Blog Action Day

I was just informed that today is blog action day--bloggers are being asked to blog about the environment today. I could, of course, post the obvious: We only have one planet, and if we keep polluting it, our children or grandchildren will have no place to stay. I could blog about what to do about it, but a lot of other blogs are doing that. Still, this is the day, and it is important, so here goes:

I think that there are a lot of misconceptions out there about environmental issues. For one thing, there has been a lot of talk about electric cars, or hybrid cars that can run on gas or electricity. The problem with that is that we're really just moving the pollution. about 70% of the electricity produced in this country comes from burning fossil fuels, so, if you're driving a car with an electric motor, your car may not be polluting, but there's a very good chance that the power plant that produced the electricity for you car is. In point of fact, considering the inherent inefficiencies of the power plant, the power distribution system, the charger for the battery in your car, and so forth, the power plant probably produces at least as much (if not more) pollution per mile than your car would using gasoline. The solution, of course, would be to build more power plants that don't burn anything. There are two kinds of power plants that don't burn anything: Hydroelectric, and nuclear. Hydroelectric is good, we simply dam up a river, and use the current to drive turbines to make electricity. Unfortunately, there are only so many rivers, and only so many places where we can make lakes. That leaves nuclear, which the environmentalists generally don't like. I'm not entirely at odds with them, but I do think that they overdramatize the issue. A lot of them worry about having a Chernobyl here in the United States. That's unlikely, at best. Without going into a lot of detail, the Soviets put a lot of emphasis on efficiency--getting the most kilowattage for the ruble--as opposed to safety. Our safety record isn't all that great, either, but our designs are more of a compromise between efficiency and safety. Three Mile Island is pretty much a worst case scenario for an American-made reactor, and even that was preventable (well, Chernobyl was preventable, too; if they had incorporated a boron fill system--but I digress). The point is, that Chernobyl was built on an entirely different philosophy than American reactors--even those built in the same time period. Still, we don't want another Three Mile Island, either; that's a legitimate concern. I would hope that nuclear plant operators have a better understanding, now, of just how wrong things can go; still, we human beings have a bad tendency to make mistakes, even with something as dangerous as nuclear power (and when profits are on the line, corporations can minimize or even eliminate safety margins).

On the other hand, there are things that we as individuals can do. I am not going to beat the recycling drum, common sense will tell you that recycling is good. It has picked up some detractors on the basis of it isn't cost-effective--only because of government subsidies is recycled paper priced about the same as 'new' paper. Let's be honest with ourselves--reuse the paper, or use it to fill a landfill somewhere so that in a hundred years or so, it will become dirt (or, if we're really lucky, it becomes fossil fuel).

We're doing a lot of the right things, we're just not doing enough. We, as a species, thought for centuries that our biosphere was too large and too complex for us to have a lasting impact on it. We know better now, but we're stuck in old habits. Remember, the biggest difference between a rut and a grave are the dimensions.