Wind and solar or nuclear?

Now all the little things that have come up during the last week.

Frank Schaeffer, the Pennsylvania pastor recently defrocked, has been offered a job by the bishop of the California-Hawaii region. The bishop can't guarantee a church appointment and the pay will be less, but the job is supposed to have all the rights and responsibilities of a regular minister.

I'm not sure how that will work, because there are some tasks, such as officiating at communion or a wedding, that must be done by a pastor with credentials. I feel a bit ambivalent about this job offer. It is great that he is being offered a job so quickly and that it will be in the Western Jurisdiction where he would not be prosecuted if his credentials were restored. But Pennsylvania needs more advocates than California does.



Richard Harris reported on NPR's Morning Edition that California's carbon emissions went up, not down, last year and did so by a huge 10%. The reason is the state had to shut down a nuclear power plant.

Which highlights the big energy debate. Wind and solar energy is cheaper and faster to install than nuclear. But one needs tens of thousands of wind turbines to match one reactor. Can we build that many wind and solar arrays fast enough? Can we motivate governments to make it happen? The answers differ.



A big item in the news this week was a study that showed multivitamins are worthless and perhaps harmful. One reason they aren't effective is that particular vitamins are only needed by a small percentage of the population.

But my dietary work over the last few months has another explanation. Though the article doesn't say so, the studies were probably done with synthetic vitamins. The article didn't mention it because most of us consider synthetic to be identical to natural vitamins. But what I've learned is that natural vitamins come with all sorts of related compounds that help the body use the vitamin. Synthetics don't have those related compounds, so the body can't make use of them. Thus they are ineffective.



An article in Mother Jones (I finished the March 2013 issue my dad gave me) notes that the world seems to be running out of phosphorus. It's a problem because it is a vital component of fertilizer and nearly all of the supply is controlled by the royal family of Morocco. But this wouldn't be a problem if we switched from fertilizer back to manure.



When I was young I played Johnny Appleseed in a small skit. From the time he did his work in the early 1800s until the early 1900s America had thousands of varieties of apples. Many of them have disappeared and corporate farming and marketing has made room for maybe 20 varieties. Because apples are my favorite fruit I was fascinated by the Mother Jones article about John Bunker of Maine who is doing all he can to track down and revive as many of the old varieties as possible. The apple at the top of the corporate list is Red Delicious, which I believe was named to hide its lack of flavor. Corporations occasionally do come up with new varieties. But they aren't heritage varieties that attract Bunker's attention. They are new varieties -- for which the corporation holds the patent.