Environment: Mother Ocean

You think you felt bad with the barfing flu that was going around this spring? Friends of mine were laid up for two weeks. Well the LA Times has a bang up series on a real sickness: ocean sickness. Besides the obvious yuckiness of slimes, jelly fish and tufts of hairy growth which reasonable people would like to see cleaned up, besides the mass deaths of fish that hungry people would otherwise eat, there is one, major, huge, stupendous reason why the sickening seas matter: the Oceans, far more than trees and green plants on terra-firma, are the CO2 sinks we need to slowdown, and reverse Earth Fever. You can plant all the trees you want to balance your automobile emissions but if the human race is to return the atmospheric CO2 burden back to an equilibrium state the oceans are the only player. Phytoplankton absorption of CO2 back in the day is what brought the early earth out of the superheated supertoxic ball it was into the livable zone for Adam, his zoo and garden. As we burn those phytoplankton, long gone to oil, we release the absorbed C02 and away it goes, up up and unfortunately not away but to self organize into an invisible, heat trapping ceiling. Before you know it 100 degree days become 100 degree weeks, tropical storms, sucking up the hotter ocean energy, become hurricanes with iron tips in their lash… So we need our oceans more than anything else that can be mentioned.
A Primeval Tide of Toxins

In another proof that it likes to stay just behind the curve, the EPA “said on Thursday that it was recommending new restrictions on thousands of uses of pesticides because of their adverse effects on public health.” Well good. Late, but good. [There is going to be soooo much work to do when the real EPA gets to work following the election of a tough, bright, unafraid Democrat in 2008…] Pesticide cut-back is good. Nitrogen run-off diminishment is better; nitrogen from fertilizers running off into the oceans has caused some 150 “dead zones” around the world. [See above story.]
E.P.A. Recommends Limits on Thousands of Uses of Pesticides

Now, if the slime doesn’t goop up the works there are interesting new initiatives to convert ocean energy into humanly useable energy. This one is capital intensive but has some interested investors and live tests. Check it out Energy from the Restless Sea