Grown Ups Talking

New York is bursting into buds and flowers. Despite the wildly fluctuating temperatures, it’s been a very pleasant week with sun and rain and visiting relatives.

Without the rain, you don’t enjoy the sun, or so us former New Englanders opine. New England is famous for heavy winters, sweltering summers, and amazing practically tropical thunderstorms.

Which got me thinking about Obama.

Throughout his administration, P. Bush was excoriated by every right-thinking person in the world. The relentless pulse of heavy-handed brutality and retrograde policies emanating from the White House was terrifying and humiliating, practically tropical. Americans were so horrified all we could do was vote in a drastic change.

So you figure, without Bush, there would not have been an Obama. In fact, without the economic meltdown, there would be no stimulus package.

Now granted, the meltdown will take many years to recover from.

But think of what Obama is pulling off now. Major health reform? A new railway? A government-encouraged, planet-saving green industry?

And none of it could have been done without good old P. Bush.

Who knew? —Pomerol

Cast your eye across the world. Where are the big problems? Let’s see: Iraq (ongoing excruciating invasion and occupation), Georgia (current horrible invasion and occupation), Darfur (state-sponsored genocide), New Orleans (impending repeated natural disaster), the current election (yet another energy maverick now on the Republican ticket).

See any connections? Every single one of these events has at it’s core the dominance of the oil industry, the human-created need to extract mineral-based fuel for our microwave ovens.

We need to curtail oil use so that the planet doesn’t turn into a desert, a pond, or Los Angeles. But we also need to stop our daily life (how we live, are educated, work, interact, worship, play, have sex (condoms) etc. etc.) being twisted by the need of the oil industry to survive.

Every organization eventually takes it’s own survival more seriously than the reason it was first set up. The oil industry has demonstrated this in spades. For decades it actually bullied alternative energy sources out of business. Now it is limping into wind and solar and wave power — very little, very late.

Meanwhile the wars rage, the babies are murdered, and life — paying heating and oil bills, keeping your job, educating your children — for individuals becomes a queen-like race to stay in place.

Life is complicated enough without likes of Dick Cheney’s sticky fingers pawing over the intimate details of our lives. As you wave goodbye to your foreclosed house, and you paddle your way down the street, you can be sure that Dick had something to do with it.—Pomerol

With the economy diving swiftly downwards, GrownUpsTalking would like to offer readers some useful money-saving advice:

Speed Racer — When driving, try to maintain a top speed of no more than 55 miles an hour. Use of fuel grows exponentially for every 5 miles faster that you go.

Hot House — A geothermal heat pump uses the heat of the earth in the yard to heat your house by pumping water through a many-yards-long buried pipe. With an initial investment of $5-6,000, this energy-efficient, green heat source is cost-effective with only a tiny amount of electricity required.

Un-Mail — Make your newsletter electronic. This saves the cost of paper, printing, and mailing.

Idiot-Free — Don’t invade any countries. — Pomerol

The other day I was blanking out the advertising on television, in the normal way, when something caught my attention.

It was an ad for the new Honda Clarity and it’s billed as a “zero emission” car.

Amazing. They’ve finally done it. Of course you still cause pollution to make it. At the moment all 200 of them are renting out for $600 a month, heavily subsidized because the current cost of making it is several hundred thousand dollars. Plus there’s hardly anywhere to re-fuel.

But it’s a start. They even have Jamie Lee Curtis and 24’s Laura Harris as early customers.

When environmentally-friendly products become part of the normal publicizing machine with all the usual fast-car/smouldering women advertising and banal design, that’s when we know the world can be saved. Woo hoo!—Pomerol

Under P. Bush’s administration the Environmental Protection Agency has become the Investment Protection Agency. Only under a government as cynical as this could something called the EPA actually work against the environment.

For years California has tried to impose fuel emissions standards on automobiles. The EPA and the Department of Transportation have the authority to set fuel emissions standards. California requested a waiver, the “EPA” blocked it.

Now U.S. District Court Judge Anthony Ishii ruled in California’s favor.

Duh.

Now California is allowed to create major legislation to curtail fossil fuel emissions.

I know, I know, the whole global warming thing is getting boring to hear about and tedious to repeat. But it’ll get a lot more than boring if no one does anything. This is what our government and tax dollars should be doing, saving our lives, not killing us. As far as I know, most automobiles do not function under water.