Category: Eco-Crap

Utter Stupidity

Eco-Crap, Gummint

From the Golden Shower State comes this latest foolishness:

Despite the fact that natural gas is the cleanest of the fossil fuels hands down (and now the cheapest), liberals continue to oppose it. The “keep it in the ground” folks scored another victory this week when the city of San Jose California voted to ban natural gas lines and appliances in all new construction projects going forward. This is allegedly part of the state-mandated goal of going 100% “carbon-free” by 2045. Of course, as with all things, the devil is in the details.

Here’s the math which these fools are ignoring;

So now, all of the appliances, including furnaces, stoves, water heaters and all the rest, will be electric. And the buildings will have electric outlets where people charge their vehicles. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that a considerable increase in the load on the electrical grid is coming. And where does California get their electricity? More than half of it comes from… wait for it… natural gas-fired plants.
To get rid of the natural gas plants when you’ve already banned coal plants, you’ve only got a few choices. Hydro is good, but California isn’t exactly brimming with water. (They get about 12% of their energy from hydro and they’re nearly maxed out.) Nuclear would be perfect, but they’re phasing that out too. (That’s another 9% they’re getting ready to lose.) That pretty much leaves them with solar and wind, which accounts for roughly 24% of their current power generation. Do you really think you can go from there to 100% in a decade or two?

And for the life of me, I could not come up with a better conclusion than the article’s:

It’s so brilliant on paper and yet so stupid at the bottom line.

Leftism in a nutshell, if you ask me.  And as a wise man said:

Fuck Off, Reg

Eco-Crap, Two-Minute Hate

I was going to write something about this topic, but Brendan O’Neill got there first, and did it perfectly.

Read the whole thing.

Update: Nobody seems to have noticed the “classical reference” in both the title and O’Neill’s enjoinder.  It’s taken from a Cheech & Chong sketch from the late 1970s (I think it’s the Big Bambu  album) which satirizes a British punk band.  And, of course, the “Reg” here is Elton John’s real first name.

Bullshit Then, Bullshit Now

Eco-Crap

I remember once talking to a guy who ran the recycling center way out on the east side of Plano, and asked him whether it was worth it.

“Other than cans and newsprint, no,” was his reply.

Turns out that aluminum cans are actually worth recycling — in that they are 100% recyclable (requiring nothing other than melting and reformulating) and it costs less — much less — to recycle than to produce new aluminum.

That’s almost true of newsprint too, except that while pulping it is fine — hardly any energy is used for that — the pulp also has to be bleached, and in the pulping / bleaching process, about 15% of the original paper is lost.  And as raw paper production (i.e. from logged wood) has become more efficient over the years, and as trees can be grown to replace those felled, the only real benefit from recycling paper is that overall paper production is less vulnerable to hiccups in supply of fresh wood — such as caused by forest fires, disease and drought.

And, he added, when it comes to recycling other stuff, glass is little better than plastic — which surprised me, but it actually costs much more to recycle glass than simply to produce it new.  And the old “plastic into park benches” spiel is likewise stupid, because it costs so much to produce such stuff, and creates so much atmospheric pollution thereby, that it’s easier just to toss plastic into a properly-lined landfill and let nature take its course.

Knowing all that, I’ve always been skeptical of the benefits of recycling — it’s always been about feeewings rather than utility — so this article came as little surprise to me. And as for this statement:

Roughly 90 percent of all plastic found in the oceans, says the Hemholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, is carried there by “the top 10 rivers with the highest loads” of plastic debris. Eight of those rivers are in Asia, two are in Africa. None are in the U.S.

…well, I do believe I’ve talked about that before.  And yes, calling recycling “America’s False Religion” is correct.

The unpleasant fact about pollution is that it’s not a First World malfeasance.  Almost all the world’s pollution, whether airborne, terrestrial and especially maritime, is caused by Third World countries because they’re fucking retarded.  And I see no reason why we  should pick up their slack, either.

Frankly, if the civilized world wants to do something concrete about waste disposal, we should stop selling it to Third World countries, and dump the stuff in the streets of New York, Chicago, San Francisco and Los Angeles, where it would scarcely be noticed.

Just a thought.