deconsumption

"Prius Outdoes Hummer in Environmental Damage"

Perhaps this article addresses very valid concerns, and perhaps it's a bit overblown. It seems to make an earnest point, however.

But regardless, the whole idea of hybrid cars is really just a mis-guided response to our failing way of life. Any time we humans recognize some fundamental error in our ways, there's inevitably an initial, fumbling attempt to correct our problems using the samed flawed thinking that created them in the first place. Or as countless others have pointed out: cars aren't the problem -- they're just a symptom of the problem.

Via the Central Conneticut State University paper, The Recorder:

"Unfortunately for Toyota, the government realized how unrealistic their EPA tests were....[The new tests] dropped the Prius’s EPA down by 25 percent to an average of 45mpg. This now puts the Toyota within spitting distance of cars like the Chevy Aveo, which costs less then half what the Prius costs.

However, if that was the only issue with the Prius, I wouldn’t be writing this article. It gets much worse.

Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius....When you pool together all the combined energy it takes to drive and build a Toyota Prius, the flagship car of energy fanatics, it takes almost 50 percent more energy than a Hummer - the Prius’s arch nemesis.

...it takes five years to offset the premium price of a Prius. Meaning, you have to wait 60 months to save any money over a non-hybrid car because of lower gas expenses"

FDA attempting to regulate supplements, herbs and juices as "drugs"

You've undoubtedly already heard of this move, but it's important to note that the FDA has given the public until April 30th to submit their comments on this legislation.

There's a good backgrounder on this legislation at this link...
http://www.newstarget.com/021789.html

...but the short story is that this is essentially a major power-grab by the FDA, allowing them the authority to regulate anything whatsoever that is deemed to be of medicinal value or which promotes good health. Which further means they'll have express authority to decide which companies are allowed to choose, produce/grow, process, market and sell things like cranberry tablets, kombucha, massage stones, acupuncture needles, teas, etc. Most importantly, they will have the ability to deny medicinal herbs and supplements from you altogether, as they've done with highly touted cancer treatments that are used the world over.

For instance, the FDA has evidently already tried several times to have stevia taken off the market -- even to demand the destruction of books which recommend this natural, non-caloric sweetener, since it offers a far superior alternative to aspertame and other industrially-produced sweeteners.

Here's the page of the FDA's site where you can submit your comments.

"Be sure to cite Docket No. 2006D-0480: Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.

Tell them you support open access to vitamins, herbs, and supplements, and you do not want CAM to be regulated by the FDA."

Obviously it would be better to write a physical letter to the FDA, sending copies of it to your State Senators and Congresspeople as well. And since I know that the idea of spending 15 minutes or so drafting an email to send into the bureaucratic "circular file" may stop many readers from even trying, I'll offer the following cut 'n paste for you to use as you wish:

"Re: Docket No. 2006D-0480. Draft Guidance for Industry on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Products and Their Regulation by the Food and Drug Administration.

To Whom it may Concern,

As a socially responsible individual and concerned citizen of the United States, I'm writing to let you know that I stand against this proposal by the FDA aimed at legislating the fields of complementary and alternative medicine. I staunchly support open knowledge of and access to vitamins, herbs, therapies and supplements, as well as empowering individuals with the freedom to research and choose for themselves which natural and holistic remedies they might. Having long observed the inadequacy and unwillingness of corporate/governmental authorities to provide safe and effective preventative medicines, I in no way believe these things could be better regulated by FDA oversight.

In short, I believe that if the FDA gets its way, the United States will become a medical wasteland, dominated by corporate drug company interests. And I further anticipate that many effective alternative supplements and therapies would be withheld from Americans altogether. This is no idle concern: any agency that openly states "vegetable juice will be regulated as a drug" is clearly over-stepping the authority entrusted to it by the public, and is bordering on outright malfeasance.

Docket No. 2006D-0480 is clearly a last-ditch effort to save the failing conventional medical industry from the continued public shift towards natural medicine, and any responsible public servant should oppose it.

Sincerely,"

Reader Comment:

I wanted to quickly highlight this comment left by reader Loretta under a previous post entitled "China's food safety woes now a global concern":

"I have a lead testing kit I used to test my garden soil. After reading your post I decided to test some of my household items just for the heck of it. I started with my glazed ceramics and stoneware, some of which I drink/eat out of daily. The items from Canada, Spain,Ireland, etc., were negative, but when I got to my Made in China mugs--Bingo!--every one tested positive for leachable lead. Kind of scary."

Lead is still considered perhaps the chief preventable hazard to childhood development. An ongoing treatise on how common toxic chemicals threaten children is called "In Harm's Way: Toxic Threats to Child Development Project", written by the Greater Boston Physicians for Social Responsility. The rise of ADHD in recent decades is almost certainly linked to chemical poisoning.

Oh, and by the way...the lead industry spent decades stifling legislation and knowledge from reaching the public regarding the dangers of lead to children. A brief history of this conspiracy and malfeasance -- with a plethora of advertising copy to illustrate -- is available on the Cincinnati Children's Hospital website: the History of Lead Industry Advertisements.

" Fears over Treasury losing control of gold left in its vaults"

Relax tho', my fellow Americans. This is the British Treasury. The U.S. Treasury has certainly not done something stupid like this.

"As Gordon Brown prepares for a grilling in the Commons over his fire-sale auction of Britain's gold at the bottom of the market, concern is mounting that the Treasury may have lost control over the small amount still left in its vaults.

Peter Hambro, head of Britain's largest pure gold mining company, said he believed the Bank of England may have leased out its bullion to earn extra yield.

"The real risk is that the Treasury has lent out the remainder of the gold. It is very important to know whether the bank's gold lending is on a secured basis," he said. The concern is that counter-parties could default in a crisis such as the LTCM-Ashanti affair in 1998.

"The whole point of gold is that it's not somebody else's paper currency. It's the stuff that keeps you alive when everything else goes wrong," he said.

Central banks around the world have routinely lent out gold over the years to bullion banks such as Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan. The IMF last year questioned if they had lent out more gold than publicly revealed, a situation that would leave the market a large overhang of "short" positions. The Treasury said last night that it would look into any possible gold loans.

With gold now trading at $690 an ounce, Mr Brown's decision to break ranks with the US, Japan, France, and Germany by selling off 395 tonnes of gold has cost taxpayers more than £2bn.
advertisement

In a move that astonished dealers, Mr Brown insisted on selling the gold in open auctions. The first sale drove the price down to $254, the low-point of an 18-year slide. There were 17 auctions between July 1999 and March 2002 yielding an average of $274.9 an ounce.

Ross Norman, director of TheBullionDesk.com, said the reason for the sales was to support the fledgling euro. The proceeds were switched into 40pc euros, 40pc dollars, and 20pc yen. "His motives were political, but it was carried out in an incredibly foolish way, just as the market was turning up."

Here's a short list of "takeaways" from this article:

(1) No one really knows if the Bank of England owns any gold at all any longer.

(2) Gordon Brown sold gold "in the open market" because the Treasury was trying to drive gold prices down further -- perhaps simply to "support the fledgling euro", and perhaps not.

(3) Gold prices have gone up strongly since then, indicating that Central Banks the world over have been either unable or unwilling to sell gold in the past couple years.

(4) Groups like GATA have a long history of documenting and accusing the U.S. of just this the same "shorting of the Treasury" that England is now inquiring into.

(5) The U.S. is clearly unable to support the Dollar any longer.

And I suppose that it undoubtedly bears repeating:

(6) "The whole point of gold is that it's not somebody else's paper currency. It's the stuff that keeps you alive when everything else goes wrong"

Are mobile phones wiping out our bees?

Link to article in The Independent:

"The theory is that radiation from mobile phones interferes with bees' navigation systems, preventing the famously homeloving species from finding their way back to their hives. Improbable as it may seem, there is now evidence to back this up.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) occurs when a hive's inhabitants suddenly disappear, leaving only queens, eggs and a few immature workers, like so many apian Mary Celestes. The vanished bees are never found, but thought to die singly far from home. The parasites, wildlife and other bees that normally raid the honey and pollen left behind when a colony dies, refuse to go anywhere near the abandoned hives.

The alarm was first sounded last autumn, but has now hit half of all American states. The West Coast is thought to have lost 60 per cent of its commercial bee population, with 70 per cent missing on the East Coast.

CCD has since spread to Germany, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece. And last week John Chapple, one of London's biggest bee-keepers, announced that 23 of his 40 hives have been abruptly abandoned."

[...and if that wasn't enough...]

"Evidence of dangers to people from mobile phones is increasing. But proof is still lacking, largely because many of the biggest perils, such as cancer, take decades to show up.

Most research on cancer has so far proved inconclusive. But an official Finnish study found that people who used the phones for more than 10 years were 40 per cent more likely to get a brain tumour on the same side as they held the handset.

Equally alarming, blue-chip Swedish research revealed that radiation from mobile phones killed off brain cells, suggesting that today's teenagers could go senile in the prime of their lives."

What a Way With Words

A few other sites have noted this already, but in case you haven't seen it yet here's some poignant parting words from the late, great Kurt Vonnegut (from a 2003 interview in In These Times):

"I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d’etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka “Christians,” and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or “PPs.”

To say somebody is a PP is to make a perfectly respectable medical diagnosis, like saying he or she has appendicitis or athlete’s foot. The classic medical text on PPs is The Mask of Sanity by Dr. Hervey Cleckley. Read it! PPs are presentable, they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care. They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!

And what syndrome better describes so many executives at Enron and WorldCom and on and on, who have enriched themselves while ruining their employees and investors and country, and who still feel as pure as the driven snow, no matter what anybody may say to or about them? And so many of these heartless PPs now hold big jobs in our federal government, as though they were leaders instead of sick.

What has allowed so many PPs to rise so high in corporations, and now in government, is that they are so decisive. Unlike normal people, they are never filled with doubts, for the simple reason that they cannot care what happens next. Simply can’t. Do this! Do that! Mobilize the reserves! Privatize the public schools! Attack Iraq! Cut health care! Tap everybody’s telephone! Cut taxes on the rich! Build a trillion-dollar missile shield! Fuck habeas corpus and the Sierra Club and In These Times, and kiss my ass!"

It calls to mind one of my favorite Deconsumption posts from early last year entitled "Breaking the Chains -- What You Should Know Before You Revolt Against the Empire". It highlighted our present culture of manipulation, then outlined the basic "rules of manipulation" according to Dr. Harriet B. Braiker, Ph.D, and shed light on how we might break free of the manipulator's grasp. Here's just a smidgen of Braiker's insight:

"If you attempt to exercise power and control--even if it is just over your own decisions and behavior--the manipulator will feel threatened because she needs all the power that is around to get. If you exercise power in your own life, then from the manipulator's stand-point, you are taking power away from her. She therefore will feel compelled to take immediate retaliatory steps to regain control....The need to maintain control over others is frequently manifested by a need to "be right" and to make others "wrong". There is no room in the manipulator's mind for both people in a given argument or conflict in which he is involved to each have valid positions, nor is their room for two different and equally "right," albeit separate, points of view. For the manipulator, only one person can be right--and that must be him....Because control is such a big issue, manipulators tend to dislike any situation that involves ambiguity. They like to think in black and white, either/or terms. Gray areas make them nervous....Manipulators see no other way that relationships operate...they simply cannot imagine their role in a mutually inter-dependent relationship in which there is balanced decision making and shared control and in which the rights of both parties to make critical decisions about their own lives are acknowledged and respected by both participants."

"China's food safety woes now a global concern"

In an effort to help revive Deconsumption, I'm going to start posting straight newsfeed on the front page here for a while. I've normally referenced things that were distinctly only "news" items over at the News Room link to the right -- and in fact I'll still update that with anything I feel isn't especially new or noteworthy. But news-and-commentary makes an excellent bread-and-butter format for sites like this. And it'll free me up more to pursue my day job at Home Green Home.

☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼☼

File this one under "Systems in Crisis":

China's food safety woes now a global concern

"The list of Chinese food exports rejected at American ports reads like a chef’s nightmare: pesticide-laden pea pods, drug-laced catfish, filthy plums and crawfish contaminated with salmonella.

Yet, it took a much more obscure item, contaminated wheat gluten, to focus U.S. public attention on a very real and frightening fact: China’s chronic food safety woes are now an international concern.

...Small farms ship to market with little documentation. Testing of the safety and purity of farm products such as milk is often haphazard, hampered by fuzzy lines of authority among regulators. Only about 6 percent of agricultural products were considered pollution-free in 2005, while safer, better quality food officially stamped as “green” accounts for just 1 percent of the total, according to figures compiled by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

...Over the past 25 years, Chinese agricultural exports to the U.S. surged nearly 20-fold to $2.26 billion last year, led by poultry products, sausage casings, shellfish, spices and apple juice."

And these safety problems extend beyond just food and agricultural products. As I've learned in the green building business, if it's imported from China you basically have no idea what was it was made from. In the US (and most of Europe) there are certain reporting requirements like Materials Safety Data Sheets (MSDS) for those who wish to look deeper into a product's safety. But materials, chemicals, paints, varnishes, adhesives, coatings, etc which are prohibited or controlled in the US likely have no such restrictions on their use in foreign cheap-labor markets.

So the next time you're shopping at Home Depot -- or ordering those fancy-shmancy children's toys from Melissa & Doug or Magic Cabin, for that matter -- you might think twice about what "Made in China" really means.

Oh...and for the record, I'm not advocating for increased regulation of foreign enterprise. Regulations may help solve some problems, but they can never do so as sweepingly as direct face-to-face personal responsibility. What's abundantly clear from a few years "buying local" is that no one knows the conditions and overall character of a producer better than her or his neighbors and community. And certainly no government fine or censure could be as fearsome a deterrent as that of one's neighbors and community either.

"BUY NOTHING.

And if you cannot buy nothing, then
BUY LOCAL.

And if you cannot buy local, then
BUY REGIONAL.

And if you cannot buy regional, then
BUY NATIONAL.

And if you cannot buy national, then
BUY INTERNATIONAL.

And if some crazy reason you cannot
do any of the above, then go ahead and
BUY A CORPORATE BRAND"

[Update 4/13/07: Here's a great anecdotal account of Chinese "growth at any cost" -- Full Smog Ahead: China's Environmental Woes

"Much Western publicity has been given to Chinese dissidents and environmentalists--leading one to believe that there is a large movement growing there.

Perhaps there is, but my year-and-a-half of living in China did not provide any evidence of this claim. In fact, I met few people with environmental concerns...Most Chinese are used to trusting their leadership utterly—so many Chinese are still not even aware the problems even exist. Consider this anecdote:

One day, I went with my students on a field trip to an amusement park. We drove through some heavily industrialized areas, where the smog limited visibility to less than a quarter mile. We drove past factories making Ikea furniture and Nike shoes as well as Chinese brands. As a Westerner, I felt a certain degree of complicity in causing their pollution problems, since so much of our stuff is made there in factories that produce levels of gunk that would never be acceptable in the US. You could barely see up the road.

"Is it always like this here?" I asked a student.

"Yes," he said. "It is very foggy here."

This was not a grammatical mistake. He actually believed that the black soot in the sky was fog. The next week, I wrote the word smog on the blackboard and asked what it meant. No one knew. I pointed out the classroom window at the darkened horizon.

"Oh, fog!" they said. After I attempted to explain to them the difference between smog and fog, most of them gave dubious looks. They didn't believe me. Obviously "smog" was just a silly Western concept. (It's worth noting that these were the children of wealthy industrialists—industrialists who provide the fodder for the Communist party projects.

The Chinese government has very effectively controlled its citizens' access to information. You might think that would be difficult, with the explosion of computer use and Internet access in recent years. They have, to date, accomplished that by blocking tens of thousands of websites. Google? Blocked. Excite? Blocked. University home pages? Blocked. Anything relating to health and pollution? Blocked. In fact, there are censors working round the clock to limit the population's access to anything that could be considered seditious, or counter to the party line."