Portlandia

I need to make a point to watch this show! The clips are so funny!

Perspective

After listening to the news lately about the Fukushima Daiichi plant in Japan and all of the panic it's causing about nuclear energy I found this article by Seth Godin very interesting.

For every person killed by nuclear power generation, 4,000 die due to coal, adjusted for the same amount of power produced... You might very well have excellent reasons to argue for one form over another. Not the point of this post. The question is: did you know about this chart? How does it resonate with you?

I had no idea! It's interesting to really think about the consequences for our energy-hungry lifestyles. If you think about people actually risking their lives so we can flip a lightswitch-- makes me think twice before using energy when I don't really need to.

Not included in this chart are deaths due to global political instability involving oil fields, deaths from coastal flooding and deaths due to environmental impacts yet unmeasured, all of which skew it even more if you think about it.

Ummm... BP oil spill anyone?

It makes me think a lot about how the world is so scared of change, people still think that nuclear energy is so dangerous. I'm still kind of deciding how I feel about nuclear energy but the chart helped put things in perspective.