Very interesting article on Climate Change

The other day I was browsing the magazines at my local Rite Aid while Heather (my girlfriend) and I were waiting for her prescription to be filled (Heather was looking at makeup and other stuff that I wanted nothing to do with), and I noticed a flashy cover on this month's edition of WIRED. It stated:
"Attention Environmentalists: Keep your SUV, Forget organics, Go nuclear, Screw the spotted owl. If you're serious about global warming, only one thing matters: Cutting carbon."
Interested in what they had to say, I picked up the magazine and began looking over the article. I ended up buying the magazine, and now that I've finally read the whole article, I figure I'd share it with all of you. Here's a link to the complete article online (wish I knew of this before shelling out 5 bucks for the magazine), courtesy of wired.com:
Inconvenient Truths: Get Ready to Rethink What It Means to Be Green

And here's my summary of the article for those too lazy to read it. Basically, it discusses 10 specific aspects of our way of life that may have originally been thought of as "bad" by environmentalists and other green folk. In a nutshell, they are:
1. Live in cities-not only does it require less energy to heat/cool large apartment buildings, but urban dwellers are much more likely to rely on public transportation instead of buying a car. An average household can reduce it's carbon-dioxide (CO2) emissions by 30% if one member takes public transit to work instead of driving.

2. A/C is OK-it requires much less energy to keep a house cool in hot weather than it does to keep it warm in cold weather. How much? A factor of 8. Meaning, the CO2 emissions from heating one house in cold weather is equal to cooling 8 houses in hot weather. Fuck New England, I wanna move out West now.

3. Organics are not the answer-hear that hippies? Seriously though, the article gives several examples, here's one of them: an organic chicken's lifetime greenhouse gas emissions exceed a non-organic chicken by 45%.

4. Farm the Forests-For real. While it's true that trees do soak up a lot of the CO2 in the atmosphere, the fact of the matter is, after a certain amount of time, trees give off more carbon than they take in. The solution is to have a continuous flow going where we plant trees, then after they've soaked up their peak amount of CO2, chop them down, and so on.

5. China is the solution-mainly from all their manufacturing. Many of us know how huge manufacturing is in China, and this can be used to everybody's advantage. For example, 35% of the world's solar cells are manufactured in China.

6. Accept Genetic Engineering-50 million tons of CO2 can be saved annually if we use genetically engineered rice.

7. Carbon Trading doesn't work-the idea of "instead of reducing our own carbon emissions, we can pay other people to reduce theirs" is completely bogus. The Kyoto Protocol, a series of projects that were designed to keep 175 million tons of CO2 out of the atmosphere by 2012, will slow the rise of carbon emissions by...6.5 days. What a difference.

8. Embrace Nuclear power-honestly, nuclear power is the most climate-friendly industrial-scale energy source. Let me take this opportunity to squash a common misconception about nuclear power plants. Look at this photograph:

See those scary looking "smokestacks" that are associated with nuclear power plants? Those are actually called Cooling Towers. And the "smoke" coming out of them? Steam. That's right, it's just evaporated water!

9. Buy used cars, NOT Hybrids-pound for pound, making a Toyota Prius contributes more carbon to the atmosphere than making a Hummer, mainly because of the nickel in the Prius' battery. Also, Prius would have to drive 100,000 miles just to catch up to the carbon savings that come from driving, say, a '98 Tercel.

10. Prepare for the Worst-last but not least. The bottom line is, we all have to accept that some climate change is going to happen in the near future, and there's nothing we can do to stop it. Our job is to do whatever we can to slow down the change, thereby reducing how badly it will affect us, while at the same time, start thinking about adapting to a warmer Earth. Al Gore says adapting is, "a kind of laziness, an arrogant faith in our ability to react in time to save our own skin." I say, fuck him. Change is inevitable at this point, we might as well prepare for it.