mamos wrote:I was reading an interview with James lovelock in the New Scientist that was quite interesting
Interesting stuff, indeed!
Carbon credits is certainly not any real kind of solution at all. It takes away the attention of and interest in real solutions.
The comments of James Lovelock seem a bit too "take turns on two wheels" (<-- is that the right expression?). In other words: simply stating that windmills are ugly and therefore are not a good solution is a bit strange.
I don't think it is too late for emissions reduction measures. So much energy is wasted at the moment. With a little bit of attention and willpower, one could use energy a lot more efficiently. Just a very simply example: imagine how much energy is saved if people (globally) would turn off lights when they are not needed? Or if you would eat a bit less meat per week. There are so many ways to save a bit of energy per household/office building or whatever. All of these little energy saving efforts together do make a difference. Not nearly enough, of course. We will have to take a lot more steps back then just turning of lights in rooms you are not occupying. But the first step is to realize that you can and HAVE to do something yourself.. You, as an individual. You have to change your life style and demand changes from your government as well.
We would have to start using renewable energy (RE) on a global scale to make a real difference. I don't mind a bit of horizon pollution in the form of windmills or solar"farms" if it enables us to battle the climate problems and at the same time enables us to live a still relatively normal (but obviously less energy consuming) life. And you wouldn't have to rely on wind generator parks only. There's thermo energy and tidal energy as well as the just mentioned solar energy.
I don't like talking doom, I like talking realism. And the reality is that you can only "push" an ecosystem this far, and then some serious changes are going to take place in that ecosystem. That is pretty straight forward, common sense logic, I think. The fact that we don't know exactly how an ecosystem is going to change does not mean that it
will not change. I'm not looking forward to find just how bad the changes will be for human life.
(
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009 ... ceans.html).
What we can do is cheat those consumers (like bacteria, nematodes and worms) by getting farmers to burn their crop waste at very low oxygen levels to turn it into charcoal, which the farmer then ploughs into the field.
Is massive burial of non-biodegradable charcoal the solution? I don't know. It seems a lot more risky to me that focusing on development of RE. I think you'd almost have to turn the charcoal into diamond to be sure that it is non-biodegradable!
We need to be sure that this so called non-biodegradable charcoal will not end up in some kind of carbon cycle after all.
To give an example: I know of a study that showed that collecting waste separately (separate the organic waste from the inorganic waste) was actually a not so smart thing to do (in all cases), because this study showed that adding organic matter to inorganic, toxic waste helped to speed up the cleaning of the toxic waste. Some bacteria in the organic waste were able to turn heavy metals into non-toxic matter. Were you to simply put the charcoal into the ground, you have to be very very sure that some kind of organism will not benefit from it and will increase their population size rapidly, maybe cause a lot of other problems, next to, of course, bringing all the carbon into the air again after all, in the form of CO2.
Also, what crop waste? I'm not sure there is so many crop waste. When grain is harvested, the rest of the plant is used to make hay for barn animals. Then again, I don't pretend to be an agricultural expert, so I do not really have an idea of the amount of crop waste and what it is used for at the moment. But I do know that burning all the crop waste means that you might be loosing a lot of nutrients as well (which have been taken out of the ground and are "secured" in/by the plant). That might mean that you have to start using more and more fertilizers.
If you want to keep the earth (top soil) healthy, the bacteria, nematodes and worms should be part of it. If all organic matter is burned into inorganic charcoal, what are those the bacteria, nematodes, worms and fungi going to feed upon, but the fertilizers? That part is a unclear to me.
What is also unclear to me is how this guy can be a Gaia-guy and also be a guest on a space travel trip... imagine how much fuel is burned and how much CO2 is released in the atmosphere for that one trip!
b.t.w. in the larger scale of things, I agree with what he is saying about how this all could be a positive thing for the earth and maybe even for the human species. On an individual scale, I don't quite like what seems to be coming right at us. But I like to stay upbeat, which is why I wrote
'First Step' (find it in the player) some time back. (You see? There is something positive in everything! This article enabled me to enter a bit of spam in this thread!)
