Environment Memo

Floating debris, around 20 million tons of it, from the Japan Tsunami is heading for California over the next couple of years.

Well, Earth ain’t no virgin, anyway. Submission time is over, and I didn’t get the memo on Sir Richard Branson’s earth challenge and reward of

US$25 million for whoever can demonstrate to the judges’ satisfaction a commercially viable design which results in the net removal of anthropogenic, atmospheric greenhouse gases so as to contribute materially to the stability of the Earth’s climate system.

Still, I have the solution, if they want to open this back up and give me $25 million. Here it is: school buses. School bus use is like tent poles: high in the morning, zero during the day, and then high in the afternoon, and then zero after that. All we have to do is put those school buses on the road, criss-crossing everywhere.

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I know, it’s futile to try to get word to people like Bill Gates, but I can dream. Gates is working hard to get work done on geoengineering, such as

building an 18-mile-long hose, tethered by balloons, that would spray tiny particles into the stratosphere to block the sun’s rays.

or
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It seems that

Two ice shelves that existed before Canada was settled by Europeans diminished significantly this summer, one nearly disappearing altogether, Canadian scientists say in new research.

Led by a Nobel Prize winner, AP reports that a group in Japan

aims to collect 10 million signatures and submit them to the government next March

demanding of the government, among other things

the cancellation of construction plans for new nuclear power plants and the planned termination of existing nuclear power plants, including the Hamaoka power plant.

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Obama’s $447 billion plan is a huge gamble. Public works programs and such are traditional methods of jump-starting an economy. The trouble is, there are tremendous resource constraints: there are just not enough materials to go around, on a global basis.

We’ve cut way back on resource utilization, of necessity, and it may be best to figure out how to keep it that way, doing more with less. I’m not sure how to go about doing this, but we sure do need to put our heads together to figure it out. It’s probably going to require creating a wholly different type of politician, coming from the bottom-up, instead of the traditional top-down, “I’m the one for you,” approach.

Dave Foreman has been around a while, and he has a new book, entitled “Manswarm and the Killing of Wildlife.”

Foreman gets into problems of population growth, including immigration. Interesting stuff.

Auto records make it so:

The number of vehicles in operation worldwide surpassed the 1 billion-unit mark in 2010 for the first time ever.

I missed the revelation last year that

A helium shortage means that helium balloons should cost about $100 each.

I believe there is a substitute for helium in party balloons. They call it air.

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