Miika Grady

Why drilling isn’t the answer

The “drill, baby, drill” chants at the Republican Convention were nauseating not only for their crassness, but because off their incredible ignorance. Somehow, the republicans seem to think that if we just started drilling tomorrow, their would be an immediate impact and all our energy problems would be solved.

The truth of the matter is, it would take close to 10 YEARS before any new offshore oil wells would be able to produce any oil for the market, and at an incredibly marginal, minimal impact as this chart shows.
[ From: Treehugger ]
[ Chart and further info: Architecture2030 ]

Wouldn’t immediate investment in wind and solar power and promoting advancements in energy efficiency be more worthwhile than more drilling? Enough with the band-aids already. More drilling just means more money in the pockets off the oil companies that have had the republicans in their pockets since the Model-T.

Obama was just a Community Organizer

Barack Obama was only a lowly community organizer? Wow. That’s terrible. What exactly did he do? [ TIME Mag, Swampland, Joe Klein ] Afterall, Rudy Guiliani doesn’t even know what that means!

Here is the summary:

“Obama was working for a group of churches that were concerned about their parishioners, many of whom had been laid off when the steel mills closed on the south side of Chicago. They hired Obama to help those stunned people recover and get the services they needed–job training, help with housing and so forth–from the local government… Obama served the poor for three years, then went to law school.”

Joe Klein continues:

“To describe this service–the first thing he did out of college, the sort of service every college-educated American should perform, in some form or other–as anything other than noble is cheap and tawdry and cynical in the extreme.”

I couldn’t agree more. Pretty disgusting how the whole convention laughed it up when Obama’s community organizing was mocked.

More entertaining republican double-speak, thanks to Jon Stewart:

And, even nicer vacation pictures

From my brother, Alex

Me and Rhys

Scandinavia pictures

Got home from a big 2-week Scandinavia vacation with my family. Here are some pictures.

All Rhys, all the time

More on my Flickr page…

Aw, what a cute pterodactyl baby

Our screaming little pterodactyl-monkey baby is almost 5 months old.

Why does food seem so expensive?

It’s related to our desire to become less dependent on foreign oil (and the Middle East). By subsidizing the ethanol industry, we’re increasing food prices.

TIME magazine breaks it down in last week’s issue, and Slate provides further explanation. The unfortunate consequences are as follows:

1. Farmers abandon growing other crops because they can get sky-high (subsidized) prices for corn (ethanol). Because farmers are growing less of other food crops, supply drops and food prices increase.

2. With oil now costing what it does, the cost of transportation and production of food has gone up, which results in higher prices at the grocery store.

3. Though ethanol is being touted as a green solution, Brazil’s rainforest and other forests around the world are being razed in favor of farm land to grow ethanol. Forest are a major carbon dioxide sink that balances out global warming. Less forests, more global warming.

So, now in addition to subsidizing oil production, we’re subsidizing ethanol production which isn’t any better for the environment, AND it negatively impacts food prices and supplies. It’s another pretty bad cycle we’re getting into. Shouldn’t the goal simply be to use the energy we have as efficiently as possible?