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SUPREME HEAT

On Monday, June 26th, in a surprise ruling, the Supreme Court entered the global warming arena. The vote yielded to a coalition of environmentalists and requires the government to revisit pollution regulations from cars, trucks and power plants. This is interesting in a few different ways. First of all, the ruling came over the strong objection of the Bush administration. Administration lawyer's argued whether the government should be involved in the "extraordinarily complex task of addressing the global issue of greenhouse gas emissions". The case will be heard in the Fall. The vote is to hear the case. Regardless of where you stand on this issue, and it is an emotional issue for some reason, it will be interesting to see where this leads. I find people to be very passionate about their opinions on this subject. It always seems to be a political issue, taken as an insult to either party, depending on which side of the argument you present. I happen to be a believer, to the extent of believing that we are polluting the atmosphere. You may have noticed, I am not a scientist. I am, however, a pragmatist.

My pragmatic thinking leads me to the conclusion that the increasing, and now astounding, level of the burning of fossil fuels since the early 1900's has probably changed the chemical make-up of the air above us. As a private pilot who has left New Hampshire on a clear, beautiful day, and arrived in Teterboro, New Jersey, just off the Hudson River and a stone's throw from New York City, to conditions that are IFR, that is, visibility so restricted by smog and haze that you can't see, I can't believe that we aren't doing damage. To see, from the air, a city the size of New York resting under what appears to be a huge cow-flap hovering over the city, and blue sky to all other quadrants, well.... The Federal Aviation Administration definition calls the combination of smoke and fog...smog. That's where the word came from.

It is well known that government is held hostage to the automakers, oil companies and power suppliers. The resistance should come as no surprise. The element that has recently changed, in my opinion, is the realignment of certain key scientists on the issue of global warming. It is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the problem in light of the almost daily smashing of weather records all over the country. Huge hurricanes, tornadoes, rain like I've never seen here in the NorthEast. These events, though they may well be part of a natural cycle, nonetheless, draw a lot of attention. I don't believe they are part of a natural cycle although I respect anyone's right to believe otherwise. What I don't understand is the resistance to trying to figure it out. People actually get angry over the issue. "Oh, you tree-huggers..." I'm not a tree hugger, but I do not relish the idea of finding ourselves in an accelerated global-heating situation with no time to correct. Do we want Earth to be the astronomical equivalent of a 3 pound lobster at a galactic clam-bake? The notion the that the planet is too large, the oceans too grand, our landscape too varied and expansive for us humans too inflict lasting damage is , to me, nonsense. The atmosphere, the area between the Earth's surface and the edge of space, is pretty thin in relative terms.

Another interesting change? Diesel engines in heavy trucks manufactured after January 2007 will have an exhaust after-burner device that is the size of a garbage can, is seriously going to affect truck applications, i.e. dump bodies, garbage bodies, cement mixers, etc. It is expected to add as much as $17,000.00 to the price of a new heavy-truck. It burns the ash and soot out of the exhaust before discharge. If you wonder why this is necessary, and the amount of noise diesel engine and truck manufacturers must have made to try and avoid it's imposition, it kind of makes you wonder. Little things like this, that aren't so little really, but slide by the public eye, worry me more than any scientific report. Seems like somebody knows something the rest of us don't know.

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I am not an alarmist. I am not a gloom monger. I also don't want to be a human Swedish meatball. I don't want the Atlantic Coastline to be in Wisconsin. And I really don't want to be the first human to find out if the lobsters were screaming when they got dropped in the pot.