I buy organic fair trade coffee because it tastes a lot better and regular coffee is one of the most polluted food products we consume- most of it is grown in third world countries with virtually no regulations on the use of pesticides.

While shopping at my local natural food store for coffee I realized I needed milk so I picked up some organic milk. When I got home (Rochester, NY), I looked at the carton and found that this milk was either from Wisconsin or Oregon- it wasn’t clear. This is crazy. We ship a commodity like milk thousands of miles? Don’t the organic food people realize what the carbon cost of this is?

I think if we’re going certify things like Fair Trade and Organic we should add a third food label: Estimated Carbon Cost or ECC. It would a shocker to know that the supposedly environmentally friendly products we’re buying are actually much worse for the planet than those that are local.

If this is for real, it’s a breakthrough. A Penn State research team has developed a way to extract hydrogen using common bacteria that is highly efficient, clean and low cost. They claim it returns 288% more energy than the process consumes.

This would be very big news as hydrogen extraction methods in use today are not energy efficient and typically require the use of petro products, rendering hydrogen’s use in fuel cells inefficient when you look at the big picture, costwise. Because hydrogen is a completely clean fuel, an efficient production process could dramatically change things. I suspect GM will be all over this for their fuel cell car project.

They also claim the process could be used for fertilizer production, another process that currently relies heavily on using petroleum products.

Nice to have something positive to write about!

Image courtesy of the National Science Foundation.

It has started. Arizona governor Bill Richardson opened the first salvo by suggesting that the Northeast should ’share’ their water with the Southwest. Apparently we’re ‘awash’ in it and they desperately need it to justify building more golf courses , growing more lawns in desert lands and building more McMansions. Now that the Colorado is running dry and their aquifers are empty, they are looking north and covetously eyeing the Great Lakes.

Only one problem. Richardson is running for President and he can’t win without the Northeast so he quickly backed off from his comments. This kind of thing only reinforces that we need a comprehensive water rights policy that is national and international. Alabama and Florida are fighting over watershed rights that transcend state and national boundaries. California and the Southwestern states are doing the same and Mexico can only look on as less and less water flows downstream to them.

No one is advocating the real changes that must be made:

• Immediately put a moratorium on any new construction that cannot show rights to at least 50 years worth of water supplies not currently claimed by others
• Drought areas must impose permanent mandatory water conservation plans on all sectors including businesses
• Long term water reclamation, storage, transportation and generation strategies must be developed and funded
• Rates for water use must immediately be raised two-fold to put the nation on an emergency notice that is a looming national problem
• Raised taxes on excess water use should be funneled into long term water conservation and reclamation strategies

This is a real time problem. And no one, especially the politicians, is doing anything about it.

Think about it.