... Golf Going Green? June 2008
Golf has always been green and it has cleaned up its act far earlier than many industries. The days of the stereotypical toxic pesticides in run-off water are nearly over and much water-recycling is in place on golf courses which started in desert areas.
One might not think of Denver as desert golf, but did you know that Denver has more sunny days than any other major city in the USA? Indeed, it's high desert and it doesn't snow there as much as one thinks. In Denver years ago dye Golf (Perry, not Pete & Alice) built an odd little golf course across the street from the venerable Cherry Hills, a USGA favorite and home to the great convergenceof 1960 currently well-documented on HBO. This course was very notable to me when I first played it in the 1980's when it was new and Denver's Economy was very depressed. There were very few houses and lots of lots. This gofl course is really shooed in if a course ever was, in factholes 13-15 were built because of a land deal with Tour Player Brandt Jobe's dad, a local Radiologist whose enormous house looks out to the rockies in the distance and oversees those holes. They still didn't have enough land to really build a golf course, but a few bad funky (as opposed to good funky) holes separated by ridiculous mounding and theygot 18 in. Heck, you used to back up against the property line to take practice swings on the fourth tee to Jeb Bush's house the golf property was so meagre. Sixty-foot tall netting was used on #11 to keep balls out of houses on a par 3 as everyone bailed from the water.
At any rate, a very extensive drainage system was constructed on this course so that any run-off was returned to the clubs ponds.
Look very carefully on the fairways of modern constructed golf courses for these extensive drain systems and try and figure where the water goes. Golf is a very good neighbor and healthy (not wet, green lush) grass uses just as much carbon dioxide as trees do and in some cases more.
Green indeed. You don't get too much more natural than the links, the true links, that is.
... On Global Warming December, 2007
Just what are we supposed to call it and why?
Global Warming? Climate change? Human-Induced Climate Change?
First off, I want to make clear that I personally believe that human beings don’t respect Mother Nature very much and that attitude must change. But don’t confuse me with Al Gore (Or the “Goracle” as The New Yorker called him this week.).
A few thoughts
◙ Little 110 pound five foot two women driving Infiniti QX 56 behemoths weighing in at 6011.4 pounds (courtesy Infiniti) by themselves is an abominable crime against nature. Even fully loaded it is a crime. (Rush Limbaugh can just go to hell on this one.)
◙ The USA’s trucks/lorries are just too massive as they deliver our disposable junk to us. Smaller cars and smaller trucks, please – and less of them, too. My office in north Denver was adjacent to one of the less affluent neighborhoods in the area and nearly every household had five or so cars parked outside as I drove to Hospital the back way to beat traffic in early morning.
◙ Styrofoam is an embarrassing affront to the planet. One little cc of styrene polymerized into Styrofoam yields what seems a roomful. It is made from non-renewable sources, is the second most ecologically damaging and virtually the most difficult to recycle product short of computer wastes.
◙ Plastics in general are pure petroleum, just as is your gasoline that you grouse about the cost of every time that you fill up your QX 56. It rarely gets recycled but is easily done if you just do it. Plastics wrap everything we buy – wrappings don’t get recycled. Oh the humanity! Seriously.
◙ Americans just can’t use glass: it breaks and someone will get sued. (p.s. glass recycles easily.) You can make glass from sand. In fact, some bunker sand is designer glass for all intents and purposes. Sand is safe, too.
◙ Shopping for a gift card (my sole non-internet Holiday Gift purchase) at a New Jersey mall I parked over 500 yards away and walked past stopped cars bumper to bumper. All contained one, rarely two occupants. Most resembled the QX 56 more than the Ford Focus. [Re: Priuses (Priusii?) see below.] I think after getting the gift card and walking back I passed some of the same people I passed on the way in. All were idling on their $3.35 gasoline in unison. I’m certain this was not isolated to Short Hills and was repeated in at the very least a handful of other cities in the US.
◙ The Prius’s batteries are another ecological farce. But the Prius is green so it’s supposed to be OK.
◙ In NYC this holiday Barneys Windows were touting a Green Christmas as their trucks idled away out back. Don't get me started on this one.
Anyway, just a start you get the picture, I became interested in doing “the right thing” long before it was cool (or planet-saving!). I was a Chem major at Florida and worked a full year in a Polymer Chemistry Lab as an elective mixing little bits of expensive this and that to make big plastic things. Sometimes. Occasionaly it was shall we say - just plain spectacular. I know a little bit about the chemistry going on here – first hand. I also am all too very familiar with scientific and pseudo-scientific methods. How one designs, executes and interprets studies can yield incredible results – just the ones that you want. Then you can take whatever large “Leaps of Faith” for your cause that you need. This is where the Goracle and I differ greatly. Need proof of results of intended consequence, just get your cancer-causing google search out and compare studies released in the popular press. Read carefully an notice that most are "Associative" rather than "Cause and effect" data.
Sorry, back to the planet. Let me just refer you to Michael Crichton’s State of Fear – not for the novel, it’s perhaps his worst story ever – but for the science. His appendix especially makes for informative reading even for the initiated and especially the uninitiated to scientific methodology as. Dr. Mike and Dr. Bill agree on this one. The over-working and massaging of data with an agenda is at work here with this Climate Change thing (That’s the better term now with these cold winters). Problem is that you cannot compare precise comprehensive modern data with data collected a few centuries ago to gain any meaningful predictive information. One cannot extrapolate the last 30 and especially 10 years of data in any useful way with any certainty. Fact is climate changes, we just don’t have enough perspective to know what is truly happening and surely NOT enough to attribute it to the presence of Man on the planet Earth. The application of scientific methodology takes quite some time and the Eco-types are cherry picking data. Being 56 I remember that in 1958-59 during the IGY (International Geophysical Year) there was dire warning about an oncoming Ice Age - guess that one's on hold.
All these things that the Eco-Loonies want you to do are very good things up to a point, but for all the wrong damn reasons. Little kiddies, your Mom and Dad are not killing the planet. Man’s pollution can in no way be compared to the scenario of climate change from an asteroid hitting the Earth nor to “Nuclear Winter” scenarios. (“Leaps of Faith”) It’s even hubristic to believe that Man has such power over the Earth. Carbon Dioxide is a "Greenhouse Gas" in theory - but it is also plant food. Plants gobble up Carbon Dioxide and give us animals Oxygen to breathe. Trees and grass love the stuff, more on that later because common misconception is that trees are somehow better than grass. Plant life is plant life, you're either a plant or an animal with few esoteric exceptions.
So, indeed buy a smaller car (but not neccissarilya Prius), refuse to use Styrofoam, recycle – especially plastics, think about the impacts of the things that you do, but NOT because we’re going to drown in seawater in 15 years – but because it’s very intelligent not to be wasteful.
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