From: Harvey Newstrom (mail@HarveyNewstrom.com)
Date: Thu Jul 26 2001 - 07:20:12 MDT
Spike Jones wrote,
> > Harvey Newstrom wrote:
> > We have tar balls wash up on shore. We have bacteria blooms. We have
fish kills. It is the ocean equivalent of bad air days....
> I dont think tar balls belongs on this list, however. Tar is a natural
> substance.
True, I should retract the tar balls. They can come from oil, but they also
can be natural. I have no idea what percentage of tarring on our beach is
natural and how much is artificial.
> Speaking of political influence, I cut out an ad in the local
> paper begging
> people to check and possibly replace the flapper valve in their
> toilets, for
> if they leak, then all that fresh water will be dumped into the
> sewer system
> and that will be dumped into the San Francisco Bay, which reduces the
> salinity of the delicate salt water marsh ecosystem, endangering some
> wading bird or other somehow. Im not making this up.
I guess I'm missing the problem here. Certainly fixing leaking toilets to
stop wasting water is a good thing.
> I guess the folks that wrote that ad wont like my idea for soaking up
> some of that baaaad CO2: by rerouting water from the Columbia out
> to the grassy western U.S. plains to grow vast forests out there. Seems
> like all we really need is water in the west to do that. Currently
> we are throwing all that good fresh water into the sea. Wouldnt that
> work, assuming there really is too much CO2? In fact, it seems if we
> put our minds to it, we could figure out a way to store enough water
> inland to lower sea levels enough to simultaneously take the pressure
> off the Holland, Venice and the island nations that built on low land
> to start with, and raise the global temperature at the same time, to
> salvage some of that good Siberian land the commies are wasting
> currently. spike
This seems strange, Spike. You seem to be against fixing toilet valves to
save water, but then you propose turning the grassy western U.S. plains into
vast forests instead. Will you grab all that land from the ranchers to grow
the forests? Will you ban logging to keep the forests from being cut down
as fast as it grows? Do you think storing enough water inland to lower sea
levels is technically easier than curbing pollution? It almost seems like
your easy alternative is worse than the current suggestions which you
dislike.
I'm not saying that you are wrong, but I am suddenly struck at how the
solutions proposed on this list seem to be harsher than the regulatory
changes currently being proposed. I have seen proposals for flooding the
Caspian Sea, filling Death Valley, putting dikes around Florida, turning
Antarctica into farmland, etc. Such major eco-engineering of the planet
seem costlier than some pollution regulations, except that the costs are
deferred from us/now to someone else later.
-- Harvey Newstrom <http://HarveyNewstrom.com> <http://Newstaff.com>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Sat Nov 02 2002 - 08:09:10 MST