W/O Power, Central Asia Residents Burn Dung For Heat As Coldest Winter In 30 Years Bites Down

DUSHANBE -- With no heating and just three hours of electricity a day, Malokhat Atayeva is struggling to survive the coldest winter in three decades in her small town in western Tajikistan. "It's so cold that water turns into ice in the kettle overnight," Atayeva, a mother of two, said by telephone from Tursunzade, as temperatures outside, normally above subzero, plunged to -20 degrees Celsius. "We sleep fully clothed, wrapped in blankets. Children stopped going to school because it's too cold in the classroom."

Like Atayeva, millions of people across energy-rich Central Asia are scrambling to find refuge from one of the harshest winters in living memory. Extreme cold is no surprise to the 60 million people scattered across a region wedged between Russia, China and Iran, but this year's winter has exposed the poor state of crumbling Soviet-era utilities and pipelines and sparked energy shortages.

Lying on some of the world's biggest energy reserves, Central Asia has attracted billions of dollars of foreign investment as the European Union and other powers seek energy deals in the region. But the cold snap caught impoverished Tajikistan off guard, forcing the government to resort to daily rations of electricity and gas. Central heating has all but stopped working across Tajikistan, its utilities ruined by a 1990s civil war.

Governments across Central Asia have pledged to carry out urgent repairs and build new electricity generators. But there were no signs of relief as the severe weather has entered a second month.

EDIT

http://www.canada.com/victoriatimescolonist/news/story.html?id=e642ba17-f93d-4725-991f-93872daa9c73

:toast:

The more dung is burned, the less organic matter is available for the farmers to use, and the lower your crop yields will be.

Gonna be a fun century.

Actually, it almost rains nitrogen now.

for fertilizer than to burn it.

And people wonder why our soils are so depleted..........I suspect most folks don't have a clue what role organic matter plays in agriculture.

Oy.

I used to know a guy who believed in vitalism - the belief that glycine from natural sources is different from glycine synthesized in a flask - because the glycine in the first case was made in a "natural" source.

This, of course, is nonsense.

In fact, "organic matter" plays an important role in agriculture because, um well, the existence of life is wholly dependent on the chemistry of carbon.

However, as has been shown in what used to be called the "green revolution" before the term "green" was co-opted by religious fundamentalists in Greenpeace who can't count, who can't read and who know absolutely zero about energy (or any other scientific concept).

It is a little known fact that the main reason that China agreed to truck with Nixon was that the "organic" way of life there was collapsing. It was immediately clear to anyone who was rational - and this would exclude the mass murderer Mao - that China could not feed itself by plowing dung into the cornfields.

In fact, the number of nations on the face of the earth who actually run this "dung" based fertilizer scheme without regular famines is zero.

The number of fundies who grasp this concept, in interestingly, also zero.

By the way, this post is in no way intended to make a statement that modern agriculture is sustainable. Even while anti-nuke fundies like the paid (off) car culture cretin at RMI blab endlessly about how to stuff our food into our gas tanks, there is significant evidence that the agricultural "bounty" of the "green revolution" - which took place mostly in the 1950's - is in going to last much longer. All one needs to do to understand this is to follow the numbers for nitrous oxide.

About the only thing that's lost by burning dung, in terms of nutrients, is nitrogen which is volatile when oxidized, usually as an oxide.

poor little tired fingers the trouble.

http://www.google.com/search?q=soil+organic+matter&rls=com.microsoft:en-us&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&startIndex=&startPage=1

Time for NNadir to do a little book larnin'.

Well done!
:toast:

I still say that babs is a freak of nature, not many babies come via the asshole as her number one son surely did.
:rofl: