For those of us who made it to pushing 70 or 80 years now on the planet, who also gardened as youngsters, Labor Day meant a good chance of a frost soon. Not harvesting tomatoes and peppers on Labor Day usually meant a lot of unusable veggies due to overnight freezing.
Just watch when our first frost appears now. I’ll bet its mid-October.
Gone are the days with no oppossums, West Nile virus, etc. There are so many invasive species now its hard to keep track.
Summer days are only a few degrees warmer, but there are easily 10 degrees warmer minimum nighttime temperatures nowadays. Since we humans have added an extra 43 percent CO2 to the planet’s atmosphere since we started burning fossil fuels, the impact is much higher in both the poles temperatures’ and the local nighttime temperatures.
Greenhouse gases do that. It is indeed right for our state and federal governments to try to stop the carbon pollution and bring the planet back into a stable balance again.
With our present level of technology, solar and wind with their intermittencies do not bode well as permanent solutions. For each time the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing (which is a majority of the time), a dirty gas-fired plant is keeping our electricity on, 24/7, while adding to the planet’s carbon burden.
The State of Massachusetts is set to buy hydropower from Canada, and, yes, it’s green, but there goes our electric money out of the country, and with Vermont Yankee closing, there goes our major local export, which was electricity, and we lost 600 good paychecks with it.
Up goes local poverty and down go house prices. In the 50 years since Rowe went online, not a single American has died nor had their life shortened due to nuclear power plants, while 20,000 to 30,000 Americans died each year from fossil fuel burning.
Luckily, about half our nuclear plants are now running on purchased nuclear warheads from Russia.
Talk about a win-win: warheads get decommissioned and we get electricity.
Ted Johnson
Greenfield