Discussion Forums

Has the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico got you so mad you're ready to quit Big Oil?

Ready to park the car and take up bike-riding or walking? Well, your bike and your sneakers have petroleum products in them. And sure, you can curb energy use by shutting off the AC, but the electric fans you switch to have plastic from oil and gas in them. And the insulation to keep your home cool, also started as oil and gas. Without all that, you'll sweat and it'll be all too noticeable because deodorant comes from oil and gas too.

You can't even escape petroleum products with a nice cool fast-food milkshake - which probably has a petrochemical-based thickener.

Oil is everywhere.

It's in carpeting, furniture, computers and clothing. It's in the most personal of products like toothpaste, shaving cream, lipstick and vitamin capsules. Petrochemicals are the glue of our modern lives and even in glue, too.
Because of that, petrochemicals are in our blood.

When the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention tested humans for environmental chemicals and metals, it recorded 212 different compounds. More than 180 of them are products that started as natural gas or oil.

"It's the material basis of our society essentially," said Michael Wilson, a research scientist at the University of California Berkeley. "This is the Petrochemical Age."

Louisiana State University environmental sciences professor Ed Overton, who works with the government on oil spill chemistry, said: "There's nothing that we do on a daily basis that isn't touched by petrochemicals."

When in the movie "The Graduate" young Benjamin is given advice about the future, it comes in one word: plastics. About 93 percent of American plastics start with natural gas or oil.

"Just about anything that's not iron or steel or metal of some sort has some petrochemical component. And that's just because of what we've been able to do with it," said West Virginia University chemistry professor Dady Dadyburjor.

Nothing shows how pervasive and malleable petrochemicals are better than shampoo, said Kevin Swift, director of economics and statistics for the American Chemistry Council, the chemical industry's trade association. The bottle is plastic. The cap is plastic. The seal and the label, too. The ink comes from petrochemicals and even the glue that holds the label to the bottle comes from oil or gas.
"The shampoo - it's all derived from petrochemicals," Swift said. "A bottle of shampoo is about 100 percent chemistry."

Just add a bit of natural fragrance.

What makes oil and natural gas the seed stock for most of our everyday materials is the element that is the essence of life: carbon.

The carbon atom acts as the spine with other atoms attaching to it in different combinations and positions. Each variation acts in new ways, Dadyburjor said.

John Warner, a former Polaroid scientist and University of Massachusetts chemistry professor, called petroleum "fundamentally a boring material" until other atoms are added and "you unleash a textbook of modern chemistry."

"Take a very complicated elegant beautiful molecule, bury it in the ground 100 million years, remove all the functionality and make hydrocarbons," said Warner, one of the founders of the green chemistry movement that attempts to be more ecologically sustainable. "Then take all the toxic nasty reagents and put back all the functional groups and end up with very complicated molecules."

The age of petrochemicals started and took root shortly after World War II, spurred by a government looking for replacements for rubber.

"Unfortunately there's a very dark side," said Carnegie Mellon chemistry professor Terry Collins. He said the underlying premise of the petrochemical industry is that "those little molecules will be good little molecules and do what they're designed for and not interact with life. What we're finding is that premise is wrong, profoundly wrong. What we're discovering is that there's a whole world of low-dose (health) effects."

Many of these chemicals are disrupting the human hormone system, Collins said.

These are substances that don't appear in nature and "they accumulate in the human body, they persist in the environment," Berkeley's Wilson said. The problem is science isn't quite sure how bad or how safe they are, he said.

But plastics also do good things for the environment, the chemistry council says. Because plastics are lighter than metals, they helped create cars that save fuel. A 2005 European study shows that conversion to plastic materials in Europe saved 26 percent in fuel.

"Compared to the alternatives, it reduces greenhouse gases (which cause global warming) and saves energy; that is rather ironic," Swift said.

Still, chemists who want more sustainable materials are working on alternatives. Another founder of green chemistry, Paul Anastas, an assistant administrator for the Environmental Protection Agency, said: "We can make those things in other ways."

LSU's Overton is old enough to remember the days before petrochemicals. There were no plastic milk and soda containers. They were glass. Desks were heavy wood. There were no computers, cell phones and not much air conditioning.

"It's a much more comfortable life now, much more convenient," Overton said.

Swift said trying to live without petrochemicals now doesn't make sense, but he added: "it would make a good reality TV show.

"http://www.physorg.com/news195469236.html

Dear Ishtar,

You make some very good points in your post. I would love to boycott Japanese products because of the Japanese government's and the Japanese whaling industry's attitude about whaling, but there are a couple of reasons I don't do that. One is so many parts to various products are made in Japan. We might think we are buying an American made product, but some of the parts could have come from Japan. Second reason is I am willing to make a bet there are a lot of Japanese people who feel the same way I do about the horrors of whaling. Please know I am not talking about the Native People of Alaska and other Northern climes. For them, hunting a whale is an important part of their cultures and a means of food for their communities. I am talking about the cruel indiscriminate taking of whale life without any respect and honor for these wonderful beings.

Walk In Balance,
Deer

I think part of the problem with such a question posed by the OP is that no matter how much or the reasons why we wish for simpler life without the trappings of modernity, we can not put the clock back to a pre-fossil fuel time. Sure we could probably find ways to reduce our usage, but no amount of boycotting is going to afford us a chance to slip back in time to have a do-over. I also think that the OP may be slightly influenced by stories and misconception that First Nations people are communing with nature on a level that James Fenimore Cooper wrote about in his novels and Disney made into a cartoon.

I'm about as traditional as one can be yet I still drive a car, buy groceries from a store, attend meetings with my crackberry in tow, get paid for an honest days work and use a computer every day. Yet, I can still skin an elk, butcher a moose in situ, trap for furs, rake blueberries, locate bear dens and fish using a weir then smoke the salmon and some would say that isn't a very traditional way of life. Our Supreme Court once said in the Sparrow case, that the inherent rights and traditions of First Nations are not frozen in time but are fluid and dynamic. As much as Disney would like us to still be running around in scanty buckskins and adorned with feathers, we too have evolved and adapted to the 21st century.

I think what I am prepared to do, is manage my territories resources and learn how to use them effectively and develop alternatives to power up my computer. I sometimes wonder at the revulsion some folks have for oil and its products, it is after all a natural product made by the earth. It is effectively an original example of recycling. Yet, we rail against the producers and gatherers. We are exceptional at pointing fingers and blaming the next guy down from us in the food chain.

Today it is big oil, yesterday it was loggers and pulp mills, last year it was global warming, tomorrow it will be E.Coli in soy products. I think what humanity really needs to give up is belly-aching about topic/affront du jour and spend the recovered energy from that to invent, discover, locate and develop other things that will make everyone better off such as fuel cell technology.

The only thing that is permanent is change.

_________________
"For as long as the world shall endure, the honour and the glory of Mexico-Tenochtitlan must never be forgotten."
- Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin

This oil spill has definitely got me thinking about living in a way that puts less of a burden on the earth, but I still do live in modern day America, and my lifestyle is inextricably tied with plastic, paper, and the exploitation of other resources. I think about "going back to the land", but that's not even feasible for most with our world's population. I guess we just have to make peace with the modern world the best we can and try to do what we can in our current circumstances. Anyway, the corporations, government, etc., still have much of the power over what happens, so I guess that I just have to live with that. I actually think that living a modern lifestyle can sometimes allow more power and influence to maybe do more significant good towards conservation and social change. If one has power and/or money maybe they could really effect some kinds of change, since this society is built on money, and power may gain recognition to one's cause. Grassroots movements and spreading awareness online may also help. I think what will really make a difference is change within corporations, which have so much influence over our society, and a change of mindset and awareness among many in modern society would do a lot of good. Maybe that would really need to come first for other things to really change. I don't know. Technology that helps reduce our burden on the earth can help a lot, and may be necessary depending on how far we've gone towards "tipping the balance" or depleting resources. It's a matter of whether it gets funded and supported.

I don't have a lot of faith in corporations doing anything towards anything but their won survival - that's just their nature, sad to say - but otherwise I agree with pretty much everything you said, Cassie.

_________________
"For as long as the world shall endure, the honour and the glory of Mexico-Tenochtitlan must never be forgotten."
- Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin

I know I said I think corporations should change, but I agree, War Arrow. I don't think they would change on their own, only through force or necessity. Maybe the government and demand from the market could do some good, but I only have so much faith and trust in either of those. Maybe people at large would have to change and exert pressure first.

Very true. I think some institutions are er... by their very nature coercive, by which I guess I mean it's like trying to persuade a cat to turn vegetarian. I think it's sort of maybe what you said anyway, but the only way to get a corporation doing some good is to play it at its own game, fool it into acting right.

That said I think there's a lot more pressure on them now in general, and that pressure should be kept up.

_________________
"For as long as the world shall endure, the honour and the glory of Mexico-Tenochtitlan must never be forgotten."
- Chimalpahin Quautlehuanitzin

enter the age of recycling

One Finnish documents' maker, John Webster, did it, he and his family lived one year trying to avoid the using of the petrochemical products. The document about it was in the opening (premiere) at 2008s. "Katastrofin aineksia" (=Elements of a disaster) tells about family's life without plastic, fuel made of oil and so on. Google movie's name for more information, I haven't watched it, just heard about.

We have got used to oil so well that it seems impossible to start oil-boycott.

Glad someone else has seen the movie. Don't remember who did it, but kinda looks like the Healthcare plan WHICH I READ IN FULL B*E*F*O*R*E I ever said anything negative about it.

When I read it, this is movie what I thought of.

There are more "similarities", but state sanctioned euthanasia . . . How much do you trust them to keep accurate records, and never falsify some?

from what i know healthcare reform is about having mandatory health insurance.

i did not see anything about cutting the high costs of doctors,hospitals and prescription drugs.

Even in "Lawyerspeak" you could do that in a couple dozen pages. That bill is over 1,000 pages and the folks who voted for it (senate and house) didn't even read it. They accepted it either in blind faith, or with twisted arms, or with bribes . . . depending on which politician we're talking about

band-aid politics