Pricey Ink Stinks

Driving is a big factor in pollution and climate change, but, if you feel a pang of guilt every time you slip into the driving seat, there are ways to limit the impact of your car on the environment.

1) Drive less

It may seem obvious, but the best way to lower production of pollution is simply to drive less. Try to build alternatives into your daily schedule: walking and cycling for short distances, and using public transport for longer journeys. For many families, driving is the only practical solution, but if you live in an urban location with good transport links, ask yourself whether it is financially and environmentally worth running a car at all.

2) Car share

One full car is more efficient than two half-empty cars, so join forces with your friends, relatives and neighbours so that you can share car space when you are doing the same trip. If you only need to drive occasionally, and don’t want the hassle of running your own car, then a car club can be a handy, more environmentally-friendly option. With companies like City Car Club, you can book a car when you need one, and pick it up from a convenient location near your home.

3) Drive well

Car maintenance and the way you drive also affect your car’s fuel efficiency. Keep your car in good condition and free of clutter, and make sure your tyres aren’t underinflated. While driving, avoid stopping and starting, and switch off your engine if you are likely to be at a standstill for more than three minutes. Keep revving to a minimum and when possible drive at the most fuel-efficient speed – usually about 45-50 mph.

4) Buy a more environmentally friendly car

It doesn’t necessarily make environmental sense to ditch your car for a more eco-friendly one if you’ve only had it for a short time, but if you’re in the market for a new car anyway, why not add environmental concerns to your other considerations? As well as being cheaper to run, you will also pay less tax on a more fuel-efficient car. Here are a few options to think about.

• A smaller car

Downsizing will reduce your fuel consumption, cutting down on CO2 emissions and saving you money, so ask yourself if you need that extra space Find the most fuel efficient models of car in each class at Clean Green Cars or Act On CO2

• Electric and hybrid cars

Electric cars are the least-polluting option, but because of the disadvantages involved (such as problems with battery life), a hybrid car that uses a battery at low speeds and a petrol engine at high speeds might be a better option

MyFamilyUK.com is a brand new website that is turning the online focus back onto families.

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Flying is the fastest growing contributor of greenhouse gases in the world, so it is always worth considering the UK, instead of other destinations, for your next holiday.

Greener Holidays

You don’t have to stay at home to ease your conscience. Although reaching far-flung destinations may not be practical without hopping on an aeroplane, there are plenty of enticing, extra eco-friendly holiday destinations right here in the UK.

1) Really Green Travel Company, Isle of Wight

Camping is a fun, environmentally-friendly option, and here you can do it in style, with comfortable yurts and bell tents. With real beds, stoves and furniture, it’s less like camping and more like a home from home. The facilities include lots of eco-friendly features like compost toilets and solar showers. A free pick-up service from the local ferry port means you can leave your car behind. For more camping options in the UK see our article on Top Ten Family Campsites.

Price: Yurts from £120 and bell tents from £100 for seven nights in low season

www.thereallygreenholidaycompany.com

2) GreenWood Forest Park, Wales

If you’re planning a holiday in Wales, drop in on GreenWood Forest Park in the foothills of Snowdonia for a family fun day out. All activities in this eminently affordable adventure park are on a green theme, and rides include the Green Dragon Roller Coaster, the world’s only environmentally friendly roller coaster which generates more electricity than it uses over the course of a year.

Prices: From £5.75 per child and £6.85 per adult in low season

www.greenwoodforestpark.co.uk

3) Wilderness Scotland

This operator offers adventure holidays packed full of activities including wilderness walking, mountain biking, kayaking and sailing. Their credentials as a sustainable tour operator have been recognised through various accolades including the Green Tourism Gold Award. As well as other initiatives, they promise to match a voluntary £5 donation given when you book, and donate the money to Scottish conservation organisations.

Prices: A seven-night family adventure holiday in Perthshire this Easter will set you back £495 per child and £695 per adult

www.wildernessscotland.com

4) Trelowarren Estate, Cornwall

Luxury and sustainability are combined in the five star holiday cottages dotted around the historic 1,000 acre estate at Trelowarren. Winner of ‘Best Place to Stay in Britain’ in the Times Green Spaces Awards 2007, Trelowarren cottages are restored and built from sustainable resources, and are brimming with eco-friendly features. They are available to rent or on a timeshare basis.

Price: Self-catering cottage for four available from £450 for seven nights in low season

www.trelowarren.com

MyFamilyUK.com is a brand new website that is turning the online focus back onto families.

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Global Warming is hailed as the new cause for this generation to fight against, to unite us all to save the world from. But is this a genuine threat to our world or is this just another scientific fad that is being over popularized by the media. In my opinion the only thing getting hotter is the rhetoric. Today the theory of global warming is taught much the same way that the theory of evolution has been taught; from the basis that it is an accepted fact, not just one of many scientific theories. The main figurehead of the global warming movement is widely recognized as former Vice President Al Gore, who gained notoriety for his docudrama An Inconvenient Truth.  This article will address not only the alleged facts of the film, but also the motivations behind the making of this film and the blatant hypocrisy that is Al Gore.

Global warming has little to do with saving the planet, and much more to do with controlling the population through taxation and fees. The cornerstone of the global warming argument is a report published in 1995 by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (I.P.C.C.), supported by over 2,500 scientists it reports that the global warming we are seeing today may not be natural. Governments around the globe have referenced this report to guide policy affecting everything from our use of “fossil fuels” to taxes and fees. In the United Kingdom “green taxes” have been imposed netting the government over £21.9 billion in revenues in 2005. (Watson, 2007)  The State of California has added an $11.00 per-year fee on registering late model cars, trucks, and SUV’s. This fee is in order to fund “alternative fuel research” with 17 Million new cars sold in California each year and the law affecting cars over six years old or newer. Now California stands to make billons in new revenue thanks to the global warming hysteria. This hysteria is supported by the weather, according to the alarmist if it is unseasonably warm; it’s because of global warming, if it’s too cold that’s global warming too. Hurricanes, tornados, earth quakes, and all other natural occurring acts of nature have all been tied to global warming according to the doomsters. Radicals like Al Gore would like to raise energy prices so high that many of Americas working poor would not be able to afford at in the winter, when pressed on this real issue his response is “It’s going to save you money, and it’s going to make the economy stronger.” (Shogren, 2007) Global Warming is more about expanding governmental powers, then saving the world.

In the 1970’s the scientific consensus was that the world was quickly being plunged into a new ice age Time and Newsweek magazines printed articles about the impending ice age that was going to freeze the majority of the United States and Europe. Newsweek’s story The cooling world published in April 1975 was urging governments to start long term economic planning and stockpiling of supplies.  The alarmists point out how thousands died in a heat wave in France and blame global warming caused by human accelerated climate change as the reason for this tragedy. However, climate change was not cited when a cold snap killed 25,000 people in the UK soon after (Monckton, 2007). In a span of thirty years, the world has gone from an impending ice age to a state of global warming. A recent article in National Geographic magazine points out that 36 million years ago the earth was far hotter than our current temperatures (Shea, 2008). The preachers of the new faith of climate change seem to forget the fact that the earth has historic patterns of warm and cold cycles, not brought on by man.

Al Gore and other alarmists are profiting both politically and financially from the creation of the global warming catastrophe, and what of this scientific consensus. If you read the book or watch the film An Inconvenient Truth, you would think that all scientists agree that the world is warming. However many have rejected the idea Indeed, many scientists now say that there has been no discernible human effect on temperature at all (Monckton, 2007) .

The much quoted I.P.C.C. report and the backbone of the Global Warming religion shows a total increase of just 0.6 degrees in the entire 20th century.  The fact is that the entire globe is not rising at a steady temperature; regions of the world are actually cooling. Greenland has cooled at a much faster rate, and at a shorter time period then the I.P.C.C. reported rise of 0.6 degrees. Cooling at a rate of 2.2 degrees per decade since measurements started in 1987, Greenland may be the most compelling evidence that there is some form of clement change happening unfortunately for Al Gore it is trending in the wrong direction (Petr Chylek, 2004).

In my opinion, the best evidence that global warming is more about creating hysteria and revenue generation is that there are countless intellectuals, scholars, and politicians that have compelling evidence against global warming, and they are not selling DVD’s.   “The best evidence supporting natural causes of temperature fluctuations are the changes in cloudiness, which correspond strongly with regular variations in solar activity. The current warming is likely part of a natural cycle of climate warming and cooling that’s been traced back almost a million years. It accounts for the Medieval Warm Period around 1100 A.D., when the Vikings settled Greenland and grew crops, and the Little Ice Age, from about 1400 to 1850 A.D., which brought severe winters and cold summers to Europe, with failed harvests, starvation, disease, and general misery” (Singer, 2007)

Dr. John Christy, professor of Atmospheric Science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville said: “I remember as a college student at the first Earth Day being told it was certain that by the year 2000, the world would be starving and out of energy. Such doomsday prophecies grabbed headlines, but have proven to be completely false” (Stossel, 2007).

The United Nations I.P.C.C. report  according to Gore says that “The vast majority of scientists agree that global warming is real, it’s already happening and that it is the result of our activities and not a natural occurrence. “ However when you read the report it says that a group of scientists stated that “this era of global warming is unlikely to be entirely natural in origin” (I.P.C.C., 1995).  But what does Al Gore have to gain from this manipulation? Power, fame, influence, what sparked Al Gore to become the environmentalist? It was not his love of nature, and clean technology.

Al Gore has been profiting from the environment for a number of years, as matter of fact his family has a long history of working with the environment. Most of it has been extracting oil and minerals out of the ground, while destroying the surrounding environment he loves so dearly. The Gore family trust has owned as much as a quarter of a million to one million dollar in Occidental Oil Company stock (Silverstein, 2000). “Nowhere is Al Gore’s environmental hypocrisy more glaring than when it comes to his relationship with Occidental (petroleum). While on the one hand talking tough about his “big oil” opponents and waxing poetic about indigenous peoples in his 1992 book “Earth in the Balance,” the Elk Hills sale and other deals show that money has always been more important to Al Gore than ideals.”  Elk Hills is tied to the most famous bribery scandal in U.S. history, the Tea Pot Dome Scandal of 1922. Tea Pot Dome was the name of one of the oil fields that Albert Fall was bribed into leasing to Pan-American Petroleum (the company now known as ARCO), the other was Elk Hills. “Gore succeeded where Albert Fall failed in selling the Navy’s 47,000 acre reserve to Occidental Oil 75 years later; giving Occidental an 87 percent increase in the first quarter of 1997 and causing the Gore family stock to sky rocket” (Mesler, 2000).

While Al Gore and his cronies tell Americans and the world that conservation is the key to slowing global warming; he and his wife live in a 10,000-square foot home in Nashville, Tennessee, this home consumes 20 times the energy of an average American home (Williams, 2007).  Al Gore also maintains a 4,000-square-foot residence in Arlington, VA, and a third home in Carthage Tenn. (home of the families Zinc mine). “While there are green energy programs in both Tennessee and Virginia that cost just a few extra pennies per kilowatt hour, public records show that Gore has yet to sign any of his properties up for such programs. Gore seems have failed at even convincing his own party to go green as the Democratic National Committee also has yet to pay the additional two pennies a kilowatt hour (as of 2006)” (Schweizer, 2006).

The Gore family home in Carthage is also home to one of the dirtiest zinc mines in the United States, and Al Gore was receiving $20,000 per month up until 2003 from Pasminco Zinc a company that has been cited for polluting the nearby Caney Fork River. Al Gore has profited over the lifetime of the mine to the tune of over $570,000.  Now the mining did stop in 2003, but not because Gore was upset about the environmental impact, the mineral rights lease ran out.  In a letter Gore wrote to Pasminco he said, “We would like for you to engage with us in a process of ensure that the mine becomes a global example of environmental best practices”. Gore was silent for nearly thirty years of mining while Pasminco Zinc released toxic substances into local waterways (Theobald, 2006). In all that time Al gore never spoke out against the mine, never worked to clean it up, never refused the money, in the end he did was he always does, he wrote a letter. Actions do speak louder than words.

For many global warming is defining this generation, it is being touted as the new evil we should rise up and conquer. But this is not Communism or a Fascist Nazi party imposing its ideals on our allies. It is a theory touted by men who will profit from it. We as Americans should strive to be more informed and find out the reason why men like Gore are so intent on pushing this theory…Because it is profitable and has netted Al Gore not only renewed political relevance, but a Nobel peace prize, and redemption for his presidential campaign loss. While we should be good stewards of this earth, we should also beware of false truths, global warming has become the new religion of the socialist movement and it has dangerous implications for our country and world.

Resources:

Monkton, T. V. (2007). “Consensus”?What “Consensus”? Washington D.C.: Science and Public Policy Institute.

Harris, T. (2006 , June 12). Scientists respond to Gore’s warnings of climate catastrophe. Canadian Free Press , p. 1.

I.P.C.C. (1995). United Nations I.P.C.C. Report. New York: United Nations.

Mesler, B. (2000, August 29). Al Gore: The Other Oil Candidate. Retrieved November 22, 2007, from CorpWatch: http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=468

Shea, N. (2008, February) Hot Penguin, National Geographic Magazine.

William, N (2007, February) Gores Personal energy Use is his own “Inconvenient Truth” Tennessee Center for Policy Research.

Newman, L. (2006, June 9). The inconvenient truth about Al Gore. Retrieved November 22, 2007, from Socalistworkers.org: http://www.socialistworker.org/2006-2/593/593_04_Inconvenient.shtml

Newsweek. (1975, April 28). The Cooling World. Newsweek , p. 64.

Petr Chylek, J. E. (2004). Global Warming and The Greenland Ice Sheet. Climatic Change Kluwer Academic Publishers. , 201-221.

Schweizer, P. (2006, December 7). Gore isn’t quite as green as he’s led the world to believe. USA Today .

Sheehan, J. M. (1996, July). United Nations’ Experts Doctor Evidence. Retrieved November 23, 2007, from Our Civilisation: http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/hot.htm

Shogren, E. (2007, March 22). Al Gore Testifies Before Congress on Global Warming. NPR , pp. 13-16.

Silverstein, K. (2000, May 22). Gore’s Oil Money . The Nation .

Singer, S. F. (2007, March 19). A Review Of ‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’ . Retrieved November 24, 2007, from Our Civilisation: http://www.ourcivilisation.com/aginatur/swindle.htm

Stossel, J. (2007, April 20). The Global Warming Myth? Retrieved November 24, 2007, from ABC News: http://www.abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=3061015

Theobald, B. (2006, April). Environmentalist Gore allowed zinc mine. Retrieved November 23, 2007, from USA Today: http://www.usatoday.com/news/nation/2007-03-18-goremine_N.htm

Watson, S. (2007, September 4). The Global Warming Tax Scam Kicks In. Infowars.net .

Michael holds BA Organizational Leadership and has been researching and studying political and social issues for over 10 years.

Article Source:http://www.articlesbase.com/environment-articles/a-very-convenient-lie-990107.html

Considerable  amount. of research is being conducted at present in developing biodegradable polymers and composites because of the environmental problems caused by petroleum-based non-degradable materials that are currently being used

Biodegradable polymers have been used in biomedical applications as sutures and more recently as drug delivery systems.  Drug delivery systems use amphiphilic (non-polar part) block copolymers that self assemble into micelles above their critical. micellar concentration 

Such block copolymers typically use copolymers of lactic acid and glycolic acid as the hydrophobic part, and polyethylene glycol as the hydrophilic part of the amphiphileas the polar part

These amphiphiles are capable of solubilizing hydrophobic drugs in aqueous media, thereby preventing premature drug degradation and premature drug precipitation.  However, drug loading capabilities of such amphiphilic copolymers is limited due to the lack of functionalities on the main chain of the polymer.

. Other renewable polymers of cellulose resources reproduced from melt polycondensation of 5-hydroxylevulinic acid) the, poly (5-hydroxylevulinic acid) (PHLA), was synthesized and characterized with the in vitro degradation behaviors in phosphate-buffered saline and in deionized water were also found to be excellent and possesses unordinary high glass transition temperature as high as 120 oC. PHLA readily degraded hydrolytically in aqueous media.   

Most commonly, the polymers for the controlled release of gene delivery systems are also biodegradable polymers manufactured as nanoparticles, microspheres,

implantable matrixes and scaffolds.  The recent developments in the polymers used for the controlled release of gene delivery systems, with emphasis on their applications in gene therapy and tissue engineering, have had a wide pace in modern technology.  These natural polymers and their derivatives are obtained from natural resources such as collagen, atelocollagen, gelatin, fibrin, glycosaminoglycans, chitosan, alginate, and agarose, Synthetic polymers include poly(lactide-co-glycolide), poly(lactic acid), functionalized poly(lactic acid), poly(orthoester)s, poly(?-amino ester)s, poly-anhydrides, polyurethanes and poly(ethylene-co-vinylacetate). Thus the exquisite adjusting of the chemical and physical .characteristics of the polymers and optimally engineered properties, may gain greater control over gene delivery and cell growth.   

The crystallization, thermal behavior biodegradability has been extensively studied in recent years.  The physical properties, such as the mechanical thermal properties, and of a semi-crystalline polymer generally is of great importance in the industry of manufacture of these polymers

Issues surrounding waste management of traditional and biodegradable polymers are discussed in the context of reducing environmental pressures and carbon footprints.  Many literature citations address the development of plant-based biodegradable polymers.  Plants naturally produce numerous polymers, including rubber, starch, cellulose and storage proteins, all of which have been exploited for biodegradable plastic production.  Bacterial bioreactors fed with renewable resources from plants – so-called white biotechnology.’ – have also been successful in producing biodegradable polymers and have the potential to become viable alternatives to petroleum-based plastics and an environmentally benign and carbon-neutral source of polymers.   

In brief, the market of real-life-applications and science technology, both in medicine and the environment require a high demand for the affordability and easy access to biodegradable polymers instead of the petroleum-based artificial polymers of non-degradable materials that are currently being used which constitute a health hazard globally.

-Same as before.

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