Boondoggle Machines

Whatever unnecessary thing they're doing with these machines, they park them in the vacant lot behind the house next door every night and fire them up every weekday morning at 7am. I picked the wrong time of day to go out and take this picture, because the sun is behind them. If I have the chance, I'll try to go out and take a picture when the light is better.

I think the bunker house up the hill from here would have been built on this lot, but PG&E put up not one but 4 ugly power poles with uglier stuff on top of them right above where the house would have been. Now it seems to have become a convenient place to park equipment. The road gets narrower and more exposed right up the road so I suppose there isn't a better place to leave them. 

Most of us know know that in order to comply with the Paris Climate agreement, we need to reduce our carbon emissions by half by 2050. What is less well known is that not only do we have to reduce the Co2 we put into the air, we also need to take 10 billion tons a year of Co2 out of the air by then. In a companion piece to the geothermal energy guy I listened to yesterday, today's interview was with a German engineer who is developing a plan to pull in air with giant fans, filter out the Co2 and bury it deep in the earth. A plant in Iceland is already operating. He plans to use solar energy to run the fans. Maybe he needs to talk to the guy I listened to yesterday who is creating clean geothermal energy....

It gives me hope that people are working on these enormous problems with great optimism and creativity, but I think I'll go back to listening to different stories. Did you know that the average woman in the USA wears a size 18, a size that is almost impossible to find in a retail store? I don't think the sizes in the US and the UK are comparable, but I suspect the basic problem is the same. The world wants larger women to be invisible. If they are fat, it's their own fault because they eat too much or don't try to lose weight. Most diets don't work or require an onerous lifestyle change that is impossible to maintain. These women can't buy clothing that fits, get decent health care or even eat in restaurants without being judged about what they eat. 

An equally difficult problem that might be further from being solved than carbon sequestration unless we start acknowledging that people come in all different shapes, sizes and colors ....

You'll all be happy to know that I only have another half hour to go on the  triangle quilt before I take it to the quilter. I may not stop listening to podcasts until the road is paved and the houses around us are rebuilt though....