Mercury Rising

I am a pretty voracious reader, and a science geek. But one of my problems as a blogger is that I am not a good note keeper/bibliographer. So whenever I write what I am getting ready to write I am never ready for the inevitable replies.

These thoughts were stimulated by the article in the News and Record today about the Duke coal burning plant west of Charlotte, as well as an article I read in Wired yesterday about technology and the environment.

NC needs more energy. Duke has got to produce it somehow. Coal is abundant. It is cleaner than ever. Up until recently there had been a lot of attention given to the carbon footprint of this plant. Now the attention is more on the mercury emissions. The opponents seem desperate. But they're on to something actually more serious now.

I think the mercury emissions issue is WAY more important. We have to know the impact of that amount of mercury - where it ends up, how it effects plant and animal life, and ultimately humans. Mercury is nasty stuff.

Coal plants, though cleaner than a generation ago, also generate sulfur dioxide (think acid rain), nitrogen oxide (think smog and ground level ozone), carbon monoxide, various hydrocarbons, various generic small particles, mercury, lead, other heavy metals, and of course carbon dioxide.

I really am not concerned at all about the carbon dioxide because I don't think we have even come close to establishing the degree to which CO2 has any significant effect on global warming, but the rest of those emissions, well, they concern me a lot.

We waste time and money wrangling about CO2 emissions while we send tons and tons of really bad pollutants into the air and water, deforest the last great jungles of the world, destroy one habitat after another, and kill off some of the most wonderful creatures we could even imagine existing.

If I were the devil, and I wanted the earth to become as ugly and horrible and inhospitable as possible, I think I would invent the issue of global warming (and especially the idea of carbon footprint) to divert everyone's attention from the really terrible ways we are already rendering our earth home barren and ugly and a wasteland.

For today, we need to know more about that mercury.

I believe we need a Marshall Plan for alternative and clean energy. We need to incentivize the technical know how of our universities and major industries to solve some of these difficult energy problems together. No, I don't think technology can save the world. But I have come to realize that it is the more affluent countries that become, in time, the cleanest, and that come to care most about the quality of the environment. It only makes sense.

I think we have barely scratched the surface as to car fuel efficiency, solar and wind energy, fuel cells, geothermal, wave and river energy etc.

To me the global warming carbon footprint bug a boo is a distraction. Let's go back to saving our planet from we already know is killing it.