MSNBC is always good for blog fodder.
Article #1: The best-kept secret to home-heating savings
Solar panels look bold on a rooftop, and a Toyota Prius looks hip in the driveway. Geothermal heating and cooling has none of that sex appeal, yet perhaps unlike the others, it can clearly save you money -- and a lot of it.
"The problem is that we don't have some big, fancy piece of equipment outside," says John Kelly, head of a Washington trade group for geothermal companies.
This is just too rich. You know there are people out there who are dying to go green, but only if it's ostentatious. You mean geothermal is the way to go, but my friends and neighbors won't be able to tell I'm doing anything? Nevermind. What a riot -- it's good for the environment, but they're having a hard time marketing to ecotards who only want solutions that shout "Look at me, I'm saving the planet!"
Article #2: Smoky bar triggered fatal asthma attack
The secondary title on this one was "First case of secondhand smoke causing an immediate death, study says." You know they couldn't wait to print this one. A girl goes to work in a bar and dies from an asthma attack. Smokers killed someone! Smokers killed someone!
But she wasn't exactly winning any Healthy Teen awards:
Rosenman said the woman had asthma since age 2. Her asthma was poorly controlled. She had made four visits to her doctor in the year before her death for flare-ups, and had been treated in a hospital emergency department two to three times that year.
Although she had prescriptions for an assortment of drugs to prevent and treat asthma attacks, she was reported to only use them when she was having breathing difficulty.
On the evening of her death, she had no inhaler with her.
Maybe the headline should instead read that secondhand smoke triggered a totally unnecessary death. It's a shame that she didn't take her life-long asthma seriously enough to be properly prepared for an attack. That's not smoke's fault; she could've walked by a lady with massive perfume overload and had the same result. And don't work in a smoky bar if you have asthma, for heaven's sake. Smoking is gross, but this hysterical secondhand smoke nonsense is too much for me. And now we have some study that says that a teen with asthma just walked into a bar and straight-up died because of the smoke in the air. What a boon that will be for the End Smoking Everywhere types.
Posted by Sarah at February 10, 2008 09:12 AM | TrackBackI did a post on the geothermal thing here.