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“I would not have made these cuts in better circumstances,”- Obama
Great Scott, how did I miss this? Late last month, the EPA released a draft greenhouse gas inventory, showing that net climate warming emissions from the U.S. fell by a whopping 15 percent from 2000 through 2009 [PDF].
A 15 percent decline? Wow. Just wow.
But the story gets even more dramatic. Over the same period, the U.S. population grew by about 9 percent. Combining the two trends, net per capita greenhouse-gas emissions fell by 21 percent over the decade. And most of that reduction occurred prior to 2007 -- when the economy hadn't yet slumped, and before energy prices hit the roof.
Today’s deep-breath news from the Fukushima plant is that plutonium’s been found in the soil. Time to panic? Not just yet: Japanese officials say three of the five samples they found were deposited years ago by minute fallout from Chinese and North Korean nuclear tests. The other two probably come from reactor three, which uses plutonium-based “mox” fuel; that’s a big deal if the reactor pops open and there’s a major plutonium release, but right now the levels in the soil are low enough to pose no threat to human health. The main problem right now isn’t in the soil or even inside the reactors. It’s in the tunnels underneath the reactors, where the the water is so ridiculously radioactive that workers can’t get in there to reconnect power lines and restart the reactors’ cooling systems. They’re going to have to pump the water out first — assuming they can figure out a way to do it without contaminating everything in the vicinity. I’m sure they’ll think of something soon. This crisis can’t last more than a few … years, right?
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