GlobalEnviroBlog

The way it is: I was very distressed when I learned of the plight of a friend of mine. He complained to his doctor about pain in his extremities. The doctor diagnosed gout. My friend changed his diet eliminating saturated fats and red meat. In fact, he adopted a mostly vegetarian diet. The pain didn’t go away.

Now, I don’t know about you but at this point alarm bells would be going off in my head, especially when the doctor continued to attribute the pain to gout. Gout is caused by uric acid. The reduction of meats and fat that my friend had made should have drastically reduced uric acid production.

A new symptom came to light. The swelling and pain my friend was experiencing in his joints got worse. The doctor said it was nothing to worry about. It was just the gout. Because my friend was on Medicare, the doctor did not run a panel of tests on liver function, kidney function and blood chemistry.

A few weeks later my friend stubbed his toe. It turned black. He rushed to the hospital where doctors were forced to amputate his foot due to an aggressive infection. Tests showed that his kidneys were failing. My friend has been in the hospital for three months.

Why it is this way: Medicare, like so many health insurance programs, is heavily controlled by cost accounting. The first health insurance sector hit by the overwhelming cost accounting influence was the Health Maintenance Organization or HMO. The accountants running HMOs began second-guessing doctors, forcing them to prescribe cheaper medications that were ineffective instead of more costly medications that would cure the situation. To make matters worse, the United States Government has made it impossible to sue HMOs for their wrong doings and drastically reduced benefits for Medicare patients. Additionally, the same cost accountants have reduced coverage and raised premiums at a rate that has left an ever increasing portion of America uninsured or underinsured.

This heavy-handed control of healthcare through cost accounting has created a disparity in health coverage in America. The wealthy can afford the premiums of insurance that provides for quality health care. The middle-class and working poor cannot afford the premiums on insurance plans that provide quality coverage. Employers, in a never-ending search for cost savings have adopted weaker and weaker insurance policies or eliminated them completely.

The way it could be: If a properly formulated universal healthcare insurance system were created by the United States Government, all Americans would receive the same quality healthcare and diagnostic procedures. The wealthy could still buy additional insurance to cover voluntary procedures such as cosmetic surgeries or similar treatments.

If Medicare had not been gutted and universal healthcare insurance was a reality, my friend would have been evaluated with a complete battery of diagnostic tests. The kidney function problems and the factors that caused them would have been caught early enough to begin appropriate medical therapies. My friend would still have his foot!

It doesn’t have to be this way: Contact your Congressional Representatives and Senators (Congressional Email Directory) and tell them to support a fair and equitable universal healthcare insurance program. Insist that all Americans deserve quality healthcare. Write the Presidential candidates and demand universal healthcare.

Richard Moolick

www.call4action.info

On a drive through the Midwest, a familiar aroma announces that a feedlot is nearby. Wouldn’t it be nice if the aroma of a feedlot could be reduced without using a lot of resources to do it?

A biological remediation of this problem can be done so that useful and valuable products are created by the same processes that reduce the odors. In fact the processes I am discussing can make the reduction in odors profitable.

The semi-liquid excrement that cattle in feedlots and cows in dairies deposit is the main source of the odor. Let me describe a system that will effectively turn this odoriferous problem into valuable products.

STAGE 1: Using timed jets of water, the excrement is flushed into a sump where it is pumped into a large anaerobic fermenter. The methanogenic bacteria naturally occurring in the manure ferment the manure, producing methane.

STAGE 2: The methane produced in the first stage is fed, as fuel, into either a boiler or a gas turbine. The steam from the boiler and the torque from the gas turbine spin a generator. The resulting electricity is usually more than enough to handle the energy needs of the dairy or feedlot with power to spare.

STAGE 3: The sludge that sinks to the bottom of the fermenter can be used as fertilizer or as a biomass fuel that can be burned for additional energy. The anaerobic fermentation destroys the bacteria that produce the strong odors in manure, leaving the fertilizer less odoriferous.

Figure 1 shows a simplified layout of this process. The use of this system to handle the solid waste generated by the cattle accomplishes several things. First, it helps to significantly reduce the odors of the feedlot. Second, it generates enough energy to supply the entire feedlot. And, third, the biomass produced in the process can be used as a reduced odor fertilizer or burned in a boiler to produce more energy.

It is easy to see how this process has the potential of paying for itself in a relatively short period. I would love to consult with any such facility that chooses to employ this biological solution to their challenges.

Richard T. Moolick

Chemical Engineer

With global warming, the rising cost of gasoline and the long commutes to work, a solution exists that can help with all three problems and reduce costs for employees and employers alike. An ever-increasing portion of America’s workforce are employed in jobs that involve pushing “electronic paper” or working exclusively through the computer and/or the telephone. These people could conceivably perform their jobs almost completely by telework. If this were to happen, numerous benefits could be realized immediately or nearly so. The amount of excess carbon dioxide dumped into the atmosphere over the United States would drop sharply. These employees would save a significant amount of money per year off their transportation costs. Employers would see a drop in absenteeism, on-the-job accidents and could reduce the overhead costs of maintaining a large central complex. The congestion on the roads and highways would be significantly reduced. Telework is a win-win situation. Let’s take a look at global warming. While it is true that telework increases energy consumption in the home, the increase is minuscule when compared with the energy consumed commuting to the office.  As reported in PC World on October 4, 2007, the Consumer Electronics Association issued  the results of a survey showing that “there are 3.9 million people in the U.S. who work from home at least one day a week. By avoiding an average 22-mile commute to the place of work, and taking into account the increased power use in the home, this practice saves about 840 million (U.S.) gallons of petrol, equivalent to taking two million cars off the road for a year.”¹ “The Washington-based Employment Policy Foundation reports that 65% of current jobs are amenable to telework.”² If 25% of America’s workforce teleworked at lease three times per week, the reduction in carbon dioxide emissions could be as high as 3.3Tg CO₂ (3.6 billion tons CO₂) per year based on figures from the U.S. EPA’s Inventory of U.S. Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Sinks: 1990 – 2005.³ This would be equivalent to a savings of almost 26 billion gallons of gasoline or about $67 billion per year.  

 As can be seen, the workers, companies and governments have little to lose and potentially tremendous gains if every worker who can telework does so the majority of the time. References: 1.      http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/138062/telecommuting_saves_carbon_emissions.html2.      http://www.allbusiness.com/human-resources/employee-development/848230-1.html3.      http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/downloads06/07CR.pdf