The unintended consequences of being green
Just asking:
Aren’t low-flow toilets so inefficient that you often have to flush an extra time or even extra times?
Aren’t energy-saving bulbs so annoyingly slow to get up to speed that people often leave them on all the time rather than wait for the light to brighten?
Doesn’t the recycling of bottles and cans and containers mean that a lot of water is wasted washing them out for the recycling bins?
And I’m always confused by the “paper or plastic” dilemma (not that they even ask anymore; it’s plastic all the way). All those long years they told us plastic in landfills was bad, but now protection of trees takes precedence? I know, I know; we’re supposed to bring our own cloth bags. But how many people do? And don’t most people buy many bags worth of groceries at a time? Are we supposed to carry a whole set of empty ones into the store?
[NOTE: notice that today I’m trying desperately to stay away from the topic of the Republican primaries. Just for today.]
All these “green” concerns are about rituals, not about substance. It is like bying indulgences for sins commited: not to undo the harm or prevent further transgressions, but just to feel good.
PFZ: Please check your primaries rhetoric at the desk; no exceptions.
**primaries free zone.
Sergey: yes, it seems to be about expiating guilt. It would be nice if it really helped cut down on waste, too, but so much of it doesn’t seem to.
The re-useable cloth bags rapidly get filled with nasty germs. The cost savings of not using disposable bags (that can be used by the shopper at home {poo pick-up}) will quickly be consumed by a small number of people get sick due to infection from putting fruit in a bag that previously held ground beef.
I made my own denim shopping bags years ago. You can just throw them in the laundry when you feel like the germ overload is too much. Feeling nicely self-righteous right about now.
We have a lamp that has a circular CFL light bulb that won’t light up unless it’s warm in the room. Sometimes I turn it on and hours later it finally lights up. It’s okay when the woodstove is roaring, but most times it’s a complete fail.
Jonah Goldberg commented on those reusable grocery bags here. Turns out they are not so green, or healthy:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/opinion/forum/2011-04-05-column05_ST_N.htm
Excerpt:
“A new study by the Environment Agency of England finds that those thin plastic bags have a smaller carbon footprint than reusable plastic or cotton satchels as well as disposable paper bags. According to ” Evidence: Life Cycle Assessment of Supermarket Carrier Bags,” you’d have to reuse a fashionable cotton bag at least 131 times to equal the low carbon footprint of a simple plastic bag. If you reuse a plastic bag – as a wastebasket liner perhaps – they pull even further away as the most green technology.
Also, as other studies have shown, those trendy reusable bags provide a wonderful breeding ground for E. coli and other bacteria. That is, unless you wash them regularly. But if you do that, as my American Enterprise Institute colleague Ken Green notes, all that bleach, soap and hot water expand their carbon footprint as well….”
You don’t even have to look at the unintended consequences to see that the worst thing for the environment has been – environmentalists.
Okay, I exaggerate, but only slightly. What’s not an exaggeration is the fact that every cent spent on so-called green activities, whether they work or not, comes at the expense of people. You don’t have to follow the causal chain too far to realize that, at the margins, people are impoverished (and even die) because of these poorly conceived activities.
What’s sad is that, to too many environmentalists, this is a feature, not a bug.
I have no problem being reasonable about the environment; I fix small appliances when I can to avoid throwing perfectly useful machines into a landfill. I don’t want to see waterways polluted with carcinogens and other synthetic material and I have no problem with a reasonable recycling rather that a disposable mentality.
Having said all that, however, IMO hard-core environmentalists are just another in a long succession of ideologically trammeled left-wing utopianists.
Time, money and efforts wasted on baseless rituals (like Sergey said) instead of finding out how to harness the power of the atom safely.
The enviros made me sick with their reaction to the Japanese catastrophe. They were over the moon with glee on this “proof” as to why all nuclear power plants had to be abolished. So what gives? Oil is geopolitically encumbered, coal is dirty, natural gas is peaking as well… What’s going to generate the juice in the coming years?
Wind and solar… yeah, right. Two technologies that would need a revolutionary breakthrough in harnessing them to make them deliver the cost-effective equivalent we get from oil, gas, coal and nuclear today. And they know it. When pressed hard enough, they even admit it, obliquely. Then they start blabbering about “reducing our footprint.” Carry on a little bit and the enviros always fall down to the bottom level, that of saying there are too many human beings on the planet and if you want sustainability something needs to be done about that. (Don’t expect them to lead by example, though.)
According to the second part of my favorite movie trilogy, in three years we’re supposed to power things up with an easily handled fusion generator. Alright, it’s just satire of futurism, and cars are still powered by gasoline in BTTF II despite the existence of Mr. Fusion, but still, it’s grating to think how life could offer some imitation of art if only the moneys were directed elsewhere than enviroscams.
I’m all for electric cars, even before peak oil, because of the geopolitical circumstances, but they won’t solve things by themselves. The electricity has to come from somewhere. (No, it doesn’t come from the wall. Not ultimately.) As far as abundance and geopolitical freedom go, only nuclear power is long-term viable–more so if we can find a way to generate energy from fusion instead of fission, thus enabling the tapping of the lighter elements, which happen to be the most abundant in the universe. The safety issues? No argument they exist. But as the environmentalist saboteurs of civilization have it, they shouldn’t be solved at all; the baby is to be thrown out with the bathwater.
Research grant money to nuclear power engineers, not for scams like global warming. Unless the unexpected happens with some other source (solar or some new invention), we need safe nuclear power plants. We need nuclear power plants, we just need to know how to make them absolutely resilient and fault-tolerant.
@ziontruth I’ve read some promising things about thorium salt nuclear reactors. Still, “nookleer” is a bad word to too many who don’t think past the sound bites they get fed by an ignorant or malicious media. Education is the key, but too many are content to remain ignorant.
The most urgent need to use disposable items comes from hygienic requirenments. Costs of washing and sterilization are formidable and still do not give any gurantee against the most dangerous bacteria and viruses. That is why in all modern hospitals almost everything is disposable.To some extent this is true for everyday houshold items. Bacteria are now on offense, and we are losing the battle. Our antibiotics do not work anymore, we have run out of possible targets for drug development, and no new antibacterial drug was put on market since 2003.
As Stephen Moore in the WSJ once put it: recycling, small-scale agriculture, local markets, no fossil fuels. Wonderful idea! It was called 1850.
I’m a conservationist and in some sense environmentalist both instinctively and on principle. But the question is what works. Never mind whether it gives you a warm feeling inside.
I faithfully rinse glass and plastic containers and put them in the right bins, pile up the newspapers in their bin along with other paper and broken-down cardboard containers, and put all three bins out at the curb every Thursday night. (Maybe every second or third Thursday for the glass and plastic, since we don’t have as much of those.) And every Thursday night I ask myself if I’m wasting my time, or worse. Among other things, I wonder if all that stuff isn’t just ending up in a landfill anyway.
I personally don’t really mind the slow startup of the CF lights, but I’ve read that there are serious concerns that they’re actually more of an environmental problem.
Tesh,
Being more abundant than uranium, and safer, thorium looks like getting to be the middle stage between (current) uranium reactors and hydrogen or lithium fusion reactors. I hope it won’t take long until humanity finds out how to safely generate energy the way God has done it with Sol, but any improvement in the meantime would be great. Anything but the enviromoonbats’ anti-civilization attitude and activities.
“Education is the key,…”
*sigh* So simple a statement, but what a challenge in it! Education in much of the developed world is in the hands of the very saboteurs of civilization and enemies of progress that got us into this mess in the first place.
The real problem is expressed so well by PJ O’Rourke:
“People are willing to do anything to save the planet, except take a science course.”
I would add my own addendum: “And they are not willing to even try and understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.”
Germany has a new climate skeptic. His book, Die Kalte Sonne, is making the news. Der Spiegel just posted the English version of his interview. It is timed perfectly with the pictures of frozen rivers I’ve been seeing on TV all week. And the Germans are even figuring that solar doesn’t work well in a land with little sun. Now if they would only get off the organic bandwagon.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,813814,00.html
@ziontruth The electricity has to come from somewhere.
Whenever this subject comes up, I trot out a comment that I read a couple of years ago during a PJ Media discussion (edited for readability and emphasis). Here it is, in full:
…according to Wolfram Alpha (search term: “usa total power consumed”), that number is now 3.86 terawatts.
You might want to look at Jevon’s paradox, just for fun. (The Wkipedia article on the paradox isn’t bad.) And then apply it to EPA-mandated improvements in gas mileage.
It isn’t a new idea, but it doesn’t seem to have reached our “mainstream” journalists.
I’ve never had a problem with CFLs, but then I live in Florida, and they generally come on quickly.
But then there’s the whole recycling thing with them. And heaven help you if one should break.
I think the answer to your first question depends on the amount of roughage in your diet. Even regular toilets need help sometimes.
As for concern about carbon footprints that lie at the heart of much of this, I’m maximizing mine along the lines portrayed in Larry Niven’s Fallen Angels. Fight the Snowball Earth!
Everything degrades the “environment” to some extent. Even recycling.
Regarding CFL disposal. No problem. It they are good enough for my house and family they are good enough for the landfill.
Another unintended consequence I’m sure.
Great stuff, davisbr. Being a computer programmer–a science-lover but not actually a scientist–I know the essentials but I’m no expert, so it’s really nice to have it put forth in professional, well-argued and math-supported form.
Definitely good of you to have saved the quote for future reference, and I’m going to do the same.
I R A Darth Aggie,
They work better in warm climates? So that’s why they don’t annoy me so much as they do other posters. I’d always wondered about that.
yes i notice all those things and a lot more. i also notice that its legal for the people that guide us into doing all that to buy stocks and such before they do so, and to curry favor with other nations who would benefit massively (on several levels) from such.
but i explained that material, you, has to be socially induced (using social engineering) to move your material into action for the benefit of those who lead. they are the brains you are the body. in order to disconnect your brain to make your body do what their brain tells it to necessitates lying, false advice, propaganda, and literally anything (as morals do not exist according to them)
its all in how the “argument for consumption” was constructed to justify, for some gain for the ends of the collective, and how we are normalized in not questioning too much (given how many years of feminism’s PC system). It just wasn’t politically correct to say that doesn’t work that way, your missing this, and so on, and let MERIT carry the day, since MERIT is the tool by which oppressors justify their position (according to them of course).
in the case of each of those what is missing is a complete picture of the thing being offered, and how it interacts with the rest of the world. (in case you didnt notice)
the point is to have an argument in isolation of the rest of the facts and influencing things an to negate using these things to make a negative conclusion, so the nice story is what is right to pick.
Common Problems with Low Flow Toilets
http://www.networx.com/article/common-problems-with-low-flow-toilets
The city said the push for efficient toilets has helped save 20 million gallons of water per year, but also left what the city euphemistically calls sludge backing up in the sewer system without enough water to flush it down.
Cui bono?
who benefits from public works? big companies, the state, unions, etc… who pays? the public…
the article then goes on why the problem isnt so much of a problem (but isnt gone) and now is like the other toilets (Where did they find these homes to ask that were out of compliance?).
but then…
Cui bono?
The city of San Francisco is dealing with its lack of flow with $100 million in system upgrades, and a controversial $14 million plan to pour bleach into the sewer system to neutralize the odor and disinfect the water.
no mention of how much money it would take to build a desalination plant for San Fran vs a whole new sewage system and bureaucracies.
Israel is now desalinating water at a cost of US$0.53 per cubic meter
Singapore is desalinating water for US$0.49 per cubic meter.
however, this mandate is in place even where water is abundant… its everywhere. so its a huge boost to public works and unions and all that NATIONALLY…
they sold the public on something that would damage the system and causes odor and desease under the auspices of saving water and doing something good for “the planet”.
but, like the link i put detailing how the soviets told the public one thing to get them to stop self aborting and have more kids and so on… for all these reasons… but on the other side of it was the socialists social planning realizing the demographic conclusion of continuing their no fault divorce, abortion on demand, etc…
see the parallel?
the need of the collective justified the story told to move material to the ends of said collective…
energy-saving bulbs…
heck.. the big light companies realized (like big pharma with generics) that there really was no way to stop commodity bulbs from third world competitors. but they DID have patents on CFLs… so Phillips, General Electric, Osram put their heads together (as they have been doing since a long time ago). and started pressuring government back in the early 80s when the bulbs were soon to start coming on line.
the politicos invested accordingly, and then mandated things. instantly india and their incandescent industry, russia and hers, and all that got a big jolt… but more interesting, china was courted as china has huge amounts of Mercury… (like the US has Huge amounts of nuclear material that its not allowed to use that could power it 500 years into the future and cheaply. that would be a unequal advantage for an oppressor nation with its wealth and everything being slowly transferred (redistributed) out). the Chinese saw money to be made, and the ability to deposit lots of developmental problem causing mercury in amounts that cant be cleaned up cheaply, as a good thing. (just as lead in children’s toys for the US was a good thing)
so again, big business and government people (fascism), doing the lets make money by creating economic history
ah… but then.. why is this sweet deal breaking down? Osram makes LEDS and one of the group is now positioned to dominate lighting by beating out CFLs… which is also why new incandescent (protected ip) which are almost as efficient will come out. and they are the same old environmentally cleaner ones…
same with each thing neo listed…
the paper and plastic thing is a problem since now they discovered bacteria in the ocean that eat it up like candy… (so much for the disaster game of directing the herd). paper is better and cheaper to recycle and has more uses… plastic is more sanitary… and the cloth bags carry diseases and insects and cat/dog dander, and so on.
so from that above, cui bono?
medical needs always tops the list on reasons that work to get more taxes and make more rules… no? in other places they are directly taxing the bags you want to promote the bags that allow us to bring our dirt from home through the meat and vegetables…
but that would not be an argument in isolation of the world and so on… would it?
just like abortion and social engineering outcomes and financial redistribution ability to cause fear or hardship, or ease of procreation… TOGETHER make eugenics programs picking those who will live more in the future and whose families will die out following their advice, or being their target and not being wealthy or connected enough to get around it…
cui bono?
on another level
you have to keep your thralls busy when they are not working for someone, or else they might compete with your children.. mustn’t let them get fully educated, just enough for them to work. cant let them have resources enough to raise themselves, use fairness and the greater numbers of the bottom against these trying to be king of the hill when you are. promote any deviancy, distraction, or false principal you can to any one who wants to believe, the more they believe the bs, the better you do…
i learned this and more from a teacher in a rural high school… a man who had a “banana theory”, having no relation to Born-Fréchet kernel theory
it was his own thing and he endeavored to teach about life besides his class purpose of electronics shop.
well… he said, he wants to help you. he thinks its great that kids get into all kinds of things… because he and his wife love bananas. he explained that if they were taking their hard earned cash and buying chrome parts for their car, they were not buying bananas. if they were out late and having sex, and so forth, they were not buying bananas. and so it goes, with many examples, and he said with all these people doing other things and spending their money on other things, the price of bananas goes down, and he and his wife can enjoy them more. The point he was driving home was not about bananas.
it was that the person that is professing to help you may have their own ulterior motive and benefit from doing so, and if they are not what they seem to be, you have no real way of knowing. not to mention that what they proffer as help might not actually be help, even if you enjoy it and think its a good time.
just a bit of food for thought…
the big light companies realized (like big pharma with generics) that there really was no way to stop commodity bulbs from third world competitors. but they DID have patents on CFLs… so Phillips, General Electric, Osram put their heads together (as they have been doing since a long time ago). and started pressuring government back in the early 80s when the bulbs were soon to start coming on line.
Art, any patent in force in the early 80s expired about a decade ago.
I would add my own addendum: “And they are not willing to even try and understand the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics.”
Physicsguy, just for fun ask an earnest liberal why we can’t just shine a bright light on solar panels when sunlight isn’t available/adequate.
Hilarity ensues.
I agree with Marine’s Mom. I made and sold canvas grocery bags over 20 years ago. Plain cotton can be washed vigorously. Some of mine are still in service after two decades.
The bags are one instance where the reusable meets the need better than the disposable. My bags never rip when full, and my shoulder-length handles are strong enough to tow your car.
But I tend to use plastic bags when shopping at the co-op, just to annoy the hippies.
Mathematically, recycling of inorganic matter plastic and glass works like buildup and decays equations. Eventually, the process reaches equilibrium and there is no longer any point in recycling. What comes into the system is account for by what goes out.
Oh hell, go look it up.
Sergey’s right about the indulgence aspect.
In the 70s California had a multiyear drought. Overwrought Berkeleyites used to carry about paper cups so that if they should drink from a drinking fountain not a drop would fall from their lips. Seriously.
And, of course, they didn’t/don’t like anyone mocking their faith. During one leftist auto de fe, this one regarding fishing nets and dolphins, an “activist” actually came into the lab and, bellowing, challenged us, “Would you kill Flipper for a tuna sandwich?”
I replied, “Not on porpoise.”
He didn’t think that that was very funny.
The fact is, the earth is one big recycling/composting machine. Yet we fear everything we make that comes from the earth will somehow overwhelm it. How stupid is that?
Just remember, with environmentalist scientism, the outcome is always: Damned if you do, Damned if you don’t.
My problem with so-called environmentalists is the lack of proportion, logic, and common sense. No one wants polluted waterways, polluted air, or polluted soil. No one wants to ‘murder’ the last snail darter. But, for example, when we as a society spend billions per each theoretical life ‘saved’ to cut the level of arsenic discharged into the air or the waterways we have reduced the topic of environmentalism to an utter absurdity.
BTW, if environmentalists were serious, instead of being watermelons, they would be promoting this: http://tinyurl.com/25mgqkd
Our waterless urinals at work are a disaster. They smell, unless thousands of dollars worth of blue chemical are poured in them annually to keep them from smelling. As are the efficiency water faucets which spray everywhere and hurt your hands.
No one wants to ‘murder’ the last snail darter.
Ahem.
” I know, I know; we’re supposed to bring our own cloth bags. But how many people do?
Yes, not many.
And don’t most people buy many bags worth of groceries at a time?
Yes, mostly.
Are we supposed to carry a whole set of empty ones into the store? “
Yup. Here in Calif. a new ‘assessment’ is getting ready to kick in…if you don’t supply your own germ laden cloth bags, they charge you .25 cents per bag…which will in time surely rise in price.
“Never underestimate the power of human stupidity, it’s infinite.”
Occam’s Beard
any patent in force in the early 80s expired about a decade ago.
true… but along the way there were more patents and cross licenses for improvements. not to mention trade secrets of the proportions of gases. the larger point is that there was nothing in incandescent’s but for a while there was a something in CFLs.
given the numbers big money was and is made. and especially more when a large portion of the selling price of the bulb is prepaid by tax dollars (and i think exceeds the cost of production, though i am not sure).
Mac
do you think you can handle the REAL answer?
well… what works is capitalism…
(the dumping by large companies was not capitalism as they were in cahoots with the state, which is corporatism, otherwise known as fascism)
you can go online and you can ask Google for the most polluted places on the planet and you will see that the list is almost all Russia and China…
and here is why and what the left lords of pc dont tell you.
Clean and all that is a luxury
(and certainly not a right)
note that the left desires there be no such thing as luxury, pets, differences, etc..
but let me make my case…
you see… when your lower down on the survival list, you do not give a flying HOOT whether your camp fire is going to do harm to the bird species in the area over the next thousand years. you kill the bird start another fire and procreate so that your children one day will have a better life. unlike the neighbor…
so the whole idea of wanting to do something right for the world is a LUXURY. it means your needs are met and that you now want to help meet the needs of others.
and being able to pay more for something that is made in a less efficient way, but greener or hand made, etc.. is a LUXURY
this is the truth no one i have yet read (but that dont mean much given the size of the world), has pointed out.
now, there is another uncomfortable truth that i must let you in on. there is no way to hurt the earth or environment or any of that.
ESPECIALLY if progress is not held back by those PROmoting reGRESSIVE policies.
the idea of pollution is erroneous. pollution is a short term issue of current living. in a shorter time than they claim, reality claims back the matter that is left around untended.
we hear these arguments of hundreds of years of garbage.. a thousand years… how much Greek and Roman trash do we deal with?
they tell disaster stories about garbage, but in another place you can watch a documentary on the destruction death and disappearance of man and that it takes less than 30 to 50 years before large cities are being inundated and are falling apart not maintained.
what i wouldnt give to know where 300 year old garbage is.
also… very soon it will be cheaper to mine and separate metals and materials from prior dumps.
AND technically if energy was 1/100th the cost of what it is now (due to more nuclear power plants), one could use plasma to separate molecules in bulk. there are a few test facilities for special purposes…
the matter we have is made from the same matter the Romans had… or the Egyptians had…
in fact, the truth is that its impossible to make any object that would last..
the ONLY things we WILL run out of are LUXURY materials.. (in truth that would at least make an alien visit plausible. they come for our boomerangs, yo yos, and gew gaws, and odd limited materials).
eventually most jewel mines will be tapped like the ruby mines of India, and other places.
but then we may be mining jewels from other planets if some idiot doesn’t sell us on the notion of leaving the universe untouched and unlittered.
there is also a tendency of nature to neutralize things over time as anything active either reacts with something, or is food for something.
capitalism and creative destruction which confounds planners who want to control things and decide who gets what part apportioned to whom is how you get greener.
but mandated laws are not how its done either, nor fascist/corporatist control. that’s just part of the problem as with the power to inhibit comes the presumption of the power of permission. this made more so if the crux of the force against such is under the control of the planner.
what would be required was an honest press who would go out and report things… and would do so without having to charge stuff up. in truth the worlds stuff has enough punch, they punch stuff up because they have a much more limited palette of points to choose from that they share between them.
wasting capital in debt and putting the break on society favors despotic and upper class. its why few societies did well under rule, and only for short whiles depending on the person.
do you really think that if we werent wasting capital on paying people to be more sedentry and have schools that actually taught, and merit (damn be the unequal outcome), and so on and so forth…
We would be in space?
We would be finding ways of living underwater?
and so on?
why are we trying to store nuclear waste for 5000 years when we are supposed to be at the dawn of regular space flight? wont 100 years be enough to lower the cost of uplifting unsafe trash and send it to the sun?
one of the interesting things after the early messy days of nano technology will be nano technology that more cleanly assembles other nano technology.
now we are making things in messy ways, but not to long in the future we will make tiny robots that at the very least can just be used to assemble molecules in ways to control properties of materials. their brains not even in their bodies… way way way before any kind that wanders our environment and does cleaning.
today you can buy the not so great roomba
but what do you think could be made in 100 years if we are not halted and crippled?
when my grandfather was born, cars were but a curiosity. by the time he was a young man they were common. by midlife they were modern in ways that some of them are still being driven. by the time he died, firebird trans am was popular. in my life? i lived and watched the transition from paper and children’s games to tablets and games on computer dominating activities for a huge portion of us.
the left has never had much vision in any principaled real way. the best they have invented are disasters and such. but as far as seeing ahead and thinking about the kinds of things that would be around that could be around. from the luddites who saw the loom being a problem… to the malthusians who saw we would run out of food never ever being able to fathom the amount of food we can grow on one acre given modern methods. or that huge swaths of desert are farmed.
i am usually pretty down on political control freaks and their stuntifying games…
but i am actually pretty up on man as a whole and that if not halted he will continue to evolve, and the best will win out in the long run as any inverting pressure is temporary at best. nothing lasts and thats everything.
we have gone a huge way in only 100 years…
and that rate is faster and faster
there is a whole space full of space and a huge quantity of materials out there to use.
and to think of saving it is inane for on the scale of the universe, even our sun would not be here permanently and if we did not leave the solar system (given living to then in some way), we would not be living anywhere.
and if we didnt contaminate other planets with life from here, by the time the sun grows big and melts the whole planet to slag…
we wont live there either…
Seattle has just become a plastic bag free zone. The libs are so happy about it. If you want paper, it costs 10 cents a bag or some such. Paper is recyclable as are plastic bags. The whole thing makes no sense but little that the watermelons do makes sense.
“Ahem.”
Noun 1. ahem – the utterance of a sound similar to clearing the throat; intended to get attention, express hesitancy, fill a pause, hide embarrassment, warn a friend, etc.
Ah, so we have identified a conspirator plotting to assassinate a rare, small fish inhabiting the waterways of Eastern Tennessee. Eric Holder is monitoring this blog and a drone will shortly be hovering over your domicile.
It is the small scale version of the critique of centrally planned economies. ‘Planners’ don’t have enough information feedback to make better choices than the public and/or groups do via their independent actions.
Throw in that our would be planners are know it all progressive types… ahem… how could it be expected to go right that often.
Snail darter sushi … mmmmmm. The only thing better is delta smelt sushi.
Eric Holder is monitoring this blog and a drone will shortly be hovering over your domicile.
Well, that explains why he didn’t read any of the correspondence regarding Fast and Furious.
It also explains the ATC snarl over my house …
ziontruth Says:
“The enviros made me sick with their reaction to the Japanese catastrophe.”
Which in turn bothered me because part of the problem was the spent rods being stored at the reactors… which they make many US plants do by standing in the way of opening a permanent place to store it here.
But to be fair; it also showed those designs were not as safe as many of us thought. Out in California (re: earthquake on the coast land) I wouldn’t mind seeing these types of plants replaced with newer designs….
Re endangered species, my politically incorrect view (hence the drones circling overhead here) distinguishes between species that would be doing fine but for us and those that were on the ropes totally independent of us.
For the former, I entirely agree we should take steps to mitigate their peril.
For the latter, in my view, a gentle nudge into the abyss is no biggie. They were on their way to oblivion anyway. Once they’re below a sustainable breeding population, their next stop is a footnote in Origin of Species.
The earth, you see, is a victim, but especially in those countries where unsustainable fossil energy use has led to pollution, deforestation, species extinction, and, worst of all, happiness.
Why do they ask “paper of plastic”? Baggers can’t be choosers.
Along the same lines as ziontruth and some of the other commenters, it has lately begun to seem to me that wind farms may achieve what might be called “pyrrhic renewability,” meaning that they would actually be worse for the environment than some kinds of “non-renewable” generating technology, especially nuclear. (I get the term “pyrrhic renewability” by analogy with Jerry Pournelle’s complaint, many years ago, about the “pyrrhic reusability” of the Space Shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, meaning that it cost more to retrieve them, clean them, refill them with fuel, and reassemble them than it would to make them for a single use and let them sink into the ocean after they were released from the external fuel tank.)
For example, it obviously would take about 143 wind turbines of 7 MW each (the size mentioned in davisbr’s quote) to replace a 1000-MW nuclear plant if the turbines had full output all the time. However, since the wind only rarely blows hard enough for full output, planning for wind farms usually assumes one third of peak output, so it would take about 430 turbines to replace a nuclear plant. Now you can see very easily that the only way to keep the wind from blowing over the turbines is to anchor them with huge concrete foundation slabs weighing many tons. I don’t have exact numbers, but it seems obvious that it would take much more concrete (with the attendant carbon footprint of huge fossil fuel consumption to make the cement, plus transport, mixing, and pouring) to make 430 turbine foundation slabs than to make the containment vessel, the foundation slab, and all the rest of the concrete in a nuclear plant.
Now consider the carbon footprints of making not only the towers for the turbines (which I believe are still mostly made of steel, although I have seen discussions of making them out of carbon-fiber composites, which also take a lot of fuel to make), but also the steel towers for the hundreds of miles of high-voltage transmission lines needed to carry the electricity from the wind farms in sparsely populated, windy areas (like western Kansas and other areas of the Great Plains) to the cities where it would be used. (A propos covering Rhode Island or Delaware with solar cells, twenty-five or thirty years ago someone published an article in Science in which they calculated the environmental impact of smelting enough steel to make frames and supports for putting several thousand square miles of solar cells into the sunny deserts of the Southwest. Unsurprisingly, they concluded that this was not a good idea.)
I could go on, but I hesitate to fill up more space in Neo-neocon’s comments. For anyone interested in seeing more, this kind of thing is a very small part of what I am hoping to put into a blog of my own that I am hoping to start in a few weeks, probably on Blogspot, because I doubt if I will be able to afford a service that charges for hosting a blog. It is going to be called “Viability Blog,” because, for reasons that will take a lot of explaining, I have come up with a special meaning for the word “viability” in dealing with the survival of the United States and related issues. I hope a lot of you will have a look, and I thank Neo-neocon not only for the opportunity that today’s post offered for me to make this comment, but for many years of interesting and enlightening previous posts for which I have never commented.
Environmentalists ordered all of Cali’s garbage dumps be rehauled when I was a kid– made it so that all the recycling that didn’t take a lot of energy didn’t happen. (People would leave stuff that they were going to throw away but thought someone would want in an area of the dump, and hunting for treasures at the dump was one of the great fun things. Heck, kids would even go out and gather recyclables as fund-raisers. Can’t have people fixing up old furniture and such, much better that they drive two hundred miles and buy something new.)
Neo: Wow! You really stirred up the peasants! I enjoyed, appreciated your blog, because it somehow suggested the damage ignorant do-goodest behavior has left us with. After reading the numerous responses, all I can say is YES! Actual events are more important than warm fuzzy wishes.
“… their next stop is a footnote in Origin of Species.”
Life on the planet is indestructible for as long as the sun provides the energy necessary to sustain life. In the long run it matters not what we, as a species, do or do not do. The record indicates that there have been massive extinction events, but life still goes on and eventually diversifies creating ecologies that rise and fall.
To quote a cheesy pop song: “We are but dust in the wind.” Monogamous heterosexual couples, homosexual couples, polygamous or polyandry arrangements aside; life goes on. 😉
Roy L., I love it, especially given an Irish accent to the term beggers which would come out baggers much like them “fackin” greenies.
I find it amazing that those little CF bulbs, complete with mercury, are totally acceptable to the “Greenies”.
If Big business would have singularly thought up the idea of eliminating the incandescent bulb the eviro’s would have been apoplectic in extremis.
“Yes” is the answer to all your questions, Neo. I find the low flush toilets especially irritating and stupid.
I know an Upper West Side Jewish lady who always votes Democrat who rides back and forth to California in a private jet but feels very environmentally sensitive because she uses washable cloth napkins instead of paper ones for everyday meals.
Oh…and what’s the carbon footprint of manufacturing a Prius versus just driving an old car that consumes more gasoline.
I drive a 1999 Camry, a 1983 Mercedes Benz 380SL (my favorite toy), and an 1987 Mercedes Benz SEL420. They all run great, especially the Camry which has 220K miles on it.
I recently attended a “Sound of Music” sing along. When the Van Trapps were pushing the car out of their estate and down the road to escape the Nazis, someone in the audience shouted out “It must be a Prius!”
texexec,
I once did the calculation a few years back for a course I was teaching. The biggest impact comes from the battery manufacturing process, which if I recall involves: mining in Canada, transport by rail to St L. seaway, freighter to Britain or Germany for refining, freighter again to Japan for final battery assembly. Add to that the $5-10k replacement of said batteries after 7-10 years.
I have to give Toyota credit for marketing genius. They really tapped into the guilt/”make me feel good” mentality of a lot of people. “A fool and his money are soon parted.”
I had a friend who was doing a complete remodel on his house including both bathrooms. He said he was going to make sure to use only environmentally sound materials and fixtures which of course meant low flow toilets. I asked him how much these tiny toilets would cost and he replied proudly “$1000 a piece”. “Wow”, I said, “That’s pretty steep”. But it was worth it he told me because in the long run he would save so much money on his water bill. A few months later I ran into my friend and asked him how his remodel went. “Oh fine” he said. “But there’s something I can’t figure out”. He said the low flow toilets would have to be flushed 2 or 3 times to get everything to go down. I asked him if the plumber changed the pitch and diameter of the drain pipe leading away from the toilet to the main pipe. He looked at me as if I’d asked him where the universe came from. He said no that they hadn’t changed any plumbing it was all in good shape, and what would that have to do with it. So I explained that what really makes a low flow toilet work is the steeper pitch and larger diameter of the pipe which allowed less water to move more waste because of gravity not necessarily the design of the toilet, I said if you increase the pitch enough and the diameter you could use just about any cheap toilet and put plastic milk bottles full of water in the tank to decrease the volume of water in the tank and as a result restrict the flow to less than half of normal. Now he looked at me as if I’d just told him where the universe came from. He asked me why I hadn’t informed him of this sooner. Hey, I always leave this stuff up to the experts, I’ll see ya around, and I departed.
oh… and if you disagree with the feminists pc green and all that left stuff… well you either have a low iq (see monbiot and his reference to a horridly done study)…
AND…
in the tradition of communism to use the medical community to come up wiht experiments on children to improve outcomes in interventions (like that german guy mengele tried)… and if that dont work, make deviency from collectivism truly an incurable medical condition whose treatments and responsed ruin the lives of these people while pretending to help them
a la the banana theory..
Welcome to the O.D.D. People Club
“Oppositional Defiance Disorder. A wonderful new disease. Now, if you oppose eauthority figures for philosophical reasons, and will not compromise your standards, you are mentally ill. If you oppose certain government programs, such as TSA sexual assaults in airports, the USA Patriot’s Act, TARP, HARP, or Obamacare, you are mentally ill. If you support a full return of your 2nd Amendment rights, you are mentally ill. If Janet Reno considers you a possible terrorist threat (such as a member of the NRA, a returning Iraq War vet, pro life supporter, Libertarian, TEA Party member, or have a ‘Don’t Tread On Me’ bumper sticker), it’s because you are mentally ill. ”
http://www.ncc-1776.org/tle2012/tle656-20120205-03.html
adorno and the authoritarian personality never quite worked right other than among ideologues, but scientific sociaism (communism), must not on mediate and adjust the realituy around us, but also must adjust our minds and what we think to coordinate that to their administrated reality to.
isnt it nice we now fulfill the quote from the commnists that one day, we will wake up and find we are communist and not know how it happened?
after all, we would forget that the founders said that the constitution is only fit of a moral and good peoples…
and that a famous french economist travelling pointed out, that america is wealthy because it is good… and when it ceases to be so..
and that stalin and others pointed out how america is like a healthy body with its morals it ethics and so on…
so they made us sick
now the psychologists who have signed on to make deviancy ok… are now going to make what was ok, deviant..
hey… another inversion..
Davisbr
Given that Delaware is the second smallest state in the country- all of 2,490 square miles in a country of 3.6 million square miles- that is not exactly an argument against wind energy. The Great Plains from Texas to Canda
From the National Academies Press [2007]:Environmental Impacts of Wind-Energy Projects: Bird Deaths in Context p 71-72:
Yes, birds get killed by wind turbines, but the number of birds killed by wind turbines is minuscule compared to all man-influenced bird deaths.
Dispersal of wind energy over wide areas will help ameliorate that issue: when the wind is not blowing in A it can be blowing in B.
While hydro-storage would appear to be the most energy efficient way of storing energy, it is not feasible in the flat and dry Great Plains, the area of greatest wind energy potential. From what I have read, energy storage in batteries, which would be used in the Great Plains, results in a loss of about 50% of energy generated.
No argument from this corner. Before Three Mile Island, I wrote a paper for an engineering class on the future of nuclear energy. Most of my fellow students predicted a rosy future for nuclear energy. I correctly predicted that nuclear energy would not increase that much from the mid 1970s for two reasons: 1) some safety problems with nuclear energy (somewhat borne out by Three Mile Island- but that appears to have been caused by user-unfriendly control systems) and 2) Environmentalists’ agitating against nuclear energy.
It would appear that some 3 decades later, #2 is a much bigger reason than #1 for the stagnation of nuclear energy in this country.
I am in favor of not using more natural resources than you need, of cleaning up after yourself–pack it in pack it out, and of doing a modest amount of recycling.
However, I regard this “green” movement as largely a very calculated and bold pseudo-science driven scam and Crusade by the Left and various elites, the UN and NGOs, pseudo-scientists and technocrats, “movers and shakers”–Al Gore and George Soros come to mind–seeking power, control, and spectacular profits, not to mention many “recycled” Communists who–after the fall of the Soviet Union–were “transformed” and reemerged as “environmentalists.”
An environmental Crusade designed to sound very “scientific” and “high minded,” “aware,” “concerned,” and “caring,” an artificially created planet-wide hysteria, an “Emergency” and “Crisis” designed to short circuit debate and any detailed scrutiny, to quickly rush drastic measures into place that are, in reality, designed to deprive us of our ability to direct our lives and make our own decisions, not to mention raiding our and our nation’s bank accounts. All so that those behind and running the “green movement” can attain the power, control, and wealth that they could not otherwise attain, a crusade that, as well, is designed to “de-industrialize the West” as President Obama’s “Science Czar, Dr. Holdren has advocated, and to redistribute our wealth–with these “scientists,” and technocrats, movers and shakers, green movement leaders, the UN and other NGOs and elites in charge of that redistribution–to the Third World in the name of “economic and social justice.”
What else was the whole “Global Warming” scam and its associated legislative regime of “cap and trade” but an audacious and brazen attempt to apply this scam to our entire world? When you come right down to it, it was an attempt to ultimately control every aspect of our lives by controlling, constraining, and rationing our access to and the cost of energy, water, and other limited natural resources, their allocation, and their use, under the guise of reducing supposedly harmful, environment wrecking, CO2 emissions and other ”Greenhouse Gasses,” that are the product of modern civilization.
P.S. England’s Royal Observatory–in the past one of the centers cheer-leading for Global Warming hysteria and disseminating the pseudo-scientific and “cooked” measurements supposedly attesting to “Global Warming”–last week quietly released measurements from 30,000 world-wide temperature monitoring stations that show that, not only had there not been any appreciable increase in world temperature over the last dozen years or so, but that world temperature was flat, or had even started to cool somewhat over this time period.
This is the same crowd that believes–and would have us believe and act accordingly–that a dog is a dolphin, is a rabbit, is a child, for God’s sake.
The same crowd that told us–along with Al Gore, the UN, and its supposed “scientific consensus” as written up in their IPCC Reports–that the ice and snow fields covering the Himalayas had drastically decreased due to, and as a major sign of “Global Warming,” and that this snow and ice–an absolutely essential source of irrigation water for India and the entire subcontinent–would evaporate entirely in the next decade or so, inevitably leading to tens of millions starving, and a world class catastrophe.
P.S. the current “Nature” has an article about how current measurements of this snow and ice cover measured by new, low level orbiting satellites shows no diminution of these snow and ice fields has occurred in the last ten years.
These are the same bunch of environmental “scientists” whose emails demonstrated a pattern of deliberately falsifying results, deleting or withholding embarrassing data, blocking questions about and scientific inquiries attempting to get data to confirm their measurements, calculations, and conclusions, and attempts to blackball and wreck the careers of those scientists who questioned them or disagreed with them.
These is the same movement which pushed for the replacement of incandescent bulbs by more expensive mercury containing bulbs that shed less, and less pleasing light, and which are a major contamination and health problem that requires extremely expensive–in the thousands of dollars per incident in “remediation” costs –if even one of these light bulbs shatters. A forced replacement that shuttered the last American plant making incandescent bulbs, and drove production of new mercury containing bulbs to the PRC.
These are the “green” dictators who reportedly have now managed to get EU laws/regulations in place that force the households in the UK to each maintain up to five different electronically monitored trash containers, with legal penalties if they don’t put the proper item in the correct recycle container.
Oh yeah–these “environmentally aware” and “concerned” members of the green movement, these supposedly objective environmental ”scientists,” the UN and NGOs , Al Gore and Co.–they’re really out to save us and the planet all right.
Every time I am required to flush my toilet twice I think of our invaluable representatives in congress and the invaluable service they provide. I won’t go into detail, but you can use your imagination.
Someone should craft a bumper sticker “flushing twice reminds me of congress”!
LOW WATER USE TOILET OPERATION
1. Flush toilet.
2. take dump.
3. flush toilet and feces.
4. use force cup to make feces flush.
5. wipe butt with minimal toilet paper products.
6. flush toilet with wipe paper.
7. use force cup to make wipe paper flush.
8. flush toilet again to make small and large pieces of up chuck brought back up by force cup.
9. take mop and mop excess water that spills on floor from force cup.
10. clean feces and wipe paper from force cup.
Then you can Walk away feeling smug, righteous and proud to have saved the environment and the world for the children of the future.
@hep-t
TMI dude. TMI.
My favorite greenie is Sheryl Crow….she of the one square of toilet paper fame. Whenever I see her name I think of her using one square of toilet paper to wipe her butt.
Go, Sheryl ! ! ! You and your butt represent the green movement. That’s entertainment.
That’s just nasty. And hilarious.
The econuts always leave mining, manufacturing, and transportation out of their equations, which is absurd. I’ve always been a conservationist and an animal lover, but these guys are up to something else: as you all have noted, they’re motivated more by loathing of their fellow humans and/or the desire to exercise power over them.
Some of them, of course, are just hyper-emotional and “ign’ant.”
Under: “Can’t Make This Stuff Up”…
As a longtime Producers Guild of America(PGA)member, I’ve had the morbid opportunity to watch that organization join in lock-step PC-Loony in recent years. Each week in the PGA Newsletter there now appears(in shades of green, of course)we are now treated to: GREEN Tip of the Week..! Here’s the vastly useful tip for the current week: “Please turn in all used DVDs of the studio screeners sent to members for Awards screening consideration…blah-blah-blah.” I KID you not. Sometimes–Gasp–we get advice like: Turn off production equipment not in use!! The Guild has a Green Committee, natch.
Don’t get me started on their Diversity Committee. Let’s see…My start in a major studio mailroom 40-years ago was populated by 4-WASPs–me among them–3-Blacks(one of whom was a hilarious Flaming Queen named Miss Harold)3-Jews(one Gay)1-Gay Italian and one often Drunk Midget named Jimmy. VASTLY diverse and 40-danged years ago. But, there’s my 2012 Guild giving pointers on diversity hiring!!!! ALLLiiiicccceeeeeeee…Stuck in a time warped Bunny Hole,’Yo.
The suggestion by Cheryl Crowe that we save the environment by all wearing some sort of long-sleeved garment with a large washable cloth buttoned on the cuff, that could be used to wipe our mouths after we eat, (and if we really want to “save the environment” in a big way, I presume our asses too) illustrates with crystal clarity just why you should never listen to any usually un- or badly educated, sex, drug and alcohol addled, reflexively Leftist “entertainer,” when they step outside of their field of expertise, and advises us–no doubt to them, from their position as “entertainers” of exalted vision and enlightenment–cretinous peasants on how we should think, behave, and run our lives, or on politics or science, national defense or the economy.