Step Up, Speak Out
Make your voice heard this awkward isolated holiday season. Score one for Planet Earth, even so! It will make you happy!
For Thanksgiving this year, use your voice to protect our forests, our water or the Arctic realm from Big Oil exploitation. Couldn’t be easier. Just click one (or all three) of the links below and add your name (and comments if you want) to the petitions urgently needed to protect our personal and environmental health from being sold out from under us.
If you send a personal remark with your generic petition, maybe paste it into a comment to this post and share with us. That might inspire another to speak out—maybe for the first time!
Stop Burning American Forests | NRDC (A chief grievance of mine!)
Forests are one of our best tools for fighting climate change and one of our best defenses against its impacts. We need to stand up and demand that the European Union stops destroying our forests in the southeast U.S. for carbon-polluting electricity generation.
European Union policymakers and Member States must:
End subsidies and other incentives for burning forest wood and redirect this critical support to energy efficiency and low-emissions renewable energy sources like solar and wind
Exclude energy generated from burning forest wood from counting toward renewable energy targets
Prioritize forest protection and restoration and ensure that all European Union policies safeguard our health, the climate, and biodiversity.
Get ‘forever chemicals’ out of bottled water!
Forty-three of the 47 bottled waters Consumer Reports tested had detectable levels of PFAS. These chemicals have been linked to cancer, birth defects, and other serious health problems in people with prolonged exposure.
Sign our petition to the International Bottled Water Association to adopt a more stringent standard for PFAS in bottled water
#ff SERVING SUGGESTION: don’t drink water from plastic bottles. You’re welcome.
Save the Arctic Refuge Before It’s Too Late | NRDC
In its waning days, the Trump administration is rushing to sell off vast stretches of Alaska's pristine Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to devastating oil and gas drilling. And now, it is inviting oil companies to request specific parcels of land in the Arctic Refuge to be made available for drilling. Oil giants like Chevron could have drilling leases in hand within weeks.
UPDATE Wednesday 25 Nov 2020 11:06 AM: funding for Arctic drilling is becoming harder and harder to find. Both oil companies and banks have decided they can no longer tolerate the risk of drilling in one of the fastest-warming places on the globe. Ben Cushing, who leads the nonprofit Sierra Club’s financial advocacy campaign, put the problem simply: “Smart money is staying away from this kind of development in the Arctic.”
If you consider "emissions for the life of the product per BTU, I'd think wood would have a lower profile. For natural gas, you'd have to factor in the energies and resources (metals, plastics, packaging etc) for all mining, manufacturing, shipping, installation and maintenance elements required towards the production of the BTU of gas heat, plus of course the eminent domain costs. For wood, the extended costs include same as above for the production of one small engine, a few hand tools, and few ounces of gasoline for saw and truck to get the dead branches a few hundred yards to my wood stacks. Most of the energy involved is muscle power. So seeing a apples-to-apples comparison for emissions from a BTU of wood-generated heat vs the same for natural gas I think leaves out a lot. And I have not seen or looked for these figures for that reason.
For giggles let's say both wood and propane have the same emissions profile and produce x BTUs of energy inside the hypothetical heated home. IF that was the case, then the choice for me would rest on what was involved in obtaining the BTUs from nature. For the propane, we know the cost and environmental footprint full well. Wood can also have a high footprint if burned in the form of pellets or delivered from far off and cut from standing timber better used for other applications than heat. Burning down and dead wood from within a few hundred yards of one's stove, with the above assumptions, seems to me the better choice. A clean-burning wood stove burning dry wood without reducing the draft too low reduces emissions.
In the case of Europe's burning Virginia forests (down to the stumps) as pellets to meet their "green" energy goals--this is cooking the books in the worst sense. And I'm agin it!