Thank Gaylord

TGIT - Thank Gaylord It's Tuesday

Today I blog a couple days earlier in the week. Today is a very important day for the color green. Today is Earth Day. We can thank Senator Gaylord Nelson of Wisconsin for Earth day. yes it was Gaylord who had the foresight to conceive Earth Day way back in 1970. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Earth_Day

Actually my favorite and home city of San Francisco beat Gaylord by a month by the then mayor Alioto declaring Earth Day in the city on March 21, 1970. Gaylord's first universal Earth day was held on April 22 1970.

Yes back in 1969 when Apollo 11 made it to the moon and landed humans on the moon for the first time there was great debate of the ruination of the earth. I guess not much has changed except we use almost twice as much oil in our global economy. We are still debating global warming and the need for energy conservation and sustainable development. Even good old Uncle Sam is in the Earth Day mood. yes the government has an Earth Day web site. http://www.earthday.gov/ Yes we see a picture of the President and First Lady in front of a national park sign celebrating their green accomplishment of attempting to reduce the backlog of maintenance to national parks. This makes playing the fiddle while Rome burned miniscule in comparison to mending the fence of Yellowstone while the planet consumes over 85 million barrels a day. By George He Has Got It Professor Henry Hyde Higgins exclaimed.

Back in 1969, when Alioto was mayor of the city by the bay, gas cost 30 cents a gallon. Today the news proclaimed that the average price for Regular Grade gasoline in San Francisco exceeded $4 a gallon for the first time. Gavin the Gavel Newsome our fame seeking mayor was seen drinking bio ethanol and chasing after the wife of one of his friends to celebrate his accomplishment of having the most expensive gas in the nation. But one could have bought a mansion in Pacific Heights in 1970 for $100,000, now the same mansion costs $5 million so gas is really not that expensive. Gas would need to be $15 a gallon to reach parity with that mansion. Old Gavy is considering an $11 a gallon gas tax to pay for his public works boondoggles. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/04/18/MNO4107CO5.DTL


Now that I have picked on both sides of the aisle in a fair and balanced way, do I see any hope as we "celebrate" Earth day 2008? Actually I do. Battery technology is improving and Lithium will come to our rescue in doubling the average fuel efficiency of vehicles. LED lighting will replace the inefficient vacuum technology of both incandescent and florescent light bulbs. Solar energy will increasing be used for heating spaces and water as well as generating PV electricity. Wind turbines are becoming common and are already competitive with fossil fuel power generation. Folks have woken up and seen the hoax being played out in hydrogen and bio-ethanol from corn and bio diesel from soy. Mostly there is money being made in being green and the greenback is the electromotive force for change in energy policy. I feel good and know that old Gaylord caused a sea change in the indiscriminate pollution of the planet with known toxins circa 1970. There will be new Gaylords in business, Congress and the White House and our great country will do more than mend fences in Yellowstone, we will show how the world how we can drive efficient vehicles, live in more efficient homes, have better public transportation, increase the fraction of our renewable electric power generation, and yet continue to enjoy economic growth without wasteful subsidies in corn ethanol or a hydrogen highway that leads to nowhere.