Environmental Consultant

Since my last post I have become employed and moved into a new place with a new roomate... and so life rolls along.

I chose a career in Environmental Consulting. I like having the word "Environment" in my job title. For reasons An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore is a good place to begin. It is surreal to be calculating the tonnage of pollutants we are pumping into the air every day (CO, NOx, CO2, SO2, H2S, VOC, etc.) Seems we don't mind what we can't see. (If it was sewage into a stream?)

I also am ethically opposed to Big Pharma (the emphasis of my Masters Degree was in pharmaceutics). For the myriad reasons why, watch Sicko by Michael Moore and/or read the book "Green Pharmacy".

I also enjoy that my office has a nice view of green.

... in this direction:

Of course I can always hear the cars - even through the double-pane window and up here on the 6th floor (electric cars don't make noise.) The stream of cars never seems to end... insanity. It is quite rare to see a bus.

However it has been fun to be sitting up here watching as as the summer storms blow through.

Just my cluttered desk. Mentioned because I remember my Dad's cluttered office desk when I was a kid and I swore I would never do the same.

So I graduated myself from a classical guitar to an acoustic guitar (soft nylon strings to hard steel strings - and my fingertips are paying the price!)

This guitar has been to Bagdad, Iraq and back with Private Matt McGuire. He sold it to me on craigslist since he needed the money (I guess he should've been a contractor in Iraq... but instead he was paid peanuts to protect them... surreal.) When I went to pick it up, he showed me his pictures from Iraq and the now obsolete money with Saddam Hussein's picture on it. He was on the first wave in and he told me that, even then, Bagdad was not a peaceful place.

Brian's electric car project that I am assisting on is moving right along. The electric engine is now in the car. Tomorrow I help him put his dash back together. We tore it apart to replace the heater coil with an electric version.

Continuing the electric car theme, I recommend the movie "Who Killed the Electric Car" (2006).
Worth mentioning is that electric cars rank lower than gasoline cars on the proportion of pollutants released to the amount of energy produced... except for the pollutant SO2. This is because coal and natural gas burned by power plants contain more sulfur than petroleum. However, the technology to remove pollutants from flue gases is much easier and more economical at one power plant (one exhaust pipe) than in millions of cars. And the technology for removing sulfur is advancing.

Speaking of power plants, on the plane ride to the Simpson Family Reunion I ran into the Professor at UT-Austin that I went adventuring to Alaska and the Sierra Nevadas with.

His research is in the extraction and sequestration of pollutants from power plant flue gases. He just came into a load of research money from the company planning on building new coal-fired plants here in Texas. CO2 was never considered a pollutant before however now, due to its ignominious distinction as a green-house gas, we are finding ways to capture and put it underground. Back into the holes where we got the natural gas.

From Austin to Denver we swapped adventuring stories.

Speaking of reunions, I was able to see a bunch of family I had really missed for a couple of years (and some which I hadn't seen in almost 5 years!)

My Grandma Simpson stole the show by getting a pacemaker put in and still making it out to our reunion campsite the next day. She has quite a constitution!

Then, and what I was really looking forward to, was a visit to my sister's farm out by Burley, ID. These are views from her back porch.

There is a big owl that comes out at dusk living in one of those trees.

Over that way is where she has the animals: goats, horses, sheep, pigs... and a pony.

Sitting out on the porch it was rare to hear the sound of a car. And at night... well you could see the stars.