I'm sorry I've ben away for so long. The early winter had me reexperiencing a long gone illness. The rest of the time I've been researching. This has to do with the biggest danger to our planet today, the extreme dependance we have on oil today. I heard that we use eight million barrels a day. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Thirty percent of this oil is used for all the transit needs of the country, including all motor vehicles, trains and planes. So the question that occurs to me is this: Where does the other seventy percent go? That's over five and a half million barrels a day. I would like to reveal some of the answers and plead with everyone to use what fragment of purchasing power we still have left and together diminish our dependance on this fossil fuel significantly enough to start not only consumer cost savings for us, but give the oil companies enough of a dent so they can't purchase our government.
Any product I mention is totally my own free suggestion. Nobody is paying me a cent for anything. I want you to laugh all the way to the bank, not the corporations.
Seventy percent of all oil use in this country does not go to transportation. Where does it go? If we could cut our oil use by half that would send the loudest possible message to the oil giants, and we wouldn't have to touch the car...yet. To do this it would be ideal to stop putting oil on everything we wear, everything we clean with,and things we put into our mouths.
Yes, mouths. When I found out about gumballs at a Smithsonian exhibit I was sick. Apparantly, over 20,000 barrels of oil are used each year in the United States for machine dispensing gumballs. Why? It makes the candy shell on the gum look shiny. Kids love bright colors, so the tiny tots cry out for it and the next thing you know they're chewing BP. When I visit my little nephew and niece I try to steer them to the gummy worms instead. I hope the news I gave their parents took hold. Surely this is a very simple thing to do to start chopping oil use.
Next, what you wear. Does it make sense to wash and dry your clothes with detergents that not only exude oil but who knows what other untested chemicals that are seeping into you molecule by molecule. Clothes that "smell clean" are not clean. What you're doing is mild freebasing clothes that are still covered in caked in detergent! How will these chemicals influence your children's development? I have this idea that the unregulated use of chemicals in this country for the past half century has slowly degenerated us and is a contributing factor in all these new diseases I never heard of before. But I have no proof.
I bought eco-ball laundry pellets for my family last Christmas from a company in Long Island called fatcatgreen.com. These natural metallic pellets in a capsule break the water molecules in your laundry into single hydrogen and magnetic OH atoms. This makes the water alone turn into its own detergent. Since these can be used 1,000 times over AND the pellets can be replaced, how much money over two years would you save not having to buy detergents, fabric softener, or dryer sheets. My mom called me a few days ago. As a breast cancer survivor her skin is still very sensitive. She was using a lot of body lotion until she started using the pellets. Not only do clothes smell like clothes, but they have never been softer...and she doesn't use near as much body lotion. Dad says he saves $40 a month on laundry products. How much more on body lotion?
I bet 90% of all body lotions have the ingredient "petrolatum" in it.
How much would your city save in not having to treat so much water? How much cleaner would your lakes and bays be? Wouldn't this aid the fishing industry now that the water would be freer from phosphate runoff. Save your bay with laundry pellets? Why not? I'd like to swim in my bay but I can't. Not unless I travel a hundred miles or more.
Apparantly this topic needs more than one entry, so if anyone has any suggestions on other things we could do I'd like to hear it. We must make the oil industry as extinct as the whaling industry if future generations are to have a life. Money will talk. Drop by drop oil will be lessened. Then we can tackle the car.
One little note: My favorite film "Dogtooth" is nominated for Best Foreign Language film at the Oscars. What can I say but whoof, whoof, whoof!