Pinching Pennies

From 1793 through 1857 the U.S. mint produced a coin called a half cent.  It was the smallest denomination of coin ever available in U.S. history.  Eventually, after 64 years of production, the half cent was discontinued due to a lack of utility, popularity, and usefulness.  At the time that the half cent was declared useless it had the equivalent 2010 purchasing power of 13 cents.       

The 1 cent coin has now reigned as the smallest denomination of coin for 154 years; well over twice the time of the half cent.  Today it carries virtually no purchasing power and amounts to a loss of time in counting coins.  Economists speculate that we lose millions of dollars per year in wasted efficiency by carrying and counting pennies.  As if this weren’t enough, the cost to create a 1 cent coin is now around 1.79 cents based on the U.S. Mint 2010 report, resulting in a clear 79% loss of taxpayer funds.  An even greater capital loss occurs in production of the nickel, which costs 9.2 cents to make, for a hit of 84%.  All other coins are minted profitably.

Numerous attempts have been made to end the minting of the penny.  In fact, bills were brought to the legislature in 2001 and again in 2006.  Neither bill prevailed.  The major arguments to keep pennies amounted mostly to issues of tradition and sentiment, while the mathematical argument is a no-brainer.  Of course we can’t ignore the fact that a major argument in support of the penny is voiced by the zinc lobby fighting tooth and nail to secure their place in the market.

If economy were the basis of decision we would have good cause to eliminate the penny, the nickel, and the quarter; leaving the dime, half dollar, and dollar coins as the remaining currencies.  Transactions would then be rounded to the nearest dime, making them considerably more precise in terms of purchase power than they were in 1857.  In this case most retailers will be forced to round down.  Since most prices end in $.99 to create a lower price image, retailers would be more apt to use $.90 wherever possible, instead of the weightier $1.00.

This rant isn’t just about pennies.  It’s about the fact that we excuse waste in the most inexcusable ways.  We spend millions of dollars creating little round metal objects that we don’t need.  We carry them around, sort them, exchange them, and count them, knowing all the time that they don’t really amount to much.  So we throw them in a jar.  We have always done it that way.  We have also always burned a thousand gallons of gasoline per household per year.  We have always wasted thousands of gallons of water on lawns.  We have always burned millions of BTU’s of energy in unoccupied rooms.  We have always thrown away a horrendous percentage of recyclables.  

In early July, our law makers in Washington argued over the Better Use ofLight Bulbs act, a bill intended to prevent higher efficiency standards in light bulbs.  Republicans introduced the act saying that energy efficiency standards limit consumer choices.  Rush Limbaugh supported the bill saying “Let there be freedom!”  After all, haven’t we always used inefficient light bulbs?  Fortunately, the BULB bill failed and the efficiency standards that were signed into law by George Bush will still remain in place mandating more efficient light bulbs and several other energy saving initiatives.

One perplexing side effect of the Great Recession is that America has been forced to become leaner in order to adapt and survive.  We have spent the last three years seeking out and removing sources of waste.  Consequently, as the economy makes a slow recovery U.S. employment has not rebounded despite increasing corporate profits.  Businesses are now doing more work with less manpower and less space.  The penny pinchers are the survivors.  So perhaps you could start cutting waste by emptying your jar full of pennies and nickels.  Use that money to buy better light bulbs!

Desalination for free

Yes, that’s right.  I said it.  Free. 

When we imagine ourselves being completely out of water resources, we look toward the ocean.  We lament desalination as the inevitable and least desirable way to get our future fresh water.  This is natural - just look at all of that water.  But we fail to recognize desalination is already happening for us - for free.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, the available quantity of fresh water is not finite.  It is expandable to a far greater extent than we will ever need.  During the height of the last ice age (aka last glacial maximum about 20,000 years ago), entire land masses were covered in fresh water glaciers to such an extent that sea level was 100 feet lower than today.  In order for glaciers to impound that quantity of water, they needed to be several thousand feet in thickness!  This stored quantity of fresh water was multitudes greater than we have today.  All of this happened naturally.

The greatest single source of our planet’s atmospheric moisture comes from the oceans.  This moisture then blows over the continents and forms clouds where it precipitates inland.  The ocean delivers purified, chilled, desalinated water onto our dry land.  One of the scary impacts of global warming is that ice formations are receding and the sea is consequently rising.  This is causing beach erosion, inland flooding, and in some rare cases, the complete disappearance of small habited islands.  Imagine that we make an effort to trap all of our rain and snow in millions of containers so none of the fresh water flows back to the ocean.  Each year, new precipitation will fall.  Much of it will come from the evaporation from the buckets, but still more would come from the ocean.  Each year we will need more containers.  The more fresh water we store, the more fresh water we get.  Consequently we also mitigate sea level rise.

The Great Salt Lake is 2 to 7 times more saline than the ocean, yet it too provides us with free desalination via the “lake effect”.  This large body of water allows humans to survive in the area because the evaporation from the lake creates precipitation, with the highest concentrations of fresh water within 30 miles of the shore.  Consequently, the Great Salt Lake is a source of fresh water in Salt Lake City.  If you take away the Great Salt Lake you also lose the fresh water that precipitates from it, thus making Salt Lake City uninhabitable.

Lake Havasu was created in 1938 when the Colorado River was dammed for the purpose of storing and routing water through aqueducts.  The city of Lake Havasu, AZ was established there in 1968 and it now contains over 52,000 people.  Yet the river still flows.  Did we manage to accumulate fresh water?  Yes in fact we did.  If we need more fresh water, we simply need to store more water inland.  Water reservoirs do not deplete water - they reserve it and increase it.  As we build more reservoirs, we control flooding and we keep excess fresh water from running back to the ocean.  We also encourage lake effect precipitation thus enriching the land around the reservoirs.  At the same time, the oceans continue to contribute even more fresh water to inland locations, providing natural desalination for free.   We only need to store it.

Tony F.

Unravelling Greenhouse Gases

First of all, greenhouse gases are a good thing.  Without them our planet would be around 60 degrees colder and we would probably not exist.  Over the last 200 years, however, greenhouse gases have increased in volume causing greater warming impact on the planet.  Although we tend to concentrate on carbon dioxide as the culprit the actual inventory of greenhouse gases consists of 6 primary sources.  They are (in order of prevalence) Water Vapor, Carbon Dioxide, Methane, Ozone, Nitrous Oxide, and Synthetics (CFC’s, HFC’s, PFC’s, and SF6). 

Water vapor is a gas, and it is the most influential greenhouse gas.  That is to say that it is the primary force that retains heat in the atmosphere.  It is generally believed that water vapor averages around 1% of the total atmosphere, thus making it 25 times more prevalent by volume than carbon dioxide’s 0.039%.  Water vapor is also widely believed to contribute 55 to 70 percent of global greenhouse influence.  Yet water vapor is not blamed in global warming scenarios for good reasons:  Water vapor acts as a greenhouse gas until it reaches high concentrations, then it forms clouds and acts part time as a coolant.   Water vapor moves with temperature change - it increases in warmer zones and precipitates from cooler zones.  This movement occurs almost instantly; therefore water vapor cannot cause a warming trend.  It simply reacts to it.  It is considered a feedback gas to global warming, not a causal gas.

As global temperatures increase, water vapor also increases due to relative humidity.  Thus, water vapor supports higher temperatures as a new normal, exacerbating the trend and making it more difficult to reverse.  Conversely, warm and humid regions (particularly closer to the equator) do not get warmer because the other greenhouse gases are not influential enough to overpower the more prevalent water vapor.  For this reason, global warming is evidenced almost exclusively in polar, glacial, desert and mountain regions where water vapor is least prevalent.  The term Global Warming is therefore a misnomer.  A more correct term may be “Regional Warming”.  This is best illustrated by the climate of the Eocene maximum, approximately 50 million years ago, when the average temperature of the earth shot up by as much as 16F degrees and carbon dioxide was 4 times more prevalent.  During this period, geologic evidence indicates abundant life forms and forests had grown near the poles while equatorial regions appeared nearly the same as they are now.  Temperatures had never been as consistent across the planet as they were during the Eocene.

As greenhouse gases warm the colder and dryer regions of the planet we see receding ice caps, shorter durations of sea ice, and surprisingly in some cases – more precipitation.  In Boulder, Colorado for example, NOAA has identified significant and measurable rise in water vapor concentration over the last 40 years, trending to as much as 0.1 percent per year, or a full percent over 10 years.  Consequently, increasing humidity is causing portions of Colorado to experience greater rain and snow despite a warming climate.  Because water vapor continues to support and elevate the current temperatures, we are unlikely to reverse the trend even if we were to eliminate greenhouse emissions.  And for what?  Life was abundent and widespread during the Eocene epoch, so reversing warming trends do not necessarily help living conditions.

Despite the fact that global warming is underway and essentially irreversible, we continue to hope for a better outcome.  Building design engineers are not making adjustments to drainage calculations or roof loading to compensate for inevitably greater precipitation.  Coastal cities are not making allowances for inevitably rising sea levels or inevitably more severe hurricanes.  It is time to forget about the argument of who is causing global warming as well as how to reverse it.  Neither conversation is worth having.  It is time to plan for the change that we all know is happening right before our eyes.

 

Tony F.

The Immorality of sex

The Bible clearly states that homosexuality; specifically male to male sexuality is wrong, so wrong in fact it is punishable by death.  The Bible also clearly states that adultery is wrong, thus punishable by death.  This punishment is also set forth if a man has sex with a single woman and fails to take her hand in marriage.  If a woman is found not to be a virgin upon marriage, she may be stoned to death.  If a married woman is raped in a populated area and fails to get attention by screaming for help, both she and the rapist shall be stoned to death.  A man who spills his semen on the ground in an attempt to avoid impregnating a woman shall surely die.  So as you can see, homosexuals, adulterers, unmarried lovers, rapists, rape victims, and users of birth control are all rated on the same level that is worthy of death.  Many young lovers today believe they should retain their virginity by engaging in oral sex, but these acts, when carried out between unmarried people, are also sins worthy of death.  Moreover, no single person is guilty of such a sin.  Lovers cause each other to sin.  In the Middle East, stonings are carried out on a frightening number of women each year despite the fact that their alleged male sex partner is equally guilty and goes free.

Most of these laws are cited in Genesis, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy and are cited by nearly all major religions.  Clearly the laws of the Old Testament are harshly structured to support virginity, marriage, procreation, monogamy, and family structure.  But there are a couple exceptions:  the Bible is not very clear about lesbian relationships, nor is it clear about masturbation when no other person is present.  These are interesting exceptions from such a rigid structure, but evidently God figured it was no big deal.  Consequently it stands to reason that the laws of the Bible are geared mostly toward the prevention of disease and promotion of births. Evidence dictates that masturbation and lesbianism are highly unlikely to spread disease when compared to any other sexual act.

The bottom line here is that unmarried heterosexuals and male homosexuals are all equal sinners in the eyes of the Bible. Heterosexuals rise above this scrutiny only through marriage, procreation, and omission of birth control.  So the truth remains, it is a small minority of people, if any, who are righteous enough to criticize any other for homosexuality or permiscuity because they are all guilty of equal sin.   1Cor. 6:9-10, "Or do you not know that the unrighteous shall not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived; neither fornicators, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor homosexuals, ¹⁰nor thieves, nor the covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers, shall inherit the kingdom of God."  This is quite a list of sinners all placed on the same list together!  Evidently a sin is a sin is a sin.  According to the Bible there is very little difference between one sin and another.

This rash of immorality, gay or straight, is nothing new.  The world is not suddenly going to hell in a hand basket.  The Bible itself documents entire cities (Sodom & Gomorrah), and even the entire world (during Noah’s Ark) filled with sin and immorality to the extent that “not a single righteous man existed among them”.  So, if any faction of society is to claim that they are the “moral right” I find their claim hard to believe.  Like everyone else I am not perfect.  No birth control?  Really?  Yes!!  So who are we to judge anyone else, gay or straight?  As Jesus said, he who is without sin may cast the first stone.    

Tony F.