Socorro Weekend

Last night and today we went to the Inaugural Rio Film Festival here on campus at Tech. We saw a bunch of very good documentaries and a few interesting short films. Right now they are playing An Inconvenient Truth, a movie that you all must see. No, really. I'll wait for you to get back. Seriously. Go.

OK, now that you are back and have seen the light, I'll give you a little look at the things we saw this weekend.
Last night they played a documentary by Jeff Barrie titled Kilowatt Ours. This was a South-centric view of the damage being caused by coal-fired power plants. Super good. Nothing that we hadn't heard before, but it puts it all together in a nice package for the layman. And it isn't just a film about how coal plants are bad; it also presents a solution. Much of the solution information is on their web site, given above (http://www.kilowattours.org/). Jeff Barrie and his wife go through a number of low-cost steps they took to cut their energy bills in half with a grand total of about $300 expenditure. One of the things they did was to install CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lamps) in all of their light fixtures, something that had an immediate and significant impact on their bills. We've had a couple of these for some time, but for some reason put them into fixtures that we pretty much never use. After getting home, we moved them. Also, we went through the Kilowatt Ours website and purchased 12 more of them for a grand total of $35 from the Energy Federation. Now, the other two we had bought at our local Smith's cost us about $8 a pop. These from the website are $3 each (although this is if you buy packs of 4), and shipping is free. Also, there is a 10% discount if you use the kilowattours code at checkout. Even if you hate the earth and don't want to conserve, these babies not only don't cost much more than regular light bulbs, they are rated to last for approximately 10,000 hours. Annually, incandescent bulbs will run you (according to the Energy Federation) $8.72 each for their energy. CFLs run $2.16. And that's just for the energy, never mind the fact that CFLs last 5 to 20 times longer. Many times, the impact of throwing something away and replacing it with something new precludes replacing your inefficient old things with new technology (environmental-impact-wise), but apparently studies show (I need to find them) that you it's better to just go ahead and get rid of your incandescents now and replace them with CFLs.
The documentary also spends some time on different types of zero-emission power types (wind and solar), as well as zero-emission ways to heat or cool your home (geothermal and passive solar). Also, it shows just how much you can save by changing over to efficient appliances.

This morning we saw one called Being Caribou, a documentary filmed by a couple who undertook a 1,000-mile, five month hike along with migrating porcupine caribou, who wend their way through the frigid Yukon into Alaska to calve for the summer on the north coast of Alaska, at ANWR. They follow the herd through some extremely harsh conditions to camp with them at the calving ground, where Dubya proposes to do some needless drillin'. We both voted for this one to be the people's choice for the festival.

We also watched one called Troubled Waters: the Dilemma of Dams about the impacts of dams and the benefits of their removal. Very interesting. Did you know that estimates place the number of dams in the U.S. between 75,000 and 2.5 million? I assume it depends on what you exactly consider a "dam". Also very informative.

A few shorts that were interesting (check the film festival website), and this evening there was a free showing of An Inconvenient Truth, which we already own on DVD and so were not too into sitting in the theater to watch. Another that everybody should watch. Again, not much that we hadn't already heard, but great for the non-climate-scientist. Pretty much will convince you that anybody who does not believe in global warming is just not paying attention.

Other than the technical glitches (like Norton Antivirus popping up in the middle of a movie, and other movies stopping partway through), and the low turnout (joint Matt-Alison scienguesstimate of 50), we enjoyed ourselves and hope that it happens again next year. Maybe somebody will join us if it does.

Whew.