Sustainability

kaiser endorses green building and sustainability along with waste reduction

CLEANER BURNING BUSES
Let’s get it clear and burned into our brains. CO₂ is a green house gas (ghg) and it along with other gases, causes global warming.

Municipality after local agency touts the cleaner burning buses or their fleet of city owned cars running on methane (CH₄ or natural gas). When methane is burned it combines O₂ (oxygen) to form CO₂.

What we need for both rapid mass transit as well as city fleets are electric plug-in and hybrid- plug-in vehicles. The ultimate would be “fuel cell” powered vehicles. Fuel cells emit only steam – water vapor, by burning hydrogen and combining with O₂. No pollutants no green house gases. Fuel cells produce low pressure steam. The steam condenses in air and falls to the ground as water vapor.

Really clean burning vehicles don’t produce green house gases. By the way, it is more correctly termed “global heating” no long “global warming.” Our planet is hot and getting hotter. Remember the fable about the frog in a pot of slowly warming water? He could have jumped out and saved himself, but grew comfortable in the warm water. Then all of a sudden it was too late and the water was boiling. Poor Froggy.

Rose Parade’s Carbon Foot Print

While watching the Tournament of Roses Parade on New Years Day I was reminded of a comment made by a old British friend.  She said “Pomp and Circumstance or ceremony is necessary to an organized society.”   It is the ceremony, dance, special dress, marches, parades the music and national attire that lend a sense of belonging and identity, even community to its practitioners, she counseled.

 

But I ask at what price?  I was appalled at what the carbon footprint of that Rose Parade must be.   300+ band members flown in from all over the world.   One troop bussed it fromEl Salvador, a 5000 mile trek, plus motels, food, and barrels of diesel fuel.   Creating tons of particulate matter.

 

At the parade site people camped out, had fires to keep warm, and created a waste pile of unimaginable portions.  Most of  it non-biodegradable.

 

So we had our yearly episode of pomp and ceremony and all I can see that is worth the effort is the boost to the organic flower industry who gained from the volume sales.