My Favorite Movie

My favorite movie is “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead” starring Tim Roth, Gary Oldman, and Richard Dreyfuss. The story re-tells “Hamlet” through the eyes of two minor characters who were childhood friends of Hamlet. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are summoned to court after the death of the king in an attempt to comfort Hamlet and to discover the “source of his distemper.”

It must have been quite some time since Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have been to court as the King and Queen have trouble remembering who is who and the crux of the entire film is that the men themselves do not know, either. The earliest memory they have is of a messenger banging on their shutters and calling their names to give them the royal summons. There is an over-arching theme to the whole movie that they do not really exist but are merely characters in a play.

Richard Dreyfuss’s character is the leader of a troop of traveling thespians. They are also visiting the court and Hamlet uses them to draw out his uncle's guilt. The thespians are portrayed as outside observers who have “seen” this play before and know how it ends.

My favorite scene of the film is when Rosencrantz and Guildenstern happen upon the castle's indoor tennis court. They launch into a game called “Question and Answer”. It is played like tennis with the same scoring but without the ball and rackets. They volley questions at each other and can only respond with questions. The use of a statement results in the other receiving a point and employing rhetoric is a foul.

The film ends as “Hamlet” ends – everyone dies.

Wealth or Freedom

What is a million dollars to me? Fifty years of making $20,000 would gross you one million dollars but, at 31 years old, I've never made more than $12,000 in one year. They say that if you put one million dollars in the bank that you could live comfortably off just the interest payments. It's as if one million is this mystical, magical number that can solve all of your cares and woes. There is an obvious and tangible difference between one dollar and one million but there is not one between $1,000,000 and $1,000,001. At what point does money make a difference?

People with a lot of money don't seem happy to have it, rather they appear preoccupied by it. Making money, keeping money, and spending money all create a stress all their own. A survey was taken of Forbes magazine's 100 wealthiest Americans in 1996 and, of those who responded, their subjective happiness was only slightly greater than the average American (Myers 70). Indeed, I am poor but happy although my debts stress me considerably. It is only in the world's poorest countries that emotional well-being correlates to income (Myers 70). Therefore, it is not money but security that contributes to happiness.

Some of our country's richest people, such as Warren Buffett, Bill and Melinda Gates, George Lucas, and Ted Turner, have pledged to commit the majority of their wealth to philanthropic causes and charity during their life or after death. Perhaps they have found a way to buy happiness, whether or not it is their own. I have a short list of charities that I would like to donate to myself: The Richard Dawkins Foundation, Doctors Without Borders, donorschoose.org, and MicroPlace, which loans money to women in third world countries to start their own small business companies.

With only a million dollars, though, I would likely focus on sharing with those closest to me. My parents, siblings, in-laws, and nieces and nephews would all be well served by a small percentage of such a windfall. My father has been held hostage by Ford ever since he was hired by the company about ten years ago. He is under constant threat of being laid-off and shift switching while putting one son through college and having two more children, ages 18 and 13, waiting in the wings. He bought a large property in Ashland County shortly before home values dropped lost much of his retirement savings in our recent economic meltdown.

My older brother, David, is a diabetic and mostly blind due to retinopathy that went untreated too long because he had no insurance. There are not many jobs that he is capable of doing but he receives social security and medicare. He is attempting to get into the voice-over business since he sounds like James Earl Jones and the recording can be done in his home.

Jessica, my older sister, is a stay-at-home mother of five trying to make it on just her husbands salary. She was going to school to be a sonographer but had to quit when she was pregnant with her twins and had to start paying back her loans without having received a degree or being able to work. Jessica and her husband abandoned the house that they owned in the worst part of town when their bank refused to let them re-finance . They are now looking to declare bankruptcy but new laws would keep all of their debt intact.

In total, I have four nieces and four nephews plus my own son to consider for college funds. Both my husband, Ian, and myself are students as well, and although Ian would rather open a book store than continue his education, I would go to school for the rest of my life if I had the resources. My current plan is to take as many math and science courses as I can in Lorain County before moving to Golden, Colorado to attend school at The Colorado School of Mines. They offer a bachelor's degree in geological science and they have a graduate program in geochemistry. A million dollars would only get me to Colorado sooner, not cause me to change my goals.

What is a million dollars to me, then? It would certainly make a difference in my life and the lives of those that I love. Yet, far from being a magical transformation of our fortunes, one million dollars would act as a leveling force, freeing us from the anchoring weight of debt. Happiness certainly is not money, it is freedom after all.

Works Cited

Myers, David G. "The Pursuit of Happiness: New research uncovers some anti-intuitive insights into how many people are happy—and why." Scientific American. May 1996: 70 - 72. Print.

Prenatal Genetic Testing

Prenatal is most often considered as concerning the period between conception and birth. Advances in our collective knowledge of the workings of genes, the effects of different alleles at a given gene, and environmental effects on DNA, both in the body and germ line, should incline us to add to the definition of prenatal as “any stage of life when people are tested for their genetic carrier status in order to inform future family planning by themselves or their relatives” (Alderson 231). This widens the scope of prenatal genetic testing and also complicates the controversy surrounding the ethics of the use of the information gathered from such tests. Prenatal genetic testing is a valuable tool and can be useful within established ethical treatments of medical information.

Currently, prenatal care consists of generalized scanning techniques for each patient including ultrasound scans with which fetal development can be measured visually and blood samples from the mother which are examined chemically. If any anomaly is detected in these routine procedures, there are more precise, yet invasive and potentially dangerous, diagnostic tests available including amniocentesis and chorionic villus sampling (CVS). These tests are also offered to pregnant women over the age of thirty-five, as this is an identified at-risk population for genetic and chromosomal defects in offspring. Amniocentesis entails a sampling of amniotic fluid removed from the womb with a syringe and carries a risk of miscarriage, while CVS involves removing cells directly from the placenta breaching the amniotic sac as well, causing bleeding, cramping, and also potential miscarriage. The amniocentesis can be performed after about 15 weeks of pregnancy and CVS is effective at about 10 weeks. (WebMD)

These diagnostic tests are used primarily to detect developmental abnormalities that are often environmentally affected and are only informative once pregnancy is underway when the only courses of action are termination or acceptance. Many women decline to have these tests, the invasive and non-invasive, done for a variety of reasons – religious and ethical ones being foremost. If one has an anti-abortion stance, one is less likely to submit to testing for conditions which have no treatment because they may feel more harmed by the stress of knowing, unmitigated by the chance to educate and prepare themselves for their coming difficulties. Other factors include skepticism of the accuracy of the tests (Li 1139) and not finding their medical provider's explanation of tests to be a useful source of information (Li 1140). Women appear to perceive their clinicians as “more interested in the aspect of controlling pathophysiology” while themselves being more of a nurturing protector (Li 1141).

Encouraging prenatal genetic testing to be done before conception will serve a variety of functions concerning the health of future offspring and potentially reduce the occurrences of medically relevant abortions. There are relatively common conditions that can be tested for in a paired couple that do not individually express a disease but can each carry a recessive allele that may be active in their potential children, such as sickle-cell anemia, Ty-Sachs disease, and thalassemia, a defect in the protein production of hemoglobin. If one finds that she is a carrier, her partner will also need to undergo testing. This sharing of responsibility for a child's genetic well-being appears to make women more relaxed and accepting of the testing because they feel less that they are the sole responsible party to a fetus's health (Reed 351) and allows men to feel more engaged in a process that has hitherto been the domain of the mother alone (Reed 354).

Genetic tests done for future parents can also predict the possibility of passing along rare disorders of which there may be no family history and therefore no reason to suspect that there may be any danger. Lesch-Nyan Syndrome is an “X-linked recessive disorder of purine synthesis” (Young 300) “in which there is defective activity of the enzyme hypoxanthine-guanine phosphoribosyltransferase” HPRT (Nyan 807). The HPRT gene is located on the X-chromosome and, when mutated, leaves the body unable to remove excess uric acid. When the father contributes another X-chromosome for a female child, there is no expression of the disease, but for a male who inherits this mutated gene, there are variants of LNS ranging from mere overproduction of uric acid to the tragic effects of neurological symptoms including severe motor disability, dystonia, spasticity, impulsive spitting, hitting, and cursing, and self-mutilation by chewing, for which the only treatment is immobilization or total tooth extraction (Jinnah 671). Prenatal testing for this disease employs amniocentesis and CVS but has, in at least one case, judged a fetus to be normal that turned out to be affected and is only used for families known to be at risk (Nyan 808). A less invasive and more accurate survey of a woman's genetic code prior to conception would aid in the educated decision of bearing children before implantation of an embryo.

Not every pregnancy is planned and not everyone has the financial wherewithal to afford early genetic screenings. Insurance companies cover most testing done for fetal health after impregnation occurs, though, so effective and safe methods of prenatal diagnosis are being devised. A study in the Department of Transplantation, Jagiellonian University of Cracow, Poland demonstrated proof of concept for separating fetal cells from maternal blood. During pregnancy, blood from the fetus enters the mother's blood stream “resulting in a physiological michrochimerism” (Grabowska S32) and, when isolated, could potentially be used for genetic diagnostic testing (Grabowska S32).

Having exact knowledge of a specific individual's genetic particulars is not a desirable scenario to the entire population. There are fears based on the idea of genetic determinism, privacy issues, and a notion of “playing God” that are pervasive throughout popular opposition to genetic testing. The arguments in the scientific community, however, are focused more on the ethics of gene therapy and germ-line engineering, but these arguments reflect issues with our current knowledge that would lessen the efficacy of large scale prenatal genetic testing. Monogenetic diseases, such as cystic fibrosis or Lesch-Nyan Syndrome, are caused by mutations of single genes and the effects of these mutations are complex, sometimes extreme, and not always completely understood. No one knows why, for instance, a defective HPRT gene causes any neurological symptoms, as it only directly deals with uric acid production and removal (Young 301). The aims of genetic testing are to allow people to make educated decisions involving family planning and lifestyle choices, and to improve health related conditions for the entire population. The overall effects of specific alleles are not certain, though, so there will be doubts when basing reproductive decisions on these tests.

The perception based on genetic determinism that individuals can be discriminated against as a direct result of their specific DNA sequencing is an outright fallacy. In his book “The Extended Phenotype,” the ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins notes that “[t]he belief that genes are somehow super-deterministic, in comparison with environmental causes, is a myth of extraordinary tenacity...” (Dawkins 11). The expression of most traits is a combination of genetic predisposition and environmental moldings. A predisposition is not a determination, but merely a probabilistic potential to react in a specific manner towards a specific environment. Some people who smoke get lung cancer. Some people who have never smoked get lung cancer. It would be unethical for an insurance company to be permitted to adopt policy rates based on genetic codes, due to uncertainty of expression that is the complete opposite of genetic determinism and any information gleaned from such testing should be seen as privileged and protected under privacy laws. In fact, there are 28 states with laws explicitly prohibiting discrimination by insurance companies on the basis of genetic testing (Hall 293).

The philosophical concept of “playing God” may stem from an idea that we have no right to interfere with the natural process of reproduction. This is referred to as the naturalistic fallacy - because something is natural, it is good. Good is sometimes subjective, but, here, it can be viewed as either “as God intended” or as strengthening the gene pool in terms of natural selection. If one views using genetic testing as a decision making tool as being against “God's will,” and following that line of reasoning through to its logical, though absurd, conclusion, one must view all forms of reproductive interference as wrong. Basing family planning on genetic knowledge is not the same as eugenics or even abortion, it is concern for the health and well-being of a potential real person and that demonstrates a level of caring that, though abstract, is deeply commendable. For others, prenatal genetic testing of pre-parenthood candidates is a sort of gentle selection, possibly preventing the spread of the defective genes in a manner more sophisticated than nature.

Prenatal genetic testing, of parents or a fetus, is a revolutionary diagnostic tool useful for education and possibly preventative care. If employed widely and responsibly, it could improve the human condition around the world.

Works Cited

Alderson, Priscilla, et al. "Prenatal screening and genetics." European Journal of Public Health11.2 (2001): 231-233. Academic Search Complete. Web. 21 Apr 2011.

Dawkins, Richard. The Extended Phenotype. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

Grabowska, A., Majka, M. and Pietrzyk, J. J. "Attempt to devise new, non-invasive prenatal diagnosis method based on fetal genetic material isolation from maternal blood." Reproductive BioMedicine Online. 20 (2010): S32. Academic Search Complete. Web. 31 Mar 2011.

Hall, Mark A. and Stephen S. Rich. “Laws Restricting Health Insurers’ Use of Genetic Information: Impact on Genetic Discrimination.” American Journal of Human Genetics. 66.1 (2000), 293-307. Electronic Journal Finder. Web. 04 Apr 2011.

Jinnah, H.A. et al. “Attenuated Variants of Lesch-Nyan Disease.” Brain: A Journal of Neurology. 133 (2010): 671-689. Electronic Journal Finder. Web. 31 Mar 2011.

Jocoy, Sandy. “Chorionic Villus Sampling.” WebMD.com. 13 May 2008. Web. 24 Apr 2011.

Li, De-Kun, et al. "Factors influencing women’s acceptance of prenatal screening tests." Prenatal Diagnosis 28.12 (2008): 1136 - 1143. Electronic Journal Search. Web. 21 Apr 2011.

Nyan, William L., Linh-Uyen C. Vuong and Robyn Broock. “Prenatal Diagnosis of Lesch-Nyan Disease.” Prenatal Diagnosis. 23 (2003): 807-809. Electronic Journal Search.Web. 31 Mar 2011.

Reed, Kate. "‘It's them faulty genes again’: women, men and the gendered nature of genetic responsibility in prenatal blood screening." Sociology of Health & Illness 31.3 (2009): 343-359. Electronic Journal Center. Web. 21 Apr 2011.

Young, Simon N. and Roberta M. Palmour. “Research on Genes: Promises and Limitations.” Journal of Psychiatry & Neuroscience. 24.4 (1999): 300. Academic Search Complete. Web. 31 Mar 2011.

The Powerful and the Powerless

In THX-1138, a movie written and directed by George Lucas and released in 1971, Robert Duvall plays the titular chemically oppressed man. He lives in a society in which a computer controls every aspect of one's life. Fetuses are developed in glass wombs and children are taught by intravenous drips. Adults are matched for roommates and occupation based on algorithmic calculations and pharmaceutical sedation is employed to suppress emotion, bonding, and sexual desire, and to promote endurance in stressful labor. Religion is used as a release valve. At anytime, a person may step into a confession booth-like room to off-load their doubts or disturbances to a picture of Jesus' face along with pre-recorded positive affirmations. Enforcement is the domain of atomically powered android police officers who speak softly and carry very large sticks; sticks that can send targeted jolts of pain through specific nerves. Prison is a seemingly endless expanse of a bright white limbo.

THX is awakened by his roommate, LUH, with whom he finds that he is in love. They plot to escape together in order to avoid going back on sedatives, therefore losing the emotional connection they now feel, or being prosecuted for drug violations and executed. The effects of being off the sedatives and an attempted manipulation by a man designated SEN-5241, lead to their arrest. THX is isolated and experimented on before a brief reunion with LUH, during which she informs him that she is pregnant. Losing his mate and the interminable rantings of his fellow inmates compel THX to look for an escape. SEN accompanies THX and, after coming across a hologram incarnate named SRT, they do find the unguarded exits. SEN is separated from THX and SRT who discover that LUH's designation has been reassigned to a fetus, indicating her destruction. After a series of chase scenes, THX escapes alone to the surface because the cost of his pursuit has exceeded its allotted budget (Lucas).

Character development in this film is completely non-existent. This story does not allow for personality because the individuals living in this tale are controlled in a way that destroys ego. Choice is removed from the equation as well as emotion and higher level cognitive activities. The humans not only do not have any power, and therefore freedom, they do not desire it. The genesis of LUH's defiance is not explained, but her actions embody personal power and embolden further rebellion.

It would be quite a shock to wake up, an adult, and find that you have been under the control of some Other – whether it be a government, person, or computer or some such technology. This is what happens to THX and he seems to be in denial up until the moment of his arrest. He attempts to go about his usual routine, even going to work, but his lack of sedation is obvious and a serious liability on the job. Stressors – arrest, torture, solitary confinement, the pronouncement of parenthood – piled upon the man make him, for a time, unresponsive and withdrawn. Without hope, such things could fracture the mind, leaving it incoherent, or merely functional. Without impetus, one would be apathetic to one's imprisonment.

THX has both hope and impetus. His emotional bond with his mate, LUH, and their unborn child creates within him a purpose, but, it is the appearance of a shelldweller – one who lives in the outer shell of the city – that reminds him that there is somewhere to escape to. The control of this society is so nearly complete, that the exits of both prison and the city itself are not even guarded, just difficult to find.

In contrast, the level of control attained in The Handmaid's Tale is still under barrage and therefore maintained by guardians at the borders and within its structure. In the 1990 film adaptation, Robert Duvall plays the Commander, a high level security officer and complicit oppressor. In an attempt to cure the ills of a free society, a fundamentalist Christian sect execute a military coup in the United States and install a theocracy with the aims of repopulating through sex slaves as human surrogates.

All that is learned about the Commander is gleaned through his candid illicit conversations with the handmaid during their late night rendezvous. He craves a personal relationship, a sort of closeness, which he cannot have with his wife. Yet he is often condescending and retains an attitude of superiority, sometimes masterly, openly hypocritical and bigoted. When the handmaid asks him why he joined in with this regime, he replies

Why? The country was a mess, that's why. A total mess. All the garbage had risen to the top. You know? Had all these pressure groups running the store, trying to dictate to us. Blacks, homos, you know, all those people on welfare....Yesiree, women. So we had to clean it up. We got a big hose and washed the place clean....I don't mean you, I...Alright, let me explain something. I'm not talking about you, I'm talking about the country. The country was crazy. Nobody felt anything - men or women. All they had was, like, how can I put this, like itches. Sex itches, money itches, power itches. That's not enough. There was no common purpose. Nothing to believe in, nothing to fight for. Nobody knew how to really feel anything, anymore. (Schlöndorff )

He goes on to mention respect and reverence as being things that are now felt by the people of Gilead. The Commander cites respect as a value important to those of Gilead in a conversation in which he is trying to justify his collusion with the architects of a society that depends upon the enslavement of fertile women and their officially sanctioned and ritualized rape.

The Commander is not without his sexual itches, either. He plans a special evening with his handmaid, secreting her to Jezebel's, a house of ill repute run by Gilead's government for use in international relations. This is seen as a useful diplomatic tool and, since it is populated by fallen women in any case, not a deadly sin to engage as patrons. The Commander, here, graduates from religiously approved rape to outright sexual assault in that, if the handmaid were to refuse, she would end up as an unwoman sent to clean radioactive waste - or worse (Schlöndorff ).

The characters lacking control of their lives in both films are followed through stages of oppression and rebellion. At each story's start, the powerless appear stunned and unable to act of their own volition. A study done at Radboud University Nijmegen in The Netherlands by Pamela K. Smith, Nils B. Jostmann, Adam D. Galinsky, and Wilco W. van Dijk suggests that “lacking power itself fundamentally alters cognitive functioning (441)” because the stressors particular to powerless individuals disrupt their ability to focus on goal-relevant information (Smith et al. 441-442). Powerless people must focus much of their attention on constant self- and other-evaluation in response to current circumstances. This is illustrated in The Handmaid's Tale with the women's inability to revolt in any meaningful manner. Communications between handmaids are, by necessity, cryptic until it can be established who is a devout believer, perhaps even an Eye, and who is a potential ally. In a society like Gilead, all relationships must go through such evaluations, seriously tasking ones mental capacity for processing goal-relevant information. THX's need to postpone any rebellious action and attempt to maintain status quo in his relationship with his society also displays this effect. He is not simply in denial about the oppressive injustices visited himself and his fellows, he lacks the ability to formulate an expedient plan and execute it because he cannot focus long enough to do so.

In the worlds of the handmaid and of THX, personal shifts from powerlessness to power do occur, though, and we see this in reality as well. In view of the cognitive effects of powerlessness, revolutions of both a personal and popular nature are quite remarkable, but the mechanism driving rebellion is easy to intuit. All societies are hierarchical, consisting of those in power, or roles of leadership, and those who are lead, the powerless. A team of researchers at the Tilburg Institute for Behavioral Econimics Research published a study on how legitamacy of power affects the behavior of those in positions of both power and powerlessness. They first noted that “(l)egitimate hierarchies are associated with cooperation; the powerful act and the powerless follow. When power is illegitimate, however, this cooperation is often replaced with force and resistance (Lammers et al. 558).” Furthermore, when the powerless view the powerful as illegitimate, they will attempt alter the situation. The principle is described narratively by the solitary man confronted by a line of tanks during the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests. He is “clearly powereless” and yet, he behaves in a manner contradictory to the effects of his powerlessness (Lammers et al. 558). The use of force and resistance is an active mode of interaction in Gilead, within its borders and at its edges. The government enforced social structure is a psychological means of control that belies its illegitimacy and keeps its citizens as prisoners while it is at war with the regions of the United States that it failed to contain in its original coup. For all those within Gilead's domain who recognize its lack of legitimate authority, rebellion is unavoidable and they have organized themselves under the auspicious title Mayday. In THX-1138, the issue of legitimacy is cleverly clouded by the mass sedation which limits the occurrences of revolt, yet the existence of “drug violation” charges shows the audience that it is not completely absent from this society. Imprisonment is advantageous to THX, in that it allows him to bypass the cognitive disadvantages of being powerless because he no longer has anything else to focus on but escape.

In these two films, Robert Duvall plays a zenith and a nadir – the Powerful and the Powerless. The effects of such positions have an intrinsic tension, a natural balance, as one creates the other. Those with power are those who take control and, when they take that control from others, they produce the Powerless. The Powerful allow any convenient trivia to justify the taking, whether it be class, race, gender, religion, or even species if it is allowed that the Powerful may someday be a computer as in THX-1138. Being the Powerless is wearying beyond measure, yet the meek and weary have boundaries across which, once they are pushed, they push back.

Works Cited

Handmaid's Tale, The. Dir. Volker Schlöndorff. Perf. Robert Duvall and Natasha Richardson. 1990. MGM/UA Home Entertainment, 2001. DVD.

Lammers, Joris, Adam D. Galinsky, Ernestine H. Gordijn, and Sabine Otten. "Illegitimacy Moderates the Effects of Power on Approach." Psychological Science. 19.6 (2008): 558 - 564. Print.

Smith, Pamela K., Nils B. Jostmann, Adam D. Galinsky, and Wilco W. van Dijk. "Lacking Power Impairs Executive Functions." Psychological Science. 19.5 (2008): 441 - 447. Print.

THX-1138. Dir. George Lucas. Perf. Robert Duvall. 1971. Warner Home Video, 2004. DVD

Controlling Carbon

Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas (GHG), as is water vapor, methane, nitrous oxide, and ozone, or O3. These gases, being present in the earth's atmosphere, reflect back to the earth some of the sun's radiation that would otherwise bounce off into the universe. By this process, the overall temperature of our planet is within the range of ideal for our form of life and without it, the average temperature would be approximately 33°C colder. It is reasonable to say that an increase in any single GHG, without a reduction in any of the other greenhouse gases, could lead to an increase in temperature and, conversely, that significant decreases in said gases may lead to global cooling.

Of all the GHGs, except for water vapor, carbon dioxide has the largest value for radiative forcing at 1.46W/m2. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) defines radiative forcing as “... a measure of the influence a factor has in altering the balance of incoming and outgoing energy in the Earth-atmosphere system and is an index of the importance of the factor as a potential climate change mechanism. In this report radiative forcing values are for changes relative to pre-industrial conditions defined at 1750 and are expressed in watts per square meter (W/m2)." (Pachauri, and Reisinger) While the atmospheric concentrations of each greenhouse gas affects how much heat radiation is retained, levels of carbon dioxide make the most difference per unit. Therefore, if we want to minimize our potential affect on the world's climate, we will want to focus on our CO2 production. Stated in such fashion, this sounds like a simple and common-sense tactic to take. In Gregg Easterbrook's essay, “Some Convenient Truths”, simple and cheap are exactly how he wants his readers to see the issue of controlling global warming. This is not the case.

Carbon is the fifteenth most abundant element on Earth and ranks fourth in the entire universe. It is the basis of what we refer to as organic and life is dependent on its abundance and stability. Photosynthetic life requires carbon dioxide to convert water and sunlight into energy, and animals, including humans, are 18% carbon. We breathe it, eat it, cannot exist without it. These facts are only indirectly related to our issues with controlling our carbon emissions, though. It is a byproduct of this carbon-based system that we have come to rely on so heavily that may cause problems. Energy. Carbon's stability means that, as it has been converted into organic compounds by various flora and fauna, those compounds are converted under pressure and over time into an extremely concentrated source of energy. Humans have created a society that is precariously balanced atop that easy to get to yet limited supply of energy.

Easterbrook posits that “...action to prevent runaway global warming may prove cheap, practical, effective, and totally consistent with economic growth.” (506) He points to previous successes in curbing emissions that have been affordable and effective. The addition of catalytic converters for automobiles, chlorofluorocarbon regulations, and air-pollution reduction by power-plants have been efficacious with costs that the American public have hardly noticed. Easterbrook makes two assumptions based on this history. Firstly, because CO2 emissions have not been reduced, we have not tried to reduce them. Secondly, because solutions to other environmental problems were economical, future ones will be as well. It is a wonderfully optimistic essay but that doesn't make it true.

The Kyoto Protocol is the most widely known measure proposed to combat anthropogenic global warming. First adopted in 1997, 191 sovereign states have since ratified the treaty. The purpose of the Protocol was to reduce average GHG emissions by about 5% from 1990 levels by 2012, or about 20% below predicted values at that time. This would postpone the predicted temperature increase 3.5°C from 2100 C.E. To 2105 C.E., five years (Lomborg, 22). An estimate of the cost for these reductions ran $180 billion annually from 2008, assuming that the United States was participating (Lomborg, 24). The figure is lower without U.S . participation, but the benefits are, likewise, scaled down. Easterbrook's premise is damaged all in one go.

There have been talks about implementing an international cap-and-trade system that would affect carbon emissions for both industrialized nations as well as developing ones. Theoretically, such as system would benefit the rich countries by allowing them to purchase rights to produce more CO2 while profiting those nations whose emissions fall well below the limit. In reality, cap-and-trade profits only the industrialized nations who already posses the wealth created by the technology that also produces the pollution that they are buying the right to produce. The countries without the industrial infrastructure will be impeded by the desire to obtain easy finances that then can't be used to create manufacturing jobs because they no longer have the right to emit CO2 from their factories. When was this supposed to get simple?

Burning fossil-fuels is not the only way that we release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, of course. In third world countries, there are millions of people without the use of natural gas, coal, or nuclear energy to heat their homes or to cook their food. They use fuels like dung or blubber, but most often, wood. Wood is not so dense with carbon and, because of that, it is much less efficient. This inefficiency leads to another contributing factor to higher concentrations of atmospheric CO2; deforestation. Growing vegetation is the best carbon sink on the planet, so for every tree lost that is not replaced with a new one, more carbon dioxide is being left to float around. So this is where it does get simple. It is easy to plant trees. Trees grow for hundreds or thousands of years, sequestering carbon in all that time. Nearly free air cleaning.

So, perhaps to focus on smaller scale projects will help. Each individual's behavior can make an impact. When our personal finances were in jeopardy because of the high cost of petroleum, we made more efficient vehicles. That made a difference. We expect more responsible resources from our utility companies and from our home appliances. That makes a difference. If we continue to hold industry accountable for the pollution it produces, it will make a difference. But if the goal is to maintain carbon dioxide levels as they are or to reduce them to pre-industrial revolution levels by the year 2100, this is not near enough. 2100 C.E. is only 89 years away. We would have to convert to non-carbon based energy, entirely. Not even the most optimistic person in the world would suggest that we could have that sort of technology soon enough for such a deadline.

For as long as there is attainable fossil fuels to burn, people will use them. Industry and innovators may continue to make the process more and more efficient and governments and consumers should be ready to make such technological advances desirable through profitability. Science will certainly learn wonderfull new things about the universe in the future and perhaps we'll be able to use anti-matter to create energy or shrink nuclear reactors to fit in the palm of your hand. It is true indeed that any sufficiently advanced technology would be indistinguishable from magic, but we'll have to wait a very long time for our magicians.

Works Cited

Easterbrook, Gregg. "Some Convenient Truths." The Aims of Argument: A Text and Reader. Ed. Timothy W. Crusius, Carolyn E. Channell. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2009. Print.

Lomborg, Bjorn. Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2007. 22-24. Print.

Pachauri, R.K., and A. Reisinger. "Contribution of Working Groups I, II and III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change." ipcc.ch. IPCC, 2007. Web. 13 Feb 2011. .

Warning

I've decided to post the essays that I've written for my English 161 and 162 classes. I wrote them to get a grade, that's all, but I am proud of a couple of them. Others...well, they're passable. Still, I will post them all just to have something Out There.