We are facing at environmental degradation. This is the concern not only for our generation but also for that of the future. I am seriously concerned about this issue because natural environment is our asset for mankind.
First, garbage problem. As a negative aspect of affluence, garbage has increased among us. This becomes serious problem. For example, illegal dumping of unused electronic products and unused cars. As another case, let’s take Mt. Fuji for example.
The beautiful Mt. Fuji has not been appointed as a World Heritage site. It is believed to be because too much garbage is left on the mountain. To prevent them, it’s important to raise citizen’s awareness. Excursion to Mt. Fuji for students and tour to the place where unused stuffs are thrown out for citizens.
Second, global warming specifically hit Japan. For example, if we excessively use air conditioner to cool down, it would accerate global warming. Besides, economy in Japan would be damaged by the increasing price of natural resources such as fossil fuels and Uranium. Because we need a lot of power supply according to the increasing power needs. However, Japan heavily relies on the import of natural resources. Economy in Japan is too vulnerable against price fluctuation.
If we don’t use air conditioner, it would degrade the productivity among international market. At my work place, temperature is set to 30 degree in summer. Every engineer works dripping with sweat. Apparently, inefficiency influences on our productivity.
I can’t imagine without any air condition.
In conclusion, garbage problem and global warming severely hit Japan.
2 comments:
Solar power is the answer to global warming.
Concerns about the environment has been growing ever. Nowadays it is very difficult to find anyone who has never heard the story of global warming. Although I personally am a little bit skeptical about the truth of global warming, we had better take precautions before hand.
On the back of concerns toward global warming, so many electricity companies which have skills to build and run nuclear power plants began to claim nuclear power is the answer toward global warming. But actually during the course of construction, they produce a lot of carondioxide, and its cooling plant releases large amount of heat, so actually this story is actually not true. So how about solar power?
It would be obvious to anybody's eye that solar rays which are consistently pouring onto the Earth's surface would become the ultimate clean energy source.
But despite this environment-conscious age, not so many people around the world seem to have put solar panels on their roofs. Why is that so?
The biggest reason is cost. In short, rather than generating electricity at home with solar cells, purchasing electricity from electricity company via cable is cheaper. So if you hope photovoltaic power generation to spread across the world, you need cheap solar cells. And if you also are concerned about the environment, what is important is not only being able to manufacture it at low cost, but also those solar cells being made of environment-friendly materials.
The would-be next generation solar cells, dye-sensitized solar cells satisfy these two conditions of environment-friendliness and low manufacturing cost, which is getting ever-increasing attention.
Not only it has great merits of environment-friendliness and low manufacturing cost, it features mechanism of generating electricity similar to the one of plant photosynthesis. Combined with advancing nanotechnology, it can develop to much better device.
Threat to Japan's Dining Table-GM food
GM crops have been around since the early 1990s, and are now grown in more than 20 countries, but are predominantly found in the Americas.
The first commercial GM food was rotting-resistant tomatoes grown in California in 1994. It was then released into market without labeling of GM product. Since then concerns about adequate labeling regime for GM products have been growing around the world. The approach towards labeling of GM foods varies from country to country. You can divide their policies into three classes. Strict, moderate, and lax.
The EU has the strictest GM guidelines of all. In EU, if the food contains more than 0.9% of GM material, the food company has to label for it. In contrast are the United States and Canada. In the United State, actually there is no mandetory labeling regime. But this is not to say labeling debate does not exist in the United States. Japan has an approach that is between the EU and the United States. In Japan, not all kinds of GM crops have to be displayed on food package, and only when the percentage of GM material in the list exceeds 5%, the food company has to label for it. Therefore in Japan it is virtually impossible to find food products on the shelf labeled as containing GM ingredients, so it means actually we are eating a substantial amount of GM foods daily like vegetable oils, soya sauce, cheese etc. We do not have the choice of avoiding them. So, many Japanese people say this guideline is too lax and actually not working.
And in regard to health matters, although we are eating GM foods daily, probably we would not get any symptom so soon, It would be something like asbesto, which takes long time to develop. Looking at the United States, so far nobody has been killed by GM foods. But several generations later, some people may show abnormalities in their body like weakning of immunity or slight surge of deformality incidences and more severe allergic reactions. So we are in danger! We need stricter labeling regime.
In Japan labeling system is run by two ministries, but in the first place, this labeling system itself is not reliable, Besides nowadays we Japanese are skeptical about the correctness of information written on the labels. Because food companies sometimes cheat, and it develops to a severe false labeling scandal. Actually so far we have experienced several of these incidences, and we Japanese are experiencing food scares. Some of so-called pure beef were mixed with other kind of meat like chicken and pork, one top confectionary used out-of-date milk, cream, and eggs, snow brand milk company shipped expired milk labeling "fresh", some sushi are actually made with some kind of tropical fresh water fish from Amazon river! It is said that these kinds of practices have been around since more than 20 years ago, but why recently more food scandals have come out? I think the reason is the economical depression. Workers at the factories are working very long hour without overtime wage, and they cannot expect increase of salary. Under this circumstance, some people go crazy, and they begin to disclose their company's wrong doings to public. Looking from one point, this tendency of disclosure is a good thing to us consumers, but any way we need better food hygine, so as measures we need to improve guidelines for labeling and increse penalties for offenders for falsification. And ofcourse more frequent inspections on food hygine is necessary.
Post a Comment