It looks like it’s just icy enough to procrastinate on the church-going, but with a little care and a bit of rationalization, the Woodster thinks he can make it to the tavern just fine.

That’s a good one and I think it defines two requirements for being human – rationalization and procrastination.  Have you ever noticed how they seem to go hand in hand?

Like the story about the country Hillbilly with the leaky roof on his shack.  When asked why he didn’t repair it, he said, “Well, when it’s raining I think about it but I can’t fix it ‘cause I’d get all wet, and when it’s not raining, it’s not a problem anymore.”

Which leads me to a bigger rationalization being played out in the news these days.  It concerns foreign oil and our dependence on it.  Let me see if I can sum it up … ummm … “Well, when there’s an oil crisis and the price goes up we think about an energy policy and then the price comes down and it’s not a problem anymore.”

Actually, I wasn’t quite accurate in my description of the oil dilemma.  It’s not a rationalization being played out just these days.  It’s been playing over and over for forty years, ever since the filling station gas lines of the 1970’s, and President Carter’s admonition to create an energy policy to keep it from happening again.

Hey, we all know our dependence on foreign oil is a big problem, right?  It’s cost us billions of dollars, thousands of lives, unnecessary wars and most important, problems for our SUV’s.  And yet we still have no practical plan to reduce it.  Well, okay, forget all those trivialities, except the SUV thing; have you seen the price at the pump, lately?

One stands in total awe and admiration at the scale of our disorganization and delay.  I think they give out awards for rationalization and procrastination this masterful.  We should, at the very least, get a national Nobel Prize for this.

Of course, it’s not like we haven’t tried, right?

Like that environmentally friendly alcohol for fuel program, where we spend 7% more energy creating the stuff (you can’t even drink it, for goodness sakes) than we get out of it, and help create food riots around the world by jacking up the price of corn.  I even read a report where they were burning polluting coal to create the heat to distill the alcohol.

I’m thinking maybe something got lost in the environmental translation there, yes?

So does our support for this senseless policy have anything to do with the fact that there are big political primaries in Iowa, which is a big corn growing state?  Could this be a political rationalization of sorts to support alcohol fuel, to subsidize it, and harvest votes from the Iowan farmers, so to speak?

Or how about us totally ignoring the fact that we are the Saudi Arabia of natural gas.  We have at least a fifty year supply.  Which, by the way, we could use to fuel our commercial truck fleet and reduce our foreign oil dependence by 50% in ten years.

Could it be that even though natural gas is cheaper than oil and burns cleaner than oil, our politicians just listen to the oil lobbies and their big fat contributions and take a pass on that natural gas thing until after the next election?  Could this be procrastination and rationalization?  At the highest level?  In our government?

I realize I’m coming across like a wild-eyed radical with all this reckless speculation, and I could go on, but I think you get my point.  We’ll just keep muddling along, following that great American Mark Twain’s advice to never put off to tomorrow what we can put off to the day after tomorrow.

When it comes to politics, energy policy and that procrastination / rationalization thing, we are about as good as it gets.  Talk about American exceptionalism!  It makes you feel right proud, doesn’t it.

Which leads me to my final point.  And that is, for all of our folly, I still believe in this country.  And I have faith we will eventually get it right.

But it’s going to be a long haul down the road yet, I’m afraid.  It’s going to be like Winston Churchill’s comment about us in World War II.

He said, “You can always count on the Americans to do the right thing – after they have tried everything else.”

We’re still in the “try everything else stage.”  So hang on to your wallet and come along for the ride.  It’s bound to be interesting.

Have a nice day – J. Daniel

P.S. Here are some other useful rationalization tools I uncovered while doing my research …

1) Play first, work second.
2) Lazy people are healthy people
3) Hard working folks are mean
4) Hard working folks make everyone uncomfortable
5) My genetic map made me this way

You can read a full development of these inspirational thoughts at http://hubpages.com/hub/How-to-Rationalize-Laziness.

As I watch the news and talk to my friends and associates, they all tell me the debate about global warming is over.  Many explain to me that we are destroying the planet by driving our cars and polluting the atmosphere with CO₂ gas.  That’s carbon dioxide, the gas in soda pop.

Imagine that.  The late, great planet earth destroyed by a giant Orange Crush or Pepsi.  Who’d a thunk it?  What an ignoble end.

But I’m here to tell you this is not true, not true at all.  It’s not all the cars and soda pop driving us toward doom.

Global warming is caused by cashmere sweaters!

How is this so, you might ask.  Well, my research has uncovered these little known facts.

It turns out that cashmere is made from the hair on the belly of a special kind of goat.  Personally, I would have preferred this to be the hair of a Yak because it would make my story more interesting – but I must stay true to my journalistic principles, so goat belly hair it is.

And not just any goat living in any old place.  It has to be a special kind of goat that lives in a very harsh climate.  This causes the goats to create a special kind of soft, warm insulating hair that is known as cashmere.

It’s a little sad that the goats have to live in such harsh places and suffer like this.  No doubt many would rather spend their time in Miami Beach, perhaps at Mangos, listening to hot Latin music, bleating and swaying to the beat, slurping margaritas and checking out some nicely filled out dancing cashmere sweaters in the process (indeed, this is what I was doing when I came up with this theory).

But I wasn’t bleating.  Everything else, yes, but not bleating, just to set the record straight.

So anyway, back to the sweater theory and across the ocean to the people in England , who used to have a lock on the cashmere goats because of their dreary climate.  The English have never seemed to mind this much as they hang out in the pubs all the time, and who’s to blame them really.  So while they were swilling pints away inside the warm pubs, their goats were outside suffering, doing their duty and making cashmere hair on their bellies to stay warm.

It was the natural order of things.

One day the Chinese caught on to this gig and one of them said #%#@*+!$$ which sounds phonetically like “cam chon fin seng mucho dollars” (simulated Chinese), which means, loosely translated, “We can do this for half the cost by using cheap labor goats and make MUCHO DOLLARS.”

So they got started on their project chop chop!

Now the Chinese have the perfect place for this with a really lousy climate called the Steppes.  No one has ever seen any steps there, actually, and there’s really no need for steps since it’s flatter than Kansas, but that’s what it’s called just the same and so we’ll just go with this.  Also note that this ties in nicely with Tom Friedman’s book on the global economy, entitled, The World is Flat.

The Chinese always do things in a big way, and recently inspired by a translation of Carl Sagan’s works, in-sourced billions and billions of goats to the Steppes.  The little goats suffered, as was the plan, and made cashmere for billions and billions of cashmere sweaters to be sold at Wal-Mart’s around the world – you know, that global economy thing again.

There was just one little problem, really.  The goats ate all the grass on the Steppes, so now they really suffered, and great dust storms started swirling across the land.

All the dust went up into the atmosphere, and carried by the trade winds (that global economy thing again) blew all over America from San Francisco to New York, trapping heat underneath the dust cloud and altering the weather in a gigantic greenhouse effect.

And there you have it.  As soon as you say “greenhouse effect” it’s global warming for sure.

Global warming is really responsible for everything these days.  For instance, when it’s blazing hot in Kansas in August, that’s global warming.  When it’s freezing in Chicago in January, it’s global warming.  And when they have droughts in the desert Southwest, or your bank account is overdrawn or you run out of beer during the super bowl, well, it’s definitely global warming.

And all because the little cashmere goats (also known as scapegoats) ate all the grass on the Steppes in China.

So I think the whole thing is irrefutable, really.  It’s hard to deny solid facts and evidence such as this.

But wait, you say. I love my cashmere sweaters.

No problem.  I’m all for saving the planet, but I’m not one of those uptight environmentalist.  After all, we still have to have fun and enjoy life.

So I say, go ahead and wear your cashmere sweaters, particularly if you fill one out rather nicely.

And let’s all meet at Mangos for margaritas!!! (chuckle).  Bring a freezing little goat if you have one (as long as they don’t bleat).

Have a nice day - J. Daniel

Note 1: Al Gora invented the cashmere sweater, but refuses to take any personal responsibility for the damage he’s done to the environment.  Now there’s an Inconvenient Truth for you.

Note 2: I bet you think I made this whole thing up, don’t you?  But truth is stranger than fiction.  There actually is some factual basis to this post (granted – cashmere sweaters are not the only cause of global warming).  But it turns out, the little goats really DID eat all the grass on the Steppes, which did create dust storms, which possibly has affected weather in other countries – including the United States.  You’ll find the following web site articles from The Encyclopedia of Earth, Times Online and News Public quite interesting.

http://www.eoearth.org/article/Eastern_Gobi_desert_steppe

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/article744158.ece

http://news-public.com/index.php/world-news/south-east-asia/90-china/1537-dust-bowls-sandstorms-in-china-affects-other-countries

So here are a couple of good news items for you.  Did you know we actually use less energy per person today than we did in 1978.  And that’s in spite of an increased standard of living.  How much less energy?  About 9%.  That’s significant.  Even more striking is our reduction in energy use to produce goods, which has dropped a whopping 53% from 1970 to 2008.

So as 2010 ends, lets take pause to appreciate this.  Ecology doesn’t have to always be doom and gloom. Indeed, I think the movement does itself a diservice with this attitude.

Sure, we have much more to improve.  But it’s clear that we have the ability to move the needle in our ecological endeavors.

Wishing you a Happy and Green New Year – J. Daniel

A positive ecological move in our modern society is the reduction of paper check usage.  Check usage has been around for a long time.  The Romans had a form of checks, although I imagine usage was quite limited. I have trouble imaging that Spartacus sat down every month and wrote out checks to pay his bills.

But check usage really took off in the 1950′s when automated methods of handling them became available.  I’m quite well acquainted with some of these automated methods.  Years ago, one of my first professional jobs was  a third shift computer operator.  I would operate our IBM System 360 mainframe, reading 350,000 checks per night into the system, and then sorting them while operating the mainframe computer.

This will keep you pretty busy and focused.

I read and sorted them on an IBM 1419 MICR Check Reader / Sorter, a large Rube  Goldberg looking machine like the one pictured above.  It had many moving mechanical parts and would feed the checks through at about twenty-five mph.  At this speed, it took a lot just to keep the machine fed and not running out of checks to read.

One of the more challenging aspects of the job was when someone had gotten a lump of a chocolate bar they were eating stuck to one of the checks, or they had stapled a check (the old please don’t fold, staple or mutilate line – but checks, not cards).

The machine would make a loud noise as the check stuck in the machine, all the while slamming hundreds of other checks in behind it at twenty-five mph and coming to a stop.  I had to pull all these jammed up checks out of the machine to get it started again — and, as you can imagine, tape together pieces of some of the checks that had been torn apart.

This usually happened one or twice a night and helped me hone my colorful language skills as a young man.  Fortuntely,  I was the only person in the bank on the third shift, so no one was offended.

So I have perhaps an emotional as well as ecological basis for thinking reduced check usage is a good thing.

So how many trees are saved by reduced check usage?  It’s hard to say but here is a very rough estimate for you.  One figure I see is that Americans use 60,000,000,000 checks per year and that number has been dropping since the 1990′s due to online payments.

Assuming a usable cord of wood (8 feet wide, 4 feet deep, and 4 feet high) is created out of each harvested tree, that will make 460,000 checks.  At 60 billion checks per year that’s over 13,000 trees.  Remember from an earlier post that we said a tree would take 10 pounds of CO2 out of the atmosphere per year.  That means these trees would help our CO2 problem by 130,000 pounds (or 65 tons).

That’s a big number.  And it’s probably larger than that since paper checks are often mailed, and it takes a tree to make 61, 370 envelops and 4,384,000 stamps.

All told, our reduction in check usage is saving trees.  And we aren’t doing this to save trees, but for personal convenience.  But it doesn’t matter, the trees are saved none the less.

Not all ecological improvements require great sacrifice — some are actually convenient to do.

Have a green day – J. Daniel

P.S. I got much of my information from A Tree for Each American, American Forest & Paper Association, Washington, DC.

Also, Wikipedia has an interesting article on checks and their history at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cheque.