writeaboutwarming

March 19, 2012 - The World Health Organization (WHO) announced last week that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) to antibiotics could well put an end to the practice of modern medicine.  Dr. Margaret Chan, WHO's Director-General, told participants at an EU health conference that AMR is exacerbated by three current global conditions: inappropriate use of antibiotics in humans and animals, increasing world travel, and lack of development of new drugs.  Rates of death among patients infected with drug-resistant germs is on the rise. In 2010, there were 650,000 cases of drug-resistant tuberculosis worldwide.  (If I am remembering correctly, the increase in tuberculosis was first observed in Russian prisons, and in Russian AIDS victims.)  As a result, only an extremely expensive, prolonged battle is capable of curing as many as 50% of these cases.  The drugs used are toxic, and in constant short supply.  Other illnesses are drug resistant as we...

The Energy Policy Act of 2005 ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_Policy_Act_of_2005 ) was signed into law by George W. Bush that year – the year that ended with global peak oil having been realized, as luck would have it. What a coincidence. One of its primary stipulations was that greater quantities of biofuels be added to gasoline, thereby (so it was hoped) reducing American dependence upon foreign countries for oil. This line of reasoning was based largely upon Brazil’s success in utilizing ethanol derived from sugar cane ( http://www.v-brazil.com/science/ethanol/bush-brazil.html ). The Act incorporates policy determined by politicians, not scientists. Fast forward six years. Let’s see how things are going: “The Russian drought [of 2010] simply sparked this latest speculative bubble. Russia did lose 33 percent of its wheat harvest, but it had plenty of wheat stocks on hand to make up the difference. Instead of using those stocks, the Russian government was persuaded by multi...

March 29 – My husband and I began eating less meat about fifteen years ago. Prior to that, because I didn’t know how not eating meat would affect my children’s growth, I served meat most nights. Once they had entered their teens, I felt free to begin cutting back. It was a very gradual process, but by the time my daughter graduated from high school, I think we were eating chicken twice a week, and pizza with pepperoni one night a week. I’d essentially eliminated beef somewhere during the transition. For the next five years, that’s where we remained stuck. During this interval, my son informed me one day that he was becoming a vegetarian. He’d seen a movie at school that had shocked him, and he decided he couldn’t bear to eat it anymore. A year later, he’d become a vegan, which – greatly to his credit – he remained for six years. He missed eating cheese terribly, which caused him to decide that vegetarianism was the best way of eating for him. The odd thing is, I can’t really recall wh...