This morning I was watching the news program of a major news progam and at exactly 7:30AM a giant headline appeared on the screen saying that a barrel of oil had closed at over $97US in New York at the end of the previous day of trading.
This is indeed quite significant news.
However, immediatly following this shocking headline there was 5 minute segment indicating the influence of such an increase in the price of oil. The new program deemed that the best way to focus the 5 minute segment was on how the price of preparing food at elementary schools has increased. Yes, that’s right, this news program decided that the aspect of expensive oil mosty worthy reporting is elementry school lunches. The 5 minute segment was filled with an explanation of why it was costing more (like transportation) and what schools were doing to cope with the increased costs as well as a good dose of parents whining about the few extra pennies (yen, really…) that they will have to pay for their elementary school attending children’s lunches (which presently stands at 230yen according to the program, about $2US.
I find it just laughable that this is what the news station feels is most worthy of reporting. But I guess what can I really expect, is there really any upside for the television station if the news network reports on what might actually happen in the event of extreme oil prices and an energy crunch.
As I wrote in a Previous article Japan was scheduled to start fingerprinting all foreigners that enter Japan include those with permenant residence and excluding those that fit into special categories such as 3rd generation Korean born or people on diplomatic visa and they did just so.
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The market for bottled watter grows every year and in the US it currently stands at 15B $US and set to pass 16B$ next year.
In the last few months, the bottled water industry has been taking a fair beating in the media. Quite rightfully so in my mind. Bottled water seems like a very large waste of energy in our already energy-strapped economy. Articles like this this point out how environmentally all that bottled water is. In fact the water has to be trucked around to get to its destination, rather than flowing through pipes for city water which is much much more efficient. Brita and Nagene even teamed up to try and get people to use Brita products to clean water and reuseable Nalgene bottles to drink from with the http://www.filterforgood.com/ website. This Nalege-Brita team seems like an especially good idea to me. Once can still get good clean water without producing the mountains of plastic bottle waste.
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In a scientific study published recently, it has been concluded that solar radiation is not responsible for the drastic warming on the Earth in recent years.
Global Warming nay-sayers have often cited solar radiation as the main factor in global warming and say that the human influence is negligible. This evidence was used in the “The Great Global Warming Swindle” video aired on the Channel 4. However, they only used data up until 1980 where the temperature on earth corresponded with the solar radiation coming from the sun. However, as the solar radiation is cyclical, the data diverged after 1980 and now it is quite conclusive that varying solar radiation has little, if any, impact on the temperature here on Earth. The above graph shows plainly that there is no connection.
Article from BBC
Well, last week it became official. The news that we all knew was going to come sooner or later has arrived. The Chinese have supraseed the USA to become the #1 polluter on Earth. As for last week, the 2006 Chinese CO2 emssions were estimated at 6.2bn tonnes while the USA at “only” 5.8bn tonnes.
Up until now, the Chinese have been hiding behind the “we don’t pollute as much as the USA” or “we don’t pollute so much per capita” arguments. But with this announcement, that all changes. The Chiinese are now the largest CO2 pollutor on earth and their per-capita pollution is rapidly approaching that of Europeans. With new coal-fired power plants opening on a near-daily basis, they show no signs of slowing up any time soon. The Chinese economy grew over 10% in 2006, but the enviornmental investment only grew 0.14%. Seems like a rather huge disparity to me.
Its not just global pollution that China is suffering from, but extreme local pollution is having devastating effects as well. North China’s Shanxi Province (which has strong coal and other heavy industries) 3 cities among the top 20 most polluted cities in the world. Rivers are quoted as “running black”. In fact, 16 of the 20 most polluted cities in the world are in China and nearly 40% of all Chinese cities are rated as either “moderatly” or “very” polluted.
As China has been facing new criticism over the increased pollution that it is emitting, other countries have been somewhat reducing their emissions. From 2005 to 2006, for example, the United States reduced its CO2 output by about 1%. However China, quite validly, points out that the main reason for these decreases is that a lot of the manufacturing that used to be done in other countries is now being done in China. China has become the manufacturing center of the world, and the increidble increase in its GDP, imports and pollution reflect that.
So that leaves everybody in a quandry. As many countries have simply exported their pollution to China, how can they fairly complain that China is polluting too much?
What can we, as people, do to help the situation? There doesn’t seem to be much as so many of the daily things that we buy are made there. It would be great if companies would start putting this kind of information into their reports.
China Daily
10 Worst Cities
Most polluted city in the world
Article in The Guardian