Tuesday, August 31, 2010

Nic Marks: The Happy Planet Index | Video on TED.com




This is a brilliant lecture. Some highlights:

Our national accounting system became fixated on how much we can produce. But "GNP measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile" - Kennedy

People all around the world want happiness...love, money, health are not nearly as important as Happiness

Costa Rica has a life expectancy of more than 78 years; higher than US. 99% of their electricity is from renewables; they abolished the army in 1949; and they have one of the highest literacy rates in the world.

Wednesday, August 11, 2010

Malaysia going Nuclear

So it's official. Malaysia, along with many of its Southeast Asian neighbours are going nuclear - what they consider to be part of the "green energy" family.

The New Straits Times reported today that the government has identified several sites, including one or two currently uninhabited islands, to locate Malaysia’s nuclear power plant.

Why are we investing so much money and expertise in a fuel that will 1) produce so much heat it will require a lot more water to cool, further adding to the lack of water for agriculture and basic utilities esp for the urban poor 2) produce a whole lot of toxic waste that we still don't know how to dispose of without poisoning our land and our people?

How nuclear power came to be regarded as a 'clean energy' is even more confounding.

And let me guess...the report says that these islands where the nuclear plants are going to be built, they're uninhabited, which means the natural life and biodiversity is pretty well preserved there. So we are once again going to deforest the land, kill off the life there, so we can built a "clean energy" plant that's going to poison us and the land even more...and for what? So that our factories can continue to increase production and present nice growth figures for the structurally poor to admire and hope to one day enjoy the fruits there of?

Oh please...give me a break! The idiocy is simply unfathomable.