Every Little Bit Helps

In oh, so many ways! This weekend's drippiness was a "drop in the bucket" of our deficit, but it was a good way to start. A torrent of rain would have washed right over the ground, and given our dry environment would probably have caused a lot of damage to our stressed trees. What we need are weeks and weeks of small amounts of rain, combined with the new conservation of water many of us are trying to practice to get us through this.

Yesterday I read two articles in the AJC online. While I know the purpose of headlines is to snare readers into buying the paper and reading the article, I know some people only read the title of the article and then they go off to spread the "news" they just read. So, the teaser was that the Prius (a hybrid motor vehicle) failed the Georgia emissions testing. "Ha-ha" say the pessimists, "those holier-than-thou environmentalists aren't so good after all!" What the teaser/headline should have said is that the emissions testing failed to work on the Prius. There are two tests they can run on a vehicle. One hooks up to the on-board computer of newer vehicles to study the history of emissions. The other is placed in the tail pipe of older vehicles. Well, the computer doohickey doesn't work with the Prius, and the very design of the Prius does not allow for the full running of the tail pipe test. The gasoline engine does not run for long enough in the idle position so the test can not be completed. Anyway, as more of these cars are nearing the 3 year old point where testing is mandatory it is hoped that the situation will be corrected and the Prius can be tested quickly like every other vehicle. The article didn't say, but I imagine other hybrid vehicles are having or will have the same problem with the test equipment.

The other article had to do with water usage and electricity. I must admit that I was one of those who reacted inappropriately to that headline--until I read it through. The thesis of the article is that the generation of electricity for the average daily use for household in GA uses three times as much water as the household uses as water each day. "Huh?" I wondered. "Water goes over a turbine and generates electricity then goes on its way. No real usage there." Wrong. Maybe up North and at the Hoover Dam this is how it is done, but here in GA and neighboring states we still burn coal to create electricity. The water is used to cool the facility and is subsequently lost to steam and evaporation. I guess sometimes that evaporated water then falls nearby in the form of rain and dew, but what the experts are saying is that we really need to be addressing our needs for electricity and how we can cut down while we are trying to address the more obvious ways in which we are using water here. Wow--it's really coming home to roost again. Our need to have it all and have it now is our Achilles tendon. Hmmm.