it is what it is
For the first time in a long time gas is below $2 a gallon in my neighborhood. Hopefully this doesn’t mean we lose our focus on the need for more sustainable transportation options, but I’m not terribly optimistic about that. It seems that people only really change when their wallets make them change, and this $1.92 gas sure is comfortable.
Monsanto is surely taking over the world. It’s bad enough they already own most of the seeds used to grow our food, and their growth hormones contaminate most of our milk, but now they are taking it over the top by trying to patent pigs. It’s almost too crazy to be real, but it is.
I’ll believe it when I see it, but given the incoming President’s environmental stances along with this recent quote from Harry Reid, and I’m starting to feel a little better about it:
“Yucca Mountain is history, OK?” Reid said in an interview Wednesday. “Just watch, we’ll see what happens real soon, just watch. You will see it bleed real hard in the next year.”
I have an idea - why not take the $20 billion still sitting around for the project and use it to build some serious solar and wind projects out here in the middle of the desert? Let the states that use nuclear power figure out where to store their own garbage.
Just a couple hours ago I made reference to a study that claimed Lake Mead has a 50 percent chance of drying up by 2021. On a slightly more optimistic side, researchers at the University of Colorado released on Tuesday a report that says there is a less than 5 percent chance of the reservoir drying up by 2021. It says there is a 40 percent chance that it will go dry in any given year after 2050.
Says the guy with the earlier more dire numbers:
“The point is, whether it’s 40 percent in 2050 or 40 percent by 2030, that’s a hell of a problem. The main factor is we’re taking more water out of the system than Mother Nature is putting in. And as long as that’s true, you can tell what’s going to happen. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist.”
It’s complex stuff and seems like a moving target as our desert cities continue to grow, but I think we can all agree that any percentage higher than 0 is just a little higher than we’d like.
At the beginning of this decade the WHO estimated that 1.1 billion people did not have access to clean water. The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change tells us that by 2050 that number will climb to 2 billion, and 3.2 billion in 2080. That’s roughly half the people on Earth. A recent article in Inc. magazine claims that “by 2025, two-thirds of the world’s population will face periodic and often severe water shortages,” and that water managers in 36 U.S. states are “predicting significant shortfalls within the next decade.”
Here in Las Vegas those shortages could come as soon as 2010 as the Southern Nevada Water Authority rushes to build a third intake in Lake Mead (which has a 50 percent chance of running dry by 2021) while they simultaneously try to get water pumping from the northern part of the state.
If you don’t think global warming is an issue now, just wait fifteen years, turn on your kitchen sink, and see what comes out.