What a view! Just take a look at the way mega-solar panels are planted all over the barren hillside with some houses built so close along its foot. In the recent months, natural calamities of all sorts have torn many a locality apart – notably floods, landslides, you name it.

You recall a number of landslides the past months tearing houses apart and claiming not a few buried alive. Admitting the house are often built too close by the hills and most of them not sturdy enough, some of the disasters should have been averted if the woodless hills behind those houses had retained what little natural strength left to withstand the heaviest of rainfalls.

Global warming is certainly a pressing issue and, wise as we claim to be, we Japanese should and must come up with some alternatives to procure sustainable energy. I don’t deny that solar photovoltaic power generation is one potential, yes, but not by merely planting panels over barren hillsides. Forgive a layman’s innocent quiz: Couldn’t our scientists invent a mechanism whereby a single ultra-powerful unit generates as much power as hundreds of that panel?

Nuclear power generation offers a hopeful source of sustainable source of energy. However, here in Japan survive a gang of politicians who insist on living in the shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and adamantly reject anything associated with atom.

Just to dampen healthy studies toward activating atom for power generation, they drum up movements instead to promote solar energy to the extent of scraping hillsides, depriving the birds and animals of their livelihood, and in the end causing landslides to bury many alive.

I have a delicious alternative in mind – yet healthier means of power generation that kills nobody, nor affects any livelihood: Kuroshio or the Japan current. Kuroshio is a powerful western boundary current like the Gulf Stream. It rises off the coast of Luzon, Philippines.

Kuroshio or Black Current creates eddies along the coastline of Japan with high kinetic energy that draws large volumes of water off the continental shelf on one side of the ring and add water to the other. Just a thought…a sheer layman’s daydream, perhaps, but who knows? A maritime nation Japan should be much better off living on oceanic tides and miserably scraped-off hillsides, wouldn’t you say?

—Sponsered Link—