The great debate

A mock stakeholder fora was held this morning during the two-hour 'Environment, Society and Policy' lecture period. It was very impressive, and I would have followed the discussion closely if I wasn't running on 4 hours of sleep...alas the finer points were totally lost on me. A few things that registered:

• Efficiency problems. Wind power is not so much a panacea as a poster-child for renewable energy. At least it makes a pretty and easily recognisable one.


• Risks. I never knew that nuclear power stations increase risk of terrorism....I have however come across the idea of dumping nuclear waste in the Mariana Trench (apparently they decided not to once a survey team found living organisms down there). There's something incredibly wrong about that notion...but then again blowing up the carbon cycle doesn't look too good either. It's all about weighing risk + efficiency.


• One of the main arguments against implementing nuclear power, wind energy, carbon quotas was that our efforts would be negligible in the global context, and only make life difficult for us. This is perhaps true on a personal scale - enforcing carbon quotas on businesses would make a much larger impact.

That said, the combined force of individuals is not to be sniffed at. While searching for recipes I came across a marvellous little site with the following quote:

If we all stop wasting food that could have been eaten, the CO2 impact would be the equivalent of taking 1 in 4 cars off the road.

- The Love Food Hate Waste campaign

Now I don't know how credible that is, but don't you think the they have the best models ever? Baaaa.*



* Banners at the bottom of the pages loop through 8 different types of 'food lovers'. Hilarious stuff.