That Morning Cuppa…
Near Portage - on the bank of the Wisconsin River, a huge coal fired power plant incinerated a chunk of the planet’s bio-heritage this morning and spewed an almost equivalent mass of CO and CO2 into the atmosphere from a stack so high that the gases are sure to carry downwind to Detroit. A marvelous byproduct - the nitrous oxide emission - presently goes off into the air to lend jollity to life of the locals a short way downwind. The Laughing Cows of Columbia County are legend in the world of cheese making. The Tavern League of Wisconsin naturally opposes the free dispersal of these gaseous intoxicants in areas where their members sell booze. This adds just one more complicating factor to the lives of those whose business it is to find sites for generation and transmission facilities in this age of eco-freakism and wimpy concern regarding carcinogenic effects. Why pay good money for a brewski if you can get loaded just sitting in the nitrous shadow of the power plant’s stacks? The stack is otherwise clean, the ash contained, no particulate matter in the air and few sulfur compounds and the like to further contribute to acid rain, merely several cubic feet of oxygen bonded now with carbon and thus more useful to green plants than to mammals, and that delicious nitrous cocktail.
The heat of the combustion created steam that helped to turn a dynamo, that pushed electric power into copper wires. While some of the electricity dissipated on the trip south, enough arrived here at Lalor Road to power my microwave for a minute to reheat a cup of yesterday’s coffee. Thus ends forever the last trace of life from some dimly understood paleozoic jungle - some early bugs, an amphibian or two, a large wad of ferns compressed, reduced to their essential carbon over the last 300 million years, now fly ash and warm coffee.
