Air Pollution

There is, kind reader, an upside to our coronavirus lockdown ... a 30% drop in air pollution ... due to much less car and airline travel, more government oversight ... see: Watts Up With That article. Pay particular attention to the two included maps.

So, we are experiencing an object lesson in what the lifestyle trade-offs would be under the Green New Deal (actually it would be more drastic). If you liked your life during the last month, then vote for those supporters of this fundamental change to our social order. If not, don’t!

One, Maybe Two, Trick Ponies

Virgin Enterprise's Sir Richard Branson has had some business success ... but some of this infant terrible's  recent promises have  been hollow. He previously had pledged  to contribute $3 billion to cleaning up air pollution ... he has delivered on less than 1/10th of this amount ... see: The Guardian Story. He also has set multiple deadlines for his traveling to the edge of space in his Virgin Galactic "spaceship" ... the latest date being this past August. Suffice it to say he has still not fulfilled this pledge ...  nor is this likely to occur anytime soon ... see: Space Shot.

One has to admire this man's chutzpah ... but, on the other hand, like Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg ... who has outgrown his bank account ... see: Business Insider Story, he sometimes seems to have much more money than brains. Success often does this to entrepreneurs ... give them one round of applause in the center ring ... and they think that they can run the circus.

Air Pollution

I have long read that the major source of new carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere is not humans but natural sources such as volcanoes, the out-gassing of oceans, etc. In fact here is a reference that estimates man’s total current contribution to new CO2 emissions at around 4% … see: Climate Depot Study/.

And scare photos, which are often used to shame us humans about our profligate pollution practices, are the spewing smokestacks of coal-fueled power plants. I invite you dear readers to compare the worst of these photos … in fact the sum total of all that you can summon up on Google Images … with the one satellite image above of a spewing volcano (found on reddit). And this is but one of 50-70 volcanoes that are currently active (this year) and spewing goodly amounts of carbon and sulfur into our atmosphere … see: Volcano Discovery Estimates.

As in many other things in life, reliable data goes a long way toward keeping a level head about the current hysterical arm-waving about global warming (aka, climate change).