Clean coal? No, really?

Recent news out of China should make us here in the States sit up and pay attention.

According to this story (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-china-birth-defects2-2009feb02,0,3417123.story) in the LA Times, government officials acknowledge birth defects among Chinese babies are increasing at an alarming rate and the culprit is the degradation of the environment.

The particular culprit leading to the nearly 40 percent increase in birth defects over a five year period is the fact that the Chinese get their electricity from burning coal. The increase is the highest near those coal-burning power plants.

These findings reinforce US research that links pollution to the incidence of birth defects.

Coal is one of the nastiest fuels out there. In fact, it's hard to find a fuel that is dirtier or causes more harm than coal, especially the coal burned in Texas.

In Texas -- as well as in much of the south -- power companies burn lignite. Lignite is a very soft coal and usually easy to mine. In fact, there is a seam of lignite that stretches from about Uvalde, near the Texas/Mexico border, through Central Texas and into the Appalachians.

Find a map showing the locations of coal-burning power plants and you'll see a correlation between electric power and that seam of lignite.

Here's the rub. Burning lignite to produce electricity also produces extremely high concentrations of pollution including heavy metals like mercury. Heavy concentrations of mercury are easy to find in stock ponds around Central Texas power plants. Mercury is highly toxic, so toxic that folks who live near those power plants are well advised to limit how often they eat the fish stocked in those ponds.

I bring this up because we're talking a lot these days about "clean coal technology." First of all, we have to acknowledge that this simply does not exist, yet. Secondly, we need to take a very hard look at the waste generated by our current coal technology ... and how "capturing" more of the pollutants from burning coal will increase the hazardous nature of that waste.

The mercury will still be there. So will the carbon and the rest of the toxic stew.

Indeed, a lot of that stuff is still around. There is over 314,000 tons of the stuff stored in Milam County, Texas ...

Is it really all that safe? "They" say it is but the people who say that are the same ones who, for nearly five decades, told us that asbestos was perfectly safe.

For those who want a bigger piece o' the pie

"Some studies have shown that companies that increase their marketing budgets in a recession do much better in the long run. Businesses that advertised aggressively during the 1981-82 recession had sales twice as high from 1981 to 1985 as those that didn’t, according to a 1986 McGraw-Hill Research report."

Times Square 12/21/08

Why is Wal-Mart in the news ... again?

I just learned that an anonymous source at some anonymous Wal-Mart some-anonymous-where has confirmed rumors that it will be the newest outlet for the iPhone.

Wal-Mart? Really!? Again, I say it -- oh shit, oh dear.

Apple could make no announcement more calculated to bring me feelings of ... well, ambivalence, at best, but more like feelings of mild disgust. An announcement that the iPhone can work on any network, that I'd greet with glad tidings of great joy.

The fact that Wal-Mart may soon carry iPhones doesn't change my opinion about Wal-Mart; nor will it make it more likely I'll willingly set foot inside one. Rather, it cheapens the allure of owning an iPhone of my very own.

I'll have to cop to being a fan of Apple computers. While it would stretch the truth to call me an original fan, I did once own an Apple IIe and, in the late 1980s, I learned the basics of Pagemaker (a version of it with none of those annoying suffixes) on a cool, boxy Apple Macintosh SE.

Indeed, for a while there in the late 1990s, our home computer was a genuine, first-generation Mac, albeit one hopped up with a screaming-fast 4 meg of RAM, a versatile 800k internal drive and two powerful external 40 meg hard drives. We still have most of the pieces it on a shelf in the garage, right next to the old black Underwood typewriter.

Today, I couldn't survive professionally without my MacBook, our home computer is a 17" lamp-shade iMac and I really like the music on my 80-gig iPod (and for some reason, this fact fills me with surprised delight). It is only by main force of will that I've managed to refrain from putting one of those discreet white Apple logos on the rear window of my conservative black Buick.

I'd already have an iPhone but, alas, the folks that provide exclusive cellular service for it isn't kind to the part of the world where I live. Their signal's spotty out here in the hinterlands of Milam County.

So, I deal with it. No iPhone for now. Maybe later. But I wonder if anyone else sees the irony in this ... that the average Wal-Mart shopper will soon have easy access to one of the coolest personal computers ever made (if you wonder what I might think of that, see the immediately previous post).

Wal-Mart shoppers

I am not a Wal-Mart shopper. In fact, except for our nine-month exile in Marble Falls, I've pretty much stayed away from Wally World and that's hard to do in our part of the country.

So, I wasn't close to a Wal-Mart last week when a contract employee at a Long Island store was trampled to death after he opened the doors to a tidal surge of Black Friday shoppers. And here I thought the South had a monopoly on that sort of Wal-Mart crowd.

It's not that I don't like shopping in big, soul-sucking steel boxes. After all, I braved the Black Friday crowds in search of a bargain on an elusive 37" flat screen LCD HiDef television. While I love to shop for electronics, I really don't like those kinds of intense, high stakes shopping excursions.

I tracked down that tv to Best Buy, a big, soul-sucking steel box. Saved 200 bucks on that sucker and I'll probably go back for the BlueRay thingy and the home theater system every large, flat-screen tv machine screams for (yes, I can hear it screaming -- in perfect counterpoint to the voices in my head -- and it wants digital sound ... ).

So, no, it's not Wal-Mart's big, soul-sucking steel box. It's that I'm politically, economically and morally opposed to Wal-Mart and have been for for a dozen years or so, long before Black Friday became a blood sport for intrepid Wal-Mart shoppers.

Given my background as a publisher of small, weekly newspapers, I could sing chorus after chorus on the evils of Wally World. It destroys local, mom-and-pop businesses, it drives down the cost of labor, most of its employees are on welfare, it imports most of its cheap, shoddy merchandise from China*, will not seriously advertise in local newspapers (a deadly sin, in my book).

Well, as I said, I could go on. And on. And on. But I won't.

But I do wonder this ... not about Wal-Mart but about what happened this Black Friday past and what it says about us. The poor fella in Long Island wasn't the only shopping-related fatality that day. There was at least one other and a dozen or so reported injuries.

Will the reporting on future Black Fridays include a death toll? Is this destined to become our uniquely American version of soccer game riots? This is only the second or third Black Friday I've been involved with (well, as a consumer, that is) and I found the experience less than satisfying. Except for the part about saving 200 bucks. That was satisfying.

Much like I avoid Wal-Mart, I think I will avoid Black Friday in the future. It seems to speak to a dank, dark part of the American psyche that is best left to the professionals like Stephen King to write about. Stephen King scares me so I'll not be seeing you in the soul-sucking steel box next Black Friday.

Unless I can save 200 bucks ... in which case, I'm there!


(*Wait a minute ... considering how much we've borrowed from the Chinese ... and how much Wal-Mart buys from them, does that mean Wal-Mart is the new General Motors [as in "What's Good for Wal-Mart is Good For America]? oh, shit, oh dear ... I"ll have to explore THAT pernicious concept in another post ... shudder.)

lolfed

I stole this from Paul Krugman's blog. Too funny, in a sad sort of way. guess you either laugh or you cry ...

but, as Krugman said, cats are cuter.