The environmental cost of spam

Tree-hugger or not, here's some news from the BBC we can all take an interest in:

Spam produces 17m tons of CO2

Selling Indulgences

In the October issue of Fast Company magazine (p.21), a reader writes a letter in response to an earlier article about the buying and selling of carbon credits:

Selling carbon credits clearly mimics the medieval practice of selling indulgences. There was no evidence they helped anybody get to heaven, but there was plenty of money to be made helping everybody feel better.

Ken MacDonald
Seattle, Washington

No Concrete Proof ...

Scientists in Sweden are reluctant to say that there's any proof that Global Warming (at least on the scale the popular culture believes) is even occurring, let alone that humans are somehow causing it.

Click here to read the article.

Is there any hope for more nuclear power in the US?

Is there any hope for more nuclear power in the US? Probably not, as long as the news outlets are so biased against it.

Exhibit A:
Headline on CNNMoney website: "Nuclear Plant Shutdown Causes Massive Florida Power Outages"
Excerpt from the actual story: "A problem with the electrical grid in Florida caused power outages stretching from Miami up almost to Jacksonville that affected as many as 3 million people Tuesday and caused a nuclear plant to automatically shut down ..."
Truth: A problem outside the nuclear generating facility caused instability in the electric grid, so the power plant shut down (safely) as a precaution. The headline doesn't just give the impression that the plant was at fault, it blatantly says so.

The fact is that most Americans have an irrational fear of nuclear power. The amount of radiation release in the Three Mile Island incident was less than is released in the average chest X-ray. And Chernobyl ... well, that reactor was not built to any reasonable safety standard. The reactor building was not even encased in concrete. FAR more radiation occurred in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania from the Chernobyl incident than from the one at Three Mile Island.

And here's something I didn't know: One big concern with nuclear power is the waste. Fortunately, most of the waste can be recycled and used for medical and other beneficial uses. France, which generates a huge percentage of it's power with nuclear plants, stores all of it's waste in a small room. We can't do that in the USA thanks to Jimmy Carter. He was concerned that terrorists and other countries might use waste to make bombs, so he outlawed ALL recycling of nuclear waste. Didn't make any difference. The bad guys have found many cheaper sources of what they want.

Until laws and attitudes change, we have little hope for the inexpensive, clean and safe power that the nuclear option offers.

There's an EXCELLENT article in this month's Imprimis magazine on the future of nuclear power in the USA. Well worth the 5 minutes or so it takes to read it.

A major meterologist on global warming

I have long been a "fan" of Dr. William Gray. Well, OK. Not a fan, but at least I know who he is. He's recently spoken out about global warming and the effects humans have on it. A brief story about it appeared on Focus on the Family's Citizen Link website. Good reading, and good to hear that Dr. Gray has his head screwed on straight. I always thought he did.

That blurb on the FotF website references an organization called Cornwall Alliance. I had not heard of that group, but their website is worth a look, especially for Christians who care about God's creation but remain skeptical about how much damage we humans do to it. It's here.

Another venerable institution loses it's luster

It was bad enough when Focus on the Family's Dr. Dobson announced that he's willing to let radical liberals like those supported by moveon.org run our country. My respect for the man and the institution he built has moved down from 100% for the first time ever.

Now, hard on the heels of that shocker comes word that Al Gore is one of the winners of the Nobel Peace Prize. What Gore's work has to do with peace is beyond me. What his work has to do with truth is an even deeper mystery.

The Nobel Peace Prize committee has made some stupid blunders in it's history, but this ranks right down there with the worst.

What is this world coming to?

I still walk the earth...

... but I've been lax at posting lately. I just looked, and the last post I made was while I was in San Francisco. Bad.

I get a little magazine called "Imprimus" from Hillsdale College. It is on my "must-read-immediately" list when it comes in each month. It's only a single article, usually about 4 pages, on a topic of current interest. If you don't get it, you should. It's free. If you can't find out how to get it, let me know and I'll have them add you to the list.

This month's issue is on the Global Warming situation. I was going to write about it here, but my buddy Wes did such a good job that I'll just point you to his blog. I'm lazy that way. He even went to their website and got the entire article and quotes it!

Click here to read it!

Whither the Environmentalists?

While I was enjoying the fireworks last Wednesday, I noticed how much smoke was in the air. It occured to me that the people of Wamego probably produced more air pollution in the first few days of July than they do during the entire remainder of the year. Perhaps not quite that much, but certainly there was a lot of it. Multiply that by cities and towns all over the country, and our pollution/particulate footprint for those few days was enormous.

Where were the environmentalists who are usually crying on TV about how dangerous humans are to the planet? Where was Al Gore -- watching fireworks somewhere?