I was thinking about how mercury from coal-fired power plants can exacerbate global warming in an indirect fashion. I read an article in the paper over the weekend, that stated that people would conserve a lot of fossil fuels if they just ate locally grown food, rather than say, buying a banana grown in South America. The article also noted that if people ate fish from local waters rather than seeking the tilapia from a far away region, that has to be shipped via jet, there would be less greenhouse gases emitted. Yet, when you live somewhere like Indiana, the fish is so full of mercury that fish from far away has to be the norm. How can you eat the fish when there are advisories stating that they are so full of mercury that they cannot be eaten in more than very small quantities? So we are left with the compounded effect of coal-fired power plants polluting our waterways and causing us to look for fish in unpolluted and often far-reaching parts of the earth--resulting in the use of more fossil fuels. Perhaps we need to re-think our fish consumption in general and start taking fish oil supplements for the health benefits. Yet, is this really the way it has to be? If there was less pollution in local waters, people probably would opt for the fresh fish grown nearby, rather than something that had to be caught in the Pacific and shipped in overnight. We may never know though, if we don't start cracking down more seriously on our mercury emissions.