Disclaimer for Friends and Family:  Thus far, this blog has been a window into our lives, our travels, some of our lighthearted opinions.  This is good and fun and real.  However, I have decided to also use this blog to give some attention to some of the serious issues concerning our country and our world.  If these entries are a little too serious and controversial for you, censor for yourself and skip it!  And now...

What can I say?  I’m surrounded!  Constant information from different sources force me think about what I like to think of as “The Black Nasty”.  Oil.  Am I educated enough to talk about oil?  No.  Am I brave enough to start thinking about it?  And TALKING about it?  Maybe...

We go to China.  Major pollution problem.  Why?  Many reasons...sheer population support.  1.3 billion people living in roughly the same land mass as the U.S.  Industrialism creates it’s own pollution while boosting Chinese economy.  Boosted economy means more jobs and income for everyone means more personal cars being purchased and that means more pollution.  But with that in mind, here’s my new favorite statistic:  Number of personal cars in China for each 1,000 people?  9.  Number of personal cars in the U.S. for each 1,000 people?  1200.

Since our travels to China, so many people have asked about the pollution there and then criticized them for their pollution problem being out of control.  Granted, media coverage during the Olympics focused A LOT on their pollution (oh those poor elite athletes, sucking all that pollution down their respiratory tracts).  Yet, a few REAL LIVE OBSERVATIONS from China:  Yes, there’s smog, pollution, etc.  But there are also very few personal cars on the road.  Almost all you see are cabs and public buses.  AND BIKES>>>bikes are freakin’ EVERYWHERE in China.  Having biked a fair share of miles around D.C., dodging drivers on cel phones, drivers yelling at their kids, drivers opening their doors into my path, drivers turning in front of me and often taking public trails to go SAFELY miles out of my way, I say China, with its red bicycle history, is onto something.  Kids, professionals, aged ladies with bent backs.  Everyone is on a bike.  They line up at intersections by the dozen.  Seriously, hundreds of bikes, waiting at the Subway stations for their owners, old bikes, tattered, seats covered with plastic bags, not even worth locking up.  Awaiting them?  Miles and miles of BIKE LANES.  Every major street has either a wide bike lane or a secondary road just for bikes.  Oh to bike in such a friendly paradise.  To cruise the street in my very own lane.  What bliss. 

Leading me to my next thought:  transportation and our entitlement to oil.  I grew up in a two car family.  I got a car at age 16.  I drove a truck for almost ten years that never got over 20 miles to the gallon.  I can’t count how many miles I could have biked, walked, taken public transport.  Just the other day, in Ft. Collins, my mom offered me her bike to do errands not more than 2 miles from the house.  I drove. 

I consider myself from a pretty average background and having lived a pretty average life.  This is the problem.  The average person I know is living a life of oil entitlement.  We have no other paradigm in which to function.  Just like the Chinese doesn’t know any different.  They’ve biked all their lives.  That’s just how you get around.  Their kids didn’t grow up like me with no other expectations and therefore, little oil entitlement. 

I started to get on board a few years ago, selling my truck, walking around the city of D.C., biking to work.  These actions, while liberating and helping me sleep a little better at night the last five years, are by no means the only solution to our oil dependency and our sense of social entitlement.  I still have to change my mind set so that I don’t see these actions as ‘alternatives’ to driving.  I want to wake up someday and see driving as the alternative. 

Being at Shawn’s parents’ house, we’ve had access to television.  This is good and bad.  Most folks know that we haven’t watched TV in our house for about three years now.  Yes, we watch movies.  News?  NPR and online Washington Post and NY Times.  Deprived?  No.  What are we always surprised by when we do watch TV?  This time of year---POLITICAL ADS.  So, I’m watching all the adds for and against off shore drilling, drilling in Alaska, increasing funding for windpower, increasing funding for alternative fuel  research and development.  Shawn and I have talked long and hard about the dream of living ‘off the grid’, using alternative energies (probably wind and solar combo depending on where we live) to power our lifestyles.  This is a huge financial commitment...it takes most households years to ‘pay for’ their solar panels in energy savings, despite tax benefits.  However, the whole time you are waiting for your personal checkbook to assure you have done something positive, your lifestyle is not using oil energy.  How much would it cost to do R & D to find a way to build and/or subsidize affordable solar panelling so that the average household can make solar their energy source, not as an alternative, but as their mainstay for energy?

As we drove across the midwest, I watched in awe at the HUGE wind turbines, cranking around in a meager breeze.  Half of them weren’t running...why?  Because we haven’t perfected a way to store excess energy produced on a windy day.  If you think about how inconsistent wind can be, you understand.  The ‘grid’ is designed to produce a necessary amount of electricity, supplemented by an amount of wind energy that can be guaranteed to be produced.  Hence, any extra is wasted.  Therefore, turbines at a standstill.  Seriously, how much funding would be required to solve this problem so that turbines are completely efficient, every wee watt of energy being used, not wasted.  Of course, solar and wind energy are not available to all.  I hear this all the time “How can I worry about energy when the economy is so bad that I can’t put food on the table.”  Or gas in the tank?  Our country is so entrenched in oil dependency, it’s affected our social systems, our international policies, our ability to believe to believe that can be free of it.  Again, it’s a transition of thinking where alternatives become mainstream and typical paradigms are flipped on their heads. 

I could write about this for a long time.  We all could...no matter what side of the ‘line’ we stand on, or if we’re somewhere on the GREAT SPAN OF GRAY in between.  For me, the bottom line is, it’s a change in how we think, not just what we do.  A change in how we think will result in obvious changes in how we vote, how we use energy, how we move our bodies around our communities and the world.  I think we have to shake our oil entitlement that most of us were born with and that is NOT easy.  After seeing the average Chinese eighty year old, peddling an ancient bike through the streets of Beijing and knowing that we are moving to one of the most environmentally friendly countries in the world, I keep working on my own paradigms, making alternatives not an alternative and thinking all along about how to shake my personal oil dependency.

C