Nuclear power provides about 35% of Japan’s electricity. There are currently 63 nuclear power plants operating in Japan making it the second largest user of nuclear power in the world. All of these power plants produce waste which much be dealt with. Especially dangerous is HLW, or high-level radioactive waste. To address this issue the Rokkasho Reprocessing Plant was built in Ibaraki, Japan. There are many opponents to the opening of the plant, including Greenpeace, which feel the plant poses danger to surrounding residents. The opponents also feel Japan should be investing money in cleaner and safer renewable energy sources.

Japan is one of the world’s largest consumers of fish. However, due to depleting ocean stocks the annual catch has been rapidly decreasing. Japan is the world’s third largest consumer of fish, following China and Peru. Numbers of the prized bluefin tuna, known as the diamond of the sea in Japan, are dwindling causing fishing quotas to be reduced. Japan has been facing international pressure from environmentalists to curb its consumption of bluefin tuna.

Japan’s whaling for “research purposes” has also attracted a great deal of negative international attention. The whale meat harvested from the research campaigns is sold in supermarkets and restaurants in Japan. Many people feel the Japanese JARPA research program is just an obvious cover for commercial whaling. The Sea Shepherd Conservation Society, lead by Captain Paul Watson, uses controversial tactics to stop Japanese whaling vessels in the Antarctic. Two common methods used by Sea Shepherd are throwing rotten butter and powerful stink bombs at the Japanese whaling vessels.

Renewable energy accounts for only 1.3% of Japan’s total energy production. Despite being technologically advanced and heavily dependent on oil imports, the country has set an unambitious goal of 1.6% by 2014. Currently Japan ranks 14th in the world for wind-power installations. With a lack of government policies to promote the use of renewable energies it is unlikely Japan will become a global leader in this area as many once thought.

Alton Trevino lives in Japan and enjoys writing about Japanese history and culture. Please visit the following pages to learn more about Japanese culture and ancient Japan.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Alton_J_Trevino

Additionally she stated; “There is still no framework or system that provides some form of environmental security”

You know it is always interesting that people complain about Industrialization for killing the environment and fail to watch non-industrialization do the same thing, as Native Indians, Tribal People and secluded human groupings in the far secluded third world, do not take care of their environments, chopping down trees for fire wood, burning forests, littering, polluting their own water supplies with human waste and animal waste, as their human troops or groups get too large.

I recommend reading “Collapse” and “Cows, Pigs, Wars and Witches.” I think that those are two of the books you should read first to really get a handle on the reality of such third world fixes. Additionally read some of the White Papers online at the World Bank and some of the research projects for agriculture, water, disease and food issues on the major NGO sites. Also the Gate’s Foundation and worthy of mention the reading list at;

http://www.WFS.org

Often has relevant information, however you have to be careful about the Utopia Liberal mentality, because you cannot have your Utopian Society or Island or Civilization, until someone breaks a sweat to build it and generally that takes hard charging, competitive, innovators and entrepreneurial types, the same ones many are busy condemning, You SEE? Consider this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow

Most home shoppers request a fireplace. Home buyers desire a hearth, which symbolizes home. Families gather around the fireplace during holiday celebrations and quiet conversations. Book lovers enjoy curling up next to a fire on a cool afternoon. Many new homes feature fireplaces in the main bedroom. After all, what’s more romantic than a fire?

According to the U.S. Department of Energy, wood-burning fireplaces emit nitrogen oxides, carbon monoxide, organic gases, and particulate matter. These pollutants can cause serious health problems for children, pregnant women, and people with respiratory problems. Like cigarette smoke, some of these elements contain cancer-causing properties.

Some urban cities have considered banning wood-burning fireplaces altogether to stem the flow of pollutants in the smog-filled air. California cities and counties have enacted local ordinances to limit the growing wood smoke problem. Mammoth Lakes, Squaw Valley, Cloverdale, Fresno, and many cities and counties in the Bay Area permit installation of only U S EPA certified wood-fired appliances in all new construction. Since 1991, the Bay Area AQMD has issued advisories for a voluntary no-burn program on poor air quality nights, “Spare the Air Tonight.”

But wait! Solutions exist so you can enjoy your fire. To keep pollutants from entering your room air, you can install a certified clean-burning fireplace insert and a glass screen. Buy a carbon monoxide monitor and an oxygen-depletion sensor to ensure safe air. The new fireplace systems keep pollutants from leaving your chimney.

Other considerations for you to ponder include the source of heating for your home. What happens when natural gas demand outpaces production? Prices skyrocket. And if your heat comes from a coal-burning electrical plant, doesn’t the burning coal produce toxins that pollute the air?

If you’re building a new home, consider installing a Pellet Stove, the most efficient and least polluting of the new stove designs. Pellet Stoves provide less than 1 gram per hour of particulate emissions. Most of these stoves s require electricity and burn compressed wood waste formed into pellets.

Be kind to yourself and to the environment. Consider these environmental issues when you light up your fire.

For more home environmental issue articles, visit Environmental Psychology http://www.environmentpsychology.com/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Jeanette_Joy_Fisher

Their plea to the Filipino electorate is to vote for candidates who will stand up for mother nature and those who “green championed” and who genuinely promote environmental conservation, protection for the common good and building ecological communities that are devoid of trash and pollution.

To assist the Philippine electorate in making “green” political choices on election day, the Eco Waste Coalition released its guide and checklist to the Filipino voters known as the “Ten Commandments On How To Choose Green Candidates”. This provide a useful guidance and insight on what to seek from candidates in terms of their environmental track record and platform.

In their quest of choosing the next ecological leaders who can apparently leave a green legacy to its people and country. The following are the Eco group’s environmental “Ten Commandments”:

1) Thou shall not vote for candidates using the 4 G’s to win: Gins, Goons, Gold and Garbage. Vote for the candidates for the essential M’s: Malinis (Clean), Maayos (Orderly), Matipid (Thriftiness), Mapanindigan (Principled), Marangal (Honorable), Mapayapa (Peaceful), Makatao (Pro-People), Makalikasan (Pro-Nature) and Maka-Diyos (Godly).
Moreover, support candidates known for their simple, pro-people and ecological lifestyles.

2) Thou shall not support candidates who nail, staple, strap or plaster campaign materials on defenseless trees and other restricted sites. Vote for candidates who love and plant trees, use the least amount of campaign materials and abide by the campaign rules.

3) Thou shall not pick candidates who use smoke belching vehicles that contribute the worsening air quality. Go for candidates on bicycles rather than those who come in convoy of cars. Vote for those who use fewer vehicles in motorcades to reduce fuel consumption and car emissions.

4) Thou shall not fall for candidates who make beautiful speeches about their love of the people and the environment but fail to match their words with deeds. Check if the candidates is engaged in any environmental advocacy or project. Avoid choosing candidates who have financial interest in any polluting and environmentally destructive business.

5) Thou shall not select candidates who profess to protect the environment but are mute on what they intend to do. Ask the candidates on how they intend to serve the interest of the environment. Vote for those who will work earnestly to heal and protect the environment.

6) Thou shall not choose candidates who are hooked up to outmoded “hakot-tambak-sunog” (haul-dump-burn) and fail to shut down illegal dumps. Vote for those who segregate their discards at home, in the work place and who support ecological, low cost and community driven alternative to dumps, landfill and incinerators.

7) Thou shall not vote for candidates who ignore the health, environmental, socio economic and human rights concerns against ’sanitary’ landfills, ‘waste to energy’ dams and similar infrastructure plans. Vote for candidates who assert the people basic needs and not to the dictates of the World Bank and other international funding institutions.

Thou shall not elect candidates who want to build big dams and allow mining, logging and other extractive industries to rape the land and abuse human rights, especially the rights of the indigenous people. Vote for those who take the cudgels for the human as well as the non human victims, such as trees, plants and wildlife of environmentally damaging human activities.

9) Thou shall not back candidates who will not take action against the health and safety threats of genetically modified crops and food products. Vote for the candidates who will advanced the people’s right to safe and healthy food as well as food production systems that nurture the earth.

10) Thou shall not vote for the candidates who refuse to acknowledge global warming and vote for candidates who see the need for preventive and precautionary actions to stop climate change. Go for candidates who oppose new coal power projects and support community made utilities using renewable energy sources.

Arnold Cafe is an active internet marketer and author of Ideas Galore: http://www.affleap.com/blog/.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Arnold_Cafe

India appears to be digging its own grave deeper and quicker than the rest of us, nearly 30% of India’s gross agricultural output is lost every year due to soil degradation, poor land management and counter productive irrigation. 7516 km of coastline have also come under attack from this environmental sabotage, overfishing remains a huge problem due to lack of legislation enforcement. Raw sewage from an awful lot of people is pumped endlessly into the ocean along with other industrial waste and chemicals.

India’s incredibly vulnerable water supply has also come under attack from every angle resulting in very dramatic drop in the national water tables. Air pollution remains a huge problem in India with the diesel used containing up to 200 times the amount of sulfur than our European diesel.

The quite rapid story if India’s deforestation is rather depressing. It is predicted that almost 5.3 Million hectares of forest have been destroyed since the independence. The government has been slow to recognise this problem and the solutions it has come up with involve unenforceable legislation mixed with wide spread corruption and a million poeple buring desire to survive

Land degradation, disease and a huge litter problem are some of the other problems which plague this great nation. It is however, not all lost…

Follow the link below for a complete view of the Environmental issues in India. http://www.all-about-india.com/Environmental-issues-in-India.html

Another Expert article from the web’s most comprehensive India resource.
Written by Oliver Wakefield of All-about-India.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Oliver_Wakefield

For those good stewards of the environment, I salute your efforts. I also believe that car wash owners who keep acids and chemicals to a minimum are indeed helping the industry. I applaud those that do not use acid in their wash process. I think illegal polluters who own car washes are very bad for the industry especially when it hits the newspaper. Yes it hurts us too, we run the CarWashGuys.com .

Our franchisees, which are mobile follow the rules, so do our truck washes and fixed car washes, as well as our aircraft wash units and boat cleaning units. Franchising is an Independent business relationship and no cases of environmental issues have come back to the franchisor, only one ADA case in the Hotel Industry was even close. Yet we still believe it is our duty to monitor our franchisee’s wash process.

The are still some rogue hold outs in the industry and are slowly being caught by environmental enforcement personnel, but unfortunately there is still a problem in the industry and these issues are serious and must be dealt with. Think on this in 2006.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Think Tank forum board. If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/. Lance is an online writer in retirement.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow

This really shouldn’t surprise anyone because the environmental movement has been going on for decades now. And it has reached critical mass. Everyone is talking about these topics. Folks are considering buying a hybrid car, like a SmartCar or a Chevy Volt in the future. During the last presidential election we had quite a bit of talk about alternative energy and it was a point of national discussion.

Everybody seems to want to do their part, and the number of people who are separating their trash for recycling has increased by 200% in just the last five years. This provides a great opportunity for those who write articles online, or for article authors who sell their works to newspapers or major magazines. Having written hundreds of articles on these topics, I’ve learned a lot from the e-mail feedback I get from my readers.

So, I’d like to recommend if you’re going to write environmental articles for the general public that you discuss how each of us can do our individual part to help make a cleaner environment. And offer helpful tips for saving energy, recycling, and provide a little philosophical thought on these issues. If you will do those things I’m sure your articles will get read as much as mine have. Please consider all this.

Lance Winslow is a retired Founder of a Nationwide Franchise Chain, and now runs the Online Think Tank. Lance Winslow believes everyone should indeed recycle; http://www.paperdragonrecycling.com/

Note: All of Lance Winslow’s articles are written by him, not by Automated Software, any Computer Program, or Artificially Intelligent Software. None of his articles are outsourced, PLR Content or written by ghost writers. Lance Winslow believes those who use these strategies lack integrity and mislead the reader. Indeed, those who use such cheating tools, crutches, and tricks of the trade may even be breaking the law by misleading the consumer and misrepresenting themselves in online marketing, which he finds completely unacceptable.

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow

Australia is also isolated – a massive island with oceans on three sides. Since it broke away from the supercontinent of Pangea it has been separate from any other landmass for 45 million years.

Because of this abundance of space and the unfathomable length of time the land has been floating on its continental plate, multitudes of unique species of land animals and plants have evolved; uninterrupted by mixing from other places. Consequently Australia is what scientists call mega-biodiverse – it has many species that are endemic (native and restricted) to this one place. Only a handful of other places on earth have such high numbers of endemic species.

Old landscapes also tend to have heavily weathered soils, a consequence of thousands of wet/dry and cold/warm cycles eking out from the parent material the mineral nutrients so essential for plants. Weathered soils are nutrient poor, usually low in organic material, and often have weak structure; in short they are easily disturbed.  So when new disturbances arrive first in the form of frequent fire and predation (roughly 80,000 years ago) and then mechanized habitat alteration (at some time after 1788), the soils and the vegetation they support have limited capacity to retain the character and properties shaped by the processes of evolution.

Many endemic species were squeezed by the change in the land to make way for people, cattle and sheep.  There are currently around 21 million people in Australia. This is only a fraction of the world’s population, however, along with the people come 9 million cattle, 86 million sheep (down from 120 million in 1997) and 97 million chickens. These domestic animals use up a lot of space. Clearing of habitat for agriculture and development changed the vegetation and the soils; disturbances that were big blows to the unique flora and fauna.

Also after 1788 Australia was no longer isolated. Soon there were introductions of exotic species – especially foxes, rabbits and many plant weeds. These novel species were often better able to use local resources and either ate or outcompeted the native species, sometimes in great boom and bust cycles that are typical of invasive species. There is even a millipede, Ommatoiulus moreleti, a lowly detritus eating invertebrate native to Portugal that has done this across southern Australia. Introductions still happen despite the best efforts of modern laws and restrictions on movement of animals and plants across international borders.

The consequence of these new disturbances bumping up against the natural features of old age and isolation is that in Australia biodiversity is being lost at a faster rate than anywhere else in the world.

Is this biodiversity loss an environmental issue? Strictly, it is not. If we were to be specific biodiversity loss is a conservation issue – where conservation is the retention of natural balance, diversity and evolutionary change in the environment. In other words the desire to retain natural processes, elements of nature (including species) and the potential for evolutionary development. Keeping things the same.

The environment has no notion of this desire for conservation. How can it? Disturbance is part of what happens. Nature has worked ways to function in all the various conditions throughout the 45 million years of drift across the ocean. It will find ways even when biodiversity is denuded, soils are depleted and temperature rises.

The environmental issue is an issue for us. Biodiversity loss will reduce the capacity of nature to buffer against change, to even out the effects of climate extremes and disturbance. Nature will be less stable. Species will be lost.

These things are a very real issue for us in ways we have yet to fully grasp.

A great start is not to see biodiversity loss not as an issue for the environment but one for ourselves.

J. Mark Dangerfield, PhD is a scientist, consultant and educator. If you would like more ideas that will sharpen your thinking and help you feel good about the world, grab a copy of his latest book ‘Awkward news for Greenies and everyone else’ at http://www.createspace.com/3379619

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=J._Mark_Dangerfield_Ph.D.

1 – It requires more energy to manufacture a CFL than an incandescent lamp.

2 – CFL’s contain mercury which can potentially end up polluting the environment.

The first issue is fairly easily answered in that even though they do require additional energy to manufacture; this is soon offset as CFLs last a lot longer than incandescent bulb.

On this issue of mercury pollution I have summarized some of the for and against points of view below:

Arguments For CFL’s

* Overall mercury emission by compact fluorescent lamps is less than the mercury released into the atmosphere by coal-fired power generation for an equivalent incandescent lamp over the same period. This assumption is based on the electricity generated to run lighting in your local area being generated via coal fired power stations. While this currently (2007) the case in Australia many places in the world today generate their electricity by other more environmentally friendly means.
* Mercury from used CFLs in landfills is not released into air and with proper disposal will not be released into the subsurface or groundwater.
* The mercury content of CFLs that use 25 to 40 watts of electricity will be capped at 6 mg per unit (this is proposed in the United States)
* Because CFLs longer life cycle, fewer bulbs and less packaging ends up in landfill.

Arguments Against CFL’s

* Many places in the world produce little energy from coal fired power plants (eg California). In the USA coal plants are now mandated to reduce their mercury emissions by between 70% and 90%.The issue of mercury is therefore likely to become more significant as electricity generation gets cleaner and CFLs become more widespread.
* The 6mg of mercury claimed for CFL’s is largely a goal at present and not the current reality.
* A lot of CFL’s are made in China with energy sourced from coal fired power plants.
* CFL’s are delivered here on ships using bunker oil, the worst mercury producer of the fuel oils.
* There are currently very few recycling program in place or planned to handle the number of CFL’s proposed.

Eco Friendly House (http://www.ecohousefootprint.com) – Making you home Environmentally Friendly. How to make your home more environmentally friendly and reduce your Ecological footprint. Information on Solar Power, Lights, Waste Water, Recycling, Garden, Green Buildings, Renewable Energy, Green Energy, Saving Water, Environmental Issues and more. Help save the planet. http://www.ecohousefootprint.com

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Dwayne_Hill

Well, for a couple of reasons, I see many companies that claim to be green, but in name only. I see many citizens who claim to be environmentally conscious and yet, do little more than recycle and probably only do that because someone provided them with colorful trash receptacles. Hey, don’t laugh, I am serious.

Regarding being dispassionate myself at times, let me tell you why. I have over the years worked hard to make our companies “pollution-free” and have gone out of my way, spent lots of money on R and D. Yet, I found myself constantly attacked by competitors, “environmentalists” and government environmental regulators. So, after a while it gets old and many entrepreneurs become less passionate.

The issue becomes; “why should I do good in the world if no one else cares and I am attacked for doing so?” The answer of course, is because it’s the right thing to do, still if you have to take hits for it, you can see that it takes strong will to not just say; “oh forget it!”

It’s like that old saying; “No good deed, goes unpunished.” Too often environmentalists are hypocrites and those accused of being demons are actually going out of their way to innovate, solve problems and really clean the air and water. Think on this.

“Lance Winslow” – Online Blog Content Service

If you have innovative thoughts and unique perspectives, come think with Lance; www.WorldThinkTank.net/

Article Source: http://EzineArticles.com/?expert=Lance_Winslow