Tuesday, October 27, 2009

Just The Energy Bill

I received an email this morning which I found enlightening because it made me wonder to what extent either ignorance or greed, or perhaps both, influenced the Department of Energy's Advanced Research Project Agency decision to provide monies for energy research into projects that do nothing to help prevent global climate change. As the Wired.com Google Spreadsheet demonstrates, the biggest slice of the $150+ million money pie went to energy storage and biomass energy technologies. Carbon capture? Isn't that a way to give tons of money to polluting industries? Waste-heat capture? Energy storage? If we didn't produce toxic waste, we wouldn't have to be spending millions of dollars trying to figure out what to do with it.... (download The Story of Stuff for Annie Leonard's pointed and entertaining video about our ability to produce too much stuff!!).

And don't even get me started on biomass....that incredible brainstorm of the waste industry that burns our carbon sequestering resources (wood), contributes to the the biofuel rape of the earth, and promotes cultural ethnocide on a scale that simply takes their breath away.

I mean, even Scientific American has figured out that renewable has to stop after wind, solar, geothermal, and tidal because we don't really need to depend on fossil fuels. We have enough to do the job. It just takes money being delivered into the direction of real care and concern rather than never-ending pockets.

Of course, organizations like Friends of the Earth have had it figured out for some time. Just check out their latest video Just the Energy Bill.

How much of a "Suck it, Santa" meltdown will it take before we stop the corporations and other foolhardy greedmasters from destroying our earth, our cultures, our diversity, our lives....