November 16, 2008 by mike.

At least it is interesting in so far as it is complicated story of rampant pollution with complex impact on the living things here on the small blue planet.

The AP has carried a story this past week about the Asian brown cloud and UN concerns that this toxic cloud of pollutants could cause more problems with our food production on this little world.

This is really an old story.  The smog of Los Angeles a generation ago was probably not very different from the Asian brown cloud.  Brown clouds are also reported with regard to Phoenix and Denver. The Denver link goes into how the brown cloud was reduced and that’s a good story.

The real lesson of the Asian Brown Cloud is that there really is no such thing as my backyard and any attempt to control growth and industry that does not see the world in it’s reality as one ecosystem, an amazing environment that has the capacity to support an amazing diversity of living things, really a Gaia organism of unimaginable complexity, is doomed to failure.

You can’t live in a pristine environment and consume products made in China and not be intimately connected to the Asian Brown Cloud.  There is no free lunch.

The brown cloud is a complex story.  Clouds of soot can offset global warming by letting less sunlight reach the ground and then less heat builds up in our troposphere.  That’s a good thing, right?  Well, maybe.

If the clouds of soot are composed of particles that cause many people to die due to pulmonary and cardiac disease, then maybe this is not the solution to the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.  It’s just a different paradigm of death and toxicity related to unsustainable human activities.

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November 16, 2008 by mike.

It’s really hard for me to feel positive about nukes because we have no viable plans for dealing with the waste that, for all practical purposes, lasts forever.  Add in the fact that the waste is deadly and can be the basis for terrorism, mayhem and extortion and my interest really wanes.  But maybe I am wrong about all that?   Maybe there is a way to produce electricity/power with nukes that we will have to use?

If so, then this article from the Guardian is talking about a possibility for a grid of the future that does not rely on combustion of fuels that produce more greenhouse gases.

I think it is worth the read and some consideration:

clipped from www.guardian.co.uk Mini nuclear plants to power 20,000 homes �13m shed-size reactors will be delivered by lorry The Observer, Sunday November 9 2008 guardian.co.uk, Sunday November 9 2008 00.01 GMT Article history Nuclear power plants smaller than a garden shed and able to power 20,000 homes will be on sale within five years, say scientists at Los Alamos, the US government laboratory which developed the first atomic bomb. John Vidal and Nick Rosen The miniature reactors will be factory-sealed, contain no weapons-grade material, have no moving parts and will be nearly impossible to steal because they will be encased in concrete and buried underground.

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