The Suburban parked at a Shell Station in New Jersey, behind a new Prius.

The Administration is sanctioning (through the “Stimulus Bill”) payment to anyone who brings in their old car, and uses that payment toward a new car. The environmental and carbon impacts of this program is devastating. The amount of new carbon dioxide that shall be spewed into the atmosphere by the recycling of old cars and creation of new cars vastly outweighs simply driving our old clunkers until they die. Preferably, we would repair our cars until they have literally rusted away. The amount of carbon dioxide and new pollution that is tacked onto the production of a new automobile is burdensome. I wish the U.S. Government would consult scientists prior to passing these programs that are meant to “bolster the economy.”

Fun Commentary on this:

http://www.journalgazette.net/

http://forums.treehugger.com/

GAGA is a true representation of our sustainable past. Mr. Garner built a community in Garnerville, a community built upon the Minisceongo Creek for its hydro power potential. Imagine that – a community built for making fine dies.

Here’s what to do – and there’s a lot of different ways to get in touch with us:

Our website: http://www.emergentgroup.com/posse/

Join us on Facebook @ The Emergent Posse : http://www.facebook.com/home.php#/group.php?gid=80673874691

Twitter us @EmergentEnergy : http://twitter.com/EmergentEnergy

On your phone: Text ‘empower’ to 68398

CNM is a tool  that can be utilized by community energy project developers to make a project more profitable. Traditionally, power generation capacity is built by large corporations in large chunks. A nuclear station here, a huge coal power plant there, lend a hydroelectric facility to the books and you’ve got a pretty good/maybe diverse portfolio. But in this equation, with a grid of transmission lines coating the country but only a few nodes of generation, there was never a place for small scale, community-based generation capacity – I’m talking everything from a roof-top solar array to two or three utility scale wind turbines behind the cement manufacturing facility. The problem has been regulation. These small generators didn’t have their own permitting and regulation categories so they fell into processes meant for 100 million dollar power plant projects. Hundreds of thousands of dollars in permitting fees and five years of public hearings kinda takes the fun out of a small wind turbine at the high school, right?

Now I’m obviously exaggerating there at the end, but the point stands that renewable energy has had trouble penetrating the market. And it makes sense from a business standpoint. Let’s think of an analogy. You’re a sock distribution company. There are four big companies who will supply you all the socks you could ever need. They deliver socks once a day in one big truck. There are also 1,000 small sock makers who offer the exact same socks. They also offer them at the same price. However, they each have separate delivery trucks. Would you, as the distribution company, even want to talk to these other smaller companies and bear the hassle or receiving 1,000 small shipments daily?  You’ve got all the socks you need and you only have to talk to three business partners and deal with minimal shipments. Sure, the socks are no more expensive, but the expense comes in terms of organizing an operating the receiving of socks.

These socks are electricity. The 1,000 small companies are solar roofs and residential or community-scale wind projects. The utility is doing what’s in their best interest. They are buying ‘bulk’ electricity and keeping their overhead down in terms of managing the electric distribution grid. So regulation must enter the sock sector if we want to give the smaller companies a chance to stand up to the big sock generators, or is that power generators?  Nevermind! Two points: First, yes, the costs to the utility go up because they have higher overhead. Second, we get renewable energy on the grid and achieve energy independence (avoiding price spikes, energy security issues, and, yes, save the planet from global climate change). Prices will eventually go down or level out when the market is mostly renewable-based, because there is no fuel cost for renewable energy generation and economies of scale will eventually bring equipment and installation costs down.

Sorry, back to CNM. Now, with CNM, the utility is required to do the following, based on the sock analogy. You want a sock from the sock maker that lives on your street? You got it. Support your local industry. Maybe you even have a financial interest in this particular, small-scale, mom-and-pop sock producer. If you buy 10 pairs of socks a month, that big distributor (the sock, I mean electric grid) is required to buy the same number from the producer on your street. The socks are all identical, remember, so who knows if you’re actually getting those. That’s not important. . .

The important factor here is that the distributor is required to support your local business, your local industry, and potentially your local financial interest (that means your local solar panels or wind turbines). Pretty cool, huh?

Me neither; maybe it’s because I grew up without t.v., or maybe it’s because these ads NEVER EXISTED BEFORE!

I find it absolutely fascinating that the airwaves and t.v. minutes are being saturated with advertisements for “Coal, America’s Fuel” and “Heating Oil, Now That’s Comfort.” If you go to the American Coal Council’s website there’s a picture of. . . a. . . golf course. “Coal, The People Who Do Business on The Course.” The heating oil campaign is hitting hard here in New England because many people are realizing they can’t afford to heat their homes with oil so they are looking for alternatives.

The radio and tv must love the revenues, as these industries have never had to advertise in the past. Why? Because there were no alternatives and there was no public awareness of the damage these industries are doing to our planet and our future. They have been saying our ‘way of life’ depends on these resources. But I would challenge, which came first, the chicken or the egg? We now have the alternatives and thus the option of adapting our lifestyle to a new world, a world where we walk and ride bikes more and actually know the names of our neighbors, where we work in buildings and communities that were designed for us, not cars, and where our very ‘way of life’ does not threaten the very life of the next few generations.

Maybe the advertising is a sign of weakness. . . Or at least a changing marketplace, which is heartening.

Click for the video.