.

The United States used to be the largest producer of gasoline from North American oil wells. But there isn’t enough oil anymore in the US, so we are importing almost 70% of the oil needed to make gasoline. Therein lies the third problem with internal combustion engines: the reliance that the US and most everyone else has on foreign oil imports.

Well, I hate to break it to you all, but the times they are a changing. And that change is coming with the Lithium-Ion (Li-Ion) battery pack.

Right now, the Li-Ion batteries are first generation power cells with room to grow. There are fledgling car companies out there like Tesla, to name just one, that produces an automobile powered solely by these batteries, which gives outstanding performance and an incredible 240 mile range before recharge. Of course, you’ll pay for this technology to the tune of about 100 grand to have one in your garage, but Li-Ion batteries are about to go mainstream in cars for about 1/3rd the price.

Enter the Chevy Volt. This is a true electrical hybrid model that uses its electric motor first and a small gasoline engine as a back up, all thanks to the Li-Ion battery pack. The electrics will give you about 40 miles of run time and after that, the gas engine will power-on to charge a generator and keep the electric motor running. It is slated for 2010 production and promises to be a revolutionary automobile.

But that’s not all. How about the Volkswagen L-1. Essentially the same idea as a Volt with the exception that it uses a turbo diesel engine instead of a gasoline powered type. This car is very close to production as well, possibly 2011, and it is in many ways the German equivalent of the Volt.

What we have here are essentially the first of the major automakers that are taking the electric powered car seriously. Drive them around all day and plug them in at night to refuel. If you never exceed their 40 mile electric range, you’ll never buy gasoline again. And as Li-Ion batteries become more popular and production increases, the price will go down and other automakers will toss their hats into the fray. It’s only going to get better.

Right here and right now, this is the revolution of electrical power that is going to kill the internal combustion engine as we know it. Yes there may be iterations of an internal combustion engine that burns ethanol, hydrogen or some other non-polluting fuel in the future, but gasoline powered engines are on their way out.

Get ready all you Mind Petalers, the change is coming, and it is going to be good!

The 40th anniversary of Woodstock has come and gone, and the 50th anniversary is 10 years down the road. Peace, love music and drugs were the mainstay of the original music festival in 1969, but something else came out of that, something that was about as cosmic as the festival was itself, and it is called change.

Those drugged out hippies which sat there in upstate New York at Yasgurs’ farm, who listened to the vibes coming off the stage from legends like Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, CSNY, Country Joe and Fish—who supplied the letters for the Fish call, “Give me an F, give me a U…” etc—moved on after that, but with a new awareness. They all believed that they could make things happen to change the world, and guess what? They did!

It started slowly enough with the protests on college campuses against the Vietnam war. It was the first time in American history that ordinary people’s voices influenced violent American foreign policy. It affected the nation so much, that the president who got us into the quagmire of Vietnam, Lyndon Johnson, saw the rioting in the streets against the war and refused to run for another term of office, because he knew he could not win. It was the first major victory of the Woodstock Generation.

The second major victory was the election of Jimmy Carter and his environmentally friendly administration. He forecasted the dire need to find alternative forms of energy, and tried to get us off of our foreign dependence on oil. The Woodstock Generation elected him and his policies, but during the next election, the old establishment reared its ugly head and we elected Ronald Reagan and his Reaganomics, or as his VP George Bush once called them, voodoo economics. Although we returned to some of the darker days of environmental ignorance, change was still in the air.

Slowly but surely, cars began to get better fuel mileage and burn cleaner, with less harmful pollutants coming out of tailpipes. Ozone killing chlorofluorocarbons were banned in the US as was the raptor killing pesticide DDT—which caused the top predators in the food chain, namely birds of prey, to absorb so much DDT into their systems that when the females laid eggs, the eggs became so brittle that they cracked under her weight.

Other changes came as organic food went from being a cottage industry to going mainstream, recycling became commonplace, alternative means of power generation came back into vogue, and species of animals like whales and the bald eagle were saved from extinction.

All of these changes were brought about by the Woodstock Generation, that collection of hippies, yippies and dippies, leading the way on the front lines for a better way of life.

In one way or another, we are all members of that generation, we are all a member of the vast changes taking place, and we are all members of that movement for peace and love that started more than 40 years ago. We have elected an environmentally active president, and say what you will about any other policy that is put forth, the Obama administration is second to none when it comes to the environment and making it better. He has presented sweeping reforms for the use of alternative forms of energy, giving tax incentives and rebates to get the ball rolling. And it’s working. Solar and windmill production is up over last year, and for all the talk of a recession in the business of US economics, the alternative energy factions had none, and in fact, continued growing by leaps and bounds.

The original Woodstock Generation started the ball rolling for change on college campuses so long ago, and all of us, no matter when we were born, must always remember where it began, and we must always remember to keep that legacy of change alive.

Back in those wacky and wonderful days of the ‘50’s, when cars were big and egos were bigger, nuclear power was touted as the new wave in energy production. It was considered extremely safe, easy to manage and reliable. In fact, by 1954 before a single nuclear plant was built, it began to look as if nuclear power was so amazingly good, that electricity might even become too cheap to meter. How’s that for a concept!

So, back then when the economy was booming, money was everywhere, and new ideas were tried just because, well, just because they were new ideas, nuclear power plants began to get built. Better still, they began to produce electricity. At first, everything started to look like nuclear power was exactly as it had been predicted; cheap and clean power. And truthfully, it really is cheap and a clean source power overall. However, what no one foresaw in the beginning was the ultimate bugaboo with nuclear power, and that is nuclear waste.

Estimates say that nuclear waste will take 3 million years to become non radioactive, which is a pretty daunting statistic. 3 million years ago, humans were just about crawling out of the swamps, and 3 million years from now, we might be crawling back in them. Just on the face of it, everyone should be able to see a problem here with getting rid of this stuff. But, what can be done about this? Nuclear waste is a fact of life with a nuclear reactor, there’s no way around it, and larger nuclear reactors produce about 3 tons of waste per year!

That factor, right there, plus higher construction costs incorporating more and more safety regulations, and the 3 Mile Island disaster, essentially killed the nuclear power movement. Suddenly, nuclear power was a white elephant with no foreseeable future in the US.

In all actuality, the waste issue by itself bedevils the industry as a whole. Stored nuclear waste must either be buried somewhere in unleakable containers for 3 million years, or it must be reprocessed. Reprocessing can be done in many ways, which is the best solution to ridding the planet of this problem, but in an age when money talks, it isn’t cost effective to reprocess nuclear waste.

So, how green is nuclear energy? The power generated is created by zero emissions, which is the darling phrase of the green movement. It’s simple, really. Nuclear rods heat water and turn it into steam which drives generators sending massive currents of electricity into the lines. That’s it, and right there you can see how in the early 50’s, this really looked like a great idea. Find a source of cold water, any river or large lake will do, and you have free power. As it was said, electricity too cheap to meter. That’s the nuclear power fantasy.

The reality is, what to do about the waste. To bury it means making containers that last, potentially, millions of years, which is virtually impossible. Reprocessing means turning waste back into usable rods that can power the reactors, which is a good idea. However, since that is not cost effective, no one really wants to do it, and if it is done, suddenly nuclear power becomes more expensive than conventional ways to produce electricity. That’s a no win situation.

There is no doubt that at some point nuclear power, even with all of it’s safety and waste issues, will become the green power that has always been expected of it. The problem is, do we just want to scrap this white elephant and lead it out to pasture, or pour billions upon billions of dollars into making it a viable alternative for electrical power generation with no guarantees, while we have solar, wind, hydrogen and batteries which are cleaner, safer and ready to go right now. And that’s a question for the ages.

Many people may never have even heard of gas fracking before. It’s the process whereby huge amounts of water mixed with various chemical compounds, are pumped under deep underground using extremely high pressure, into established natural gas wells. This procedure breaks up the surrounding rock which releases still more gas into the well, and overall it dramatically increases natural gas production [Para 2 & Para 4]. That fact can’t be disputed.

Supposedly, with water and chemicals pumped so deep into the earth, there really should not be any effect on the human population. In fact, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has deemed all chemicals used for fracking as being safe for both groundwater, human populations, and the environment as a whole [Para 5, Lines 5 & 6]. That means individual states are responsible for the legislation on whether or not to allow fracking [Para 12], and permits are routinely applied for this supposed environmentally friendly technique, even as close to such large urban areas as New York City itself! [Para 2]

So then, if the EPA considers fracking as relatively harmless, and states across the U.S. allow thousands of wells each year to be fracked, what’s the big deal you might be asking?

The big deal here is that, just like the secret ingredients involved in making Coca Cola, the ingredients used for fracking wells does not have to be disclosed [Para 6, Lines 1-5]. That gives companies a free pass to be able to use any chemical or combination thereof as a fracking agent, with EPA approval no less. This stew of chemicals gets pumped below ground and aids in the extraction of natural gas, but at what cost? Although EPA approved and permitted by states as a safe way to obtain said natural gas, it’s the other side of the story that needs to be known.

Chemicals nearly killed an emergency room nurse who was treating a mining employee that was caught in a fracking fluid spill [Para 1 & 2]. Residents of Pittsburgh, whose wells had been fracked for the past year, were told to drink bottled water because high levels of contaminates, thought to come from fracking, have been located in their drinking water [Para 6]. Extreme water pressure has been reported in wells and other water sources from gas fracking, blowing water out of toilet tanks and leaving foul odors and an oily residue behind [Para 5-8].

In fact, scientific analysis of fracking fluids puts the finger on 278 toxic chemicals involved, with a staggering 93% of these which cause known health effects [Para 7]. And remember, all this has been certified safe by the EPA. Unfortunately, there is not a whole lot that can be done about this procedure. Since the federal government has signed off on this technique, and state governments undoubtedly get huge permit fees, there won’t be an end to gas fracking anytime soon.

However, there is a light at the end of this tunnel. Environmental protests were so effective in New York City, that the aforementioned permits to allow gas fracking in that area have been put on hold until next year. The Governor himself has directed updated legislation, to take into account modern drilling technology and waste disposal of the millions of gallons of water used in the fracking process. This new legislation will be determined by public hearings and draft regulations, and is considered a victory so far for New Yorkers and the surrounding environment [Para 7 & 8].

It is a small victory to be sure, but a victory nonetheless. And although gas fracking around the U.S. will certainly continue, let it be known that according to the companies that use it and the EPA which certifies it, health and safety need not apply.

[image credit: Gadjo Dilo]

However, incentives and words about what should and need to be done, goes only so far. It’s up to us to use these tools and use these incentives and use the knowledge that we have, and make this whole green movement work! Not the government, not your neighbor, it’s up to us, all of us, from top to bottom.

There are those of us who don’t even realize that we are a part of this. The person that thinks they have nothing to do with the green movement, and then pitches an empty beer can into a recycling bin, is just as much a part of this as you or I. The person that looks outside and sees what a gorgeous day it is, and decides to hang their clothes out instead of putting them in a dryer, or the person who merely checks the tire pressure on their car to make sure the tires are full on a monthly basis, is as much a part of this as anyone else.

Do they know it? Probably not; and do they care, hardly. But the fact is, they are out there doing it, maybe as a collective consciousness, maybe through osmosis with all the green information flowing in the airwaves, or maybe just because one little spark went off in their head to be a little more responsible. Regardless, it works.

Those of us on the front lines doing things like saving trees, becoming organic farmers, being actively involved with our carbon footprints, even going out in public and spreading the word, that is the crux of the green movement. It’s the soul of what drives us for this passion to make the environment better. We like to see ourselves as the movers and the shakers, the go-getters, the do-gooders, and none of that can be disputed.

But probably for most of us, it all began when that first can or bottle was thrown into the recycling bin. That first real act of environmental duty whether we even realized it or not, was the true beginning. We’ve all been there, we all started at the same place. All it took was a little awareness to know that it was the right thing to do; and you know what? It still is!

Get out there, do your thing, and at least make a difference in your world. I believe on some level, every one of us attempts to do just that. No matter what you do, no matter how you interact with the green scene, you are making an effort, and that’s what really matters here.

Yet, so is the person who does something as simple as pitching an empty can or plastic bottle into the recycling bin. Ultimately, this little act of environmental friendliness, even in that most basic of ways, touches each and every one of us. Multiply that selfless act by hundreds of thousands of times every day, and you have a true understanding of what that one little can or bottle means. Knowingly or not by the person who did it, in the greater scheme of things, that affects us all from top to bottom. And that’s where it all begins.

Plastic is here and here to stay, I’m afraid, and so we will have to deal with it. As much of a scourge it is to the environment, it has many good and positive uses, particularly in the medical industry where using plastics have no doubt stopped the spread of disease and have saved countless lives.

But there is one element of plastic that we can all do without. We can get rid of plastic bags altogether, get rid of them for shopping, and get rid of them in our landfills. Did you know that upwards of, perhaps, a trillion plastic bags are used each year worldwide, and truth be told, these are 2003 figures. I am too frightened to look up more modern figures because I just don’t want to know. One is too many as far as I am concerned.

We don’t need plastic bags, people, I mean at the very least for grocery or food shopping, where most of the plastic bags come from. If there is a medical or health need for them, more power to those that need them, but as far as everyday society goes, they need to be gone and disappear.

The worst part about the plastic bag is that it can be totally recycled. As in 100% recycled. Then why are we only recycling 1 to 3% of them every year? I’ll tell you why, it’s too easy to just throw them in the regular trash then to separate them out for recycling. We are lazy, that’s why.

If you are a regular Mind Petal reader, you have certainly seen my article on plastic water bottles. I hate those as well. They fall into the same category as plastic bags, although they aren’t quite as insidious since plastic water bottles are getting about 30% recycled, so although that’s still pretty horrible, it’s better than plastic bags.

The problem here is that there are so many alternatives to plastic bags that it isn’t even an issue. Virtually any where one goes, there are canvas reusable bags, nylon reusable bags, backpacks, purses, boxes and anything else you can think of that is equally as good as or better than a plastic bag! I mean, this isn’t that hard.

I have several reusable bags that have been serving me well for years. I keep a couple in my car for just in case, and I have the rest in my house when I know I am going major shopping.

When I ride a bike I take along my backpack and can fill that baby up with quite a bit of goodies. This is a no brainer here. I have even taken several plastic bags, pushed them inside of each other, duct taped the handles together and made myself a super duper heavy duty reusable plastic bag. Except for a few pieces of tape, it didn’t cost me a cent. And if I can do this, you can do this too!

Anyway, as you can plainly tell, I do not like plastic bags. So, can we get rid of them please? Thank you.

Talk about a firestorm brewing, one of the mainstays of the environmental movement, which are bio fuels, are now under attack by…these same environmentalists who advocated its use in the first place! What? How can this be? Aren’t bio fuels supposed to be one of the answers for getting rid of pollution and CO2 in our atmosphere? Let’s get down to the nitty gritty, shall we?

One of the climate initiatives the current administration is wanting to develop is the implementation of bio fuels, in particular ethanol, to start replacing fossil fuels that we burn in our autos and trucks. The transition to do this and do it as fast as possible, is a serious priority, and supposedly a well meaning priority as well.

Now, no one is going to argue that ethanol being burned in a car or a truck produces less emissions than gasoline. So many studies show that ethanol burns cleaner that it has become an obvious fact. However, that isn’t the sticking point to ethanol production and usage. The big debate now centers over the way it’s made, the cost it takes to make it, and the pollutants released during production, which in scientific terms are called, indirect emissions.

These include things like cultivating the land to grow crops for ethanol production, harvesting those crops, transportation of those crops, and even land usage overall was taken into consideration. The point of that argument is that yes, ethanol burns cleaner than gas, but overall, no, it is just as polluting.

Well all you Mind Petal readers, there is or should I say was some actual proof that broke down the ethanol to gasoline energy rating, and yes it was in fact a win for gasoline production and emissions over ethanol production and emissions. As late as 2006 and possibly beyond, it was calculated that ethanol cost more in energy to make then what was left in fuel energy.

But, guess what? A brand new study released just this past January 30th by University of Nebraska, Iowa State, Michigan State, and the University of Wisconsin, found out that ethanol produces twice as much energy as it consumes. So why was this study so much different than all the others done so far? Because of new data which includes less water needed to make ethanol because of better production standards, new corn hybrids create more corn with less fertilizer, and the scraps from corn and any other plant can be turned into ethanol as well.

And then think about this for the future. Fossil fuel emissions are going to go down in the harvesting and planting of crops since eventually, all those vehicles will be burning ethanol too!

But for the Green Guy here, this is the bottom line. Even if there is a one to one ration with ethanol pollutants and gasoline pollutants, regardless of all of that, forget about anything else except one other thing, ethanol production is sustainable. Get it? We don’t have to go digging in some foreign country for our fuel, we can grow it all right here, every last drop! Not to mention, and ethanol additive to gasoline like say E-85, is already less expensive than petroleum, and ethanol will always be cheaper, which makes it automatically better for the economy.

Let’s face it, bio fuels win. I’d much rather be addicted to a fuel made in the heartland of America, keeping American dollars in this country, as opposed to paying some foreign marketplace for gas and making those foreign producers rich from American dollars.

I mean, wouldn’t you?

First of all, even in this recession that we are having right now, solar cells are having a boom year. If you ever wanted to invest in the stock market, solar cells are darn near a sure thing.

More states will be giving tax benefits and rebates this year, mainly due to the new government administration and the 30% tax incentive that benefits solar cell purchases, and at the very least, these incentives will be in place for the next 8 years! Our government has passed into law major incentives for anyone who wants to use alternative energy, and that means easier access and much more cost effectiveness for you. It also means, continued growth in the solar industry.

But, lets forget about the money talk right now, and get into the meat of the solar powered revolution, the actual solar cells themselves.

Right now, the highest efficiency solar cells are converting about 20% of the suns light into electricity. Only a few years ago, it was between 12 and 15%, so efficiency is steadily growing. However, there are designs out there called the 3rd generation of solar cells that are getting in the area of a nearly 50% conversion rates of sun to electricity, and needless to say, once those get to the market, it will be another solar cell revolution.

The big buzz this year is from a product called thin film solar cells. Unlike traditional solar panels that need to be mounted in ungainly looking, and to some peoples’ eyes, ugly roof frames, thin film solar cells need merely to be glued down to a roof where they lay almost invisible to the naked eye! Although they are not yet quite as efficient as regular crystalline solar cells (the standard in the industry), because they are thinner and cheaper to produce, you can get more of them in the same space and therefore, quantity equals quality in this case.

Right now, that is what is available to anyone out there who wants to go solar, and those are truly a couple of good choices. However, there are designs of solar cells out there with efficiency ratings that are truly amazing and make the ones available now look like toys.

For example, Boeing invented a solar cell that gets about 40% efficiency by concentrating the suns rays onto the cells themselves. That’s by still using the old standard cells, but just by doing a little tweaking, they are able to reap large benefits.

However, the most promising technology on the horizon are called 3D or nano tube solar cells. These cells have a raised coating that look like miniature skyscrapers and capture all forms of light, from visible to infra red and ultra violet. Although no efficiency rating is given on these experimental cells, it is the goal of the scientists working on this project that every last photon collected is turned into usable electricity. In lay persons terms, that equates to somewhere in the 75% to near 100% efficiency. Talk about a revolution, and this is going to be a big one.

There you have the skinny on everything solar, what’s out there now, and what will be available for the future. Personally, I’m licking my chops because this is the type of technology that is the wave of the future, and I can hardly wait!

I mean, how many of you parents would love to know that when your children go to school they are learning, not only the basics of education, but also the basics of conservation and responsibility? And we can take that a step farther and say, how many students would love to embrace the environment through studies and hands on teaching? This is what we mean by green ideas for the classroom.

Public and private schools being what they are, and I am not in any way dissing these institutions one bit, can only do so much with the curriculums that they are allowed to teach. I myself came up through the public school domain, my core principles about the environment stemmed from a sociology class I was a part of in high school. But teaching about the environment was a fringe experience and not the norm. I suspect that in modern public and private schools, although awareness has changed, the teaching policies haven’t advanced much since I was in school.

Well, here are a couple of schools that deviate from the normal everyday run-of-the-mill teaching institution, that are willing to incorporate the environment into classes, but not so much by teaching alone, but by being hands-on. Now there may be others, but these two stand out. One is the Fox River Academy Environmental School, and the other is the Manassas Park Elementary School They have gone green not just by teaching about the environment, but by living it with their construction, their practices and the fact that the schools themselves are the curriculum that are totally hands on working examples of what going green is all about!

Thanks to the communities along with the state and local governments, as well as individual donations, they are teaching green from the ground up. And folks, there is no better way to go green when the students in our schools learn about the environment, alternative energy, and ways to be natural and organic, then to learn it in school at an elementary level.

My question is, with all the Obama initiative money floating around out there, this should be one of the priorities for spending it. If these schools can do it on a local level, ANY school should be able to do it with a little government funding. Yes, I am all in favor of the current administrations green energy initiatives, but our schools should be the starting point about learning how to be green. Teaching and learning green at school levels, using a building that is full of energy efficient solutions as well as alternative methods, is the perfect medium for students to not only learn green, but live it, every day of their lives.

I applaud these schools for going down the green pathway that they are. They set shining examples of what can be, and what should be in all the schools across America. Mr Obama, are you listening?