T. Boone Pickens has been spending his own money on TV commercials inviting people to visit his website and read his energy proposal for America. The man makes good sense and I signed up for his email updates.

One item I'm really fascinated with is some information regarding cars being fueled by natural gas. This is nothing new. Over twenty years ago we had a Ford van converted to run on propane. The gas station was by State Fair Park in West Allis and the oil in the engine never seemed to get dirty. Run out of gas before getting to a propane station? We carried a regular propane barbecue grill tank of gas that could be connected and get the truck another 30 miles or so. Even that wasn't really new technology. My uncle had a farm tractor, a Minneapolis Moline, that ran on propane.

On Boone's website is a link to natural gas fueling stations.  Those prices you see are called Gas Gallon Equivalent which means "CHEAP" as compared to gasoline. The Journal recently had an article on compressed natural gas and it was pointed out that there are home fuel pumps available to hook up to your gas meter. It takes a long time to refuel, but imagine never visiting a gas station again. Notice that a CNG station is here in town at the WE Energies site on West Avenue. The bad news is limited hours, probably due to their trucks being about the only ones using it, but I'm sure longer hours would happen if the public begins using it.

So while natural gas can be used to fuel our cars and trucks, what will the additional demand for it do to the price of it? Will it drive up the cost of heating our homes? There is still the so called "Carbon Footprint" that is left behind by burning natural gas, if you buy into that idea. I still believe that the solution to energy needs will be how we create electricity and the obsolescence of the internal combustion engine.

In the past I've criticized new construction as putting a load on our dwindling water resource. This, even though the business that I'm in is dependent on new construction. Briefly, I don't believe that long time residents of the city or county should be put in the same boat of inconvenience to accommodate development and expansion. Those dwindling the resource should be the ones to carry the load. Water wise, this would be prohibiting watering lawns, gardens and washing cars in new developments except with water gathered from cisterns or other non-aqufier sources. On site water recycling of gray water should be included with conservation efforts.

Preparation for the diminished used of petroleum should be implemented in the the building code too.  Electricity is the energy of the future. We will power anything with a petroleum engine with it and we will heat our homes with it. As an expert in the heating and cooling business, I can see gas furnaces going the way of oil furnaces in the next twenty years. Honda has shown a natural gas powered fuel cell generator to recharge electric cars and provide power for the home's electric furnace and heat pump/air conditioner. For those of you with hot water heat, there have been electric powered boilers so don't feel left out.

GM will be introducing the electric car, the Volt, which will run entirely on electricity, recharge at home if desired, but have gasoline back-up so you don't get stranded. In my needs, the electricity range is adequate for most all of my driving around. So the Volt can replace one of my cars and the other can be the guzzler used to pull the boat and so forth.

The building code should anticipate the plumbing changes and increased electrical service needs of the near future and require that it be install NOW in new construction and remodeling of existing homes and buildings. 

"We have met the enemy and he is us" Pogo, Earth Day 1970

OK class, take your Sunday newspaper and turn to page 12A and read the headline; "Judge rules against oil drilling in Michigan forest". Let me start by pointing out that Congress, our body of lawmakers, presently has a national approval rating of 9%. This is one reason why. People are sick and tired and getting poorer partly due to federal judges legislating from the bench. Congress seems to not be interested in doing anything about that. 

We hear the word pristine used often as a reason why we can't drill here or there. Yet I've gone geocaching in seemingly pristine places only to find out that they were restored landfill sites. The things out of place were the occasional pipe sticking out of the ground for water testing. The Discover Channel recently did a special on earth without humans. If we were to vanish from the planet, our roads and buildings would crumble as nature grew in the cracks and crevices. Pollution would be cleaned up by micro-organisms.

Use your best whiny nasal voice here; "Well the big oil companies aren't drilling where they already have leases". Could it be because it isn't cost effective to go after it there, yet? In my travels, I've seen small oil rigs inactive one year and a year or two later they are pumping up and down. Cost effectiveness is why.

We need to get the whole mess going so that we can satisfy our present need for oil while at the same time work toward eliminating our need for it. Congress's approval rating will never get higher than 9% until they begin getting things orchestrated and stop worrying about re-election funding for their cushy jobs. Slapping down judges that are creating roadblocks to this progress would be a good step!

Snapshots are usually thought of as still pictures. A capture of a brief moment in time. Sometimes they can fail to tell the whole story and lead one to incorrect conclusions.  Like taking words out of their context. Politicians love to do that to each other. Sometimes opinions and even conclusions are based on snapshots of information. Wise people are flexible enough to change their opinions and conclusions when presented with the whole video rather than the snapshot or the whole text rather than the snippet. Even wiser people don't come to conclusions without seeing the whole story.

I shudder when world leaders (G8) decide to put economic stress on their countries, such as carbon dioxide emissions, based on a snapshot of the history of the world. I don't think that even a crazy Iranian leader would deny that there was an ice age.  Evidence of warm weather plants have been found at the north pole regions, so it is logical that there have been times of unusual warmth. Global Warming, in other words.  Man was not there to cause it. While the snapshot shows it appears to follow man's industrialization, the video shows otherwise.

The planets Mars and Jupiter have been detected as warming up slightly. Jokes have been made about that but doesn't that mean that some serious evidence to the pop culture beliefs about global warming are being dismissed? Could it be that the sun might be to blame here?

I'm a ham radio operator. We are very familiar with how the sun affects radio signals and every eleven years the sun has a cycle that hugely affects radio.  What other cycles might the sun have that we don't understand or are aware of that could be responsible for climate changes?

Now I hear that clean air may be partly responsible for global warming! Makes sense. What happens to the temperature when a cloud goes overhead on a sunny day? Is man a factor in the particulates clouding the air or might it be volcanoes spewing ash at irregular times?

So long as political science and theories make extreme conclusions based on snapshots, real progress will falter.  We need to see the whole video.

There is no shortage of articles about the flood. I didn't realize just how bad it was until I got out of the neighborhood, even though the intersection of Bel Ayr and Pine Street, just a few houses from me, had water that appeared as deep as four feed deep and many flooded basements in the vicinity. This is not the time to talk about it here. It'd get lost in the flow of things. Later.

Sunday I did decide to visit Mitchell Park and Minooka Park's Dog Parks. Kanook and I went to Mitchell first as I knew it would be flooded and that the flooding would be over the sod which would allow Kanook to splash around and not get muddy. It was more than I expected.

It is not unusual for River Road along side the railroad tracks to flood out just east of Mitchell Park Road. However, it was not only flooded between it and Barker road, Barker Road was also flooded with a good flow of water heading east into the park's marsh. A car could negotiate it so long as it wasn't going fifty miles per hour.

Once in the dog park, there were several dogs splashing and even swimming in the water. Kanook immediately joined them. While watching them splash in and out of the water, I noticed something splashing at various location near the new shore. Closer inspection showed them to be carp. The ones that broke water appeared to be ten to fifteen pounds to this seasoned fisherman. Once the waters recede, these fish will be trapped and die off leaving not only a smelly mess, but for whatever reason, many dogs love to roll in such stinking stuff. This is not the first time fish have wandered into the park.  Last spring someone was complaining about a dead carp near the end of the fence that their dog rolled in. Once again, I'd like to see them put up some snow fencing to block off the area.  Soon it will be a mud hole from the dogs running in and out.

Speaking of mud holes, out next visit was to Minooka. Two months of evaporation and seepage were erased and the "seasonal pond" was restored to near winter melt off conditions. Except there is a rim of mud surrounding it.  Even fewer visitors are seen at the large dog area because of it while the small dog area thrives and continues to have many users.

In closing, I do want to acknowledge the people of the city who suffered flooded basements.  I know what  it is like as I endured several floodings when In Milwaukee near the Lincoln Creek. So much destroyed and so much work to clean up. More about this when we've had time to finish the work, rest and think about what happened.

It is probably too late because the science experts called congressmen have already destined tungsten incandescent light bulbs to extinction in a few years.

To set the record straight, I have compact flourescent bulbs in my house.  I counted eleven. I also have several tube type flourescent fixtures.  All long before it became the "green" thing to do.  I did it because I like to save money and Wisconsin Focus on Energy had a big sale on them some years ago. That's market forces at work rather than dictation.

If you have been following the news, you'll know that compact flourescent bulbs have mercury in them. You may also know that there is a movement for dentists to collect the mercury in amalgams (tooth fillings) before they get into the sewage system and then the water systems. I never did understand how these fillings could be healthy.

I know a bit about mercury. Being in the heating business, we have used blobs of mercury in thermostats for decades. They are now obsolete but we collect old thermostats so the mercury can be salvaged. It probably ends up in our light bulbs now!

I also dabble in gold prospecting. Much of the mercury found in streams was from it being used to attach to gold dust and make it easier to "pan out".  This mercury coated gold would then be heated, the mercury turned to a vapor and the gas would go through a condenser coil and out would come clean fresh blobs of mercury. It was the vapor that was the real killer, but the liquid isn't much better.

So you can see, while we have made efforts to contain mercury from thermostats and tooth fillings, we've created a new way to reintroduce it into our landfills and work it's way into our groundwater. While these bulbs last a long time, I've had a couple fail way short of their touted five year life expectancy. We need to come up with a recycling plan for these bulbs now. Something voluntary would be nice, but I believe the best way is to charge a deposit, perhaps $1.00 each, so incentive to recycle them is made rather than disposing into the garbage.

Is this a bright idea or what?

Today's front page was about an electric car call the ZENN which is all electric and plugs into an regular outlet to recharge. All well and good until I saw it had a top speed of 25 MPH. Uh, can we say golf cart here?

But it has ZERO EMISSIONS! False.  It is possibly dirtier than your Ford Explorer hoping to make it between gas stations before going empty. Don't get me wrong. Electricity is the future. The question unanswered here is how much pollution does the electric company turbines emit to create that electricity? We are an "Out Of Sight, Out Of Mind" people. As long as our toilets flush, we don't care too much about where it goes. As long as our electric car is pollution free here, we don't care about how much pollution is made to create that electricity there.  Oh, it has lead acid batteries. Did you know these spent batteries often are shipped to the Pacific Rim where recycling the lead fouls the land and poisons the underpaid workers there? To be fair, perhaps the same thing happens to the nickle batteries used in current hybrids. That I don't know.

Putting all of that aside, let's encounter one on the streets. It goes up to 25 MPH. What good it is for just going around the subdivision? Oh, you are going to try to get downtown with one? Lets see, Moreland is 30 MPH and 35 MPH in places. You can't drive five over the posted speed limit without someone blowing your doors off to the right because you aren't going fast enough to suit them. Then again, maybe a bunch of these things slowing down traffic might make things safer.

The article did say that some owners of the Zenn do have wind turbines and solar panels to generate electricity. Bravo! That is true green, but also the exception.  So until we know how many kilowatts these things require to move about and how much the power company's pollution output is to generate that versus that of a somewhat comparable subcompact, lets not get too excited over humming along at 25 MPH.