OH NO, WE DON'T HAVE A PROBLEM

Hello all you naysayers! All you who chuckle at the prospect of less oil existing for our abundant lifestyles! Those of you who think there will never be an interruption in our oil supply now or ever. It's 2008. Let's have lunch and talk about how our lives are progressing in 2010, shall we?

San Fran is doing it for themselves!

Here we go. San Francisco has really stepped up to the plate to be the leading authority in all things recyclable. My hopes now is that more cities will follow quickly out of intelligience, not merely necessity. Check out the article

Will Green be the Bridging Technology?

Our planet is painstakingly waking up to the fact that petroleum will soon no longer be a major component of almost every product we use and ingest. This is because, guess what, we're close to using up all the fossil fuels we can easily extract from the ground. Scientists and researchers and big manufacturing companies are slowly investigating the use of plant materials to replace all that oil has done for us. Of course, this sounds all sweet and green, but the reality is that this experimentation should have happend a dozen years ago, at least, to begin to mitigate the affects of an energy source soon to be depleted. Yes, it's a valiant try for these chemists to begin their search for alternatives, but the fact remains that they only have a few years left to come up with long term solutions which currently use the energy of petroleum products to fuel their research.

New Ways, Old Materials

Here is yet another way to envision recycling: everyday objects transformed into shelter instead of wasting energy to reformat these materials into new products. . .How about using plant material as wallpaper? . . . Rem Koolhaas has designed the most ecologically sustainable city to date located in the United Arab Emirates that should prove to be a fascinatig experiment of humans' ability to create zero-carbon cities.

Inkjet Solar Power & Mannahatta

A company in Massachusetts has successfully constructed a machine which uses inkjet printer technology to create fast, inexpensive solar cells on flexible plastic. The possibilities are endless...so were the possibilities of Manhattan prior to our concretization of the island - Dr. Eric Sanderson has created maps of what Mannahatta, the Lenape Indians name for NYC four hundred years ago, used to look like with its bounty of diverse ecological environments.

How We Throw It Away

An article about where New Yorkers can recycle their unwanted or obsolete electronics. It's a relief to see that organizations exist to help us dispose of toxic products every one of us own and will eventually throw away. The biggest issue is changing our behavior. It is deeply ingrained in our throw away culture to simply toss our unwanted possessions in the garbage. It seems that consumerism has effectively preached to the masses a god-given right to a simple, thoughtless, and quick way to unload all that we don't want and to speedily replace it with something new.

$104 a barrel

There is a great opinion piece in the New York Times about our sobering oil situation, Bush's insidious disregard thinly veiled as harmless ignorance, and Exxon Mobile's $40 billion profit in 2007 and the new subsidies our government wants to give to big oil companies. Enough to make one want to riot, barf, scream, move to another country, and so on, etc. My thanks to journalists who are able to articulate and present these facts coherently without resorting to the above mentioned reactions.