Sziasztok!
Segitseget szeretnek kerni, energia-gazdalkodas, haztartasok energia 
felhasznalasaval kapcsolatban. Elsosorban informaciokra van szuksegem 
(szakirodalom, Internet cimek, energia-gazdalkodasi, kornyezetvedelmi 
szervezetek cime (E-mail, postacim)).
Ezenkivul erdekelnek a temahoz kapcsolodo jogi vonatkozasok.
Pl.: energia privatizacioval kapcsolatos torvenyek
A valaszokat a cimemre kernem  nem a kornyeszre.
Elore is koszonom a segitsegeteket.

> ------------------------------------------------
- Arany Szilvia  E-mail:  -
> ------------------------------------------------

KEdves Piros!
Csak olyan gyakran tudom kuldeni a Meadows-rovatot, ahogy Dana 
megirja oket.....  Ui. sajnos nincsenek annal regebbi szamaim, mint a 
KORNYESZbe kuldtem.  De ime itt a kovetkezo.
Diana
> ----------------------------------------
MILLENNIUM, SHMILLENNIUM

On April 6 it will be 1000 DAYS TILL THE YEAR 2000!!!  There will be press
conferences and a global sing-along.  Countdown clocks will be set ticking,
aimed for the turning of the millennium.

 (Purists will point out that the actual millennial change will occur on
January 1, 2001.  They will keep saying that for the next three years, while
everyone ignores them.  We've all been conditioned by car odometers; we know
the historic moment comes when the 000s roll up on the dial.)

It's already impossible, I hear, to get a reservation for December 31, 1999 at
the world's hot party spots.

I'm sure the media giants are making their plans too.  Sixty-minute specials
reviewing the history of the last thousand years.  Talking heads speculating on
the next thousand.  Medallions, T-shirts and other collectibles.  Special ads.
Coca-Cola Brings You the 21st Century!  That's one reason for a 1000-day
countdown, like declaring Christmas right around Halloween, to allow plenty of
time for marketing.

I have to say, I'm dreading the hype.  It's dismaying enough to use a
thousand-year event to have drunken parties and sell trivial stuff.  It's worse
when you remember that the millennium is a non-event.  Our calendar is
arbitrary.  The Chinese new year does not fall on January 1.  The Persian year
starts on the spring equinox.  Muslims, Jews, and Buddhists do not key their
calendars to the year of Christ's birth, and our Gregorian calendar, which was
not defined until the year 1582, got the year of Christ's birth wrong.  We're
getting excited about the year 2000 basically because we have ten fingers and
toes, so we add zeroes when things hit 10, 100, and 1000.

Therefore my first reaction to the countdown is: Millennium schmillennium!

My second reaction is WOW!  What an opportunity to glance up from our humdrum
lives and take a good, long look at where we've been and where we're going.
What a fine thing to think and talk together with a THOUSAND YEAR perspective.
What a chance to see ourselves in the great sweep of history, to be humbled by
the thought of all the generations that went before, and to take responsibility
for the generations to come.

Whatever year we pick, we could create an uplifting, transformative millennial
celebration.  Some serious groups will be vying with the unserious ones to do
just that.

One of them is the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), which is about to launch a Living
Planet Campaign -- "designed to make the last 1000 days of this century a
turning point in the worldwide struggle to preserve species and habitats."
They will have a press conference on April 3 to identify two hundred places on
earth, which, if they were all protected, would represent "viable samples of
every existing wild habitat on earth."

WWF will encourage millennial gifts to the earth, which could be as simple as a
household buying an energy-saving lightbulb or as grand as a nation protecting
a virgin forest.  Two gifts to be announced on April 3 will be a
3000-square-mile chunk of state land in Florida, to be donated by governor
Lawton Chiles to the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary, and a commitment
by the president of Mongolia to protect at least 30 percent of his country's
biologically rich landscape.

Another organization ready to seize the year-2000 initiative is the
appropriately named Millennium Institute.  It is preparing a "Millennium Report
to the World," intended to be not a thick manifesto from a think-tank, but a
compilation of information, dreams, and plans from all sorts of people,
especially young people.

The Institute encourages groups -- families, churches, friends -- to gather
every 100 days during the 1000-day countdown, not to receive ideas about the
millennium from TV programs or pundits, but to discuss its meaning for
themselves.  The Institute is assembling some questions to ponder, timeless
enough for a millennial perspective and timely enough to reflect this
particular moment in history.  Here are just a few (for more, check out the
Millennium Institute website at www.igc.apc.org/millennium):

What stands in the way of a happy, creative life in the next century?

What does a new millennium mean in terms of traditions already in flux?

What kind of public and private commitments and actions are required of us, to
shape the first decades of the next century?

Do our spiritual or communal traditions furnish us with the means to rethink
the use of force (of any kind) in the light of a new millennium?

In a world where the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer,
how can we resurrect kindness and generosity?

To what extent do we want to be incorporated into a global culture?  How will
large corporate structures of all sorts -- economic, informational, religious,
government -- come to grips with their global responsibilities?  Do we have at
hand a global ethic?

Whom shall we call upon to lead us into the 2000s?  Where shall we look for the
new ideas needed to survive in the next millennium?

The more I think about it, the more I see that the opportunity here is for all
of us to choose own moments to mark the millennium -- not fleeting New Year's
Eves, but long moments during the years 2000 and 2001, to look backward and
learn, to look forward and plan.  The opportunity is to tune out the outside
hype and bring up the wisdom of our souls.  Don't let anyone sell you
millennial thoughts and dreams.  Come up with your own.

 (Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at
Dartmouth College.)

INDUSTRY COULD BE A CLEAN AIR GOOD GUY

If the EPA carries out its plan to strengthen the Clean Air Act, that will be
the end of Fourth of July fireworks.

Backyard barbecues will be banned.

You will probably lose your job.

The economy will crash.

All for a few asthmatic kids, who should just stay inside on smoggy days.

So industry ads and spokespersons are saying.  It's astonishing.  They still
hire public relations firms at high prices to try to make us believe stuff like
this.

The National Association of Manufacturers is asking companies for $25,000
apiece for a "major grassroots lobbying effort" against the Clean Air Act.  An
industry front called Citizens for a Sound Economy is spending over $100,000 a
week on radio ads warning that the feds are about to take away our fireworks.
Their hired guns picketed Senate hearings wearing prison stripes and handing
out bumper stickers: "Tell the EPA that Barbecuing is Not a Crime!"  The Air
Quality Standards Coalition consists of 600 firms and trade associations, each
ponying up thousands of dollars to keep clean air standards from being
strengthened.

There's no way the American Lung Association, which very much wants the
standards strengthened, can match that kind of spending.

Twenty-seven years after the passage of the Clean Air Act, over 60 million
Americans still live in places where breathing endangers their health.  Twice
that many are regularly exposed to harmful levels of ozone, the prime
ingredient in smog, the one that makes you gasp and wheeze, the one that
reduces even a healthy adult's lung capacity by 15-20 percent.  Incidence of
severe asthma, especially in children, is rising rapidly.

Given those facts, the Clean Air Act may look like a failure, but in fact it is
a fair success.  The air in most of our cities is improving slightly, though
population, traffic, and industry have increased.  Los Angeles, always the
worst case, had 239 unsafe air days in 1988 and only 103 in 1995.  Despite
industry resistance and underfunded government enforcement, the Clean Air Act
has let us go on growing without the air getting worse.  The trouble is, the
air is still a long way from healthy.

Congress wrote into the Act that air safety standards must be based on health,
not cost, and that the EPA must check every five years to see if new science
might require standards to be updated.  The EPA had been slow in doing that.
So in 1993 the American Lung Association sued the government to force it to
obey the law and update the standards.

Now the EPA has reviewed hundreds of journal articles, suggested two new
tougher standards, and gotten them approved by two scientific review panels.
EPA chief Carol Browner says, "This has been the most extensive scientific
review and public outreach process ever conducted by the EPA for public health
standards."  Industry says the science is weak, but industry always says that.

The new standards, now open for public comment, lower the acceptable
concentration of ozone by 25 percent.  And there is a new standard for
extremely tiny soot particles -- the ones most easily inhaled deep into the
lung.  Meeting the new standards would, says the EPA, improve the health of 37
million adults and 13 million children and prevent 20,000 premature deaths,
500,000 asthma attacks and 9.000 hospital admissions per year.  AND cut haze in
national parks and $1 billion worth of agricultural crop losses.

It would be worth giving up fireworks and barbecues to produce that result, but
of course fireworks and barbecues are not major sources of air pollution.  The
folks who bring you the real air pollution just made that up.

Medical and environmental groups are saying the new standards aren't tough
enough.  Industry lobbyists are telling us how much they will cost.  In 1990
they predicted the new acid rain standards would cost $1500 per ton of abated
sulfur dioxide.  The EPA said it would be more like $500.  The real cost turned
out to be under $100.  Now industry says the new Clean Air standards will cost
$200 billion a year.  The EPA says $7 billion.  Make your own guess about the
real number.

If industry heads were not caught up in a system that forces them to be
irresponsible, they would stop hiring PR firms to spread nonsense.  They would
admit that there is no scientific reason to doubt that the tons of pollution
they emit make the air bad and people sick.  They would recognize the
immorality of earning profits for a few, while throwing costs onto everyone who
breathes.  They would stop plotting to deceive government and citizens, as if
we were their enemies.  They'd come around to our side.

They'd say -- I can picture it now -- "You know, it's important to manufacture
things, to employ folks, to make money.  But it's wrong to make money at the
expense of someone else's health.  We don't want to do that.  So let's figure
out together how we can have clean air and a sound economy.  We'll put our best
technical minds to work on it.  And in an open, democratic process, we'll
decide on a fair way to split the costs and benefits.  Let's work together to
make the air clean."

After the comment period, the final EPA standards will be issued in July.
There's still time for industry to turn itself into a good guy.

(Donella H. Meadows is an adjunct professor of environmental studies at
Dartmouth College.)

Mindenfele aprosag:

1.  Egy hallgatom keres barmilyen olyan ceggel kapcsolatot 
Magyarorszagon, aki napkollektorok gyartasaval, forgalmazasaval, 
import/exportjaval vagy eladasaval foglalkozik.  Kerlek, emilezz a
  cimre, Andrey Baltinskynek.  (vagy angolul vagy 
oroszul....), ha tudsz javasolni neki egy jo kapcsolatot.

2.  Zsuzsa rakerdezett kelet-europai energiaintenzitas 
adatforrasokra. Az egyik legujabb es legreszletesebb publikacio, ami 
targyalja a kerdest, es remek abrak vannak benne, az:

"10 Years after the Chernobil Disaster
Electricity in Eastern Europe"  by F. Chr. Matthes  and Lutz Mez.  

A kiadvanyt a Henrich-Boll alapitvany adta ki; fax szamuk 
49-221-207-1151.
(zsuzsa, ebbol a konyvbol faxoltam Neked a kert oldalakat!)

3.  a multkori energias irasaim kapcsan tobben rakerdeztek olyan 
irodalomra, ahol a szolaris epitkezesrol es lakas-felujitasrol lehet 
tanacsot kapni.  

A Chelsea Green publishing company-nek van nehany evtizedek ota 
bestseller klasszikusa:  
HomeMade MOney (ebben mas okos dolog is van 
energia-takarekossag ugyben, nemcsak szolaris trukkok; amugy  Rocky 
Mountain Institute keszitette a konyvet ) 
Passive Solar Energy,
The New Solar Home BOok; 
Solar Living Sourcebook,
Energy-Efficient and Environmental Landscaping; 
The Rammed Earth House.  
A jo bennuk, hogy "csupan" kb. $20-$30 egy konyv, ellentetben a 
szokasos $50-$100 -os szakkonyvarakkal. 
Tel: 1-800-639-4099 az USA-bol; sajnos europabol nem tudom, hogy kell 
rendelni; de meg lehet probalni a szerkesztoseg fax-szamat:  1-(802) 
295-6444.  Cimuk:  Chelsea Green Publixhing Co., 10 Water Street, 
Room 310, Lebanon, NH 03766.

A masik, a Solar Energy Houses es meg sok mas okos konyv a James 
&James-tol.  http://www.jxj.com.  Ez a konyvuk pl. 75-90%-os 
energiamegtakaritasos hazakat mutat be.

Jo olvasast,
Diana

@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@
Dr. Vorsatz Diana
Professor of Energy Policy
Dept. of Environmental Sciences and Policy
CENTRAL EUROPEAN UNIVERSITY