Everything I need to know about global warming I learned in 3rd grade

On Friday, April 17, 2009, the Environmental Protection Agency announced that they were formally declaring carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons and sulfur hexafluoride as pollutants. I am extremely excited that the government has finally taken an official stand on how intensely human activity on the planet has impacted the state of our environment. The declaration opens doors for many new and necessary policies that could accelerate the changes that need to be made before we cause our own extinction. In The 11th Hour, Leonardo DiCaprio told me that the U.S. government's denial of the severity of climate change and global warming was the single biggest obstacle to positive change. So, the EPA's announcement is good.

On the other hand, the fact that it is 2009 and the EPA, the governmental agency appointed to monitor and regulate the state of our environmnet, is only now declaring the danger of these potent gases is disturbing. When I was in 3rd grade in 1994, my mother gave me a book called 50 Simple Things Kids Can Do to Save the Earth (the book was actually published in 1990....19 years ago). Now, I remember quite clearly that "The Greenhouse Effect" was described in that book as one of the "things that was happening" that needed to be stopped. The Greenhouse Effect was the 90's phrase for global warming. So, I, as an 8 year old, knew more about global warming, its consequences, and what I could do to stop it, than the EPA did in 2007.

If the EPA was a schoolkid, I would have require it to take the 3rd grade over again, as it just isn't keeping up with its peers.

I guess you really do have to cook your food...

The New York Times has a lot of good information, but sometimes its journalists just fail to get to the point. For example, today my daily email of headlines included U.S. Food Safety No Longer Improving. I clicked the headline to learn more. The article started out great, stating that the food safety system in this country needs some serious help due to the fact that it was "created when most foods were grown, prepared and consumed locally." This really caught my attention. Here was a perfect opportunity for a NY Times reporter to provide a critical analysis of the entire food system, not just the food safety system. Low and behold, as I read on, the only solution presented to me was that the "F.D.A. needs to do more inspections.” This led me to ask myself, "How exactly would more inspections help?" We could hire the 650,000 people who were laid off in February to work as FDA inspectors and we still wouldn't catch all of the contaminants. Furthermore, as a later part of the article stated, “You can only tell people so much to wash their cutting boards and wash their hands,” Dr. Jones said. “I think we’re running out of things to do to make dramatic improvements.” Though Dr. Jones seems to think we have zero options, there is still one brightly shining star that could help remedy the food safety system and it isn't getting people to use more soap and water.

Fix the food system. Prevent the contamination of meat by feeding cattle what their stomachs can digest rather than force feeding them inedible feed and then pumping them full of antibiotics while they lounge in their own e. coli contaminated excrement. You can irradiate the steaks that come out of that cow and hire an inspector to make sure that always happens, but it seems a lot easier to me to let your cows roam a plot of grass and keep their muscles healthy until it is time to turn those muscles into food. Since a large percentage of bacterial contamination of food is ultimately caused by contaminated fecal matter that enters the soil and handling equipment, eliminating the cause of contaminated fecal matter would actually attack the contamination of food, rather than preventing already contaminated food from entering the market.