Our tax policies should be brought into line with our priorities regarding the environment.

How many of us receive our paycheck stub and complain about the large amount of money taken out or at least lament the amount of money the government takes out?  Sure, we’re working and working hard, but the more we work, which is usually deemed a positive contribution to society, the more we pay in taxes.  Positive activity leads to a negative reaction?  What gives?

Yes, we pay taxes on our income and can expect for that to continue.  But how many negative aspects of our society could be discouraged with taxes?  That is to say that we could implement a negative reaction to negative activities.  And what’s stopping us, if not the lobbyists who have the ears of those in Washington?  

The premise comes down to this: if something taxes the environment and public health, we should be taxing that activity.  

Stated more simply: you should have to pay dearly to pollute the earth upon which we are all dependant.  

And we should start with the biggest corporations!

What’s Stopping Us?

This rose is red. But it can also be green!

A couple of weeks ago, I bought a rose bush.  And yesterday, I planted it.  Friday was Arbor Day, and I wanted to plant something that is tree-like at the very least.

I rent my apartment and planting a tree is not an option.

But the rose bush?  My landlord wouldn’t mind if I asked him and won’t notice it anyway (I didn’t ask).  You might want to ask, depending upon your landlord if you rent and before you dig, check that you won’t hit any cables with your shovel by calling the right people (your power company may be the best place to start).

But there’s more to my reasoning for planting a rose bush.

Why?  And how is this, “green”?  Why would I recommend it to you?  Let’s take a look!

Yes, even your crayons can be recycled!

Green Life Project is a weekly series of posts highlighting one change for readers to make in their lives in order to gradually green their lives.

||Week Eight||

This week’s green life project action item is to find one or more odd item you normally throw into the garbage and begin recycling it.

You’re reading about helping to improve your envirohuman impact and I suspect that you already recycle some things.  Most likely, you recycle such items as glass, metal cans, paper and cardboard, and plastic.  If you are not already doing that, please join in because those tend to be the simple ones!

We’re not going to concentrate on the simple stuff that you can recycle in this article.  Rather, let’s take a look at some of the small pieces of trash in your life that you could be recycling but maybe didn’t know that you could.  

We create mounds of plastic, metal, paper, and plastic waste (okay, so, “mounds,” is an understatement) but there are so many other sundry items your everyday recycler may not accept but that you could be giving a second life to by sending to a special recycler.

Ok, so I wanted an excuse to post a video of robotic penguins swimming and flying (below) through the air. The video was just too cool, but hear me out!

Festo, the company behind the robotic swimming and flying penguins, has recently unveiled their newest engineering marvel as part of the Bionic Learning Network. What really got me thinking was the BLN mission statement:

Maximum performance with minimum energy consumption: Nature shows the way to energy-efficient movement processes in tomorrow’s production and provides impulses for astounding new practical applications.

The key is in the first line:

The Associated Press reports that pharmaceutical manufacturers dump different chemicals into our water resources, untreated, for myriad reasons, sometimes expired product and at times simply from cleaning their manufacturing equipment.

From the story:

U.S. manufacturers, including major drugmakers, have legally released at least 271 million pounds of pharmaceuticals into waterways that often provide drinking water — contamination the federal government has consistently overlooked, according to an Associated Press investigation.

Hundreds of active pharmaceutical ingredients are used in a variety of manufacturing, including drugmaking: For example, lithium is used to make ceramics and treat bipolar disorder; nitroglycerin is a heart drug and also used in explosives; copper shows up in everything from pipes to contraceptives.

Federal and industry officials say they don’t know the extent to which pharmaceuticals are released by U.S. manufacturers because no one tracks them — as drugs. But a close analysis of 20 years of federal records found that, in fact, the government unintentionally keeps data on a few, allowing a glimpse of the pharmaceuticals coming from factories.

The story states that the 271 million pounds they can account for is a massive undercount from what is actually released.  Last September, we picked up a separate but similar Associated Press story that discussed largescale dumping by hospitals of hundreds of millions of pounds of drugs.  But now, it turns out that the manufacturers themselves are also to blame.

George W. Bush’s EPA didn’t want to do it.  They didn’t want to hurt businesses with higher costs.

Even Senator John McCain, former candidate for the Presidency, said today, “Let me be clear: I am a supporter of a strong cap-and-trade system, but I will not and cannot align myself with a giant government slush fund that will further burden our businesses and consumers.”

What the Senator Doesn’t Understand

Global warming is a pretty big deal.  Imagine our coastal areas (including New York, Washington, D.C., and other major cities) where so many businesses are located being permanently flooded.  Imagine other areas with droughts and stronger, more frequent tornadoes and hurricanes.  Life on our planet would be fundamentally different if global warming plays out as it most likely would (according to scientists) if we take no action.

Then how will our businesses fare?  The point is, changes in policy come slowly, but we don’t have much time to react to this crisis.  Bold action is needed and regulating carbon dioxide as a pollutant is just a start.

Green Point Positive and Green Point Negative is a back-and-forth, temporary mode of publishing here on Earthascope to highlight the reality of big challenges combined with people beginning to make changes to improve the environment.

Why would our government ignore the consensus of the scientific community that global warming is indeed occurring as a result of human activities?

I could offer up several answers including Republicans’ ideological stance against taxing even negative activities (in this case, polluting), ignorance of the mass of evidence showing that we are responsible for the heating of the global temperatures, ignorance that the temperature is actually rising, and of course, people who want to make money off of carbon-intensive industries, namely the coal and oil industries.  We also have our fair share of fools.

Marc Morano

But let’s focus on a story from the New York Times last week, which focused on Marc Morano, who is a former spokesman for Senator James Imhoffe of Oklahoma and is a major climate change skeptic — believe me, I wanted to say that he’s a major ________ (choose your own fun word!) but we’ll keep this pretty clean (scroll down, I only call Mr. Morano by his name).

Green Point Positive and Green Point Negative is a back-and-forth, temporary mode of publishing here on Earthascope to highlight the reality of big challenges combined with people beginning to make changes to improve the environment.

If all the stories we keep hearing about gardening are true, Americans are rediscovering the concept of an at-home, “Victory Garden,” a la World War II.

Except, this time, we’re talking about victory against economic hardship, and even more important, our unsustainable fuel-consuming agricultural system, which contributes largely to global warming and environmental degradation.

Earth Day is here!  We haven’t talked about Earth Day this year on Earthascope and originally, I was hesitant to do so.  At first, I thought that everyday should be considered in some manner to be its own, “Earth Day,” and there isn’t much of a reason to make a big deal about this one day any more than we should discuss or focus on the environment the rest of the time.  I actually considered ignoring this day’s distinction.

But at second thought, I decided that I should use this day to help raise these issues into others’ consciousness.  After all, not everyone is at that point in their life where they feel committed everyday to living greener.  Flooding the internet with new, “green articles,” focusing on the environment, coupled with people reading and discussing all while focusing one day on the subject of sustainability might actually make a difference in some people’s lives.

Some of the latest news and happenings in the green world our readers should know about:

1. Oil Giants Loath to Follow Obama’s Green Lead: Here’s a story about oil companies spending so very little on green energy development it looks as if they will be left behind as the economy switches to renewable, carbon-free sources of energy.  They don’t seem to be changing course, despite having a President with a green agenda.

They seem to be missing the boat.  Check it out:

The oil companies have frequently run advertisements expressing their interest in new forms of energy, but their actual investments have belied the marketing claims. The great bulk of their investments goes to traditional petroleum resources, including carbon-intensive energy sources like tar sands and natural gas from shale, while alternative investments account for a tiny fraction of their spending.

And:

In the last 15 years, the top five oil companies have spent around $5 billion to develop sources of renewable energy, according to Michael Eckhart, president of the American Council on Renewable Energy, an industry trade group. This represents only 10 percent of the roughly $50 billion funneled into the clean-energy sector by venture capital funds and corporate investors during that period, he said.