Nuclear solution
Your correspondent Frances MacGuire of Friends of the Earth is clearly confused in criticising the British government for blocking moves to exclude nuclear power from the Clean Development Mechanism at the Climate Change Summit (4 December, p 52). The Kyoto targets cannot be met by renewable energy alone. Only with a vigorous nuclear power plant building programme will the targets be achieved.
Nuclear power, like renewable energy, creates no carbon dioxide emissions. The target of reducing greenhouse gases by 12.5 per cent between 2008 and 2012 (New and Renewable Energy Report, 1999) and CO2 emissions by 20 per cent by 2010, can only be met by increasing the nuclear plant programme. Britain’s Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering are right when they advocate that the building of new nuclear power stations should start as soon as 2003.
In the early 1990s, the reduction in CO2 produced by Britain was a result of the increase in nuclear power. As the older nuclear plants retire, they will have to be replaced by new ones if the CO2 targets are to be met. If the plants are not replaced, CO2 emissions will greatly increase. France, which is 80 per cent nuclear, has halved its emissions over the past 25 years. Japan, with a strong nuclear programme, has also greatly reduced its CO2 emissions.
Renewable energy sources have a contribution to make, but they are of limited capacity, with available land being a considerable restraining factor. They are still capital-intensive and will require substantial energy storage capacity to be available when there is no wind or limited sunlight. On its own, renewable energy will be unable to come anywhere near the Kyoto targets.
Green farms
Your article on the external costs of farming perpetuates the myth, invented in the 1960s, that agriculture is damaging the environment (18 December, p 10). Not one of these “costs” holds water.
First, 80 per cent of pesticides cleaned up by water companies are non-agricultural. The major culprits are local authorities and railways.
Secondly, a recent study by the Scottish Crop Research Institute failed to find a direct link between the level of nitrates used by farmers and the levels of nitrates in water.
And thirdly, food poisoning is far more likely to be related to the handling or storage of food after it has left the farm. British farmers have succeeded in cleaning up many of the food pathogens that were around in the last century.
How is the cost of 拢25 million per annum to restore endangered species and wildlife habitats calculated, and why is it assumed that agriculture is responsible for all the supposed damage? Examples of the damage that is being repaired would be instructive to those unaware of the actions of large numbers of farmers.
Agriculture sustains British biodiversity with virtually no official recognition. It is a net greenhouse gas user and cannot be blamed for air pollution or rising sea levels.
How are farmers damaging their land and spoiling the landscape? What would be the cost of no food production in Britain? We would have to import all our food from countries with lower animal health and welfare standards, and higher use of chemicals. We would also face extra transport and unemployment costs.
Letter
The idea proposed in your editorial (18 December, p 3) about placing the label “good for the planet鈥攁ll externalities included” on foods that have been priced to reflect their true cost should be extended to all products, particularly petrol (gasoline) and products derived largely from fossil fuels.
If the price of all consumer goods reflected their true environmental cost, then spending patterns would rapidly shift towards the least environmentally harmful products. Part of the price could be in the form of an environmental tax to be spent on environmental remediation efforts or healthcare costs resulting from pollution.
To reduce the overall tax burden on the consumer, income taxes could be lowered, particularly for those spending a large part of their income on such necessities as food.
GM knee-jerk?
Your report on genetically modified potatoes that can resist potato blight and other fungal diseases includes the predictable knee-jerk response from the anti-GM lobby (11 December, p 8).
Despite the effect that this breakthrough would have had on a major historical disaster, the Irish potato famine, I can imagine that if there had been a GeneWatch UK at that time, it would no doubt have raised spectres of damaging soil ecology and generating resistant strains of bacteria and fungi.
This contrasts with your report on the use of spent penicillin mould to control soil-borne pathogenic fungi (11 December, p 22). In the experiment cited, pellets of the penicillin mould were added to the soil to make up 1 per cent by weight. The fact that this is likely to encourage bacterial strains resistant to this important antibiotic, as well as affecting the soil ecology, did not elicit comments.
Is it because the treatment is “organic” that it did not attract adverse comment from the environmentalists?
Letter
Your report states that the new GM crop would have prevented the Irish potato famine. This sort of statement is a fairly typical “spin” being used by those wishing to justify the continued development of GM foods, such as that these foods will help end world hunger.
In fact, although the potato blight devastated the potato crops, the true cause of the famine was political. The life of the Irish peasant meant nothing to the British rulers, who could have easily imported food to save people from starving. What actually happened is that Ireland continued to export food to Britain during the famine.
Similarly, today there is no reason why anyone should go hungry. The shortfalls in grain or other crops that have caused every famine in the past 20 years are nothing compared with global stockpiles. The reason why this food is not given to those who need it is that flooding the market will drive prices down鈥攁nd when prices decline, so do profits.
Those who demonstrated outside the World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle understood that the motivation of the big food combines is profits not people. New 杏吧原创 should be more careful not to reproduce GM food propaganda when reporting on these issues.
Done that
In the article on “dark energy”, George Kraniotis says: “Oddly enough, nobody considered whether [the energy associated with the cosmological constant] might have an effect on the scale of individual galaxies” (18 December, p 15).
However, this was exactly the point in the paper “Is the missing mass really missing?”, which I published in 1998 in Astronomical and Astrophysical Transactions (vol 16, p 37). In this, I showed how a small deviation from the background vacuum energy (or the energy associated with the cosmological constant) can explain the rotation curves of spiral galaxies. Thus there is nothing new under the Sun (or Galaxy).
I had a lot of problems getting my paper published. This effort seems to be useless if other people reinvent the same thing.
Cruel cut
What an enlightening piece by Peter Ayton (11 December, p 47). Many thousands of men have either been traumatised by having their genitals mutilated by circumcision without their consent, or feel that they have been significantly harmed by the procedure, or at the very least regret that their penises have been permanently altered.
Yet this unnecessary mutilation of small boys’ genitals still goes on. Even in Britain, it is estimated that 15 000 boys every year have their foreskins removed for no medical reason. This happens because some doctors do not understand the normal development of the foreskin, have not kept themselves up to date on conservative treatments for foreskin disorders or allow themselves to give in to pressure from parents who feel they have the right to surgically alter their child’s genitals.
Circumcision is not the benign procedure once thought. It is now known to interfere with the normal functioning of the penis, causing sexual dysfunction and loss of feeling. It just seems incredible that at the close of this century, adults have still not stopped mutilating the genitals of little children who are unable to say no.
Letter
One aspect of circumcision has been totally ignored by Peter Ayton, who has obviously not spoken to any women on the subject.
I have had many lovers during my life. All the British men among them (all born in the 1940s) had been circumcised. None of them knew why and none of them felt traumatised. Men from other countries I have known had not been circumcised.
My experience is that men who have been circumcised make infinitely better lovers. Their erections are firmer, their lovemaking lasts much longer and they are able to raise another erection much sooner.
A doctor friend told me once that the head of a penis which is not restricted by the foreskin is used to the rubbing of underclothes and is more able to tolerate the stimulation of lovemaking, so that ejaculation does not take place until after a much longer period of lovemaking.
I am no longer prepared to risk the disappointment of making love with a man who has not been circumcised. I am happily married to a man without a foreskin.
Letter
Good for Peter Ayton. I made the same point in 3001鈥擳he Final Odyssey.
Future generations will find it inconceivable that millions of Americans mutilated their babies owing to the influence of a man who, as your quotation shows, was obviously a sadistic lunatic.
This gives me an excuse for a joke I heard recently which will be appreciated by at least half the human race:
Q. What is the correct name for the useless piece of skin at the end of the penis?
A. A man.
Double trouble
If Joel Berger and Carol Cunningham’s moose impersonation is good enough to allow them to study the animals close up (25 December 1999/1 January 2000, p 62), I wonder whether they have taken into account that they may end up doing some unique but inadvertent research into predation of moose, from a first-person perspective?