Finally! We are breathing more easily. I look out across San Diego Bay and the sky is clear for the first time in two weeks. Only a week ago I looked at the setting sun and saw an angry grey sky and an orange-red orb. The news on T V had little else on it, fires, thousand of square miles of wild fires which ravaged San Diego County, burning more than a thousand homes and causing a billion dollars in property damage.
There were satellite pictures of the smoke plumes that drifted out across the Pacific Ocean, driven by what we call Santa Anna winds which come from the east. These winds drove the fires and made the job of putting them out very difficult. The plumes looked like grey-white smears. Carbon emissions of the worst kind! It is hard to imagine how many thousands of tons of carbon were represented in those smoke plumes and what that did to the atmosphere. This was another contributor to global warming, and yes, an inconvenient truth.
The grey yellow smog that used to blanket the Los Angeles area has been reduced in the last ten years, but a vast amount of carbon fuel consumed by vehicles in California; vehicles are daily throwing tons of carbon into the air, our atmosphere. The simple fact is that the hundreds of millions of vehicles operating in the United States on a daily basis is a major factor in atmospheric pollution that continues to plague the earth. America continues to contribute a huge share of global atmospheric carbon. From time to time I glance at Visible Earth for NASA images to see what the earth looks like. What amazing images these are, smog and smoke plumes show up dramatically in various localities on our planet.
Almost one month ago, there were computer enhanced models of smoke which were spooky. Grey-brown in nature, they moved from west to east across Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh across the Himalayas into Tibet and onwards. Curious I checked and saw other such satellite pictures made last year and the year before. I read about the ‘smog’ that is rising from across the sub-continent constantly. China is upset because her own terrible pollution problem is aggravated by the grey-brown plumes moving in from the east. Kiran Nagarkar describes this phenomenon from Bombay in a report dated 11/06/07, “From Bombay with Smog.” He writes, “Bombay is already considered the world’s most polluted city. In ten years, it will become the most populated one.”
Justin Huggler writes in 2005 in “India Smog Hides Deeper Fear” that India is the fifth-largest producer of carbon emissions in the world releasing 50 million tons into the atmosphere a year, more than any European country. He explains that the main factor is the demand for power generation, for large cities like Bombay and Delhi. The big problem, he says, is that most of India’s power stations are still coal-fired, and the domestically mined coal is of poor quality, leading to carbon emissions. So, the need for electricity is the reason such vast amounts of coal are burned daily. But there are other areas of pollution that are unique to India.
Imagine five hundred million common folk who can not afford natural gas or kerosene, all cooking their breakfast and dinner. I can imagine.
As a child I squatted next to chulas and blew on dung fires with a pipe to heat the water for tea, the griddle to make chappati. Six of us, all kids, living in Taxila would follow the cattle to the fields, and I can remember the feeling of warm dung I picked up for my friends to take to their homes. I remember plastering the dung patties on sun facing walls to dry. My mom would ask me what I did while I ‘played with the Indian kids’ and my reply was always, having fun. I would always return home dirty, to her chagrin. My dad, a doctor, worked in the hospital operating on hundreds of people, removing their cataracts. That hospital had a large godaam which stored coal for fires and heaters. The dust from that coal was fair game for anyone to take away. My friends picked up small particles and swept up black dust to take home to add to the fresh cow dung. Round bricks were made from this mixture with finger holes poked in them to burn evenly. In America kids play with mud from time to time. I played making black dung bricks.
Imagine how difficult it is for poor folk to cook their food. Fortunately many of them have cattle; for milk, ghee, curds and yogurt, and the by-product, dung. The cow is really a boon to India, holy cow, it feeds people and then even helps do the cooking besides. Recently I read that there are perhaps four hundred million of them in India. Oh, oh, natural gas. All of this adds onto the picture I see on Visible Earth, images of Indian plumes of pollution that cover the land in a thick cloud, drifting eastward toward China.
“The clouds consist of ash, acidic chemicals and carbon, which come from the burning of fossil fuels and wildfire. One of the most intensely polluted and most studied brown clouds, which hangs over the Indian Ocean, has recently been found to consist largely of the smoke from dried manure used for cooking." (C.Venkataram et al. Science 307, 1454-1456:2005). Obviously such visible brown clouds drifting eastward become smoking international political issues.
So what do the Chinese burn? Coal. A report about this warns, “Beijingers Told to Stay Indoors As Smog Hangs Over North China”. Lots and lots of dirty coal is being burned, 6000 coal-fire heating furnaces and up to two million home coal burners in Beijing send the toxic mess up into the atmosphere; Olympic games here we come! The rural peasants also burn twigs, grasses, branches, leaves, anything that will burn, including cow dung. Entire forests have been denuded. The resultant? China has one of the worst air environments in the world. In the larger cities the skies were always grey; when I was there a few months ago and I was amazed that I seldom saw ‘blue skies smiling at me’. After a few days one gets used to it, except for the cough and sneezing and tight feeling in the chest.
Above the Amazon basin a smoke plume billows. Slash and burn. Slash and burn the rain forests to make room for farmers who need fields to plant crops. Millions of them. What do you say to a guy that wants a hectare or two to feed his family? Rain forests are natural air purifiers and they are going, going, --- The rain forests are the earth’s natural purifiers and they are rapidly being cut down by people in need. The issue is people need fuel, farms and food. People and more people with needs! From my perspective the greatest area of environmental pollution is the hot population growth, unchecked population growth that is straining the earth’s capabilities.
The San Diego fires threw up a lot of smoke. Top ‘world’ politicians throw up smoke screens or ignore the warnings in favor of continued economic development. Air pollution is certainly a factor in global warming that many wish to ignore. Making money, keeping the economy going is the cry. Even if the problem were taken seriously right now, we as global inhabitants are leaving behind us a legacy which will change the nature of life for our children.
The answer to the need for cheap and clean energy production may well be in the realm of nuclear and fuel technology for India’s “civilian program...” Nuclear Friends in Need, Yale Global Outline, July 12, 2007. No easy solutions. Few Indians living in the millions of small villages use electric stoves to cook food, nor will they in the future. God, what a lot of problems there are! Nero fiddled while Rome burns. We are global fiddlers too. I look back to my simple, carefree childhood with feelings of warm pleasure; a hot cow-dung patty in my hand. Fuel for thought.
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