Why should I try to be funny and cogent when I can put up the great Steyn on another of the goofy left’s ideas–sustainability.
When people became obsessive about recycling, sustainability as a more comprehensive and more burdensome silliness was bound to follow.
Neither concept,as practiced by goofy enviro fanatics, are sensible.
http://www.steynonline.com/6119/the-pause-and-the-cause
Thanks
Why are playing the “ideal temp” game at all?
Janice, I am with you. an average temp fo 75 is about right if people what to play the ideal temp game.
I am invited to talk about climate and human health effects in July, and i may take up your argument.
Personally, I would like to see carbon dioxide up around 2000 ppm, but I have to be careful where I say that. Also, would probably have to use coal along with the trash, in order to get the temperatures high enough. The EPA and our current political regime would have heartburn over that. We cannot keep following the current war against energy, however, and the pendulum will need to swing back towards moderation and wealth creation, at which point most of the federal-acronym-agencies will be seriously curtailed, and we can get back to being prosperous. Which will include intelligent recycling done by private enterprise.
I agree, Janice. I don’t object to burning trash large scale. Makes more sense than burying it. But as you noted, we do have to go large-scale. The release of CO2 is a “problem”, but one the greenies really have not come up with a solution to. Kind of tricky since all of life is dependent on CO2 and there’s really no way around releasing it. I also agree that enterprise and capitalism work best in dealing with the problems.
There are methods that have been developed over the last few decades, that allow the burning of trash without excessive amounts of pollutants or particulates. It does have to be done on a large scale, because the cost is prohibitive for small-scale operations. The technology uses the same techniques used in coal-burning plants for controlling releases. The biggest drawback is the supposedly unhealthy release of carbon dioxide (that is where we lose the greenies). Basically you need a very hot fire and a closely controlled rate of feedstock. Think of a pellet stove on a very grand scale. The best part is that the ash can then be processed using normal aqueous chemistry, to pull out the heavy metals for recycling. Plants such as this could probably be self-supporting, as the recycled metals and chemicals would be worth more than what it costs to run the plant. Plus the “waste” heat can be used to run turbines to generate the electricity to run the aqueous chemistry. We can burn our trash intelligently, with the spirit of free enterprise and capitalism (oops, lost a few more greenies with that).
http://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf
for those who would like to read the actual document and make up their own minds.
I did NOT say it saves energy. I said it saves landfill space. As for burning, I suppose if we want gray skies like China, fine, burn away. 300,000,000 people burning tons of trash should give us pristine skies and a not cluttered landscape. Go for it. You show those “greenies”, by gosh. We can burn our trash.
Reality Check, you need one most of the time it takes more energy to recycle. Laws of physic are had to overcome, Dispersed items over a large graphic area is expensive and energy intensive to collect. Recycled glass is extremly stupid since to make all it takes is a good quality sand. Plastic is second in stupidity oil wells produce far more plastic far cheaper. The one class of materials really pay are metals. Yet at that if the metal is in the form of a can, it is only pays to recycle aluminum cans. Bauxite is very energy intensive to process, that why it pays to recycle aluminum cans.
As to burying garbage it one of the stupidest ideas the greenies every came up with. When you think about it we find most of our raw materials as oxides and then process them to remove the oxygen, what you end up with is a useful but unstable compounds, As an oxide most compounds are relatively inert, yet in their pure form they can be rather active. Burning trash turn those compounds back into oxides, burying does not, We are now finding those pure non oxide compounds like to migrate, when they found that landfills that problem. They then thought what about the old open dump sites where we us to burn trash. When they tested those old dumps and in the majority dumps sites there was little if no migration of the compounds. Funny how our agents of smart today are so d^&m dumb.
Agreed–as I noted in my comment. My city cannot recycle glass, but they crush it and put it on the animal pit to discourage predation. They only do two types of plastic because there’s no market for the others.
Interesting that you mention how people used to burn trash (I remember as a child having a burning barrel in our back yard–had one as an adult until the drought caused to many burning bans). Now, it seems that we call burning trash “biofuels” and consider it “sustainable” and “renewable”. Not all locations allow burning and some use methane from landfills, but we seem headed back to burning, just on a large, expensive scale with filtering. And, yes, that’s supposed to be progress……..
Recycling makes sense, if there is an infrastructure that supports it. Doesn’t make sense when it is forced on people, but the infrastructure is lacking to actually carry it through to completion.
We used to reduce landfill space by having backyard incinerators. Everything flammable was reduced many-fold to ash, and homeowners paid (from their own pocket) to have the ash and non-flammables taken to a dump. Then municipalities found they could skim money from homeowners by offering trash pickup service. When that didn’t produce enough money, they forced people to stop burning their flammables, thus increasing the volume and weight of stuff taken to the dump. Now the dumps are overflowing because nobody is allowed to burn the flammables into ash (not even the people who run the dumps). Yet, this is called progress.
While I generally enjoy Mark Steyn (had to turn him off yesterday due to his apparent support of lawbreaking), recycling is not nonsense. It is if you do it to “save the planet”, but if you are doing it to reduce landfill space needed or because it makes economic sense, then it is a correct choice. To reject everything greens do as “nuts” is to behave exactly like the Greens.
The whole thing falls right into the 300 page U.N. Agenda 21 … global “sustainable development”… and it covers everything … we have had three presidents sign on, and hundreds of counties and cities. Obama has actually implemented more of the agenda than any other president, through regulatory agencies, and actually unconstitutional laws crammed through the liberals in congress. Folks call it crazy but it is really scary and close to being a done deal…