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Air Quality Not Issue At Beijing Olympics

Posted by Average Voter on Thursday, August 21, 2008 7:19:39 PM
   I kept expecting to hear about the smog issue in Beijing while watching the Olympics but it has yet to surface. Of course it was one of the big topics a few weeks before the games started. This article in the TimesOnline gives a little insight into the workings of keeping the smog down, although the writer is not impressed. Communist China is one thing, the over-indulgent human race is another.
 
But how much of this Green Olympics malarkey is diesel smoke and mirrors? One of the official sponsors is McDonald's, serving burgers by the diesel-powered truckload and it is an established fact that beef production is one of the heaviest consumers of water, for example.
 
Evil big corporations!
 
And how much aircraft fuel was used to ferry - I don't know the precise number but let's guess at a minimum of 30,000 - athletes, officials and media people to Beijing, and that is not counting hangers-on and tourists, from all points of the globe?
 
Evil aircraft industry! How dare they burn so much fuel getting people to China to compete!
 
Then there are the tonnes of rubbish we generate, the millions of meals we consume greedily, the gallons of water in plastic bottles we glug before we all turn around and fly home in our Jumbo jets with their airborn trail of emissions.
 
Humans, always eating and drinking and drinking and eating and flying and eating and drinking...Jeez....
 
 
 
 
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Climate Change Is Making It Hot In Spain

Posted by Average Voter on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 7:52:07 PM
   In this article from the ever-popular website, StopGlobalWarming.com we have an article on the drought in Spain. Here is the first sentence in the article:
 
Spain is experiencing its worst drought in 40 years. Climate experts warn that the country is suffering badly from the impact of climate change and that the Sahara is slowly creeping north - into the Spanish mainland.
 
I only have one question here...was it climate change 40 years ago when they had a drought?
 
Here are the last few sentences in the article:
 
"You must not leave the tap on for too long because water will be wasted and we won't have enough water in Barcelona", five-year-old Teresa solemnly told me on the way to the playground area in one of the city's parks.

Her friend, seven-year-old Carmen, then added: "If you want to shower in hot water, then you must collect the cold water that comes out first in a bucket and use it later to water the plants".

And from eight-year-old Juan: "If you don't have water, there are lots of things you can't do. You can't live without it. Without water we can't survive."

At least Spain has produced one good thing in this, the year of drought - some of the most environmentally aware children in Europe.
What? Most environmentally aware children? Oh please...
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Kansas's Govenor and Green Energy

Posted by Average Voter on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 7:39:09 PM
   As the Planet Gore article states, Kansas Govenor Kathleen Sebelius is on Obama's short list for V.P., and she is serious when it comes to the environment.
 
“Instead of building two new coal plants, which would produce 11 million new tons of carbon dioxide each year,” Sebelius said earlier this year in defending the state’s decision to nix new coal facilites in west Kansas. “We now know that carbon has a huge impact on the atmosphere, and global warming is very real. In a state like Kansas, where over 20 percent of our jobs and economy involves agriculture and the land, changes in the climate and atmosphere can be devastating. Kansas has great opportunities in clean energy and alternative fuels.”
 
Guess what, wind power doesn't work when the wind isn't blowing. And now Kansas is going to pay.
 
“I’d say this decision pretty much halts wind development in western Kansas,” said David Snyder, economic development director in Ness County. “We need transmission lines, and we need the coal plants to get them.”

Snyder is simply reciting Renewable Power 101: It’s not economically practical for transmission lines to be erected for wind alone due to the line expense and the erratic nature of wind power. Wind, in other words, can only supplement larger (and less intermittent) energy sources.
 
“Not only do we lose the $3.6 billion expansion investment (and) those hundreds of jobs won’t happen,” says Kansas House Speaker Melvin Neufeld, “(but) other companies considering expansion in Kansas may see us as an unfriendly place to do business and tens of thousands of Kansans now face the very real possibility of higher electric bills.”
Green enough for you?

 
 
 
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Movie Of McCarthy's Book 'The Road'

Posted by Average Voter on Wednesday, August 20, 2008 7:25:11 PM
   I finished reading Cormac McCarthy's book The Road in short order, finding it hard to set it down. In the LA Times On The Set section writer John Horn talks with the people who are making the movie version. It is always funny how the book is never good enough for a movie. They have to not only change things but add them too, and this one is no different.
 
WITH THE incessant threats -- cannibals, thieves, starvation, dehydration, hypothermia -- the Man and the Boy face, it would seem unnecessary to make their survival even more difficult, but that's precisely what Penhall ("Enduring Love") and Hillcoat chose to do.

The film's most obvious departure from the book -- outside of the elimination of the novel's vaguely nuclear "long shear of light" that stopped clocks at 1:17 -- is its redoubling of the book's fleeting flashbacks of the Man and his final days with his desperate and suicidal wife (Charlize Theron). Throughout the movie, the filmmakers also have amplified McCarthy's already vast peril.
   
The book told a story that delved into the relationships of a father and son and the difficulties and depression of life after all ways of sustaining it is left to scavaging. But what it dealt with is living. Staying alive for your son, and keeping life sacred. As this article says, it tells a different stories to different people. But one thing this story doesn't tell is this;
 
So even as the filmmakers were ratcheting up the story's danger and despair, they also were pushing to make the movie as uplifting as possible, emphasizing its intrinsic father-son love story and promoting the notion that the Boy embodies some sort of messiah. Along the way, movie version also became much less a story about a post-nuclear catastrophe and more a tale of climate change and a dying planet.
 
Climate change never once entered my mind while reading this book. Yet, this books story line makes it easy to turn a nuclear holocaust into climate change. You can't get a movie funded in Hollywood without mentioning climate change, global warming, or taking a stab at President Bush.

 
 
 
 
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