On The Third Hand

The list of potential “threats” to the earth’s environment grows daily. Our cars, among many other products of the industrial age, have been vilified as the ultimate menace to the atmosphere. To hear the hypercritics and enviro-muckrakers talk we will all be reverted to primordial soup within a decade or so. So what’s next on the enviroweenie’s hit list?

Cooking, at least for those that live in south Asia, cooking has been “linked to possible climate changes.”

The major source of potentially climate-changing soot in the air over south Asia is home cooking fires, according to a team of Indian and American researchers.

The burning of wood, agricultural waste and animal manure for cooking is the largest source of black carbon in the air in that region, according to the team led by C. Venkataraman of the Indian Institute of Technology Bombay.

“We therefore suggest that the control of these emissions through cleaner cooking technologies, in addition to reducing health risks to several hundred million users, could be of crucial importance to climate change mitigation in south Asia,” the researchers wrote in a paper appearing in Friday’s issue of the journal Science.

The effect of soot in the air over the Indian Ocean is some 10 times that of the so-called greenhouse gases, according to the researchers. The pollution causes the air to absorb more sunlight, warming the atmosphere and cooling the surface beneath.

Just what “cleaner cooking technologies” are appropriate isn’t stated. I suspect the first guy to market a nuclear powered oven will be nominated for a Noble Prize by Mr. Venkataraman, but I may be wrong.

In an effort to get ahead of the curve I also have a suggestion. I purpose a world-wide ban on beans. Kidney beans, navy beans, string beans, even pinto beans should be banned. Plowed under if in the fields, and burned if in silos.

That should place me way ahead of the “flatulence as greenhouse gas producer” meme. You know it’s coming!

Cross Posted within the Cranial Cavity