From the BBC: naturally-occurring coal beds are currently on fire, and those fires in China alone will eventually contribute CO2 emissions as large as those produced by all of the USA's cars in a year:
"It's in no-one's interest to have these fires burning. It costs the coal resource, it's contributing to the greenhouse, it's a public safety and health problem and it's an ignition source for new forest fires," said Alfred Whitehouse [of the US Ministry of Energy and Mineral Resources Coal Fire Project].
Boggle. I don't know what's the most staggering; that we have major coal beds which are being untapped because oil is cheaper, or that they're catching fire (either naturally or through human agency) and nobody's doing anything about them.
The more pressing danger is that fires in Borneo - you remember, the ones that started five and a half years ago and that still haven't all been put out - are threatening attempts to protect orang-utans. Still, an American company reckons it can use waste products from coal fires, combined with foam, sand and other stuff, to smother and put out coal fires, which sounds to me like a nice re-use of materials, as well as a nice example of lateral thinking: what best to put out coal fires than dousing with the stuff that, almost by definition, coal fires can't burn, i.e. the stuff they leave behind?
One thought, though: if Bush was serious about protecting the environment, then rather than changing the rules to help his logger friends, he would encourage companies like this, starting with helping them to put out the fires in the US (there are a few, apparently), thus giving them a technological lead that they can then use to obtain markets abroad. This is one of the most useful things a Government can do - as various Scandinavian governments have done with mobile phone (Nokia, Ericsson) and wind technology, for instance.
Currently listening to: Angel - Massive Attack, Mezzanine
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