Sustain the World's Environment

Noun environs - the area in which something exists or lives; "the country--the flat agricultural surround" environs - an outer adjacent area of any place We all need somewhere to live, we all need the environment - the area where we live put simply. Collectively, this is the world and together, and only together, can we ensure its sustainability, for our lives now and our children's futures. This blog will be all about those things that affect this issue.

Everyone can only sympathise with the people of Japan at this time following the massive earthquake and subsequent tsunami that hit the country the other day. We can only hope that when the death toll is known that it will be as low as possible and especially right now that the current crisis at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant can be quickly brought under control. What all of this underlines is how precarious nuclear plants are, especially in the so-called 'Ring of Fire', the most active region in the world as far as seismic activity goes. Currently Japan has 56 nuclear plants but its not the only country in the Pacific basin to have them. China has 13 (with more planned), all of them on the Pacific coast (or not far from the coast). Here is a map showing nuclear reactors in the region: We can't be sure that in future, even if we escape disaster in this case, that future earthquakes won't lead to severe radiation leaks into the environment. All this underlin...

Economist Jeffrey Sachs said carbon capture and sequestration (CCS) technology and nuclear will be necessary to avoid catastrophic climate change His comments were made as part of a presentation at the Asia Society in New York Monday night."Carbon capture better work because they [China] are not going to stop using coal," said Sachs, director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University and the author of The End of Poverty and Common Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet , among other books. He gave a lucid and thoroughly depressing talk on " China's Role in the Global Climate Game ," describing a number of unpleasant options China, the United States, and the rest of the world will have to face in dealing with climate changes already underway. "Any quantitatively realistic path for a fast-growing China will mean a tremendous reliance on coal," he said. "They will have to use growing amounts of coal for decades to come." That leaves the U.S....