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MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 2013
opinion
TEXT FREE FOR ALL
Someone just explained to his friend that mRNA is a "thing that changes stuff," is it socially acceptable to scream BE MORE SPECIFIC!!! across Anschutz?
What happened to making it a smoke free campus? Blech.
Text your FFA submissions to 785-289-8351 or at kansan.com
To the person seeking an on-campus golf cart, consider getting a segway.
Anyone else see the girl with all One Direction school supplies?
There are so many religious groups on campus, but not nearly enough are dedicated to Nic Cage.
The frat packs are becoming self aware? Isn't that like how the plot of "The Terminator" starts?
Just saw a Mexican break a piece of bread in half and hand it to a friend, the friend said "thank you Jesus" (they-soos). #MindBlown
My immunology teacher kinda looks like the Teddy bear from "Toy Story 31"
EDITOR'S NOTE: Does he smell like strawberries? Try to be subtle.
How can we lose when we have Thor in our cheer squad??
98 Stowers should be moved to running back!
Mizzou fans started the Woo in the rock chalk chant. Do we really want to continue it? Boo to the Woo.
I don't know if a Chipotle has ever ran out of food, but I'd like to think if they built one on campus, us students would be up for the challenge.
I always whine about standing in the heat at football games and then I remember that there are dudes actually in playing football like 20 feet away.
I have a new favorite cereal few months. Anyone have some obscure cereal recommendations?
Do you guys think the Chancellor ever submits FFAs?
Our football boys get a lot of trash talk, but honestly they are some real nice fellas as well as hard workers. Proud to be a Jayhawk student wise as well as a life long fan. Love them hawks!
ENVIRONMENT
PSA: Roughly 92 percent of all FFA submissions are complaints from engineering majors. Someone please make it stop.
UNDEFEATED, KU FOOTBALL
ROOLZ!!!
hey, u awake
Kansas football makes strides in green movement
I know being a Jayhawk pretty much requires me to be a basketball fanatic, but growing up in southeast Kansas has fostered my love of goal posts and shoulder pads. My earliest memories are of watching stadium lights while my dad cheered next to me at Pittsburg State University football games. I was enamored with the way bugs or snowflakes (depending on the season) looked as they passed in front of the light's glow. Now, when I look at the lights in Memorial Stadium, I'm thinking to myself, how much coal does it take to power one of those lights? I guess that's what happens when you become an Environmental Studies major—childhood memories become ecological nightmares.
Until last year, when a professor casually joked about the carbon footprint of a football game, I had never considered the externalities of a sporting event. From that point on, when I entered a stadium I passed judgment on the situation around me. I thought to myself, do these people even
know what that synthetic field is made of? But then reality hit me like a pigskin to the face: I didn't even know what that field was made of. I realized that a simple comment in a classroom had influenced the value I placed on my favorite autumn activity. I fought back against my urge to place football in the box of "environmentally hazardous" and did what anyone with WiFi would do: I started Googling.
I began with the question of how stadium lights are powered. I initially believed that all lights were coal-powered, energy-suckers. However, after a bit of research, I discovered that there is a green movement among many NFL teams. Some fields, such as the MetLife Stadium in New York, use solar powered lights and a large number of stadiums use efficient, high-wattage lamps in order to reduce energy costs, inadvertently reducing the use of fossil fuels. Obviously, all stadiums are not created equal. Some will require more energy than others. Some will use coal or natural gas to
By Gabby Murnan gmurnan@kansan.com
power their lights, while others will use greener energies. Overall it is important to note that football teams are trending towards reducing their carbon footprint.
reducing them carbon footprint. Next I tackled the surely deployable world of synthetic turf. My pre-conceived notion was that synthetic fields are cesspool of toxic chemicals, but a quick search sent my negativity packing. The little black dots on football fields that inevitably get stuck between my toes are ground up used tires, made with chemical additives—doesn't sound like the greatest surface to face-plant into. However, numerous government-sponsored studies have shown that levels of chemicals in synthetic turfs, similar to the AstroPlay field the Hawks have been playing on since 2000, are not harmful. In fact, one could argue that synthetic fields use recycled materials as well as conserve water. Once again, the institution
of football has foiled my high- and-mighty eco ideals by swaying towards environmentally friendly practices.
Lastly I entertained the trash issue. Memorial Stadium has a seating capacity of 50,071. If the entire stadium's occupancy purchased one bottle of water from the concession stand, roughly 2,097 pounds of empty plastic bottles would remain. Now multiply that number by 7 home football games and the equivalent weight in plastic waste is that of almost four African elephants. My disdain for bottled water dissipated when I discovered that many universities offer game day recycling options for fans. In fact, the University will be promoting sustainable habits this fall by launching its waste-diversion program. Rock Chalk Recycle, which will provide recycling and composting options at Memorial Stadium and Allen Fieldhouse. Although an enormous amount of waste is produced during a single game, the efforts of many teams and universities to encourage
recycling and composting provide a ray of hope for environmentally conscious football fans.
Alas, my hopes of exposing the institution of football as an evil, environment-destroying industry were foiled by the ecologically minded initiatives of university athletic departments and the NFL. Although it put me in a sour mood for last year's football season, my professor's comment led me to question the social norms of football country and allowed me to strike a balance between appreciation of football and awareness of its environmental impacts. Now I can attend a game at Memorial Stadium with a heart full of past football memories and a head filled with just a little more knowledge on how I'm interacting with my environment. One thing is for sure, I will still be the girl staring up at the dazzling lights and telling the drunken guy next to me to recycle that bottle.
BOOKS
Gabrielle Murnan is a sophomore majoring in Environmental Studies from Pittsburg.
Literary analysis provides insight to everyday life
Being an English major, I've had my fair share of existential life-ponderings, moments of questioning my choice of study and panic about the future. But after three years of studying literature and writing extensive papers, I've realized that majoring in English was a great choice.
Why? All emphasis on the importance of clear, effective writing and communication aside, my exposure to a variety of stories and viewpoints—both fictional and real—has taught me to process the world through more than one lens. In other words, reading books has given me the ability to see everything from more than one side. This is a really important skill to learn while you're in college; half of any major is really learning how to think outside the confines of the box you were raised in.
the box you use in class So how did literature help me gain this quality? Let's start with an issue that's been on a lot of people's minds lately: men and women in media. Because of a particular performance by a certain young celebrity, and an equally obnoxious song by another celebrity, the roles that both men and women play in the media, and their choices as entertainers has been the focus of many conversations and articles. This isn't news. Many times, the reaction to celebrity "scandal" is the same: there's slut-shaming for women, bigot name-calling
By Tasha Cerny
tcerny@kansan.com
for men, and everyone pretends to hate certain celebrities while secretly Googling everything about them. But what I find most interesting is that no one ever stops to consider their own reaction to these celebrities and why they have that reaction. People complain about the society that's reflected in the entertainment world, but ultimately, the underlying issue is our own expectations for that world.
Harnessing my English major superpowers, The Hunger Games trilogy is a great look at societal expectation for entertainment. Yes, I realize that America is a ridiculously long way away from being a fictional, war-torn, dystopia that hosts an annual reality TV-esque tournament where children fight to the death. But if you really consider the way Capital citizens treat tributes, it's not all that different from the ways in which we emulate celebrities and drool at anything that comes from the hands of Hollywood.
We could talk all day and night about women's roles in the media, how we live in a "man's world," and the moral degradation of society, but at the end of it all, the phrase 'sex sells' is still only true because we, as a society and audience, allow it to be true. Celebrities allow themselves to
be seen and choose to perform the way that they do because it's what we, as an audience, have collectively asked for. The pressure to live up to "Hollywood standards" is only reinforced by our choices as an audience.
So, while it may seem random to relate a fictional young adult novel to the celebrity hubbub that surrounds our lives, I feel that I gain some insight about the world by making that connection. And if I didn't have the exposure to literature that I do, wouldn't be able to make that connection. Moral of the story: being an English major is awesome, but in case you aren't one (and even if you are), reading "just for fun" is really important. Conversations about how and why we do things, why certain choices are made, and why certain actions are committed, are an important part of learning about the world and people in general. Literature, particularly those stories and books you won't read for class, helps give us new perspectives and experiences to draw from in those conversations, so that we can build stronger reasoning and reflect more widely on the world around us.
Tasha Cerny is a senior majoring in English from Salina.
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ENERGY
EPA pushes inferior ethanol product
@Kansan_Opinion we didn't wear the full band uniform so we had 0 casualties!
The Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS) is broken. The
dard (RFS) is broken. The RFS is designed to allow the Environmental Protection Agency, the EPA, to set a schedule for increasing the amount of renewable fuels used every year. In other words, the EPA determines how much ethanol is in your gasoline. Hooray, we will be independent of Middle East oil (if you lean right) or yippee, we are taking steps in the right direction to stop burning fossil fuels (if you lean left). With this kind of bipartisan appeal, no wonder something like the RFS withstood scrutiny and had strong support from both sides of the aisle. While the intention was great, the execution has been awful, and upon real examination, the RFS has to go.
Let's begin with how the RFS is enforced. How do you make sure refiners – big, greedy companies that hoard fat margins for themselves – blend ethanol into their evil gasoline? How does one reel in these robber barons and force corn down their dirty throats? Easy enough: Renewable Identification Numbers, better known as RINs. A RIN is a serial number attached to a gallon of biofuel to track where it goes. Based on a refiner's output, that refiner must also have a certain number of RINs. If the refiner doesn't have enough, it faces stiff financial penalties.
This is where it gets hairy. RINs are being traded, because if a refiner doesn't meet their RIN requirement, they can buy the RINs and be in compliance. Great, but decreasing demand for gasoline and increasing quotas for ethanol have caused the price of a RIN to skyrocket, putting upward pressure on gasoline prices. And then there's the issue of fraudulent RINs, an entire other column-worthy subject.
Ethanol producers would have you believe that the RIN issue is just the refining industry whining. They actually would have you believe that ethanol is reducing the price of gasoline. Let's entertain that thought for a brief moment. If ethanol, a commodity, was making gasoline cheaper for the same energy value, why must the EPA mandate billions of gallons of ethanol production with the RFS? If you went to a refiner and said, "I can make your gasoline cheaper and just as efficient in engines, no doubt," which refiner would turn you away?
That's because ethanol isn't making gasoline cheaper. Then, are people just investing in ethanol production because the government is mandating ethanol
By Chris Ouyang washley@kansan.com
That's my problem with the RFS. The EPA is picking a winner and a loser, in a huge way.
production? Absolutely. What a novel idea. Have they overinvested? Yeah, a lot of companies have, which is why you see fighting between ethanol producers and refiners around the same time every year. It's right around the time the EPA states its ethanol volume goals for the RFS. If that number is too low, ethanol producers lose; if that number is too high, refiners lose.
Let's say the government gets an itch for fating sugar. I'm looking at you, State of New York. Okay, New York wants 1.5 billion pounds of Splenda to be consumed. Make it happen. Oh, Splenda is more expensive than sugar? Who cares. You must mix Splenda with sugar or be penalized.
Absurd, right? How is that different than the EPA demanding 16.55 billion gallons of ethanol? I'm very against the principle of the EPA propping up an entire industry - ethanol - because sometimes, when the economy is doing well, our government gets a renewable energy itch.
I'll drive it home – do you know why it's hard to find soda with real sugar? It may have something to do with corn syrup being cheaper than cane sugar. Consider high miles per gallon (mpg) cars, the proximate cause for declining gasoline demand. Is the Prius's success because of the government's mpg mandates, or is it because of consumer demand, rising costs of gasoline, and competition within the auto industry? I'm in favor of the latter, primarily because the latter is true.
I'm all for innovation in the energy industry, but what's wrong with forcing the ethanol industry to innovate through market forces? What's wrong with: hey, we shouldn't be forced to buy your product, especially when it's lower quality and more expensive. In the face of obviously declining demand for gasoline, it's baffling that the EPA stands unwavering, hailing ethanol as the next generation of fuels. Sorry, that's going to require actual innovation, something that won't happen as long as the EPA is propping up the ethanol industry with the Renewable Fuel Standard.
Chris Ouyang is a senior studying Petroleum Engineering and Economics from Overland Park. Follow him @ChrisOuyang.
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