Undercurrents

I’m always curious to read discussions of hybrid cars in the mainstream press.  The following story came from Yahoo! News, and it was one of the featured stories for Yahoo! email users today.  Part of the fixation with the anti-fuel efficiency perspective is on cost, especially relatively short term cost like what you’ll pay in a year or over 5 years.  This article is no exception.   What’s more aggravating is that when the environmental reasons are mentioned, they are done so with such tokenism in a way that’s really insulting or patronizing to the reader.  In this article, the writer dedicates all of two and a half sentences to the really important reasons to buy more fuel efficient vehicles, only to ultimately leave the reader with the importance of a “bottom-line” analysis.

What’s most demeaning about this article and others like it is that it states the obvious as if it’s some grand discovery worthy of our attention: new hybrid cars cost a lot of money. Of course, so do new conventional fuel cars.  In an analysis of a new hybrid versus a new conventional car of the same type or class, the financial benefits of the hybrid would likely shine.  But instead of focusing on this comparison, idiot writers, like Terry Jackson from Bankrate.com, focus on ridiculous menial mental exercises that perpetuate our snail’s pace in the world of automotive fuel efficiency.
Click here to read “Trading in Gas Guzzler May Cost You.”

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The Hartford Neighborhood Environmental Partnership has created a website to organize all of the events and activities happening in April for Earth Day in Hartford.  Check out the site at www.hartfordearthday.blogspot.com.  Event organizers are invited to share their information for the site by sending all relevant information to hartfordearthday@gmail.com.

To celebrate the website’s release HNEP invites the public to join them for a drink at Firebox Restaurant on Broad St. Wednesday evening between 5 and 7:30 pm.

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I am trying really hard not to be cynical about the state of environmentalism today. It seems too good to be true that so many people are suddenly paying attention. Part of me fears that this is just a trend, like watching The Sopranos or wearing Uggs with sweatpants. So, naturally I was skeptical when I found a copy of AllGreen Magazine.
(more…)

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Clearly nobody in the federal government resolved to be competent in 2008. As early as February 6th, 46,000 square miles in the Chukchi Sea may be leased and opened to oil drilling. Anchorage Daily News reports:

The lease sale in an area slightly smaller than Pennsylvania was planned without information as basic as the polar bear and walrus populations, said Pamela A. Miller, Arctic coordinator with Northern Alaska Environmental Center. The lease sale is among the largest acreage offered in the Alaska region.

This decision will essentially be another way that people continue to laugh in the face of the sure signs that climate obliteration is happening. (more…)

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Here’s a yacht club we can all get behind, and you don’t need to own a boat. Taking on the bottled water industry with a taste test that proves the obvious: tap water, bottled water, it’s all H2O, baby. And you gotta love the yacht club vice commodore’s sign off:
“It seems people buy things they don’t need, with money they don’t have, to impress people they don’t like,”

writes Aurora Nowak, Hog River Yacht Club, University of Hartford

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Did anyone read the article in the Courant about the dairy farmer in Ellington who had to sell his cows earlier this year in order to keep his farm? According to the article, a quarter of the 210 dairy farms in Connecticut have closed in just in the last 4 years!

If you are interested in learning more about agriculture’s precarious situation from the farmers themselves there is a viewing of the documentary The Farmer’s Voice at the Asylum Hill Congregational Church (814 Asylum) on Friday night from 6 to 8. This film is specifically about CT farms. Knox Parks is hosting the potluck event.

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The folks over at Alchemy Juice Bar (now Green Vibration) are calling for a demonstration against former TV weatherman Art Horn. He is speaking tonight at the downtown branch of the Hartford Public Library. His presentation is called “Global Warming: Fact or Fiction.” The talk is set to begin at 6pm.

Horn calls global warming a “myth” and has been doing paid presentations since he was dumped from WVIT 30.

Demonstrators are asked to be at HPL for 5:30pm. The library is at 500 Main St.
Here is the latest call to action:

“Meet at the Hartford Public Library in protest to Art Horn calling Global Warming a HOAX and getting paid with our TAX DOLLARS to say so! We will be there with signs and cue cards please join us at 5:30!!! Bring a small flash light if you have one. The Hartford Courant is writing a story and we need people to SHOW UP!!!”

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The following is a press release from our friends at ACORN -

When: 9:00 a.m., Tuesday, October 23rd, 2007

Where: Lot 45-47 Enfield Street, Hartford, CT

Members of Hartford’s North End United chapter of the community organization ACORN and residents of the North End will meet with city officials Tuesday morning to demand why the city’s promises to see to the clean-up of abandoned vacant lots, made at a meeting on October 2nd, have not been fulfilled.

“No one should have to live like this,” says ACORN member Rosie Easterly of Enfield Street, who shares her back door with an overgrown lot. “The rodents are so bad, it’s ridiculous. If the city doesn’t do something soon, the rats will evict us.” (more…)

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I read Dennis House’s blog. There, I said it.

I haven’t crossed over. I don’t love WFSB. Don’t think he’s a particularly good reporter. I read always in hope that he’ll give shout outs to the city that he lives in, the same city that is routinely disgraced on the nightly news.

So, this morning when I checked in with the evil empire, rummaging through the mostly rehashed news, I found my House blog-reading somewhat validated. (more…)

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Often I feel like the Slowskys, the talking turtles from the high-speed internet ads who relish their supposedly slower-than-cable dsl connection. In one of the ads, Bill Slowsky downloads some file at a snail’s pace, and he says “aaahh, me time.” I’m more and more convinced that the human race is hurling itself into extinction. I think the human race can learn from Bill Slowsky. As a species, we’re embarrassingly inept at solving the self-created problem of our demise. There’s too much money to be made. So, I’ve decided to enjoy what’s left as much as I can.

(more…)

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