So Why Did You Buy Those Green Matches?

So these matches have been around our house for some time. Not being smokers, and only lighting a fire in the fireplace only occasionally, it takes a while for my wife and me to go through a box of matches like this.

I don’t know of another company that makes wooden matches like this other than Diamond. Ubiquitous as Acme is to Wile E. Coyote, I’ve seen Diamond matches all over the place and can remember no other, even from the time that I was allowed to light my first fire when I was a child.

            What I do notice that is obviously different from the boxes of matches that I remember from my childhood is the pleasant photo of a tree branch and gauzy sunlight that highlights the words “greenlight” and “Sourced from Responsible Forests.” The match tips are even green, as opposed to the traditional red.

            After getting past the idea of a forest being responsible, as though an area covered by trees could exercise a greater or lesser degree of rectitude, I googled the term Responsible Forest and got this website from Diamond, which clarifies the term as “Responsible Forestry.” As the matches are so small, I had always imagined that Diamond could supply themselves with all the wood they needed for years with just a couple logs. But apparently, the number of matches that Diamond makes is so great that they wind up cutting down a fair number of trees in the process.

            I didn’t look into this very much, so I don’t know how responsible Diamond’s forestry policy and practice really are. It could be quite comprehensive or could be a case of greenwashing. The question that I’m curious to ask here is: How much does a green label or packaging affect what you buy?

            I’m a committed environmentalist. I dry my clothes on a clothesline, take public transportation, at least once a week, reduce my driving, eat at least a little lower on the food chain than I used to; I even volunteer to work at saving a number of endangered species. There are a good number of folks like me. But really, we are a minority. What about other folks? People who aren’t as dedicated to saving the whales as I am, do they reach for the greenlight matches as opposed to the regular matches? Do they choose a laundry detergent from a company that promises that their business practices are sustainable to the seventh generation? How much does this matter to folks?

            So if you’re still with me, I’d like to know if you buy eco-friendly products. Why do you choose to do so? Is it important to you? Why? If it’s no bother, please post to the blog instead of other social media like Facebook. Thanks so much!

California's Own Climate Change Feedback Loop

We don’t often talk about the feedback loops that make a warming world even warmer. But as the thermostat on the planet goes up and up, there will be more and more of them. Feedback is when an effect of an input further amplifies the effects of that input. One feedback loop that is sometimes cited in climate change is snowfall. A warmer climate leads to less snow falling on the Earth and the snow that does fall melts more readily in the warmer climate. With less snow on the ground, which reflects sunlight back out into space, the planet warms a bit more than it otherwise would. So the world gets even warmer, which means even less snow, which means further warming, less snow and further warming.

            See where this is going.

Jimi Hendryx: feedback you want

Here in California we are providing an additional feedback loop to our globe warming. In our case, climate change has been a factor in the drought that we are enduring here. The warmer atmosphere means that things evaporate more quickly, so what might have been a fairly normal downturn in the precipitation we receive has turned into a years-long and extremely severe drought.

California's drought: feedback you don't want

Less water in our rivers and streams means that there is less water flowing behind the dams that generate hydroelectric power. So our hydroelectric power stations cannot generate as much electricity as they used to, which means that our electric lights, televisions, and computers are powered by other sources. While much of this power gap is made up by renewable sources, some of that electricity is generated by burning natural gas, which puts carbon into the atmosphere. Less water = less hydroelectric power = more natural gas burned = more CO2 in the air = global warming = less water = less hydroelectric power... OK, you see where this is going.

The Waters - and the People - of West Virginia Are Unsafe Again

This is one of those bits of news that sends my cynicism meter into the stratosphere. On Monday, the West Virginia House Judiciary Committee passed, by a 13 to 12 vote, SB 423. This bill will undo the chemical tank safety legislation that was passed last year after a coal-cleaning chemical from a tank owned by Freedom Industries spilled into the Elk River and poisoned the drinking water for 300,000 West Virginians, some of whom had to rely on bottled water for weeks. Schools were closed, and many businesses, such as restaurants, lost business.

The bill would give West Virginia’s Director of Homeland Security and Emergency Management more power to withhold from the public information on the chemical tanks in the state. I don’t know about you, but that certainly makes me feel more secure. The bill also reduces the number of tanks administered by last year’s safety law from around 50,000 down to about 12,000. State mandated inspections will be cut back under this bill, and information concerning hazardous materials stored near drinking water intakes will be blocked from the public. The bill has already passed the West Virginia Senate. Governor Tomblin’s signature is almost a certainty.

Ken Ward at the Charleston Gazette has more detail of the story here, and you can read his Coal Tattoo blog about it here.

How is a fiasco like this possible? Is it that the folks in West Virginia are too distracted by driving their kids to school and getting themselves off to work that they don’t have the time or energy to care about the water they drink? Or have all those chemicals in the water affected the memories of all those people who had to go to the store just so they could have water to drink last year?

Bryan T. McNiel, in his book Combating Mountaintop Removal: New Directions in the Fight Against Big Coal, says that West Virginia best resembles a third world country, one in which an outside industry extracts resources and, in order to do so, has all of the state, the political leaders and the populace, under its thumb. Even if you were to ignore the endemic poverty of West Virginia, the poorest state of the union, or the manner in which the coal industry keeps its message in the minds of the folks of the Mountain State—going so far as to inject itself into the classrooms of Appalachian schoolchildren—this latest turn by the elected officials in Charleston would be proof enough that McNiel is correct in thinking of West Virginia as the banana republic that rests somewhere between Pennsylvania and Kentucky.

I guess that it will be impossible to find out how this came about. Did this legislation come about only recently, the result of renewed backroom deals between politicians and the coal companies? Or had the fix been in from the start? That SB 373 was only a sham, a dog and pony show of politicians doing what’s right for the state of West Virginia and the people who live there, while they knew full well that months hence, possibly even a year later, that SB 373 would die and the laws to protect the water would be as flimsy as a rusted 50-year-old storage tank held together by duct tape and earnestly crossed fingers.

            I don’t think we’ll find out either way. Oh, and by the way, we still do not know about the toxicity of 4-Methylcyclohexane Methanol, the licorice smelling substance that fouled the waters of the Elk River.

Troubled waters again for West Virginia