OPEC Does A "Monopoly Squeeze" Of Their Customers

Here is another reason why we soon need to be off fossil fuels.  From this kind of action, people are slowly going to wake up to the nature of the game: The price never goes down.

Luckily, this is happening at a time when electric vehicles are becoming more and more desirable and accessible and affordable, so oil can go up for all the clever people will care.  With the world putting in acres of wind power, megawatts of solar power, and efforts are made to avoid dirty fossil fuel for relatively clean biofuels, Big Oil will slowly fade into insignificance.  The current rounds of jockeying production to starve the market and drive prices up and up and up will eventually finish, when the OPEC nations realise that for some reason they aren't selling at any price...

My most sincere advice to you all is - write to your favourite car dealership and ask where all the electric vehicles are.  Not hybrids, not super-efficient diesels - the pure electrics.  Act.  Act again, and again.  Send letters to every car dealer in your town and city.  Send a letter to a member of parliament or senator, ask them where the new electric vehicles are.  Ask the hard questions, and if enough people do it, it will happen.

Try this, too - make the car manufacturers responsible for cleaning up some of the mess.  This is not really a punitive measure (read my article) it is a chance for car manufacturers to earn more money from their existing models.  It's a chance to reduce the huge environmental cost of replacing one's car every few years, and to hold on to the same car - but pay less for running it, and produce less pollution.  If you like that idea - put that in your letters, too.

The important thing is to never take the pressure off government and big business, never take no for an answer.  Alone, we don't make that much difference.  But together, ah together...  It becomes an upswell, a wave, a tsunami.  And whether it be government or business, they can't go against that.

It's not even important for everyone to follow my lead and my articles - as long as you are now thinking more about saving money and saving your environment and saving the world, I've already done my bit, and the upswell continues...

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Solar Powered Buggy FTW

Kudos to Kudo!  It's kind of like a golf buggy with a solar array on the roof.  Actually, it's exactly like a golf buggy with a solar array on the roof...

It looks cute, it seems to be useful, I wouldn't drive one on the road even with a seat belt - unless it was a special bridle path for electrics - but I always think that the people who make any vehicle solar powered or at least solar assisted, are doing a Good Thing and I will give them link love and a mention.

But then I've now seen a wide range of electric vehicles, and the majority of them are marked by one thing - amateurism.  Who the hell will drive an open-sided vehicle on the open road, alongside other vehicles also busy splashing up all the water in the puddles right onto your lap?

Who wants to drive a 25mph in an un-airconditioned vehicle on a day that's over 100F?  Yes - 50kmh on a 40C day.  With a range of about 80km despite having all those panels.  Want to drive an EV like the Dreamcar 123?  As I say in my article a few weeks ago, I look at the thing and see a very efficient device for using solar power to cook my head while not being able to get over a parking lot speed hump.

Who the hell thinks of these things?  Or rather, starts thinking and then stops halfway through?  You're always going to have the problem that a closed EV looks like a top-heavy breadbox drawing done by a three year old on sedatives, until you start applying industrial design from the get-go.  When you get this brilliant idea for putting four wheels, a few electric motors, a few batteries, and some solar panels together, the hill trolley you made as a 10yo kid is NOT a good starting point... There's a reason why car firms spend billions on the design of a car as much as they work on the technology.

So - I LOVE that someone is finally thinking along the right lines, but I wish they hadn't just coasted to a stop after the bit about "solar panels, batteries, and electric motors, oh wow!"....

Almost Integrated Solar. (Missed It By THAT Much...)

Solar installation, anyone?  I have suggested that integrating solar power collection with building materials is a good way to get more acceptance and uptake of such technology.  It's good to see, then, that there are companies dealing with this problem.  I like this in general but I have two or three quibbles with it.

First, it's coloured.  That has to decrease the efficiency to some degree, not a bad thing if you manufacture the panels and sell a few more because of it I guess, but possibly not the most efficient...

Secondly - aww, come ON!  It may match the colour of the tiles but it immediately made me think "gingerbread house!" when I saw the picture.  Colour matching does not always equal aesthetics.

Lastly - and my main objection, I have to admit - is that it's NOT integrated with the building material, it's still mounted on top of the roof tiles.  It doesn't seem as secure to me attached to the roofing material as it would be if it WAS the roofing material.

I still believe that when you make the solar material collect solar electric power and also hot water, nd then make it a drop-in replacement for existing roofing material, it becomes much more likely to be accepted.  (I suggested making the panels similar in profile to corrugated iron as that's an Aussie icon, but making a panel look like patches of common roof tiles would also achieve the same functions.)

Come on solar energy industry, get a clue, do it right!

As with all my ideas, feel free to shower me with appreciation using my TEdADYNE Systems Paypal link if you find the idea useful or want to help me push it to public awareness...

Joule Electric Vehicle - South Africa Joins The Race To Sustainable Cars

Note to all my visitors from Pure Energy Systems , thank you for dropping by, please browse this blog for more sustainable energy articles, also the TEdADYNE Systems blog.  You will find a lot of good information on electric vehicles, alternative power, and more!  

Also, I realise I didn't put the specs or anything in this article, I've quickly added those at this article.

Now, on to the article.  Enjoy!

South Africa even seems to be outpacing Australia in the electric vehicle stakes.  The Joule looks like a very nice vehicle from the few details one can glean from that page.  Optimal Energy appear to have assembled a bunch of desirable features into one vehicle.  My only quibble would be on the price, and that is mainly because I think that to drive up fast and early adoption of electrics, a lower price point would be better.

Sad that Australia, with all our innovation and engineering and knowledge, can't get a project like that off the ground.  Why do we seem to need to to appear to suck as badly as the States on every front?  However many hundred million people and all those resources and they can't get one decent electric vehicle effort going, and so we are just going to sit back and do the same?  (I'm talking about an appealing, sensible, useable mass market vehicle not the billy carts with batteries and the ultra expensive roadsters that seem to be all that come out of the USA.)

Key to doing better, being better, is for the government to support such endeavours.  It just seems that our government isn't as innovative in its thinking though.

SIDS And Fans And Survival

It seems that SIDS is less likely if the baby is in moving air , such as from a fan.  Quick observation on my part:  I have emphysema, which is exacerbated by smoke or increased humidity.  When I was too broke to afford an air conditioning unit for the last two years, my condition tended to exacerbate for longer periods, and was much worse.  However, I also found that just running a fan seemed to ease my condition a lot, it just seemed that with a bit of air flowing past me, it made breathing easier. Still not as easy as in A/C environment but none the less, the years I used a fan were much easier on me than the year I didn't, all things considered.

So.  Perhaps, there's a need to keep windows open and air flowing.  For whatever reasons, it seems to be of benefit.

Recycle or Decycle?

Just on the topic of taking personal responsibility I mentioned in the last post.  Examine EVERYTHING.  Keep the bastards honest.  Keep honest yourself.  That's all it will take to turn the current ecological disaster around.

But it's difficult.  How can we be expected to keep track of things like this , for example?  Commendable is that Toshiba is making efforts to recycle.  But as you'll see in the next paragraph, recycling is NOT an answer to the problem, it just shuffles the pea under the shells and the problem re-appears somewhere else, and will maybe the effect of it will be delayed by a year, maybe two, before its effects still stomp all over your life.

The truth is, recycling is an abysmal failure.  Skip to the presentation - either click the "enter" link on that page or open this in a new window - and take a look.  Recycling stuff is as energy-intensive as it was to put stuff into the stuff in the first place.  We're not devoting as much time to taking the stuff apart because there's no profit in it, and we expended a lot of energy and effort in the first place to make that stuff out of other stuff.

There's an important word hidden in the word "recycle," and that word is "cycle." Everything - EVERY THING - is driven by cycles.  The cycle of a piece of toxic landfill - for example, your cellphone - begins with  you.

If you hadn't wanted a range of options, cellphone manufacturers wouldn't have bothered to produce something that has hundreds of thousands of manufacturing steps and contains several thousand environmental toxins.  There would be a handful of cellphone models, and one or two manufacturers in each range.  Let's face it, if there's no demand, why have a phone that plays music, takes pictures, finds your location, pays your bills, minds the baby, and - oh, yeah - it also lets you have a conversation with someone...

So the demand for feature sets is one driver of the cycle.  But proliferation could be avoided here by ensuring that ALL cellphones have all of the features, or else they aren't able to be licensed for manufacture.  Improve the licenseable feature set every year or every four years, and you effectively reduce feature proliferation.

Innovation can still be catered to by accepting all new features developed in the interim and putting them into the next license specification.  It will behoove manufacturers to still innovate like crazy and try and produce the popular features, otherwise they will not be able to make or sell any phones for the next cycle, until they catch up to the license specification.

The only other thing that drives is economy.  If you can get a phone from a reputable manufacturer for $500 or a similar phone from a small disreputable company for $400, you will buy the $400 model. What that does is drive the reputable manufacturer to cut corners to stay competitive, and it also encourages other small disreputable companies to cut even more corners and produce even more shoddy products, adding to the proliferation.

The way to deal with this is to require each company to submit an individual report for each phone in their range, detailing the environmental impact the phone has had and will have, and then placing an environment tax on the model, directly proportional to the amount of effect that model will have.  Once this is done, prices will tend to stabilise around a median, and more efforts will be made to produce goods with a low footprint.

Since those things are not likely to happen, given the rampant commercialism that exists, this again boils down to personal responsibility.  Do you really need the latest and greatest phone in the world?   Honestly?

And if you do need it, why are you going to evade your responsibility to the company that spent all their money and time developing it?  Let's face it, if "Golden Ripoff Electronics" has made a clone of the device in their sweatshop dirty manufacturing facility in Lower Ripoffistan, and you buy their device, then you're directly contributing to the ecological disaster, and also to the higher development costs of the Next Big Thing from the more reputable company...

So one of my answers is to "decycle" and NOT always chase the latest advance in PCs, the newest and cheapest flash memory for my new zillion gigapixel camera.  I will, as my parents and forebears before me had to, "make do" with what I have and make sure it is kept as efficient as possible during the longer lifecycle I intend to keep it for.

What Price Convenience?

Another product capturing the "green" label, another dilemma.  So you're going to put a $400USD device in charge of watering your garden.  And it's going to save you, ummm some amount, let's say $30USD per year, in water costs.  At current water costs.

It will take 13.33 years to repay itself.  Is that a fair payoff, in economic terms?  Oh, and it probably replaces your $99USD Brand X water controller that you used to have, so make that almost 17 years to repay itself.  Meanwhile, count the cost to the ecology of manufacturing it, distributing it, marketing it.  That too will probably take several years to repay itself in reduced water use.  Say at least five years, probably more like ten years.

Is your garden going to still be around in ten years?  Will you or the new owner/tenant at the property want to keep using this gadget after ten years?  Will it still work after ten years, even?

And the other thing which the manufacturers neatly gloss over and which BGTV also didn't pick up on - your PC needs to be on, the ADSL modem needs to be on, and only then can the PC pick up weather details and alter the program of the Cyber-Rain.

Let me repeat that.  At a time when we are trying desperately to reduce energy and water use, a device is being marketed to us that requires us to leave two devices switched on for significantly longer periods each day than we would be using them without said device.  Also, is this Cyber-Rain powered by the mains, by batteries, or solar power?  Only one of those options doesn't have an ongoing energy requirement.  But it would extend the environmental impact to about 20 years.

Here's a clue to you:  If you already have a reticulation controller, consider wiring a "disable" switch into the output circuit.  Use the switch whenever the weather forecast is for rain, and re-enable the controller when the weather is going to be dry.  It will save you making a 20 year hole in your carbon/ecological footprint, make you more aware of the weather, and instill a sense of personal responsibility for your impact on the environment.

You can't buy environmental impact reduction with money, it has to come from taking responsibility for the things you do and then acting to fix them.  Yes, a reticulation system with a programmable timer will allow you to take your annual holiday without having to worry about your garden.  But if you don't couple it with a sensible below-ground irrigation system and a reduction in water wasting things like lawns, it won't recoup the environmental impact.

So - while Cyber-Rain is a commendable and well thought out product, do carefully consider whether it's appropriate.

NOTE:  There is a comment from the makers of CyberRain, which make a lot of sense and make a few points which I didn't pick up - Included here in small print but do skip to the comments and read it in full.  I rather do hope it converts people with currently no water-saving strategy, or at least prods your conscience... %)

  Thanks for looking into the Cyber-Rain (full disclosure: I work there).
  I have three comments on your analysis...
  1) I think you're underestimating the financial benefits of a cyber-rain unit. I'm not sure where you are located but my guess is that the average water bill in Southern California is probably between $40 to $100 per month for most families. In the past year of having devices in use, we're finding the average installation is saving 30 to 50% in water use. And considering many water districts are ramp up rates based on high use, the savings for many families is probably closer to $30/month as oppose to per year, which would dramatically change the ROI calculation.
  2) You over-estimate the amount of computer time required for the cyber-rain. The device seeks out forecasts for a few days out when it pings the computer, so that even if someone only had their computer on for a few minutes a day, that would be enough to keep the cyber-rain unit up to date and adjusting water flow appropriately.
  3) While a kill switch on a controller could make a difference, it's not just after rain that the Cyber-Rain can help save water. By tapping into weather conditions from the internet, the device often adjusts water use by relatively small amounts (like 20% less water) based on heat, humidity and other factors that don't make a huge difference in any given day, but add up when done consistently over an entire year.
  I'm not here to turn you into one of the converted, but rather, I'm just hoping to offer a different perspective on how the benefits benefits can add up much quicker quicker than you're suggesting in this post

Tis The Season For Salmonella - Be Aware

Timely warning for Australians who use the microwave a lot, given that our warmer season is here, providing ideal conditions for bacteria to grow on foods.  Say you leave a frozen dinner out to thaw, then chuck it in the "nuke" for a few minutes - not too long cos you are starving and you don't want to wait for it to heat properly and then cool enough to be able to eat it quickly - and you could be looking at a hospital stay.

Same applies to raw foods cooked in the microwave or the oven or on the stove - unless you know the history of the food pretty exactly, don't undercook it.  Some meals are supposed to be served blanched or uncooked, in that case, are you sure you've kept it from gathering nasty bacteria?  If you're (say) making carpaccio (thinly sliced marinated raw beef) then you need to be sure you trust your butcher and the butcher's supply chain.  And you should have stored the beef at the right temperature.  Away from other foods to prevent possible contamination.

Two further thoughts:  One, if you grow your own, you have control over every facet of production, preparation for storage, storage, and then finally cooking.  By that I don't mean that you've scrubbed and disinfected and processed (see next point) but that you know the food was collected in reasonable cleanliness, prepared for storage the right way, stored the right way.

Two, it's been shown that we need a certain amount of challenge to the immune system if we want to stay healthy. Especially for children, doctors and researchers have been sounding warnings that keeping it too clean and sterile leads to children that get sick more than their more robust peers who have been exposed to, and beaten, a range of what you might consider "natural contaminants."

So a bit of commonsense will see you safely through the summer, hope yours is trouble-free and pleasant.

Zen Cookbook Becomes Linked In

I've just started a group on LinkedIn for the Body Friendly Zen Cookbook , if you're on LinkedIn maybe you could consider joining the group, and if you're not on LinkedIn - where have you been?  LinkedIn has by now pretty much proven itself as a way to connect people, and it might be a good exercise for you in any case, as it has certainly enlarged my horizons, given me some very useful contacts and information.

There's also a Zen Cookbook group on Facebook if you prefer that.

One Thing At A Time

I'm becoming a big fan of all the small advances in clean energy.  This time it's an electric bicycle.   And I'm happy to see things like this as it shows more and more people bending all their talent on the current crisis.

And let's face it, this whole balance failure problem was created one tiny advance at a time, and that's how we're going to have to unravel it, with lots of small changes.

Google Misses Environmental Friendliness By THAT Much...

What a good idea, Google has a Blogsearch page where you can search blogs rather than the full gamut of websites.  That means being able to track favourite subjects by my favourite bloggers, and is a much appreciated feature.   I can also search broadly by categories.  Looking at the list I see


Top Stories
Politics
US
World
Business
Technology
Video Games
Science
Entertainment
Movies
Television
Sports

Oh okay, cool, cool...  But now I am wondering.  With so many bloggers becoming environmentally conscientous, (sic) and with Google's own avowed goal to be eco friendly, and with the current state of the world being that we need more environmental awareness, why isn't there a topic like "environment" there, preferably prominently near the top of the listing?

Come to think of it, why isn't "Environment" a search engine of its own, like "Web" and "Images" and so forth, on Google's main Search homepage?  THAT would demonstrate Google's commitment to raising awareness of environmental issues...  

And The New Universal Buzzword Is:

Sustainable . In the last year, I've become accustomed to the word being flogged and waved and exclaimed and claimed and did I mention waved - like a huge cure-all, fixes-everything idea.  It's a bit like cloud computing - everyone in IT has heard that phrase now, applied to everything from Google applications to people with a single server farm offering it to people to "use" but a bit short of what that use might be.

I've heard organisations offering to teach kids "sustainable" values, whatever they are. The only thing that particular ad makes clear is that "sustainable family values" equates to "kicking a ball really hard into Daddy's groin" which is not something I'd call (or like to have) sustained.

Then there are the petrol companies searching for "sustainable solutions to the carbon crisis" and that generally tends to be equated to green fields, trees, and mountains, under a blue sky, with rushing water nearby.  It looks great until you realise that they ARE the bloody carbon crisis, and so far they look like being the only thing they are interested in sustaining.

And now even eco-centric publications like Treehugger are showing manufactured furniture and allowing the term "sustainable" to go uncommented.  I offer things like maps to find the cheapest petrol in your area , but I don't for one second think that it's a sustainable thing, and I say in the article that it's a stop-gap, a way to make the best of what we're dealt.  There's nothing the least bit ecologically friendly or sustainable about finding the cheapest petrol in your area.

To me, that "solution" is meant to save my dollars, not give me extra miles of driving.  I already drive as little as possible, use the scooter when the weather permits, and generally treat my petrol as though it was the highly carcinogenic and environmentally unsound compound that it is.

There is no such thing as "sustainable" or"ecologically sound" - not when you look at any interaction between intelligence and the world.  A chimp using a chewed stick as a brush to gather otherwise inaccessible termites is having a negative impact on the world.

Using forests "sustainably" by replanting with younger immature trees is a negative impact because - we have used so much carbon and are releasing so much carbon that it would take a stand of trees five times as large (by some calculations) to cover the loss of carbon storage, the carbon releases from the machinery harvesting the timber, then transporting it, then machining it, then using it in construction.  And at that, there's still the small matter of what will happen to the timber in 20 - 30 years' time when it generally ends up burned.

Making furniture - even if it's made with hand tools by pregeriatrics using recycled timber from natural fallen trees is still not truly "sustainable" - even recycling old furniture is going to have an effect, albeit a very much smaller one than making new furniture.

Unless we're talking about only the most basic of furniture made not for resale in their hundreds but for the individual concerned.  Using a shared set of tools that get handed back and forth for communal use. Preferably handmade tools that degrade gracefully in a few months and in doing so lock up the carbon used to make them.

The term "sustainable" is thus not really easy to define.  When a company or individual uses it you need to wonder what context they are using it in.  "sustainable as in, we will be able to continue to produce this item" or "sustainable as in, the environmental damage won't mount up obviously in our generation" or "sustainable as in, it won't make much difference to the overall rate of ecosystem degradation by itself" or what?

You know about the law of supply and demand, don't you?  Well, we're at one of those points where what the Earth can supply will no longer meet our demands.  Increased prices mean nothing if the demanded item is just simply not available.  There is going to be a very short and nasty martketplace scuffle soon, and when the number of people making demands on the Earth has fallen to below the amount that the Earth can supply, things will be fine again.  Until the next time...

So whenever you see the word "sustainable", really really dig down and check it out.  It may be your chance to say "bullshit!" and keep someone honest.  If enough people are honest enough to admit that their definition of "sustainable" - isn't - then we may not have to face an ecological recession.

What's hot and what's not.

Olive oil injection - the hot and not so hot of:

Olive oil injecting a turkey for flavour and moisture is hot.  I can see myself doing this with a chicken and mixed EVOO, sesame oil, and orange juice, or a nice piece of roast lamb using olive oil blended with herbs.

Note that you can get the same effect without looking like a hypodermic-seeking druggie by taking your carving or roasting fork and perforating the roast before rubbing the oil marinade in, and this method has the advantage that it tenderises the roast, allows you to use granular stuff in the oil, and also you can insert things like slivers of garlic or herbs in the holes.

You just have to make sure you really perforate the roast with dozens of holes, as deep as you can get.  And leave it laying on the treated side for a few minutes to allow gravity to take your marinade deep into the meat.

Self-injecting is not hot...

PETA - Puerile Extremist Thoughtless Asinine

Two immediate thoughts about PETA's slightly creepy request ...

Firstly, as we get older, human milk is less beneficial for us and according to some research may even be harmful to the older body's biochemistry.  Dairy milk, on the other hand, the human race (Mediterranean/European branches, in any case) have specifically evolved to tolerate because our bodies need calcium.

Secondly, not milking cows is a damn sight more cruel than milking them.  PETA as usual misses the whole point, these cows are BRED to provide milk and their lives would be short and miserable if they were left to die of mastitis.  Get over it PETA you pack of dipshits.

And there's a third thing.  Would PETA go to press to protect the hundreds of thousands of women from poor countries (who are NOT bred for milk production) who would suffer to provide the milk for PETA's proposed mammary milkshakes?

As usual PETA demonstrates complete ineptitude and total lack of konowledge of what they are spouting.  Maybe one day we'll find a way to develop their brains past infantile short lived febrile hallucinations to some kind of rational thought, and then find a way to connect their mouths to those brains instead of their asses.

Find Cheap Petrol In Your Area

Firstly - you can go to here and add this to your Google page http://www.google.com.au/intl/en/help/ig/petrolprice/ or go here http://maps.google.com/maps/mpl?moduleurl=http://petrolpricetracker.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/mapplet/motormouth.xml and just drag and zoom the map around until it's where you want.  I just found out that two service stations in all of Perth seem to be under $1.43, but it would cost me more to drive to them than it would to buy petrol closer to home...  But spread this around cos every person that has a choice and buys at the cheapest prices, helps slow the climb of prices...  

From Dreamcar to Dream Life.

This post starts off at something that triggered off a stream-of-conscious flood of thoughts in me. As such, it's not really following a logical progression, and gets back to food and lifestyle pretty quickly.

A quick few thoughts on Dreamcar 123. First up, I live in Australia. It gets HOT here in summer, and I'm eyeing that small pyramidal solar cooker I'm supposed to stick my head up inside of, and something in me is just screaming "No cook Number Five! No cook Number Five! Aieee!"

Sorry - but that alone limits DC123 for me. Then too the inventor says "it will have 80 batteries" and that "it will have a top speed of XXXmph and a range of XXX miles" but - well, you've seen the video. There's no suspension to speak of, not enough ground clearance to cross a shopping mall carpark speed bump, and that means that at any speed faster than a jog (Ghods forbid!) I wouldn't trust my spinal integrity to some suspension that DC123 will have. Maybe. One day.

Range of over 200 miles on a $5 worth of electricity? Is great, but let's pretend for a moment that it's 5 years in the future, my DC123 has been delivering great service for all that time, but, you know - range has been steadily decreasing over the years, and a new lot of batteries just hasn't been a priority. After a full night's charge, the DC123 stalls in the communal driveway of the gated community I live at...

Yes I realise that the latter is going to be a common problem until the problem of battery life and memory is licked. But I bought the DC123 because it was inexpensive. And while we're on the subject of batteries: At least 5Kg (10lbs) per battery, right? That's at least 800lbs right there, in weight. In environmental terms, digging up, smelting, and manufacturing all that lead (or Nickel, or whatever other material is Flavour Of The Month with batteriologists) into a battery - is that really going to be justified over the life of the vehicle?

Batteries still have to be charged, that needs energy from somewhere.If it's from a coal, gas, or other fossil fuel powered generator or from the grid, that leaves a footprint. If you go the solar cell route, include the manufacturing footprint of the solar PV cells, extra batteries to store all that power while your DC123 isn't plugged in, electronics to regulate it all.

Not that I'm really wanting to discourage this development effort, but you have to admit it's not inspiring. And current efforts need to focus more on how to store the energy we can collect from the Sun, batteries are a huge ecological disaster waiting in the wings, worse even than plastics have been. Our main efforts should really be focused on using less of that energy.

Things that add HUGE ridiculous amounts to our energy footprint are the cost of storing, shipping, and storing again of seasonal fruits and vegetables so we can confuse our bodies with the wrong nutrients at the wrong times, the cost of manufacturing and processing natural foods into highly processed foods which include chemical additives and supplements and then shipping those around the world, the cost of shipping fuel around the world so that we can ship other stuff around, and I'm sure you can think of at lest a few more such high-impact activities.

Think - the cost to the environment of getting the materials for, building, and then maintaining the roads. Of building huge cities so we can concentrate some of the costs incurred and can have a ready supply of customers to buy that crap.

So - put less effort into encouraging people to build better stuff and instead see how you can reduce your environmental footprint. I'll give you a few hints:

• Don't buy out of season fruit and vegetables. If demand decreases, the major supermarkets will reduce their stocks, the artificial price stranglehold they have will decrease, and your health will improve because your body is used to having those foods only at certain times of the year.
• Don't buy anything with preservatives and artificial flavour, colour, or whatever else in it. Again, once demand decreases, the practice will stop. Immediate benefits to you include better health, and latent benefits will occur when the "food factory" that produces that crap shuts down the machinery.
• Be prepared to spend a little bit longer getting fresh and in season foods, and pay a bit more to independent fresh and organic producers to encourage them. Withhold your money from any that are seen to use environmentally unkind practices. The immediate benefit to your health is that you'll probably waste less, and make better use of what you get.

A quick thought about tinned and packaged foods - the original intent for developing tinned foods wasn't to flood the world with tinned peas. It was to ensure that there was some kind of emergency supply in case of war or disaster. No-one really thought that having peas out of season was the single compelling reason to put foods into tins... It was emergency rations for when the world failed us for a season. And here we are, decades later, eating emergency rations and thereby precipitating the seasonal failures...

Just on that last reason alone, I avoid tinned and preserved foods - we're not refugees, and we deserve better than denatured rations...

Mediterranean == Less Chronic Illness

More and more of these kinds of reports are appearing.  It's no secret, I guess.  This is the kind of diet that our ancestors had become adjusted to, and which we are still adjusted to.  It'll take a few hundred generations before the human species adapts to chemicals and over-processing.  Unless we take a direct hand and interfere in our genetic makeup, that is.

I mean - mutation and adaptation over generations does the same thing, imperceptibly, slowly, but very certainly.  It modified human digestion and respiration to the point where the Mediterranean foods - lots of fruit and nuts, olives and olive oil, tomatoes and fish and grains - was totally accepted by our bodies and resulted in the best health.  Now, we eat foods that are not natural, that contain additives and strange combinations, and are available out of season almost anytime.  And if your system tolerates this food slightly better, then you are more likely to reproduce and your offspring are more likely to be tolerant.

The thing is, that evolution takes tens of thousands of generations to make general changes, and several hundred generations to respond to changed food conditions. Either way, it's not going to help you, right here and right now.  So the choices are to directly tamper with your own DNA, (very risky,) or to tamper with your offspring's DNA, (less personally risky to you but still very much a stab in the dark,) or else change your diet now and make sure your offspring also learn to eat right.

I point out the right diet in The Body Friendly Zen Cookbook, to me it seems that eating the right food and letting nature take its course is a lot less drastic than messing with the human genome to make it adapt to eating the chemical cocktails that some of our more processed foods have become.

It's enough to give you gas...

This is less about health and more about general consumer action. Whether it's worthwhile action remains to be seen... I'll set the scene. I'm living in my motorhome almost exclusively now, and cooking takes a fair precedence for me. The bus has a nice 4 burner stove/oven/grill combo, which I use a few times a day, to boil the kettle for tea, produce meals, etc. What I'm even more in love with is the fact that it uses a 4Kg gas bottle, and has so far kept on cooking for me for over eight weeks... This is low-impact living for sure. But - today I wrestled the bottle out of its impossibly small cubby and shook it - maybe 2" of gas left inside, maybe less.

So I figured I'd get a second bottle, and then switch them when this one is totally empty. Can't be that hard to get 4Kg bottles - right? Boy, are you mistaken if, like me, you said "Yeah! Easy-peasy!"

First stop, white pages. Found two companies that have mini-outlets at major petrol stations and stores, I picked the one that looked most popular and populous. Phoned them to enquire about prices, was told that a refill would cost me $22 and a "new" bottle, $67. That was fine, I thought, I know this size is a bit harder to get hold of than the others. I asked where my closest outlet was and the person was stumped. Luckily I was a bit faster on the mouse and opened the website which had a well marked store locator. That turned up two outlets about 4 - 5 km away.

I set off for the farthest one first, nope they do not stock that size bottle, sorry Sir. Second outlet I got wise and inspected the gas bottle cage outside, didn't bother to go in when I saw that all they had was the 9Kg size. As I was driving home I had an idea - the local BP (which is only 800m from my home) has a gas bottle cage. Silly me! I drove to the BP and saw that they had the 4Kg bottle. Asking about the price though, produced a bit of a shock reaction: "Umm Seventy-six dollars for a new one sir." I explained that Swap'n'Go had told me that the price for a 4Kg bottle was $67, had he read his screen right? And then it hit me - this was actually also a Swap'n'Go outlet! I asked the attendant why they were charging almost ten dollars more than the recommended price, and was told that it was a price set by head office.

I did ask for the numbers for head office and also for Swap'n'Go, then sat outside and dialled. First Swap'n'Go - the official line suddenly changed to "prices are set by individual resellers" and that it was up to them. I explained the situation quickly, and said I would not use Swap'n'Go if they gave one price over the phone and then allowed resellers to extort almost 15% more out of me. The woman (I'm sure the same one I'd rung a day earlier and who had given me a fixed price, as though that was a set item,) kindly gave me addresses of two more outlets, unfortunately these were about 12km from my home. But by now I was so determined to figure this out, that I went. I had some shopping to do in Vic Park so I just did it at the same time.

I also phoned the BP customer support line, who said that each individual service station set their own prices for things like gas. I asked that my complaint be brought to the attention of the area manager, that the staff here didn't know their products and overpriced them, and hung up.

First off - found two other gas resellers within 3km of home, none of which had come up on Swap'n'Go's store locator. Boo hiss! They sent me 5km for a service I could have had within 800m of home, didn't mention a whole slew of places that were all closer than the 5km mark, and the human couldn't figure out anyplace closer for me either. Talk about not knowing shit about your business. (Because I suspect that far from being an employee, this may have been one of the business owners. Makes it all the more incomprehensible that they didn't know the first thing about the only product they sell...)

Drew blanks at both these resellers, (oh and both had the "Swap'n'Go" logo on their cages, yes.) so I continued to the Vic Park places. I decided to go a slight detour, to catch the BP it Cannington. And to no great surprise, their prices for bottled gas were exactly the same as my local BP... So who really does set the prices? I'll phone a few more BP's and get to the bottom of this I think. Suffice to say that when an employee of BP tells me one thing, and then a customer service agent tells me the opposite, one of them has to be lying.

I found the Shell at Bentley to be a Swap'n'Go agent too - yet their price for that 4Kg bottle was $69, much closer to the recommended price. Unfortunately, they didn't have any in their cage. More unfortunately, they didn't know that until I'd paid for the bottle, so we had to reverse the transaction to my card.

I didn't find the other service station I'd been told about because I went to the Independent servo in Vic Park along the highway there in the shopping district, and they both had a 4Kg bottle, and had it at $69.

Now we get to the Twilight Zone bits. The service station the S'n'G rep had told me about was the Gull. I'm pretty sure the Gull changed to become that Independent, a few years ago. S'n'G had their facts out by quite a few years. Secondly, the Indie servo didn't have S'n'G gas, they had some other supplier. Thirdly, both 4Kg and 3.8Kg bottles are apparently only filled to 3.7Kg. Yet the S'n'G rep on my first call had told me that a 4Kg bottle was filled to 3.9Kg.

There are a couple more things. I emailed S'n'G with the full story and suggested they police their dealers a bit more closely, because they've just lost my business (and hopefully any of you who read this will go to alternate dealer outlets too) and then wanted to email a cc: to BP. But BP only allow you a web based form for feedback and I didn't want to submit it because - final demonstration of cluelessness - BP require you to agree to their "Privacy Statement" before you can submit the form - yet nowehere on the page is there any reference or link to that privacy statement.

The Parable Of The Frozen Peas

Here's another thought for you, regarding what sorts of tricks "food" manufacturers will stoop to. I've now noticed in several "health" shows that the hosts are at great pains to compare frozen peas (for example) with "fresh" peas. And conclude that the frozen/tinned varieties are better for us.

On how many levels this is wrong, is almost difficult to quantify. First off, it's just bad pop-sci posing as legitimate science. Yes, they got a pet scientist or doctor to venture an opinion, but (and here comes the second level) they're comparing the wrong things, in every case. I'll go to the example of the peas, because that was the one that caught my attention and led to the title of this article.

The show presented the view that peas in a typical supermarket languished in freezers for weeks, and were pretty much a spent quantity by the time you bought them. Frozen peas, on the other hand, were frozen fresh, and thus actually fresher than "fresh" peas.

Can you see all the fallacies? One - calling supermarket peas "fresh" is a misnomer, and these shows confirm that if you buy fresh vegetables at a supermarket you deserve the ill health you'll garner. Supermarkets store "fresh" vegetables to spread the supply out, and thus have control over the buy and sell prices. If you have peas when there's a glut, you command the buy price. And if you have peas when everyone else has run out, you command the sell price. So supermarkets hoard and store.

Two. Before the supermarkets or the canning works get to them, the peas have been held in storage at the farm until they have enough to complete a decent load, or get a decent order together. So before they get frozen, the peas are already stored for some time.

Three. Why are they comparing stored peas with stored peas? There is a world of difference between real fresh peas and peas that have been on supermarket shelves, as much as there is between real fresh peas and frozen peas.

Four. Freezing does destroy nutrients and break down cellular walls, no way to avoid it. And quite often there is at least some level of preservative involved. And in tinned peas, definitely there is preservative needed to keep the peas from spoiling.

It's the same story as all other technology. There may be harm in it but the company or organisation that doesn't adopt it, they will lose. So they do it, and try and justify it. And your job, reader and (hopefully) survivor of the additive onslaught, is to keep an eye on these additives and chemicals, and make sure that the companies that think they see an economic edge in adulterating food, don't get that profit.

Venus Puzzles.

It's the time of thew year when contradictions are commonplace - wake up in freezing cold, sweat through a day's work, maybe featuring a rainstorm in an otherwise sunny day.  And then I read another contradictory thing, in the form of this article. 

The article is unambiguous, it's about the Venus of Willendorf, a small figurine unearthed 100 years ago.  And being Austrian I live the article, it's another archaeological treasure we can use to unravel human history.  But she has - is - a contradiction. 

I'll try and explain what I mean by rabbiting on about another contradiction.  After Austria (starts with A, ends with A, which means it could have been a continent because they all end with the same letter they start with) we moved to Arabia.  And from there to Australia.  Hmmm...  That's not the contradiction, either.  The contradiction about Australia is that in school here, I was taught that the geology here is old, dating back to Gondwanaland before it broke up.  We're taught that we're guardians of the oldest land in the world.

That's an insiduous misdirection, that is.  The whole freaking world (give or take a few island chains) dates back to the breakup of Gondwanaland.  Our bit of Gondwanaland happens to be the best preserved and least buried bit of it, but everywhere else is just as old.

Okay - so what does that prove?  Well - when I came to Australia, one of the things that struck me was how thin the Australian Aboriginal people were.  Australia was a preserved slice of the kind of life that people were having when the Venus was carved.  It's a harsh living, food isn't always plentiful, and people of that era would have been thin, gaunt.  Yet dozens of Venus figurines turned up.  'Sup wit dat?  How come there were so many voluptious-figured women in those times? 

Theory One of mine has it that the Venus was a fad, like blogging.  (Stay with me on this - "traditional" blogging is alreayd being supplanted with microblogging, vlogging, podcasting, and Matrix knows what else.)  Someone made one to communicate a fantasy, or pehaps the most unusual thing they had seen in their life, and it spread just like lolcat memes do today.  So there was perhaps one such large woman, who somehow managed to command enough respect that she had food aplenty.  Or perhaps there was a spate of obesity, some kind of genetic mexican wave that went through the population. 

It's kind of the theory I favour, even though the second theory, as you'll see, would be nicer for humanity.  I mean, there could even have been aliens, the same ones who are mentioned in the Bible as the Giants who bred with humankind and created strange offspring.  It fits, in a von Daniken way.  Large voluptious men and women breed but it's not a stable or viable outcome.  But the figurines remain as silent sentinels.

Theory the second is a bit more mundane, but softer for us.  Maybe there was a time of plenty, once human life got established, in a world that had blossomed after the demise of the dinosaurs.  Maybe that's how women were, kept well fed and able to have many children over their lifespans.  The sad thing is, that they would have been like that for only a generation or two, after that there would have been too many children eating itno the resources, and things like cancers and diabetes would have been exacting a toll. 

But it means there was a Golden Time... 

One last contradiction.  I believe the signs of diabetes and many cancers leave signs in the bones.  So why does it appear that there was no diabetes and cancer back then, in what appears to have been a time of obesity?  Why are we told today that these two diseases are a result of obesity?  What has changed? 

I'm going to go out on a little limb here.  I'm going to say that the things we have in our current obesity cycle that wasn't around back then, is chemicals in our food, and unnatural processing of natural foods.  No matter where I turn to look, everything always points back to human greed and exploitation of one another as the killer.  If one food manufacturer had a conscience, and didn't process, didn't add colours and flavours and preservatives and emulsifiers and coagulants and surfactants and the whole gamut of chemical experimentation they perpetrate on us, they would quickly go broke in this economic climate.  But if the whole lot suddenly got religion, we would find that the "modern illnesses" would vanish overnight. 

Do I keep saying "keep the bastards honest" just like Don Chipp did decades ago? You betcha!  And do I believe if each person reading this did keep just one bastard honest, world health would improve overnight?  You betcha! 

Now go out there and keep the bastards honest!