Commentary of the daily news

Being on sick leave, which I currently am, has very few positives affiliated with it. One of them, however, is the fact that I have time to read the daily newspaper – Helsingin Sanomat in my case – in its entirety. That being the case, I decided I should have one post on what many blogs are all about: news commentary. I’ll skip the main news item (presidental election results) altogether, ’cause I’m sure people hear more than enough about that from elsewhere.

Of course, since we’re talking about a newspaper, none of the news part was really new. Newspapers have, for me at least, become sources of in-depth information, columns on varying topics and a source for an alternative point of view for news discovered online the previous day. Now all we need is for newspapers to realize their changed role and start tweaking the content to the right direction.

And nuclear power shall save us all..

On the very first page, europarliament member Lasse Lehtinen is calling for more nuclear power, pointing out correctly that nuclear energy is undergoing a renaissance. However, there are some weird ideas here – he’s saying it’s “unrealistic to imagine that the additional energy required by the european lifestyle could be produced by wind or by damming up more rivers”. Hydroelectric power from rivers is probably at or near capacity, that’s true. But wind? I’m sure it’s unrealistic if you don’t build any wind power plants but I don’t believe wind power’s potential can be dismissed quite that easily. What’s more, Lehtinen is saying that “If electricity is produced by other means than wind, water or nuclear, emissions will also increase.” which seems to imply that emissions are not increased when using nuclear power. He conveniently forgets to mention that production of nuclear fuel causes quite a bit of emissions..

Fireplaces screwing up the air quality

One would think that suburban areas like Lintuvaara in Espoo have a pretty good air quality, at least when you compare it to downtown Helsinki. It turns out that’s not quite the case, and the culprit are the citizenry with their “energy-saving” or “romantic” fireplaces. Thanks to people burning wood the air quality has occasionally been extremely bad in areas with few other pollutants.

Recently wood-pellet based heating for houses has become increasingly popular. Yet, particulate matter emissions from these are quite bad, not to mention burning wood is a significant source of carbon dioxide. I wonder how many people think it’s somehow an ecological choice to burn wood in the fireplace and thus save electricity – and fail to take into account that the pollution they’re creating in the process can very well be relatively worse than what they’re saving in electricity.

Another roof down, 66 dead

In Poland, the roof of an exhibition hall caved in on hundreds of people gathered at a pigeon fair. At least 66 people died and more than a hundred were injured. The cause is premilimarily thought to be heavy snow packed on the roof. Quite a few roof collapses have been happening in recent years, and I think t’s inexcusable that places are allowed to remain open when the structures are under more stress than they’ve been designed to take.

But what I’m even more worried about is that accidents like these are probably just going to become more and more common due to climate change – the increasingly extreme weather phenomena can bring lots of snow to places where they’re not used to it and where the buildings have not been designed to handle it.

Letters to the editor

This is always an interesting section and today was not an exception. Leena Mallat is writing well about relative moral values in the society and how they’re nowadays ingrained into both personal and corporate lives. While her writing is somewhat edgy, it’s refreshing to see that there are still people thinking like this.

At the other end of the spectrum is Anelma Järvenpää-Summanen who is complaining about developments relating to a phenomenon I have to admit I’m extremely skeptical of; electricity allergy. She brings out the point that when cellphones are likely soon going to be allowed on airplanes, “wireless technology is taking over even the rest of our time and space”. I’m not an expert here, but I’m pretty sure a commercial jet has quite a few stronger sources of electromagnetic radiation than cellphones.. Also, she says symptoms are often triggered by a “new cellphone” – which is curious as new cellphones tend to emit much less radiation than older ones..

Down with beer

I’ve never liked beer but do enjoy drinking wine, so the findings of a recent Danish study are just perfect: according to the study, those drinking wine eat more healthily than those who like beer. Some 3.5 million shopping carts were analyzed and it was found that those buying wine more often also bought fruits, vegetables, olives, chicken, vegetable oil and low-fat products – whereas those who preferred beer, bought more TV dinners, sugar, potato chips, butter, sausages, pork and soda. It makes sense on an intuitive level too: I’ve seen the combinations beer & sausage and wine & fruits being consumed at the same time countless times, but rarely do I see anyone downing chips and wine or beer and grapes.