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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (6972)	7/12/2006 2:54:25 AM
From: Wharf Rat	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36917

It's not that Aids isn't a problem. Or Iraq. Or drunk drivers. Or malaria, famine, whatever. They are. They just pale compared to GW and Peak Oil. Doesn't do a lot of good to cure African Aids if those people die by GW induced drought. Malaria; bad by itself, but they are now finding that mosquitos have changed their range due to better, for them , climate conditions. Gore mentioned Nairobi, and one other city, had been built at a high enuf elevation to put them out of mosquito range; but now the mosquitos have moved their range up in altitude as that area warms. It's nice to worry about fresh water, but what are you gonna do when the climate changes enuf ( sub-Saharan Africa, maybe our SW) that a permanent drought develops? "you have excess demand on limited resources." That is one of the biggest problems, constant thread thru peak oil and global warming and water, and everything else; there are too many of us on the planet to keep living like we are at a sustainable level. Could well be a big die-off over the next 25 years, if we don't get it together. I'm starting to see a lot of articles about the morality of using agriculture for fuel at the expense of food. People may starve cuz we are using corn to run cars. We probably don't even need to go to space to solve it; the sun puts out lots of energy,and all wee have to do is capture it, in whatever form; solar, hydro, wind ( and the moon moving the tides around). We just haven't gotten into things like micro generators on bridge supports. Most of the bridges are on rivers with currents, but we don't take advantage of it. We do lots of stupid things. I see logging trucks going down the highway to a mill, and trucks going up the highway to a mill. Ditto lumber. A good plan would get trucks to the closest mill. I used to watch trucks haul an old mill from Arcata(Ca) down to SF, to ship to China. Couldn't meet our standards, so sell it somewhere else. Should have required that we make it meet our pollution standards first. Now those same trucks are hauling pulp south, to be shipped to China, turned into paper, and shipped back here. Huh? And we should ship them by rail. (Without looking up the actual values), somebody on the Oil Drum crunched numbers and found rail is like 8 times more efficient than trucks for cargo, and electric trains are 3 times better than conventional; or vice versa on the numbers. But, electric rail is 24 times better than trucks. But the rail line which once went to SF has been inactive because of weather related damages over the years. Did you know we can't sell our cars in China? Won't meet their emission standards. We have fucked ourselves. My solar; only things made in America are the disconnects, the wire, and the 4x4s holding the wire. The inverter is German, the panels Japanese, the supports from S. Korea. Cuz we did nothing, since doing something would be bad for business. Shit.