Hidroaysen Part I: The Nitty Gritty

About a month ago on Monday, May 9th a Chilean Congressional Committee that evaluates environmental impact of perspective projects within Chile gave the okay with a vote of 11 in favor and one abstention to move forward with a project called Hidroaysen that is to take place in Patagonia, Chile. What I'm going to do is give a nuts and bolts, who, what, where, and why description of what exactly is going on with this project because I am more and more interested in this environmental BS and all that hippie we're destroying the world crap. (Don't tell anyone that).

Hidroaysen is a project to build five hydroelectic plants in Aysen, which is the second most southern region of Chile. This involves building five dams on two seperate rivers in the region. These five plants will be able to generate the equivalent of 35% of the energy consumption of Chile in 2008.[1]

So what's so bad about this? Everything sounds great and dandy, the project generates good clean energy and a significant amount of it.

The argument against Hidroaysen: Patagonia is virgin, untouched land. It is a truly breathtaking and unique nature reserve that similar to the protagonist in Madonna's hit single, has been relatively untouched by man.

Building these dams would affect an isolated number of ecosystems in one area. It would not be spreading widespread harm and damage (get it?) to the region and its inhabitants. It would affect 22 square miles out of 42,000 square miles. Less than 1% of the region. (the 22 miles is a rough calculation I did. hackers have managed to block the Hidroaysen website so you cannot log in and read about the project. That seems fair. Not.)

With that being said:

"If the Aysen region was a glass of milk, Hidroaysen would be the fly floating in it."

Here's where it gets tricky. Chile needs the energy. It has over double the population of Massachusetts and consumes less energy than Massachusetts. What that tells me is that 1) we are quite the hipocrites here in Mass. with our feel good liberal hippie rhetoric about going green and being leaders in the green revolution while on a global scale, we are incredibly wasteful offenders. (On a sidenote I think a lot of our wastefulness comes out of habit and from the fact that everything is automatic and already plugged in and a lot of what we use is out of sight out of mind. For example we turn the faucet and have hot water, set the house temperature with a thermostat and leave everything plugged in. Versus in Chile, you have to turn on the gas and light the water boiler each time you want to use hot water. If you want heat you need a to connect a 2 gallon gas tank to the space heater but for the most part just put more layers on, and this is a weird one but in Chile you don't leave everything plugged in all the time for fear of electrical surges. To reiterate, out of sight out of mind, when you are actually physically turning on the gas, filling the tank, you feel the consumption a bit more.)

and 2) you forgot there was a 2 didn't you? and 2) energy consumption is clearly linked to standard of living. As the standard of living increases down there, energy use will increase quite dramatically with it.

So why not do a similar project elsewhere or use an alternative energy sources?

Here's where the situation gets more complicated. You've got incredible economic growth in Chile going on at the moment which increases energy demand. 90% of the population lives in the 9 (of 15 total) central most regions of the country which combine to comprise just 20% of Chile. To put it in other words, you got a whole lot of people in a concentrated area in the middle of the country where energy resources are already maxed out. Chile has been experimenting with alternative solutions and in the last 15 years began to import natural gas from Argentina and oil from Brazil, Angola, and Nigeria. The problem is most of these countries are not the most stable places in the world and the supply is apt to get shut off suddenly and disrupt the Chilean economy.

(deep breath) With the concentration of population in the middle of the country it is pretty much maxed out of local resources, 43% of their electricity is already generated through hydroelectricty. Nuclear energy is not really a viable option due to earthquakes (one of the strongest earthquakes in the world occured 2 years ago in Chile) and building more plants that use oil or gas and pollute is not an option due to the forced dependence on unreliable countries and the Metropolitan Region already suffers from a terrible smog problem (kind of mixing issue here because it is mostly caused by cars and buses), this winter they have had 3 separate days of severe smog emergency, where the city recommends not going outside.

Could you imagine how beautiful a city it is without the smog? You actually don't realize you are under it until there is a clear day after it rains and you go, "where did all these snow capped mountains come from?"

and an entertaining video on the smog problem for those who like puppets and speak Spanish:




That my friends is where the issue stands today. It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. It seems at the moment the project is by no means going full steam ahead as the government first tries to quell the unrest with the project.

If the Hydroaysen project is scrapped it would be a huge statement and a landmark moment against any future development in the south, basically saying that Patagonia is off limits.

Now that you made it through Part I, you're reward is Part II, the initial reaction following the decision to pass Hidroaysen. Nothing like a good old-fashioned Latin American protest where inevitably capitalism was made to be the root of all evil, government vs. the people and rich vs poor.

[1] Know what's awesome? I don't actually have to do footnotes because its my blog. I just did made that one for fun. Any journalist worth a salt keeps their sources protected.

Fire Engine No. 3, I really would have liked to see you in action.

Who is this fire truck kidding? It looks pretty baller until you fixate upon the fact that it only has 4 buckets. And they are not exactly big buckets either. And you have to figure that at least one bucket is needed for the horses carrying the cart running to the fire and the other for some oats. So you are left with two buckets. And if the horses are running you are left with two half buckets. Must have been designed in Chicago.

I am trying to think of things that I find to be equally as useless as this firetruck. What comes to mind:

1) Llamas. What exactly do you even do? Talk about a mistake by Noah. Should have brought a couple more woolie mammoths or something.

2) A degree in Political Science.

This is the first photo that comes up when you google image political science. (I'm the hand on the far left. We're like a team of less strong Atlases).

This is the fifth. I can't tell if it is a girl or a boy with some adolescent girl-like man boobs:

3) The Lincoln luxury pick-up truck. Fuck you luxury pick up truck because you can't actually be used as a pick-up truck for real.



4) The letter combination of p and h. It takes two of you to do the work of one and you just confuse little kids and foreigners. (Note the exception being the use of  ph in the term phat because it gives the word different meaning.)

Move over Rosa Parks, you're not the only one whose got a bone to pick with the bus company

I can only imagine how the bus company came to this decision. So many questions, like why do frogs get singled out? Is it a big enough problem that it needs to be one of the three signs on the bus? My best guess is that there must have been some sort of horrific accident involving a frog that got loose on board. Si se puede! Justice for frogs!

You said it best Kermit.

Nuts Cuatro Nuts or more accurately translated "Loco por el Maní"

It's one of those weird things that doesn't translate exactly. Like Spanish subtitles on TV. For example someone will say, "You pee sitting down" and the subtitles put it simply as "Tú eres gay." Takes all the fun and pageantry out of our refined English expressions, especially the insults.

So back in the day when Joe and I were studying abroad, fresh out of the comfortable layer of filth and jello of 1914 for the first time in months, growing freakishly fuzzy mullets, and unable to grow facial hair (which I think is still the case) and still sticking our dingalings between our legs so that it looked like a . . . well, I think you get the idea, back in those days, we used to laugh every time we saw a a Nuts 4 Nuts stand in the streets of Chile because it makes no sense in Spanish. Nuts Cuatro Nuts? Suckers, must be just some savvy American business man selling his old beat-up stands to a poor Latin American country.

However, it turns out that is not the case . . .

Meet Luis Martínez, the face behind the mystery of Nuts 4 Nuts. After seeing his photo one of the many reasons I hope to never use a comb-over/forward and would actually consider hair surgery.

Luís Martinez is known in Chile as El Conejo, which means The Rabbit. I don't know how he got that nickname or why because rabbits are "herbivores that feed by grazing on grass, forbs, and leafy weeds" aka they don't eat nuts (unless forbs are nuts). Anyway, El Conejo is kinda local legend down here, everyone knows of him and his story.

Dramatic recreation of El Conejo looking for work in the US:

D-Yikes!
Tags: SOUTH
PARKmore...

Now for the real story . . . the Behind the Music . . . The E! True Hollywood Story if you will (if you only read the first sentence and watched the above videos you'll get the basic idea):

El Conejo basically did what these guys did except with a nut cart by his side. He arrived in New York at the beginning of the 90's and found work at a horse track through his father, who did something useful with his life and was a famous Chilean jockey. (Sidenote: If you can name from what Matt Damon movie comes the line, "Why don't you do something useful with your life, like be a jockey?" I will never pass gas in your presence again.) The work at the racetrack was not long-lived because while under the care of El Conejo, a multimillion dollar racehorse took a false step and broke its leg ending both his career as a race horse and El Conejo's employment at the racetrack.

However, that multimillion dollar mistake turned into a multimillion dollar business for El Conejo.

After leaving the horsetrack a friend found him work selling nuts on the streets of New York and in his first year as a vendor, El Conejo set the single day records in sales, selling a total of $1,962 of NUTS.

El Conejo realized that with a little organization and planning, street vending, especially nuts, could be quite a lucrative business and El Conejo began the quest to build his nut empire. By the year 2000, El Conejo had 20 Chileans selling nuts on 15 street corners of New York City and made the decision to move back to Chile and expand his business.

Closing facts:

- El Conejo is now a millionaire.

- When he started in New York he was illegal and was forced to use a spotter to watch for the police. He had his cart seized numerous times and was under the constant threat of deportation under Rudy Guiliani's 0 tolerancy policy.

- There are now 160 Nuts 4 Nuts stands in Chile and it has expanded to cities across South America and Spain.

- Down here a small bag runs about 60 cents and a large bag about 1 dollar.

- No, I don't have any fun nut facts, only that peanut butter does not exist in Chile.

- No, I don't know how El Conejo feels about peanut butter.

- I think there are plans to make a movie about El Conejo, it probably won't be that good.

- This is the second time I wrote this post and I took absolutely no joy in doing it.

- There are always going to be competitors and imitators out there in the business world and not all of them will necessarily make sense. Joe and I saw this gem in the south of Chile:

The one up. A proven succesful business technique. We brought you Duck Tours, they bring you Super Duck Tours, they brought you 4 Hour Energy, why stop there? Boom, Five Hour Energy. Nuts Cinco Nuts? And you are selling pop corn? What kind of world are we living in? Upon further thought, I actually don't think it is any reason to panic and we can officially conclude that people down here don't understand the play on words "Nuts 4 Nuts."

(I wrote this post about a week ago, but it got deleted by the website. I think the content was too racy. I walk a fine line. Anyway I tried to reconstruct it but I don't really remember all of it.)

Flashback video to when we all used dial-up internet

Didn't turn out quite like how they drew it up on the chalk board a decade ago.



I remember this video from when the internet just came out. That's right, let me repeat: when the internet just came out and we were all still using askjeeves as our search engine and my dad had a stack of the free AOL trial disks to dial-up and connect to the internet. Sometimes when I was fighting with my sister and I knew she was on the internet I would pick up the house phone because that would break the connection and she would have to spend the next 10 minutes logging back on so she could IM her friends. And then I picked up the phone again. Good times, good times. Stefan 1,154 - Danielle 0.

The following is a pretty awesome collection of links I found through this article:

Note the following phrases are all plagarized from the article because I am lazy:

The New Yorker looks back at bin Laden cartoons over the years.


In the wake of the jubilation that followed the news Osama bin Laden was killed last night, the Wall Street Journal looks into the science of revenge. Check out their story here to figure out why so many took to the streets to celebrate his death.


Check out the 10 most-tweeted bible verses in response to bin Laden's death, courtesy of Atlantic.com. Number 1: "Do not gloat when your enemy falls; when they stumble, do not let your heart rejoice" (Proverbs 24:17). 


Some lighter consequences of yesterday's news: NYMag.com reports that Miley Cyrus's 2009 hit "Party in the U.S.A." has become the Osama bin Laden death anthem and explains why.


The U.S.-led coalition in Afghanistan released some videos of deployed troops’ reactions to the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Check them out here.


Before American forces took out bin Laden in Pakistan Sunday, there were a lot of myths floating around about his whereabouts and habits. NJ’s Yochi J. Dreazen and Sara Sorcher debunk four myths about al Qaida’s leader.

Food Pic of the Day: A rare inside look at a Chilean Completo

The Chilean Completo, one of the most mind boggling creations that has come out of the chilean culture. A layer of mayonaisse, followed by avocado, then tomato, and finally the hot dog itself.

A special thank you to our unseen test subject and hero, Benjamin, for taking that brave brave bite. He subesquently told me he liked it and then ate the rest.

Clydesdog