0705102017

This is the first post that’s not about something in central New York directly. However, indirectly this affects us as much as it does everyone else around the world.

Many models predict that if a lot of bad things happen around the United States, one of the last truly habitable places to live just might be this area of the country. Even though that sounds good, what it will probably mean is that everyone will come here and we’ll be fighting for our own existence.

That doesn’t sound good does it? So, let’s look at a few interesting tidbits I came across and see what we think of them…

In 2009, Scientific American magazine came out with a slide show that they called “6 Hidden Environmental Truths Revealed.” In the brief slideshow, they named some things that impact the environment the most. Here is our expanded version on some of their points.

1. The differentiation between the haves and have-nots. They determined that, based on comparable currency amounts, much of Asian and African countries exist on an income of less than two dollars a day. That statistic is compared to America, where more people than anywhere else average at least $200 a day. Americans are considered the best paid people in the world.

The study believes that you can’t take care of the environment legitimately unless you can take care of all the people in the world, and if there is as drastic a disparity as there happens to be, then one group of people will always be at the short end of the ecological scale.

2. There’s some very interesting information as it pertains to pollution in the United States. The common perception is that the large cities are filled with all sorts of nasty things that are getting into the environment.

That may be true, but it seems the biggest contributor of carbon dioxide to the environment actually occurs in suburban or rural areas. That’s because traditionally factories are not built directly in the cities, but usually in outlying areas.

Also, rural areas that depend on farming equipment and tending to livestock use more gasoline over short distances than automobiles do over long distances, and we all know about the methane that farm animals seem to produce. Adjusted for population numbers, Wyoming turns out to be the state that emits the most carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, while New York state and California are among the lowest.

3. Even though we’ve been going through a recession, the dollars being spent to help the environment have actually gone up. In 2008, more than $8.4 billion went towards green projects and companies that are working to create green products. Around 40% of all monies were spent towards trying to improve solar technology.

4. As much as large manufacturing companies are trying to convince us all that they’ve become more environmentally conscious, it turns out that there are at least 156 storage ponds of pollution in America. It is estimated that it would take at least 400 years to clean them all up by using today’s technology. And that assumes that these manufacturers would immediately stop dumping into these ponds.