Causes: Greenpeace - Whaling

I reckon Greenpeace does some of the best activist work in the entire work. I'm proud to say that one of few good decisions my parents have made was to sign up and become a sponsor/member (IDK) of Greenpeace and give a monthly payment of like $30 or something fairly minimal like that. It's like $1 a day, and it's a great cause! I love Greenpeace, I could possibly even join them - 'cept not really, too much work & too little reward. People destroy the environment for money, and for people to deprive themselves of money out of "good will and respect for the world" is... always going to be a struggle.

I hate & wanna stab people that criticise their efforts, such as the fiasco with Japanese whaling! Japanese people, I love your singers & entertainers... but your fishermen are dicks! Leave the poor whales alone, they're precious and you've already destroyed so many their numbers have dwindled. It's cruel & unfortunate to think people will DESTROY the world purely to make money. One by one, animal by animal, resource by resource, we are surely destroying the world and it definitely doesn't have an infinite amount of anything with the massive world population we boast today.

If you want to help out (which you better fucking do since you read my blogs and hopefully get some sort of enjoyment out of it for free), head to http://action.greenpeace.org.nz/tokyo NOW and enter in your name, e-mail and city and click SEND to send a (already written) e-mail to the Japanese government asking/begging them to halt the injust act that is WHALING. 25,000 have done it - you can too.

If you're a New Zealander and wish to support Greenpeace, head over to http://www.greenpeace.org.nz.

If you're from elsewhere in the world, head to http://www.greenpeace.org/international/.

Greenpeace Going Nuclear

The times they are a-changin'. Are the activists becoming more realistic or is the environmental crisis so bad that it requires an Earth triage of sorts? It is often said that when the green activists embrace nuclear power and the conservatives embrace ethanol, we know things are changing.

Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore, speaking in Texas last week before the Gulf Coast Power Association, said he remains in favor of moving away from fossil fuels. From the Houston Chronicle:

Moore, who is chairman and chief scientist of consulting firm Greenspirit Strategies and co-chair of a pro-nuclear energy group called the CASEnergy Coalition, said nuclear power could help wean the U.S. from its reliance on foreign oil and natural gas. It could also reduce the health effects of power plant emissions and save oil and gas for better uses, such as creating plastics, he said.

About one year ago in April, Moore wrote this essay, "Going Nuclear, A Green Makes the Case," in favor of nuclear power in the Washington Post, with this powerful opener:

In the early 1970s when I helped found Greenpeace, I believed that nuclear energy was synonymous with nuclear holocaust, as did most of my compatriots. That's the conviction that inspired Greenpeace's first voyage up the spectacular rocky northwest coast to protest the testing of U.S. hydrogen bombs in Alaska's Aleutian Islands. Thirty years on, my views have changed, and the rest of the environmental movement needs to update its views, too, because nuclear energy may just be the energy source that can save our planet from another possible disaster: catastrophic climate change.

Look at it this way: More than 600 coal-fired electric plants in the United States produce 36 percent of U.S. emissions -- or nearly 10 percent of global emissions -- of CO2, the primary greenhouse gas responsible for climate change. Nuclear energy is the only large-scale, cost-effective energy source that can reduce these emissions while continuing to satisfy a growing demand for power. And these days it can do so safely.

An interesting take on one of the ethical questions of total destruction caused by nuclear materials:

Over the past 20 years, one of the simplest tools -- the machete -- has been used to kill more than a million people in Africa, far more than were killed in the Hiroshima and Nagasaki nuclear bombings combined. What are car bombs made of? Diesel oil, fertilizer and cars. If we banned everything that can be used to kill people, we would never have harnessed fire.

And then back to Japan as providing one of the technological solutions:

And new technologies such as the reprocessing system recently introduced in Japan (in which the plutonium is never separated from the uranium) can make it much more difficult for terrorists or rogue states to use civilian materials to manufacture weapons.