Sorry Ain't Enough...

There is nothing left

to you

at this moment

but to have a good/big laugh.

from the Zen.

Drop in the ocean

The broken BP rig is leaking about 8,820 tons of crude oil into the Gulf every day. It is sickening the ocean and killing marine life. Believe me, I grieve. However, what worries me even more is what we don’t see. A little over half that amount gets burned and released as auto emissions into the skies of Los Angeles every day. That’s somewhere in the vicinity of 4,740 tons of hydrocarbons a day. It is sickening the air we breathe and causing debilitating respiratory problems. Sustained exposure to hydrocarbons compromises the body’s defense system resulting in ailments such as chronic bronchitis and pneumonia. If you don’t believe me, check out an emergency room in L.A on a smoggy summer day. What is even more insidious is what crosses the mother’s placenta, and gets absorbed by the human fetus. Toxins related to hydrocarbons are known to impair prenatal development. This accounts for a higher incidence of developmental disorders such as autism, attention deficit, hyperactivity and dyslexia. Sometimes impairment doesn’t show up until later in life when it becomes visible as signs of depression or schizophrenia. I believe the human suffering caused by addiction to fossil fuel is immeasurable. It makes the Gulf oil spill seem like a drop in the ocean.

Pigs In Space

Deepwater Horizon begins gushing oil into the Gulf of Mexico.

Deepwater Nightmare

The Deepwater Horizon drilling rig explosion occurred on April 20, 2010 on the semi-submersible offshore drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in the Gulf of Mexico.

Survivors described the incident as a sudden explosion which gave them less than five minutes to escape as the alarm went off. After having been on fire for more than a day, Deepwater Horizon sank on April 22, 2010 in 5,000 feet of water. 115 of the 126 member crew were recovered, and eleven remain missing.

Although initially the undersea wellhead appeared to be contained, on 24 April it was found that the wellhead was damaged and was leaking oil into the Gulf. Coast Guard Rear Admiral Mary Landry described it as "a very serious spill, absolutely." BP plans to use remotely operated vehicles (ROVs) to close the well at depth; up to 19,000 barrels of oil a day is estimated to be leaking from the wellhead. The valve closing procedure was estimated to take 24 to 36 hours as of April 25; oil cleanup was being hampered by high waves on April 24 and 25. By April 25, the oil spill covered 1500 square km, and was only 50 km from the Chandeleur Islands, ecologically sensitive barrier islands already damaged by Hurricane Katrina. (read more)

Yeast In A Jar

Highway To Hell

Today, over 25,000 children died around the world

Corporate Murder

"We are not expendable. We are not flowers offered at the altar of profit and power. We are dancing flames committed to conquering darkness and to challenging those who threaten the planet and the magic and mystery of life."
Rashida Bee, Bhopal gas leak survivor

The Union Carbide disaster, also known as the Bhopal disaster or the Bhopal gas tragedy, was an industrial catastrophe that took place at a Union Carbide pesticide plant in the Indian city of Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh on December 3, 1984. Around 12 AM, the plant released methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas and other toxins, resulting in the exposure of over 500,000 people. Estimates vary on the death toll; the official immediate death toll was 2259, which rose greatly over time. The government of Madhya Pradesh has confirmed a total of 3787 deaths related to the gas release. Another source says that a few days later the death toll had doubled. Over the next few years, the lingering effects of the poison nearly doubled the toll again, to about 15,000, according to government estimates. Local activists say the real numbers are almost twice that. Others estimate 8000 to 10,000 died within 72 hours and 25,000 have since died from gas-related diseases.

Some 25 years after the gas leak, 390 tonnes of toxic chemicals abandoned at the Union Carbide plant continue to leak and pollute the ground water in the region and affect thousands of Bhopal residents who depend on it.

(read more)

Junk Yard Man

You are not content with

polluting your planet

Now you have made your

outer space a junk yard too

Within the vast debris field

there are tens of millions of

small fragments and an estimated

19,000 at 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) or heavier

The Kessler Syndrome will soon render

space exploration, and even the use of

satellites, infeasible for many generations

The Chemical Edge

This little piggy went to market,

This little piggy stayed at home,

This little piggy had roast beef,

This little piggy had none...

And this little piggy is an example

of what chemical and toxic pollution

is doing to biological life forms,

meaning us, the cause of it all,

we are the little guinea piggies,

and we will be the ones that go...

"Wee wee wee" all the way home.


(read more)

Earth Creatures

We were here

before you were

Coastal zone

We used to call them swamps. Oil companies dumped sludge into them. Real estate developers excavated them ..and built pricey coastal communities like Marina Del Rey. Just north of there, surfers in Santa Monica began getting sick ..with symptoms ranging from skin rashes to heart attacks. I used to get ear infections. Investigators discovered high levels of toxins in the water ..both natural and man-made ..and began closing beaches for like months at a time. We don’t call them swamps any longer. They’re ‘estuaries’ ..and they serve a purpose .. filtering runoff before it goes into the ocean ..removing contaminants .. keeping the shoreline hospitable ..and the ocean sustainable (ask a fisherman). The Bolsa Chica wetlands is the only one remaining in Southern California that hasn’t been developed to the point where it’s lost all of that. A 40-year old feud between developers and environmentalists has kept it that way. Fanatical environmentalists. I’ll bet you there’s not one person surfing the nearby river jetty who hasn’t gotten sick.

Permanently Protect the Arctic Refuge!

Click here ~> Urge Congress to Permanently Protect the Arctic Refuge! - The Petition Site

Elon Musk

Elon Musk (born 1971) is an American engineer, entrepreneur and philanthropist best known for co-founding PayPal, SpaceX and Tesla.

He is currently the CEO and CTO of SpaceX, CEO and Product Architect of Tesla Motors and Chairman of SolarCity.

The White Zombie

The oil industry doesn't want you to know about the electric car...
with an electric car and a small solar panel you could drive for free.

Message in a Bottle

A Sea of Plastic

Just for worldwide consumption of bottled water in 2004 alone it took roughly 87.4 million barrels of oil. You can imagine that with statistics for 2008, we have a figure in the hundreds of millions of barrels of oil being used just to produce bottled water. Don't buy water in plastic bottles, water is free!

America and the world’s addiction to plastic doesn’t end there. Plastic bags take oil, just like plastic bottles to produce. Currently the U.S. consumes 100 billion plastic shopping bags in a year and worldwide consumption is estimated to be from 500 billion to 1 trillion plastic bags a year. That is roughly 1 million plastic bags a minute being consumed and less than 1% is recycled. If we legalize hemp we could make bags from a profitable and sustainable source and avoid wasting all that oil and energy making "trash that lasts forever."

I guess it's okay to pollute our waters now because, "we can $ell them clean water in a pla$tic bottle." Clean water is a right, not a commodity to be exploited. I bet next they will try to $ell us air and fire and dirt.

Sperm

In the 1950's the average sperm count was 120 million per milliliter. The average sperm count today has been halved to an average of around 60 million per milliliter in the Western world, a decrease of 1-2% per year.

My guess is that all the poisons, chemicals and female hormone mimicking compounds we've introduced into our environment and food have begun to concentrate in our bodies and are slowly trying to turn boys into girls. Male infertility will be the method of our self-annihilation. We are killing ourselves and the planet with our waste.

Plastic in the ocean (Plastic is forever)

This is Genevieve Johnson speaking to you from the Odyssey in the Canary Islands.

When I reflect on our time researching at sea over the past five years, two unrelated things stand out - sperm whales and plastics.

We are not always assured of finding sperm whales. However, even in the most remote regions of the ocean, plastics are guaranteed. Unfortunately, the relationship between plastics and all marine life is far more intricate than most of us could possibly imagine.


The numerous benefits of modern society's productivity make almost all of us utterly addicted to plastic products. Most of the products we use on a daily basis include, or are contained in plastic. We drink out of them, eat off them, carry food and clothing in them, sit on them and drive in them. Plastics are durable, lightweight and can be made into virtually anything. It is these very practical and useful properties of plastics that make them so harmful when they make their way into the oceans. Unfortunately, most of us give little thought to where plastics come from or where they end up after they have served our brief purpose.

The vastness of the ocean is incomprehensible to those who have never spent any time at sea. Yet, as we gaze out over the horizon from onboard Odyssey over what most of us imagine is a pristine seascape, we are continually confronted with a sea of plastic.

Historically, humans have always tossed waste into the ocean but marine organisms broke it down in a relatively short time. Unfortunately, our quest for convenient packaging over the past 50 years or so, created a class of plastic products that are immune to even the most rapacious bacteria.


Despite the era of recycling, only 3.5% of plastics are recycled in any way throughout the world. Today, plastic debris causes considerable, widespread mortality of marine wildlife, including mammals, birds, turtles and fish through entanglement in monofilament plastic fishing gear and ingestion. Turtles mistake plastic bags for jellyfish and other prey. Seabirds, particularly Albatross, mistake plastics floating at the surface for food and ingest them while foraging. Three hundred thousand cetaceans drown annually in fishing gear, while necropsy records of several stranded cetaceans, including large whales and particularly dolphins, reveal the ingestion of plastic debris.

The problem with plastics is they do not biodegrade. When something biodegrades, naturally occurring organisms break down natural materials into their simple chemical components. For example, when paper breaks down it becomes carbon dioxide and water. However, plastic is a synthetic material and never biodegrades. Instead it undergoes a process called 'photodegredation', whereby sunlight breaks it down into smaller and smaller pieces over very long periods of time. A disposable diaper takes an estimated 500 years to break down while plastic 6-pack rings for cans take 400 years and a plastic water bottle can take up to 450 years to degrade. However, this does not mean they will disappear, all remain as plastic polymers and eventually yield individual molecules of plastic too tough for any organism to digest.

In 2001, the Algalita Marine Research Foundation based in Long Beach California led by Captain Charles Moore, conducted a survey thousands of miles out to sea in a remote region of the Pacific Ocean known as the North Pacific subtropical gyre in an effort to assess the extent of the problem of plastic pollution in the ocean. Gyres are areas where oceanographic convergences and eddies cause debris fragments to accumulate naturally. What the researchers discovered was both shocking and outrageous, a floating mass of plastic junk stretching across an area of ocean the size of Texas. Rivers of soda and water bottles, spray can tops, candy wrappers, cigarette lighters, shopping bags, polypropylene fishing nets, buoys and unidentifiable, miscellaneous fragments collected in a huge rotating mass of plastic pollution.


In addition to large obvious pieces of plastic, the results of the survey revealed minute plastic fragments mixed with tiny sea creatures. The published results from the survey reveal a sea of plastic soup comprising "six pounds of plastic floating in the gyre for every pound of naturally occurring zooplankton." Charles Moore now believes "plastic debris is the most common surface feature of the world's oceans."

Until now, no studies were conducted on filter-feeding organisms such as jellies, whose feeding mechanisms do not permit them to distinguish between tiny fragments of plastic debris and plankton, and no studies to assess potential effects on these filter-feeders. It is now known that plastic fragments heavily impact these creatures. When broken into smaller pieces, these tiny plastic fragments accumulate non-water soluble toxicants such as PCB's, and pesticides such as DDT. Plastic polymers, or tiny plastic resin pellets act as sponges for these chemicals and other persistent organic pollutants, concentrating such poisons up to one million times higher than their concentration in the water as free floating substances.

The implications and scope of the problem is astounding considering about 250 billion pounds of plastic pellets are produced annually worldwide for use in the manufacture of various plastic products. When these products break down into fragments and disperse throughout the oceans, they concentrate and transport toxicants. In the North Pacific oceanic gyre, Moore and his team witnessed filter feeding jellies or salps with brightly colored plastic fragments in their stomachs. Fish consumed by larger and larger predators in turn eat these tiny organisms, all the while the toxicants continue to climb and concentrate up the food chain. In many cases, this chemical pathway leads directly to human beings. Many of these chemicals are 'hormone mimics' and 'endocrine disruptors' and are released into the body when plastic is ingested. The effects of hormone disruption on humans can range from birth defects to cancers.


The facts are daunting and the future looks grim. Moore and his colleagues currently predict a 10-fold increase in plastic in the ocean by 2010 bringing the ratio of 60 pounds of surface plastic to every one pound of zooplankton in the North Pacific gyre.

In the meantime, it is up to all of us to be aware that we share one fragile earth, sustained by one ocean system. We can all contribute to its demise, but more importantly we are all responsible for the conservation of our marine environment and the amazing life it supports. We do not need to make sacrifices in our lives, only minor modifications. We can help minimize the impact by being responsible about the amount of plastic products we consume. Unfortunately labeled recycling bins are not always reliable; if possible reduce the amount of plastic products you purchase by searching for alternative materials and reuse plastics where possible. We can all make a difference.

Tesla Motors

The Tesla Roadster is a plug-in electric car with a range of over 200 miles. The new "Model S" sedan will have a range of 300 miles. This is what we've been waiting for.


Referring to the Tesla Roadster, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger said, "I test drove this vehicle, and it is hot."

Plastic