"Challenges that impede prograress in energy savings include low fossil energy prices due in part to energy and fuel subsidies, an incomplete market-drivers policy, and the lack of capacity building for energy saving."
So from what I can tell, China is trying really hard to make themselves more energy efficient and produce less greenhouse gases, but people still prefer to buy fossil fuels because it's cheaper and there's not enough dedication to get the renewable energy movement down. What is a market-driver's policy?
Tuesday, May 3, 2011
Tuesday, April 5, 2011
An Inconvenient Conversation
An Inconvenient Conversation
Lynn Le
4/5/11
First off, we talked about how appropriately named this project was. Inconvenient is right, and because of inconvenience, I talked to a separate person for this assignment, and not my parents. Not only that, because I don’t care enough to do more than necessary for lack of my own time, I will honestly say here that I simply got the questions answered in interview format. There was no requirement that said this had to be in sentence format, so I am presenting this raw.
What forms of energy are available?
Wind, Tidal, Solar, Nuclear, Coal, Natural Gas…
What are the benefits and drawbacks of current energy sources?
Turbines of all sorts are expensive to build, Nuclear can have environmental drawbacks and can be dangerous, Solar panels take up a lot of space, Coal is bad for the environment, and Natural gas is limited.
Nuclear doesn’t have any immediate effect to the environment and is efficient, Wind takes up little space and has no effect on the environment, same with tidal. Solar is cheap, doesn’t hurt the environment and can be efficient. Coal is cheap and convenient, and natural gas is environmentally safe.
How can we provide the energy we need while maintaining ecological balance?
We can do away with harmful sources of energy and instead put in environmentally friendly means of energy.
How does climate change?
The change in climate is mostly natural. It’s natural for climates to change every once and a while on earth, as seen with the changes that the earth has already gone through. That is not to say that pollution is not a factor as well, it’s just that climate changes because it simply does.
How do we study global climate?
We take data about rainfall, temperature, snowfall, and etcetera.
Why is there a disconnect between what science is telling us and what the public and politicians are doing about climate change?
This is because the politicians are using climate change to further their careers. They don’t care for the facts, so they don’t pay attention to them. The public is similar. They listen to the politicians and the media and not what scientific journals are saying. Both are under a sort of state of hysteria where they only believe one thing and won’t look at the facts, even if they are presented to them.
What role, if any, do morality, ethics, and spirituality play in addressing climate change?
There is only a role when it comes to solving climate change. There are the issues of deforestation to create places for cleaner energy, there’s cost issues… and of course, there’s always the one crazy person who thinks global warming is a sign from God.
What leads some people to commit themselves deeply to addressing climate change -- and not others?
Some people commit themselves to the problem—creating less greenhouse gasses, dealing with cleaner energy, etcetera. Others are looking to repair the damage done to the earth. This is probably because some think prevention is more important than dealing with the damage already done, while others want to focus on repairing what we have then preventing it from happening again.
What is the hardest thing about addressing climate change?
The fact that the effects of anything we do can barely be seen. Every change we make, every tree we plant, there is no tangible evidence of the good we have done, so it can be difficult to motivate change.
Friday, April 1, 2011
Back to 1983
Back to 1983
Wednesday, March 29, 2011
So it’s spring break, and there really is a lot and nothing to do. After getting back from a convention this weekend, I was tired and I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything at all.
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday cleaning up the stuff from the convention—freebies, uploading photos, putting away my costumes, fixing the props that got broken, and contacting the friends I had made there by finding them in places online.
There wasn’t much to do after that.
So on Wednesday, I slept in. I didn’t even hear my alarm go off, so I guess that counted as not using it. I woke up at some ten or eleven o’clock, had my breakfast—or rather, brunch, since it was pretty late…—and waited for lunch by talking with my sister in our room.
That’s what we always do in the mornings—it’s what gets our mind going and thinking, so when we have time, we usually talk for hours.
So then it was lunch time, and when we got out there, our mom had prepared us a Vietnamese dish that really required no oven. It was washed cold white noodles with the eggrolls and barbeque meat we had leftovers of from the previous day, with some herbs and covered in fish sauce, which was really just lemonade with some garlic and stuff in it. We mixed it all together and ate it—it’s not as unpleasant as it seems, it’s actually one of my favorite dishes.
After lunch, which I had seconds of because I loved it so much, I went and read some Japanese comics from my brother’s shared shelf—since I was bored and I had nothing better to do and I had been meaning to get around to reading them.
So most of my week in general was reading through one series called Chrono Crusade, which I finished that day. But so long of reading kind of hurts my body since I’m stretching out on the bed so much. So I went to the living room and played chess with my brother and sister, which I won once against my sister but lost all the other times. We had set up the chess board before for one of Dave’s math homeworks, and hadn’t bothered to put it away, so we might as well have used it.
The rest of the night was pretty much just reading manga and playing chess and talking to my sister.
Now onto answering those questions on the blog, I didn’t feel much need to communicate with anyone since I was being lazy that day. News about Japan came to me when my parents were talking about how outrageous the media was about this radiation thing, since it really was being blown out of proportion, but other than that I don’t listen to the news on a regular basis anyway so I didn’t change much there.
Obviously, since I’m on the computer so much, giving up the computer was the hardest, but I like reading comics too so it wasn’t that bad. The least hardest was probably TV since there wasn’t anything good on during the weekdays anyway. I wasn’t really surprised with how easy or hard it was to live a day without electronics, since I’ve done it before and it’s not that big a deal. The only thing I missed was talking to my friend who I usually talk to every day, but I didn’t talk to her during the convention either so she understood since I do get pretty busy. I’m surprised I didn’t do any drawing though, I thought I would have when I got this assignment.
So now onto the next assignment from the only teacher who really assigned us any homework over the break.
Wednesday, March 29, 2011
So it’s spring break, and there really is a lot and nothing to do. After getting back from a convention this weekend, I was tired and I honestly didn’t feel like doing anything at all.
I spent most of Monday and Tuesday cleaning up the stuff from the convention—freebies, uploading photos, putting away my costumes, fixing the props that got broken, and contacting the friends I had made there by finding them in places online.
There wasn’t much to do after that.
So on Wednesday, I slept in. I didn’t even hear my alarm go off, so I guess that counted as not using it. I woke up at some ten or eleven o’clock, had my breakfast—or rather, brunch, since it was pretty late…—and waited for lunch by talking with my sister in our room.
That’s what we always do in the mornings—it’s what gets our mind going and thinking, so when we have time, we usually talk for hours.
So then it was lunch time, and when we got out there, our mom had prepared us a Vietnamese dish that really required no oven. It was washed cold white noodles with the eggrolls and barbeque meat we had leftovers of from the previous day, with some herbs and covered in fish sauce, which was really just lemonade with some garlic and stuff in it. We mixed it all together and ate it—it’s not as unpleasant as it seems, it’s actually one of my favorite dishes.
After lunch, which I had seconds of because I loved it so much, I went and read some Japanese comics from my brother’s shared shelf—since I was bored and I had nothing better to do and I had been meaning to get around to reading them.
So most of my week in general was reading through one series called Chrono Crusade, which I finished that day. But so long of reading kind of hurts my body since I’m stretching out on the bed so much. So I went to the living room and played chess with my brother and sister, which I won once against my sister but lost all the other times. We had set up the chess board before for one of Dave’s math homeworks, and hadn’t bothered to put it away, so we might as well have used it.
The rest of the night was pretty much just reading manga and playing chess and talking to my sister.
Now onto answering those questions on the blog, I didn’t feel much need to communicate with anyone since I was being lazy that day. News about Japan came to me when my parents were talking about how outrageous the media was about this radiation thing, since it really was being blown out of proportion, but other than that I don’t listen to the news on a regular basis anyway so I didn’t change much there.
Obviously, since I’m on the computer so much, giving up the computer was the hardest, but I like reading comics too so it wasn’t that bad. The least hardest was probably TV since there wasn’t anything good on during the weekdays anyway. I wasn’t really surprised with how easy or hard it was to live a day without electronics, since I’ve done it before and it’s not that big a deal. The only thing I missed was talking to my friend who I usually talk to every day, but I didn’t talk to her during the convention either so she understood since I do get pretty busy. I’m surprised I didn’t do any drawing though, I thought I would have when I got this assignment.
So now onto the next assignment from the only teacher who really assigned us any homework over the break.
Thursday, March 3, 2011
Intro Paragraph and Outline
WSDE Essay: Why we buy aesthetically appealing food and food packaging.
Original thesis: We have been conditioned to buy pretty, packaged foods by marketing and advertising schemes designed to make us think we would feel better about ourselves if we bought this product. It's not true that it would make us feel better, but our subconscious mind is drawn toward it and the convenience of packaged food.
McDonald’s, Burger King, Coca Cola, Sprite, Gatorade, Snapple, Lays, Doritos, Cheetos, Hershey’s, Nestle, Kirkland, Kellogs, Ralphs, Albertsons, Vons, Walmart. What do all of these have in common? Packaged foods and brand names. More than likely, every household will have one of these products or go to stores that sell these products. They are often bought based on advertisements seen on television or the sheer convenience of “needing” such a brand and having it on the shelf of the nearest store. But they aren’t products that a person might actually “need”, they are products companies make people think they need and it will make them feel better if they get it. People are conditioned by marketing and advertisements to buy the most convenient, colorful, packaged products to fulfill a false desire.
I. Conditioning
a. Raised by marketing
II. Marketing
a. Psychology
b. Colorful packaging
c. Price and economy
III. Convenience
a. Comparison to old days
b. Obesity
c. No one wants to look around for other things
IV. Closing
a. Often, the false desire isn’t necessarily good for health
b. What can change?
c. What can make it better
Saturday, February 26, 2011
Blue Gold Commentary
I didn't know Los Angeles was such a barren desert--I know we live in a desert, but it never occurred to me before that our "prosperity" came from such a long way. I certainly learned a lot about the pipelines and dams that provide humans water, but also a lot about the disadvantage of trapping that water.
I have known for my whole life that water is an unstoppable, always moving force. That humans have learned how to contain it seemed like a good thing, but then I learned from the movie Blue Gold: World Water Wars that there is a reason that water is not supposed to be inert. Chemicals, bacteria, and nutrients are moved and dispersed through the water as it flows, so keeping it still kills the nutrients and gives chemicals like mercury and other things like bacteria the chance to grow. It also creates oxygen bubbles, so the water is no longer good anymore.
Dams were built to stop water so industries, who use it most and pollute it most, can bottle it up and sell it back to us. They take a lot of water and don't put it back, so the water sources are depleting quickly--this isn't the way nature meant for it to be. Water was meant to go in a cycle--to return to the place it came from eventually. But because of the way our cities are built, the water can't be returned in a natural way. It goes through the sewers, polluted by trash and other human waste, to go to the ocean, where it pollutes the ocean too.
It's sad that not only do we destroy our water, we destroy ourselves and we don't even realize it. The privatization of water is causing us our lives--we literally have to pay money to live. And those who don't have money, like in developing third world countries, can't pay that money. So they cannot live. Is this what the world has come to?
I have known for my whole life that water is an unstoppable, always moving force. That humans have learned how to contain it seemed like a good thing, but then I learned from the movie Blue Gold: World Water Wars that there is a reason that water is not supposed to be inert. Chemicals, bacteria, and nutrients are moved and dispersed through the water as it flows, so keeping it still kills the nutrients and gives chemicals like mercury and other things like bacteria the chance to grow. It also creates oxygen bubbles, so the water is no longer good anymore.
Dams were built to stop water so industries, who use it most and pollute it most, can bottle it up and sell it back to us. They take a lot of water and don't put it back, so the water sources are depleting quickly--this isn't the way nature meant for it to be. Water was meant to go in a cycle--to return to the place it came from eventually. But because of the way our cities are built, the water can't be returned in a natural way. It goes through the sewers, polluted by trash and other human waste, to go to the ocean, where it pollutes the ocean too.
It's sad that not only do we destroy our water, we destroy ourselves and we don't even realize it. The privatization of water is causing us our lives--we literally have to pay money to live. And those who don't have money, like in developing third world countries, can't pay that money. So they cannot live. Is this what the world has come to?
Wednesday, February 23, 2011
Annotated Bibliography
My Essay Topic: Why we buy aesthetically appealing food and food packaging.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Dangerous-Food-Additives
It's a list of chemicals and additives found in food and on food packaging that could be dangerous to you. But it seems we still buy these things just because they are appealing. I think it's helpful since if we do look on food packaging, we can find these chemicals on there and this article links them to dangerous effects.
http://undergroundwellness.com/why-we-buy-unhealthy-foods-part-one/
This is about a psychoanalysis of why people buy more appealing things. It says that companies market their products to attract out subconscious mind, so that we'd feel better about ourselves if we buy this product. One of the things I'd definitely add to my essay would probably be a little social science and psychoanalysis, not only of the consumer but of the marketer.
http://www.examiner.com/food-in-new-orleans/why-we-eat-unhealthy-foods
This talks about why we buy cheaper and easier food, and how advertising and conditioning has made people get used to doing so. It talks briefly about how we'd go for a cheaper, nearer, easier, more efficient and most available choice and get obese. It also talks about how we get little exercise with today's technology as compared to the past when most people didn't have cars so they had to walk or something. This is a little bit of psychoanalyzing, with all the reasons why we buy the brand stuff or the cheap stuff or the most marketed stuff.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/how-about-them-wrapped-apples/
This is an interesting article about how food packaging is important. It explains the effects of packaging, how it prolongs shelf life, so that food wouldn't be thrown out and cause more methane gas emissions, which is more potent than CO2. It might be a good point to include in my article.
http://www.truth-it.net/packaged_food_industry.html
Talks about the convenience of packaged foods' affects on our health. It goes over how the chemicals in packaging are hazardous to human health.
http://quazen.com/recreation/food/reasons-we-buy-packaged-bread-buns-or-rolls/
A list of reasons of why we might buy things (in this case, bread from a store). It might account for some of the psychoanalysis stuff.
http://hubpages.com/hub/Dangerous-Food-Additives
It's a list of chemicals and additives found in food and on food packaging that could be dangerous to you. But it seems we still buy these things just because they are appealing. I think it's helpful since if we do look on food packaging, we can find these chemicals on there and this article links them to dangerous effects.
http://undergroundwellness.com/why-we-buy-unhealthy-foods-part-one/
This is about a psychoanalysis of why people buy more appealing things. It says that companies market their products to attract out subconscious mind, so that we'd feel better about ourselves if we buy this product. One of the things I'd definitely add to my essay would probably be a little social science and psychoanalysis, not only of the consumer but of the marketer.
http://www.examiner.com/food-in-new-orleans/why-we-eat-unhealthy-foods
This talks about why we buy cheaper and easier food, and how advertising and conditioning has made people get used to doing so. It talks briefly about how we'd go for a cheaper, nearer, easier, more efficient and most available choice and get obese. It also talks about how we get little exercise with today's technology as compared to the past when most people didn't have cars so they had to walk or something. This is a little bit of psychoanalyzing, with all the reasons why we buy the brand stuff or the cheap stuff or the most marketed stuff.
http://freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/08/how-about-them-wrapped-apples/
This is an interesting article about how food packaging is important. It explains the effects of packaging, how it prolongs shelf life, so that food wouldn't be thrown out and cause more methane gas emissions, which is more potent than CO2. It might be a good point to include in my article.
http://www.truth-it.net/packaged_food_industry.html
Talks about the convenience of packaged foods' affects on our health. It goes over how the chemicals in packaging are hazardous to human health.
http://quazen.com/recreation/food/reasons-we-buy-packaged-bread-buns-or-rolls/
A list of reasons of why we might buy things (in this case, bread from a store). It might account for some of the psychoanalysis stuff.
QQC
"Meat comes from the grocery store, where it is cut and packaged to look as little like parts of animals as possible."
This quote was interesting because I remember Robert Kuhl saying something similar about corn, about how we only buy things that are aesthetically appealing and if they aren't, we don't buy them. Why is that? Why do we care so much that our food looks perfect?
That in itself can be an essay topic, exploring why people like things that look perfect rather than taste better, or buy things that were sprayed with chemicals to be preserved rather than something local even if it's not pretty. It works especially here in San Diego, where it seems a lot of our food and water supplies are imported from elsewhere.
This quote was interesting because I remember Robert Kuhl saying something similar about corn, about how we only buy things that are aesthetically appealing and if they aren't, we don't buy them. Why is that? Why do we care so much that our food looks perfect?
That in itself can be an essay topic, exploring why people like things that look perfect rather than taste better, or buy things that were sprayed with chemicals to be preserved rather than something local even if it's not pretty. It works especially here in San Diego, where it seems a lot of our food and water supplies are imported from elsewhere.
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