http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/23/dining/23sushi.html

Tasty, hmmm??? Want salt with that mercury?

No solution is perfect - LED's use caustic chemicals to produce, CFL's
use a micro-dot of mercury. But - CFL's put out more useful light for
the energy used than any other commercially available light source,
which means tons of coal not being burned across the nation meaning tons
of mercury not being released into the atmosphere as a result.

Of course, it's even worse - the sushi isn't necessarily the fish
they're advertised to be:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/22/science/22fish.html

So, in trying to avoid one fish, you may be eating the very fish you're
trying to avoid, or eating something far worse. But... you say you don't
eat sushi so what's up? Well... sushi does not have a monopoly on the
fish market or on corruption. It's a tiny segment - and if they're this
bad, you can believe that the rest is just as rotten to the core - both
in contamination and in corruption. And fish is also used in many
products that we consume or apply.

Of course to avoid it in the near term, all it takes is to put in a
decent little tank of your own - taking up little more room than a
child's wading pool - and raising your own fish - be it tilapia or
catfish or whatnot. But in the long term it's going to take
multinational cooperation in reducing coal burning power-plants output.
And that means choosing the lessor of two evils - choosing the CFL with
it's dot of mercury to avoid the release of ounces of mercury it will
prevent over it's life. It also means getting past all those crack-pots
who are protesting wind-farms and coming up with any lie to support
their opposition - noise keeps them from sleeping, birds get killed.
Sheesh - noise? People pay high dollar to live near the coast where
there's noise ALL the time. With all our roads, we all have the noise of
traffic 24/7 including Jake-breaks in the middle of flatland just
because the truckers are being obnoxious. Dogs barking all night. Cats
in heat. Neighbors booming music. Noise is ubiquitous in our lives and
they claim that wind-farms are noisy and should be banned? Bird kill -
most who say that have never been to a wind-mill. See any dead birds?
For every dead bird you find, I'll show you hundreds killed by
bird-strike on wind-shields of cars, and hundreds more killed by clear
windows on houses. Not to mention birds sucked up by jet engines. I've
hit birds. Several. I've also seen birds slam into windows head on.
Nearly messed my pants it startles me so much. But, I've never once seen
a dead bird from a mill. It can happen - but it's a lessor evil when
compared to the alternatives. You know, our traffic and windows has
killed more birds than West Nile Virus even! Sheesh.

Of course, I digress from the topic. What we do has an impact on the
environment that returns to bite us in one way or another. Wasteful
energy use comes back to us in our diets, poisoning us. Non-organic
agriculture creating entire dead-zones in the Gulf of Mexico from the
soluble fertilizers. And each of these are caused by each of us a little
bit at a time. So each of us can reduce it a little bit too. One CFL
bulb in each of our homes will make an enormous difference. Complete
conversions would make phenomenal differences. The only non-CFL's we
have are on variable switches - and I'm in the process of changing those
switches and replacing them bulbs too.

We just need to break past these fear-mongers and take a stand.

I do find this amusing:
"When told of the newspaper's findings, Andy Arons, an owner of Gourmet
Garage, said: "We'll look for lower-level-mercury fish."

Sooo.... is that like going to market and saying "I'd like the Mercury
Light fish, please." Look for lower-level-mercury fish - how do you
tell? Ask it? Hey, eat any mercury lately? Are they really going to take
samples from every fish and send it off to be tested? Typical response,
methinks - in other words - they have no idea of what they're buying and
sell this stuff hoping no one notices or comes and tests. Which...
someone did notice.

Labels: Wind Turbine