Monday, March 4, 2013

Miscellaneous 167

1) According to cdc.gov, it costs approximately $1.50 a year to spay one hut in Africa with DDT. That's it. And if we did this on a massive scale we could potentially save HUNDREDS OF THOUSANDS of lives a year, every year. What do you say that we all get over this idiotic aversion  to what is clearly one of safest and most inexpensive pesticides ever invented (and which helped to get rid of malaria in this country and which also saved thousands of soldiers' lives during WW2 from typhus and dysentery) and really make some headway here?............2) Let me throw out a question here. Let's say that you just had some major heart surgery and you ended up in the intensive care unit. What would you rather have your oxygen source and heart monitor powered by; a coal-powered or nuclear plant or a wind farm (a wind farm that is absent any fossil-fuel backup, I'm saying)? Me, I'm kind of going with the former one, thank you very much.............3) Radical environmentalists hate copper mines. They despise them. And so I almost hate to tell them that one of the key raw materials that they use to construct high powered windmills (the generator, especially) actually happens to be....COPPER!!!!!!! I mean, I know that they think that these things (along of course with their computers, cell-phones, etc., etc.) basically drop out of the sky and all, but to be THIS damned short-sighted about it, I don't know.............4) Yes, some mosquitoes have developed a resistance to DDT and that would in fact be a problem if DDT was only a toxin, BUT IT ISN'T. It's also a repellent and it's that property that could conceivably save countless lives in not just Africa but Asia and Latin America as well.

3 comments:

BB-Idaho said...

The copper used in wind turbine generators is used in any type
electrical generation: the rotating coils/magnetic field being the link in converting
hydro, coal, gas, nuclear energy
into electrical. Chile is by far
the largest producer of copper.
As with any large mining operation,
the environmental problems lie with
overburden/slag accretion and runoff, as well as stack gases.
The worst mining operations involve
nickel: the vegetation area around Sudbury, Ontario resembles the starkness of Hiroshima.

BB-Idaho said...

RE: "costs approximately $1.50 a year to spay one hut in Africa with DDT." A typo and understandable, the meaning is still clear....but pet owners would
love to get a spay for $1.50!

Will "take no prisoners" Hart said...

Good catch and, yes, a very good deal indeed.