Mooning

After the parade, we went to Moon Marble.

I see something new every time I go, or see something in a different way, it seems. Bruce showed the video, I've seen it a few times, that shows them making machine-made marbles at a now-defunct American factory.

Wages may be higher here, but shipping glass over great distances is expensive (one reason why prior to Ripple Glass, nobody was recycling the stuff around here).

But melting the old irregular marbles, the raw glass and whatnot takes twelve hours in an astonishingly hot kiln. That's a lot of energy.

So I guess marbles get made wherever they still consider smokestacks to be 'progress.'

Not that it's necessarily all that terrible: I have my doubts about global warming anyway, and at least a marble is a highly durable good. A lot of the things we use colossal amounts of energy to make don't last the day.

And I'll bet if you're only counting energy efficiency that the factory made marble is still less intensive than a handmade.

I know it's not a lens I used to see anything through, what those who have drunk the Climate Change Kool-Aid refer to as the 'carbon footprint' of things, people, or lifestyles.

But you don't need global warming for an awareness of resource consumption to matter. Some of the jams we get ourselves in politically come from insulating ourselves from such knowledge.

People who, for instance, want rooftop solar panels are often people who find nuclear, coal and hydro power all impossibly dirty and dangerous. Yet without two of those three, there probably isn't enough juice available to make the solar panels to begin with.