I had no idea this project existed, but The National Priorities Project celebrated their 25th anniversary in October 2008.

Here is a 12 minute video about the project and those who work on it:

America’s priorities are made very clear and very real by how our government spends the money we pay in taxes. NPP follows that money all the way to the local level. If we don’t have a handle on where the money is going and what it means in human terms, we can’t change the nation’s priorities.

To most of us, the federal budget is so huge it’s like Monopoly money. The amounts are unfathomable. If we break those numbers down into chunks we can swallow, we can understand how they effect our lives. We can only change the nation’s priorities when we get the people involved on a grass roots level, but we can’t do that if they are lost about what the numbers really mean for each of them.

We can’t reduce and eliminate the military/industrial complex President Eisenhower warned us about in his 1960 farewell speech if we don’t know what is being spent on Cold War projects. Between now and then, President Reagan brought back the military/industrial complex in a huge way at the expense of everything else in the U.S. federal budget.

This year, for the first time in a very long while, Congress finally cut something out of the Pentagon’s budget. They put an end to the production of F-22 fighter planes that the Pentagon doesn’t want, the Air Force doesn’t want and the rest of the military doesn’t want.

It’s all very far from over, but that one change to a different priority in military funding is a start in the right direction. The wars we fight now are guerrilla wars on the ground, not country-against-country where both have a full compliment of military mite. Al Qaeda and the Taliban don’t have a Navy or an Air Force. We don’t have dog fights with them. F-22′s are for dog fights. That money can be spent on other military needs, such as F-35 fighters that support guerrilla ground troops.

I am not against equipping our fighting soldiers with the best that we can get them. But we need to make sure what we are providing them is in fact what they need to improve their safety, performance and allow them to win more quickly in the type of warfare they have to fight today.

By critically reviewing what the military spends money on, it can result in some budget savings by equipping them with what they really need rather than continuing to produce weapons, ships, guns, and planes designed to fight the Soviet Union. Should a hot war arise against Russia or China someday, we have the capability of nationalizing all our production facilities to produce what that type of war would need. They did it in 1940 with the technology of the time. We can sure as hell do the same type of thing today if we have to.

In the meantime (should this type of war ever happen again), we don’t have to be completely prepared for a large scale, nation-to-nation, conventional, hot war. The money being spent on those projects can be used to rebuild infrastructure, reduce poverty, improve education, provide jobs, develop alternative energy and fund health care for every American.

What is the federal budget doing for your community and what has been cut from it since Reaganomics? Visit NPP and find out. Then start a dialogue with your family, friends, neighbors, coworkers, state legislators, governor, Senators and Representatives. Armed with the numbers and where the funding is going v where it is needed, we can have meaningful conversations, discuss much smarter policies (which dictate where money is spent), turn this country around and get it going in the right direction for a new century and a new millennium.

Lets start the discussion in the comments.

Sources:
National Priorities Project
Media Education Foundation

Technorati Tags: American priorities, federal budget, National Priorities Project, spending equals priorities

Auto Fuel

There is one silver lining to the huge economic cloud that has been looming over our heads for a year and won’t be blowing away anytime soon. With high gas prices and then huge job losses, many people drove less this year. Less driving means less oil consumption and less carbon dioxide production. It also means less of a human contribution to global warming.

I personally purchased 9 fewer tanks of gasoline this year compared to last year. I get about 240 miles per tank of gas where I live in mostly city driving, so I drove about 2,160 fewer miles this year than last year. When gas prices were so high during the first 3 quarters of 2008, I made a concerted effort to combine trips and reduce the amount of driving we had to do. I didn’t change our “less driving” habit when gas prices dropped over the last 3 months. I plan to continue to keep the total number of miles I drive per year as low as feasible for environmental reasons. At first I did it for economic reasons, but we live just fine and drive less. We are going to continue to drive less.

Electricity

Many of us have begun to migrate to compact fluorescent light bulbs and increased the air conditioning temperature 1-2 degrees in the summer and decreased the heating temperature 1-2 degrees in the winter. A lot of us have also been more conscious about opening windows on temperate days instead of turning on the A/C. I know I’ve paid a lot more attention to fixing draft problems and making sure everything is sealed better than I ever have in the past.

I also made some small but beneficial changes in the way I do laundry. I wash the colored clothes in cold water, but I still wash the white clothes in hot water with a cold rinse. At the end of the spin cycle, I turn the dial around and run the load through a second spin cycle. Then I dry the clothes with my electric dryer using the automated sensor feature instead of timed dry, and I added two dryer balls to the dryer. The balls help fluff the clothes, cut static and reduce drying time. Between two spin cycles, dryer balls and using the sensor setting, we reduced the amount of electricity we use per month significantly.

I reviewed my electricity and natural gas consumption on our November bill and found we consumed on average 17.5 fewer kilowatt-hours of electricity per day in November 2008 than in November 2007, or 428 fewer kilowatt-hours in November 2008 than in November 2007.

We consumed the same amount of natural gas during the same time periods, so we didn’t see any savings there. It probably has to do with the fact that we have an old gas hot water heater. An on-demand unit would use far less gas and only produce hot water when it was needed.

Economically, our utility bill hasn’t gone down, but it hasn’t increased, so we are making significant progress in energy savings given that rates increased over last year.

Selling Power Back to the Electric Company

As soon as we can spare the money, I plan to install some solar panels on the back side of the roof and perhaps a small wind turbine on the back side of the garage to sell some power back to the grid during sunny days and anytime it’s windy. I also plan to replace my old windows with more energy efficient windows. My house still has the original windows it was built with in 1964. We also likely need even more insulation in the attics than we have now, and we have at least R-22. R-30 would be better. There is still plenty of room to add more.

If everyone installed just one bank of solar panels and installed one small wind turbine, the increased power available during peak daytime hours would mean that our electric power plants would not have to increase power generation to cope with the rising demand for electricity. New, more efficient, environmentally friendly technologies would then have more time for development and scale-up to handle our electricity demands in the future.

Electrical Grid Infrastructure

Infrastructure needs to be sexy starting now. Really sexy. I see an electrical infrastructure future that is much like our decentralized computing power. We used to rely on big, mainframe computers and we logged into them from remote terminals. Now our computing power is contained within the PCs that sit on our desks and in our homes, and spread worldwide around millions of servers that contain the internet. The company I use to host my blogs and websites, HostGator, converted to 100% wind power in 2008.

I see our electrical utilities able to grow more slowly if every new home is built more energy efficient and with power generation technology. Older homes need to be retrofitted to produce at least some of the power our households consume. If we all sell power back to the grid during the day, we take some of the burden off the centralized system. Eventually we may be able to take most of the burden off centralized systems and rely more heavily on local power generation on each building that uses power. In 100 years wind and sun will likely generate the vast majority of the electrical power we use.

We need to invest in America’s infrastructure, so if it takes sexy to make that happen, here is an audio attitude adjuster to help you get started:

Have a listen: infrastructure purr (By Rachel Maddow)

Technorati Tags: decentralized electricity generation, electricity consumption, energy usage, Environment, gasoline consumption, infrastructure purr, natural gas consumption, Rachel Maddow, solar panels, wind turbines

Tim DeChristopher, a 27-year-old University of Utah student committed a grand act of civil disobedience to help protect some U.S. National Parks in southern Utah from oil and gas drilling. Here’s a video from The Rachel Maddow Show about it:

These National Parks are some of the most beautiful, pristine areas in the entire world. Oil and gas drilling close to these areas and the development that would come with it will destroy these lands forever. It took the Earth 4.5 billion years to build these beautiful places and if we don’t protect them we can’t get them back. The federal oil and gas leases for these lands must be stopped.

I’m very impressed with Mr. DeChristopher’s resolve to do the right thing, even if it means he has to go to prison. If he is convicted and sentenced, I hope President Obama will pardon him, especially if it turns out the lease auction violated the law.

How serious are you about protecting our environment? Are you willing to commit acts of civil disobedience, face federal legal charges and even go to jail if it will protect the Earth?

I’m older and more pragmatic, and would be willing to do a lot of things to protect the Earth. I would be willing to trespass and lie down in construction areas to prevent it from proceeding. I and any others who performed such acts would likely be arrested and released, but those acts would not carry fraud charges and significant federal jail time.

So this begs the question: how serious are we going to have to get to make this huge ship, the USA and developed world, turn around in time to prevent catastrophic environmental changes on our planet?

We already face some changes that will be difficult to deal with, but can be handled with fast action and good technology solutions. But if we don’t make significant changes within the next 10 years, we may face far worse catastrophes that may effect large populations of humans with mass starvation, insufficient clean water, pandemic disease outbreaks, and increased flood and tropical storm activity that could wash entire cities out to sea.

Technorati Tags: Bush-Cheney, civil disobedience, Environment, Lame Duck Actions, National Parks in Utah, Rachel Maddow, Tim DeChristopher