Budgets are dreary affairs when they involve money and politics; they just annually confirm that the only way to stop politicians spending is to deny them the money in the first place. However, before we go on to more interesting budgets, we note with pride that AtE subscriber Rep. Phil Gramm has shown that there are honest men even among politicians (though, of course, he is not a professional one). Ousted from the budget and energy committees by O'Neill and other pols of the more usual kind because he voted by logic and morality rather than by Democratic Party discipline, he decided to run for his seat again via the voting booth, not crawl for it through corridors and lobbies. He will re-enter the budget committee as a Republican, but may not make it again to the energy committee. No matter: an honest politician will confound Congress whatever committee he sits on.
But on to more interesting budgets. Chemical elements and compounds such as oxygen have a natural cycle (e.g. oxygen emerges from photosynthesis by plants, combines into carbon dioxide in animal lungs, and is again absorbed by plants
¾to trace but one of many parallel branches). Such a cycle has a "budget" describing how much of the element or compound is in circulation, and how much of this total goes through the individual branches of the cycle. Since as much must go into each branch as comes out of it, the budget must balance, for nature, unlike Congress, cannot have the treasury print paper oxygen.A new branch of the carbon dioxide cycle and its budget has now turned up: it goes through the guts of termites. Like other animals, they eat food containing carbon, but their guts host a bacterium that enables them to digest the carbon very efficiently, turning 90% of it into carbon dioxide, methane and other gases. The belches and winds of a single termite would not, of course, qualify it for this month's newsletter, but when the quantity recently measured in the laboratory is multiplied by the estimated number of the world's termites, the result is some 50 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide a year
¾more than twice the amount produced by all the fossil fuel combustion in the world.However, one should be careful to avoid unwarranted conclusions. Termites have been around a lot longer than massive fossil fuel burning (which started only some 200 years ago in England), so while termites may be responsible for a lot of CO
2 in the atmosphere, they cannot explain the steady rise of its concentration during this century.[More: P.R. Zimmerman, J.P. Greenberg and others, "Termites
¾a potentially large source Of CO2, methane and hydrogen," Science, 5 Nov 1982.]
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Vol. 10, No. 6
Newsletter: Access to Energy Newsletter Archive Volume: Issues Issue/No.: Vol. 10, No. 6 Date: November 23, 2004 04:35 PM Title: Nuclear wastes: law and reality
Copyright © 2004 - Access to Energy Newsletter Archive
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