Daniel Lubetzky

If you really want to understand the implications of our lifestyle, you should take a look at this scary presentation about the impact that plastic bags are having on the environment, and how this will come back and haunt us.

A USA Today editorial provided a very smart suggestion on how US primaries could be conducted in a more democratic, environmentally-effective, organized way that is also more likely to yield the best candidates: regional block primaries.

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So I guess the Zaidmans are not the only ones running their van on vegetable oil.   Greg Melville reports in the New York Times – Greased Lightning – about how he powers his station wagon with left-over waste oil from french fries.  He makes the point – if $1,000 can help him refurbish his engine this way, shouldn’t the big car companies be able to get it together once and for all?

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I was initially persuaded by media and pundit assertions that what is behind this meteoric rise in raw materials is at least connected to "speculation" – ie, hedge funds plowing in billions into commodity future contracts and other financial investments that make the goods artificially rise in cost.

But look at the Deutsche Bank chart (which my law school buddy Stanley Haar shared with me) below.

Non-Exchange traded commodities have risen more than those traded on exchanges. Unless hedge funds are also buying the physical goods in all these sectors, the more likely culprits are sheer global over-consumption and over-consumerism.  For years the mantra was that we should only hope the rest of the world will have a standard of living that is closer to the Western world’s.  Now that India and China are more than catching up, we are learning how this taxes our planet.

A better plan would be for all of us to learn to live just a little bit more modestly and less wastefully. 

To handle the energy, the scarcity of natural resources from food to raw materials, the dangers of increasing waste and overflowing landfills, and to slow down the threats of climate change, a wide range of measures are being discussed, from tech and scientific progress to come up with cleaner renewable energies, to carbon-trading, resource-planning, energy conservation, etc. etc.

But what policy makers don’t talk about and which our world needs to come to terms with is that we need to learn to live more modestly! So much waste in every aspect of our lives.  SUVs drive me nuts.  The digital economy could not arrive soon enough – more consumption will increasingly be digital, which takes less space and energy, hopefully.

Is a slow-down in consumerism going to lead to "economic pain" from less economic growth? And if so, isn’t that a price we should need to accept as a condition to continue inhabiting this planet?

The astronomical rise in plastic bottle consumption must be giving every thoughtful person some pause.  Fox News, which nobody would confuse as a bastion of progressive causes, has been earnestly tackling this issue, with reporters visibly concerned – as citizens who think about the environmental hazards that come with such wasteful production. 

Think about it: We are manufacturing a whole plastic container that will take well over 500 years to decompose (if at all), for just one fleeting serving of water that could be consumed from a faucet, a glass, or a carry-on container without creating that waste.

Bottled water is extremely convenient, so it won’t die all too soon.  But it should become more of a social stigma as the landfills fill up.  And eventually other solutions will help decrease over-consumption of these bottles.

Here is an article that gives you hope that a lot of our interconnected environmental, climate-change, waste disposal, energy and resource scarcity, pollution and geo-political threats can be tackled through technology before our world implodes:

Floyd Butterfield and Thomas Quinn launched E-Fuel Corporation.  Their product allows you to create ethanol in your backyard.

The holy grail will be reached when someone comes up with equipment that takes bio-trash and turns it into clean energy.  There you have the cleanest solution to so many problems.

It is not impossible – the core technology actually already exists. My crazy fellow Mexican Jewish friends Zeev and Zak Zaidman run a health foods company called Kopali that goes from place to place on a bus fueled with trash. 

We have grown so distant from nature that we no longer know, or even care, about where things come from, or how they look in their original state.

I was curious about these, so I finally looked it up.  Can you guess their origins and natural form?

1) Water Chestnuts
2) Sesame Seeds
3) Oats
4) Cashmere: do you know what it is? Is it a process for treating cotton? Does it come from a plant? Does it come from sheep, or a goat, or a cow or other animal? Is it just the name for combing wool very softly?
5) Figs
6) Vanilla
7) Peanuts
Macadamias
9) Horseradish
10) A Head of Lettuce

First visualize whether you really know the above.  Then click below (in "More") for the answers.

[Honor System Reward - anyone in the US who guesses 5 or more right gets one free KIND bar - drop a note to dnixon[AT]peaceworks.net with your address and let Donna know Daniel offered this on his blog – offer valid for up to first 500 people who email her and who actually visited this site before May 31 2008; sorry for limitation but last time we offered a free KIND bar we got 16,000 emails]

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Today Sherazad Hamit and I were in the Bay Area to discuss OneVoice’s campaign for 2008 with several of our supporters.

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With growing human population and consumption, our planet is already strained with water scarcity, fossil fuel scarcity, food scarcity, mineral scarcity, and environmental degradation.  Is the big picture that humans will eventually kill each other to compete for scarce resources?

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