What Should Be Measured? . wherefore the best means that I could imagine to wake him out of his trance was to cry loud in his ear ''Hough host! What''s to pay? Will no man look to the reckoning here?'' Thomas Nashe, The Unfortunate Traveller, 1594 In a boggy meadow a few paces to the side of a former logging road in West Virginia, a pipe assemblage crouched hissing. Bubbles rushed up from the pool from which rose one of its tubular columns; there was a reek of natural gas, and from the side of that pipe came a steady outrush of gas, comparable in force to the jet of compressed air from a motorized tire pump, which when I was alive could blow a penny across a parking lot. Since methane is a primary constituent of natural gas, I suspect there was methane in this petrochemical breeze that gushed so continually from the ground, the product of negligent waste. Until meeting the retired mining inspector Stanley Sturgill I used to believe that what I smelled in places such as this was methane, which actually bears no odor; the odor is crude oil.-In its first 20 years, methane, as you may recall, is at least 86 times more effective at trapping heat than carbon dioxide. The environmental activist who was guiding us here remarked that he had already informed the state Department of Environmental Protection of this gas rig''s ongoing crime. Of course nothing was done, here and for all I knew in thousands and millions of other sites.

Holding the pancake frisker directly in the gas jet, I took a one-minute timed count, and obtained a reading of 15 counts per minute, 0.06 microsieverts per hour-the lowest I had ever obtained in West Virginia, and indeed pretty close to the lowest possible measurement. Coal-fired power plants give off poisonous emissions, and some of them are even said to be radioactive-which my superficial measurements never found to be so. The air dose by the John E. Amos Power Plant in Nitro, West Virginia (this I measured by poking the frisker out the window of a moving vehicle, a procedure which should have increased the number of encountered particles), was a trifling 39 counts per minute, 0.12 micros per hour. (I did not dig in the ground or frisk anybody''s tomatoes.) In order to accurately inform you to what extent the four modes of resource extraction and utilization considered in Carbon Ideologies were or were not harmful, I would have needed to measure at least the following: carbon dioxide, methane, chlorinated fluorocarbons, aerial particulate sizes, concentrations and compositions; acidity, turbidity, conductivity and metal content of water, the latter subcategorized into selenium, cadmium, aluminum, etcetera; I also ought to have sampled the density of specific microorganisms, amphibians and crustaceans.

Accomplishing this was impossible for me, and I am sorry. At a manageable price I could indeed have bought a meter to monitor certain emissions such as carbon dioxide, but the salesman sadly explained that because those gases mix so instantaneously with air, a useful measurement could only have been obtained right up on the smokestack-from which I was fenced out by the so-called regulated community. That environmental activist in West Virginia (his name was Chad Cordell) had a device to sample water for pH and conductivity; maybe I should have bought one of those. But more often than not, I found myself in waterless places. So please consider the pancake frisker readings in the remainder of this book as placeholders for the measurements that I would have taken had I possessed more money and power. Perhaps it was just as well. My readings in the red zones scored sufficient drama in their way; and only one variable-radioactivity-needed to be considered. The manifold effects of fracking, coal-burning, oil refining and kindred operations augmented one other variable of yet more crucial interest: the warming of our planetary home.

Since I could frisk neither a smokestack nor a barrel of oil for greenhouse emissions, there was nothing for it but to let this book grow inchoate. I could hint at the villainous parts played by this heavy metal and that gas; there were so many villains! I could portray well-meaning ignorance, mercenary dishonesty and ruthlessness, indifference, useless heroism and sensible accommodation. Among the tales of coal and oil and natural gas I never heard of accidents comparable to the reactor failures at Fukushima. What then could my narratives be? Although they do not speak directly to climate change, I ask you to consider the preceding nuclear section as a concentrated relation of this book''s theme, which runs like this: Once upon a time there was something dangerous that could not be seen, felt, heard or smelled. ("Because it''s invisible . ," sighed my Japanese taxi drivers.) Making use of its associated fuel had been convenient, but terribly mistaken. The best plan would have been to get away from this nearly unknowable thing, but such a course of action appeared so utterly inconvenient that we preferred to continue on as before, which might entail killing our children.

Then again, maybe our children would be lucky enough to die from their own stupidity instead of ours. As The Wall Street Journal reminded us, I think by way of reassurance: It''s easy enough to drive out to the country and find somebody in overalls willing to blame the latest flood, drought, windstorm or six-legged pest outbreak on the increased carbon in the atmosphere. About Permissible Limits For every human presupposition and every enunciation has as much authority as another, unless reason shows the difference between them. Montaigne, "Apology for Raymond Sebond," 1575-80 Assuming that our generation had in fact been able and willing to measure, record and publicly share local and planetary levels of hydrofluorocarbons, nitrous oxides, carbon dioxide and all those other invisible analogues of radiocontamination, the next step, which would have been more contentious, must have been to establish legal ceilings for each, along with procedures for addressing violations. A few pages earlier I compared Japan''s and Ukraine''s statutory limits for cesium-137 in various foods. Their variability of categorizations, as in the case of milk, did not entirely obscure consistent ways of thinking. For example, the Ukrainian allowance for higher radioactivity in dried than in fresh foods presumably derived from a supposition that before consumption the dried items would get rehydrated in a significant bulk of (I hope less radioactive) liquid; therefore, one would ingest a smaller quantity of dried than fresh milk, even if the respective liquid volumes were the same. This is arguable, but plausible.

And although the Ukrainian allowance of 2,500 becquerels per kilo for dried berries did seem awfully lenient, in fact the two nations'' chains of reasoning ran somewhat parallel: AQ: "a few pages earlier" is in Vol. I. Recast? The Ministry of Health of Ukraine had set its standards based on the fact that the content of Cs-137 and Sr-90 in food and drinking water should respect the accepted boundaries of the annual effective exposure of 1 mSv. And the Japanese Ministry of the Environment had likewise said: To achieve further food safety and consumer confidence, Japan is planning to reduce [the] maximum permissible dose from 5 mSv/year to 1 mSv/year. Yes, permissible limits would inevitably be arbitrary, like speed limits, felony charges and rules of war, but that alone could not invalidate them, because the lack of limits was more perilous. And we needed to draft them for greenhouse gases. In addition to that annual per capita food radiation limit of 1 millisievert, we should have established annual per person emissions ceilings for, at the very least, the dozen most pernicious heat-trapping agents (doubtless you from the future have a longer retrospective wish list).-But that whatever those ceilings were, we would have hated them as infringements of our freedoms.

And so when I was alive we wasted years arguing about national and international carbon budgets. It was as if Japan and Ukraine had agreed to disagree as to whether they needed to safeguard their citizens against unregulated intake of cesium-137. AQ: Delete that? That was one reason we kept burning and selling coal when I was alive. COAL West Virginia, U.S.A. (2012-15) Kentucky, U.S.

A. (2015) Barapukuria, Phulbari and Dhaka, Bangladesh (2015) Overleaf: Roadside view of a West Virginia coal mine Coal Ideology Assertions UNIQUE OR INTRINSIC BENEFIT "The lowest cost, most dependable form of energy available." West Virginia Coal Association, 2013 "Coal is our most abundant fossil fuel source." George A. Olah, Alain Goeppert and G. K. Surya Prakash, 2009 "Our coal is a basic feedstock of our nation''s chemical industry ." West Virginia Coal Association, 2013 "Coal has also contributed to the steady, longterm progress achieved in reducing atmospheric pollutant levels, as well as other improvements.

" National Coal Association, 1993 "A secure domestic fuel, unaffected by the politics and instabilities of the Middle East." National Coal Association, 1993 "The energy density of coal is almost double that of firewood with otherwise similar properties." Rolf Peter Sieferle, 1982 "Renewable fuel sources . cannot do what coal does. They cannot power America 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, rain or s.