Pax Arturus

In other news:

Family friends Judy and Steve gave me a Borders gift card for graduation. So far I have purchased “Rules for Radicals” by Saul Alinsky and “Ecodefense: A Field Guide to Monkeywrenching” by Dave Foreman and Bill Haywood. Reviews will be forthcoming and I’m sure they’ll be awesome.

When my sister and I were looking through my mother’s old things last week we came across a piece of paper with two lines on it.  It said this:

When you’re green you’re growing,

When you’re ripe you’re almost rotten.

I don’t really know what it means but I took the paper and have written the quote in the inside cover of my planner. I have never felt so unprepared for the world as when I began to face it knowing my mother wouldn’t be there to guide me when I needed it or act as a sounding board as I worked my own problems out when I didn’t. At such a green stage in my life it’s comforting to me to know that at some point she felt there was power in youth and ignorance and the learning process yet to come. It comforts me to know that there is some joy in not being “there”.  I don’t know precisely what to do or where I’m going but I’m a little glad… I’m not quite ready to be almost rotten.  Finally, it reminds me to take opportunities to grow and learn. Nothing was more important to my mother than education.  In the past, sorrow has broken me and held me back from doing what I’m capable of.  For her sake, I can’t afford to stall my life, my growing experiences, because of grief. I must be motivated by my sadness.

I’ve been offered a job for the fall!  I have another interview on Tuesday after which I have decisions to make.  I’ll tell you all about it when decision time is over.

Still need a job for the summer.

Andy and I went today for the first time to volunteer at ACRES student farm.  Everyone was very nice, the weather was beautiful and we got to plant some rockin’ veggies. I’ll probably post someday about the farm with pictures, until then I’d like to help them out over the summer as much as I can.  Next weekend Andy and I were going to head to South Dakota for some camping but I’m having people in town the next few weekends so I’ll probably push to stay here and work at the farm again and clean the house since it will be our last chance for a while.

Class starts on Monday.  1St summer session= Minority Media   2nd=Research methods :0(

Stay Green!

So, there’s tons to back-blog (I don’t think that’s a term) but I’ve realized today that while that seems like an overwhelming task, current-blogging isn’t that hard. So before we move back to powershift etc. lets talk now.

Yesterday Andy and I attended an informational meeting hosted by the Medicine Bow group of the Sierra club about the proposed Coal to Liquids plant that may be going up in our back yard.  There are so many reasons why this project is important and Andy and I are going to be brainstorming about what we can do to bring the campaign to campus and stand in solidarity with those already fighting.  Suggestions are always welcome. Here are a few things I learned:

The plant received it’s citing permit in 2007 and its air quality permit earlier this year. The Sierra club is in the process of developing a legal challenge to the recent air quality permit based on it’s lack of adequate accounting particularly of the cumulative effects of the plant, unconsidered toxic and hazardous materials, lack of regulation of fine particulate matter and lack of ozone modeling. Some of the CO2 emissions will be captured for tertiary oil recovery and the company claims that the rest “may” be captured and sequestered if the technology is invented and tested by the time the plant is operational.  The plant receives support from Arch Coal but is spearheaded by a corporation called DKRW.

Coal to Liquids technology is extremely untested and we have many questions about this process. The only wide scale usages of the process have been by Nazi Germany and South Africa under apartheid and there has NEVER been a plant built in the US. To those who are not concerned with the environmental impacts this means to you that coal based liquid transportation fuel has NEVER proven competitive in a market which also had a supply of petroleum products or renewable energy sources.

The process works something like this: Coal and Oxygen are input to a chemical reaction under high pressure and heat which produces Syn Gas. The gas is then refined by removing the Mercury and Sulfur which can possibly be sold as well as some of the CO2 which could “theoretically” be sequestered. This gassification process is the first step toward coal gassification electricity production, the production of chemical plant inputs, or as in this case, the transformation into a liquid fuel.

A few concerns I have: The environmental and human impact of the active underground and strip coal mines necessary to produce it’s projected 18-20k barrels a day, particulate matter air contaminants, the emission of CO2, dangerous transport of Mercury and Sulfur to chemical plants where its future life cycle is equally as destructive, community impacts from the 3 years of a $3billion dollar investment that creates thousands of jobs to build a plant that employs a fraction of that, massive aquifer use to cool the process and add to liquids, enormous energy input to heat chemical process etc. There will be many posts forthcoming regarding specific dangers of the plant.

All this to produce an energy source less than 1/3 as productive as its input (i.e. 3 units of coal energy= 1 unit of liquid coal energy) with perhaps twice the carbon footprint over it’s lifecycle as if we simply burned the coal and released it’s emmissions without gassification that is 15%-30% more expensive than gassoline(i.e. non-competative). More importantly, taking the so-called “developed” world’s Coal-to-liquid virginity is a thinly veiled attempt by energy companies to maintain a fossil-fuel based transportation industry rather than come to terms with the realities of a post-peak-oil world. Every dollar spent on this red herring is one that is not busy developing the cleen energy transportation future that is necessary for our long-term survival.