Environment Forum
Global environmental challenges
Schwarzenegger household green plan: short showers, hydrogen Hummers
Here’s some advice for Californians who think Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger’s climate change policy goes too far: just be happy you’re not his kid.
Before he became a body builder, before he was the Terminator, and before he turned into the Governator, it turns out that Arnold was the youngest in a family that had no running water and relied on an outhouse. That’s what he told fourth graders who innocently asked about how he spoke to his kids.
“I have major fights with my kids,” he responded, quickly segueing into the difference between post-World War European poverty and the Golden State.
“We had kind of a system where we carried the water from 200 yards away from the well, to our house upstairs to the second floor where we lived, and then my father would wash himself first, and then my mother would wash herself, and then my brother would wash himself in the same water, and then I would wash myself, and it was all dirty, because I was the youngest. So that’s how I grew up because conservation was big in Europe. Especially since I grew up after the Second World War. There was no food, there was little electricity, there were blackouts left and right, there was nothing. After the war was worse than during the war. So we had absolutely nothing,” he said.
And while the Governor now has solar panels to heat the water in his pool and jacuzzi, a hydrogen-powered Hummer, and he recycles, it seems conservation is still BIG — and mandatory — in the Terminator household.
He recalled watching his kids take a stool into the shower to sit and enjoy the hot water — for a long time.
“I’m sitting outside timing it now, and it’s 15 minutes, and still they are in the shower. So I open the shower door and turn off the hot water and then all of a sudden they start screaming, because it is cold,” he said, adding that he had created rules: no shower longer than 5 minutes — or else.
California gas stations defy new pollution rule
Wednesday is the deadline for California’s gas stations to install sophisticated nozzles and hoses to control vapor emissions at the pump, and the Los Angeles Times reports that some one in five station owners are in open defiance of the new state order.
Gas station owners say that the new equipment is so expensive that buying it during the worst economic slump in decades would put them out of business.
“It may be necessary to protect public health, but it’s unaffordable,” James Hosmanek, who owns a Chevron station in San Bernardino, told the newspaper.
Hosmanek, who has already laid off eight employees as his business struggles to survive the recession, said banks and equipment lenders have rejected his requests for some $60,000 in loans he would need to buy eight new nozzles and hoses and that “even if I could get the funding, I couldn’t make the payments.”
He told the Times that the owner of a Shell station down the street complied with the new order by putting the equipment on credit cards, a solution he calls “financial suicide.”
Hosmanek and his fellow resistance fighters are hoping for a last-minute reprieve with the help of California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger, who last week asked the state legislature to give the station owners another year to comply. And a Democrat Assemblyman has introduced legislation that would provide $8 million in grants to the stations.
But public health and environmental groups are fighting back, saying that the gas stations have long known the new rules were coming.
How oh How does eight new knozzles cost $60,000 are they made of gold? What I dont understand is that when they find ways to improove on things, they end up costing so much. I get so angry at these shows that show how to build GREENER, yet GREENER seems to cost eight times as much.
I think the most important thing to tell your story is why you think it is important, why you think it is worth to tell and what we can learn from it even though our situation is different from before. Use the story as a good cause and teach people why we should care about our environment and what we can do to help.