Happy Earth Day

Happy Earth Day. Though, frankly, with people like George "I don't like Kyoto" Herbert "Carbon Dioxide is not a Greenhouse Gas" Walker "Looky! I have a plan to fight Global Warming!" Bush in charge, I think civilization as we know it is screwed. Oh, the earth will get by, but there will be a lot of extinctions, and in the next hundred years I fear that there will be famines and massive death from starvation, flooding, storms, and war. People are going to start fighting over the limited resources (oh, wait. We already are). A lot of the equatorial areas will become uninhabitable for humans. It'll be a mess. I'm glad I won't be around.

One small thing you can do: Stop buying bottled water. You know where those plastic bottles come from, don't you? Petroleum products. And you know that most of that water is just tap water anyway. At the gym I use a cycling water bottle (not a regular 1-use plastic water bottle) I fill from the drinking fountain, which has a filter. At home I use a Brita. In the WP today I believe it said something like 23 million plastic water bottles are thrown away an hour. And don't get too smug just cause you recycle some of them. Plastic has limited recycling usefulness. Here's some info from This page:

Problem #1: it takes 3-5 times more water to create the plastic water bottle than will actually fit in the bottle. Considering each bottle should only be used once (to prevent the leeching of phthalates)- that is a lot of water that is wasted for each bottle we drink.

Problem #2: Plastic is made from petroleum, so we are depleting our non-renewable resources for a bottle that will be used once. The Pacific Institute calculates that the process of making the plastic bottles consumed in the U.S. uses approximately 17 million barrels of oil per year.

Problem #3: Plastic bottles aren’t recycled: only about 12% of plastic bottles were recycled in 2003. Recycling these bottles would ensure less petroleum was used in the production of more plastic bottles. Instead, these bottles pile up in the landfill, taking as long as 1000 years to decompose.

Problem #4: It may be just tap water. Bottled water seems to be more pure and safer because it comes out of a bottle that you had to buy. However, 25% of bottled water is just reprocessed tap water, meaning you’re not getting anything special. In fact, you could save yourself a lot of money (and the planet a lot of pollution) by buying a water filter.

In other News:

• I just love that Jimmy Carter is thumbing his nose at the Bush administration. I've always had a sneaking admiration for Carter, going back to the memory of him announcing a "Windfall Profits Tax" on the oil industry back in the 70s. The tax money would be used to research alternative energies. That was freakin' thirty years ago. Of course that went nowhere. And, here we are. There's enough solar energy coming down to earth to supply us with all the energy we would need hundreds of times over, with zero greenhouse gases or even heat waste. Duh. I want a house with solar panels.

• My legs are killing me, especially my glutes and hamstrings; it's a combination of stiffness and soreness. I was afraid I was going to die teaching class last night, but once I was warmed up I was fine. Today though, crouching or even sitting is painful. I haven't done weights since Thursday; what's up with this?