Climate Change and Our Health

Jack Welch clearly touched a nerve with Felix Salmon (See: http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/) by referencing a slanted WSJ piece regarding climate change. Is "slanted WSJ" redundant, especially since Murdoch bought the paper?

Felix stated, "Jack Welch’s reputation takes another downward lurch as he pushes denialist nonsense from the WSJ editorial page"

Climate change could be man made, man-altered, environmentally altered, or some combination of the above. I ascribe to the combination theory. Regardless, it totally misses the point that we need to get off of our dependency on fossil fuels. Here are just a few reasons:

1. It's unhealthy in areas of high population to breathe the exhausts from cars, buses, diesel trucks, etc. If there's any doubt about this, go visit your nearest urban area or the urban areas of China and Mongolia, where they are bringing online one coal burning plant per day - sans the scrubbers. In the words of Al Gore, "There is no such thing as a clean coal burning plant."

2. It's unhealthy to our import/export ratio to use fossil fuels. When we buy most of our fossil fuels from abroad, we are simply exporting US dollars abroad. Just because we have always done that for the last many decades, it does not mean it's a good thing.

3. Jack's own former company, GE, has an extremely cool technology that uses spent uranium from nuclear power plants to take care of all of our energy needs forever and get rid of the issue of storing the waste, and they have a fairly large stake in wind power, as well. If anyone should be in favor of getting off of fossil fuels, it should be Jack Welch.

4. Rather than import fossil fuels, we could leverage our innovative know how and export clean energy solutions. There's a lot of wind and sun in the Middle East and elsewhere. Here's where an economic stimulus could have a large multiplier effect. As anyone who has read my blogs knows, the best economic stimulus for this country is to get rid of capital gains tax for venture capital. That would spurn innovation, boost the stock market, create wealth, and provide new technologies to improve productivity, prolonged healthy living, and exports.

5. Fossil fuels are just plain bad for the environment, if not the climate. From strip mining for coal to dealing with the sludge from oil and gas drilling and tanker bottoms to the exhausts. There's nothing clean about it. It's a filthy business, and we ought to do everything as a nation to get rid of it.

The list can go on, but let's stop debating climate change and move the debate to human and environmental health. After all, a couple of large undersea volcanos, periods of hyperactive sun spots or a super gamma ray burst, and climate change will happen fast, regardless of what source of fuel we use, so we may as well use the cleanest, most efficient possible. After all, the planet would be a much more beautiful place.

In the meantime, to further promote a healthier environment, stop reading newspapers, like the WSJ. They are a waste of trees, and most of the editorial content is so slanted, they are a waste of time and money. All of the news, and then some, is online - most of it is free, like Felix Salmon's column on Reuters.

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