The Roman Catholic Church is selling indulgences, the Orthodox Church is selling absolution certificates (συγχωροχάρτια – synchorochartia), and the European Commission is selling pollution allowances!
Climate scare is the hottest hoax on Earth! People tend to confuse environment protection with climate control. We have to take care of our rivers, lakes, seas, forests, and air. But humans cannot control the climate. Rabblerousers have been for a long time searching for a simple and sufficiently threatening catastrophe that could justify the implementation of kleptocratic ambitions. After having tried various alternative ideas, they came up with the idea of dangerous, man-made global warming. This concept was formulated despite the absence of reliable data.
Libertarians believe that green investments and green jobs are stupid socialistic ideas that deviate resources from more profitable investments and more productive jobs. Climate change is heliogenic, not anthropogenic!
There's a new kind of math for the environmentally concerned, one that answers those everyday eco-conundrums like, Which is better: a reusable stainless steel water bottle, or those throwaway plastic ones?
The answers come from life cycle assessment (LCA), the method used by industrial ecologists, a discipline that blends industrial engineering and chemistry with environmental science and biology, to assess how man-made systems impact natural ones.
LCAs can help avoid a narrow outlook on environmental concerns by compiling an inventory of relevant energy and material inputs and environmental releases, evaluating the potential impacts associated with identified inputs and releases, and interpreting the results to help make a more informed decision.
LCAs tells us that buying food in one store that's been shipped in bulk leaves a smaller carbon footprint than driving around town to the local bakery, farmer's market, and dairy. Or that the better wine choice for those living east of Columbus, Ohio, is a French Bordeaux, and for those to the west it's the Napa Valley.
Those are simple problems in ecological accounting, which is designed to evaluate any manufactured thing - your iPhone, Cheerios, lip gloss - on its entire range of impacts on the environment, human health, and the people who labored to make it. An LCA lays bare the hidden impacts of our stuff from the moment its ingredients are extracted or concocted, through manufacture, transportation, retail, use and disposal. A simple glass bottle requires 1,959 discrete steps from birth to disposal, each of which can be analyzed for dozens of impacts, from particles emitted to air, water and soil, to energy footprint or impact on the incidence of cancer.
So here's the lowdown on a very practical question: is it more ecologically correct to tote a stainless steel bottle you refill with water, or to use water in throwaway plastic bottles? As it turns out, it all depends.
Off the bat, making stainless steel has a worse impact profile than knocking out plastic bottles. Food-grade stainless is an alloy of chromium, nickel, and pig iron. The chromium comes from minds in places like Kazakstan and India, where workers have a heightened risk of cancer from exposure to the raw ore. Melting the metals requires heating them to thousands of degrees. All these processes release hundreds of pollutants into air, water and soil -- including green house gases like methane and lung-clogging particulates. Then once you have your steel bottle, if you wash it in a dishwasher that uses a half-liter of electrically heated water, somewhere between 50 and a hundred washes result in the same amount of pollution caused by making the bottle in the first place.
Putting aside the question of plastics ridden with BPA, the chemical suspected of being a carcinogen and endocrine disrupter, the overall ecological impacts of a stainless bottle, compared to plastic, are more worrisome pretty much across the board.
So does it pay to use plastic bottles rather than stainless? Yes, but. You've got to use the stainless bottle enough times to offset a great number of the plastic ones. At just five plastic bottles replaced by the stainless, the math starts to tip toward stainless; 25 uses bring you to the tipping point where most of the ecological negatives of the plastic bottles are outweighed by your using stainless steel. And at 500 replaced plastic bottles you pass the last marker -- freshwater eco-toxicity -- so you're benefiting the planet every time you sip from your stainless.
Anthropocene is a new geological era of the sudden explosion in human activity during the last two centuries, a sharp break from the past, when things changed much more gradually. Half of Earth’s land surface has been altered by humans. The population has exploded by an extra one billion in a decade. When I was born in 1945 population was only two billion and now it's more than seven billion.
We've got a small planet, constraining the goods and services it can provide, while we are pursuing infinite growth not just of the number of people, but a growth in what we're consuming as well. Innovation could alleviate the pressure on our limited resources, allowing the population to grow without compromising individuals' quality of life. Our lifestyles, including our ever increasing appetite for goods, are having a dramatic impact on the consumption of the world's resources.
A freakish commercial of Greenpeace shows an angry child accusing all adults of destroying his future with global warming! Thousands of drones benefit directly from the global warming scare, at the expense of the ordinary consumer. Environmental organizations globally, such as Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, and the Environmental Defense Fund, have raked in billions of dollars. Government subsidies for useless mitigation schemes are skyrocketing. Emission trading programs are at two hundred billion euros a year level, with large fees paid to brokers, those who operate the scams, and kleptocrats. Many people have discovered they can benefit from climate scares and have formed an entrenched alliance with mafiosi and kleptocrats.
The best way to go green is fixing environmental problems at their source, and that source is government. Government is by many accounts the largest polluter in any country. By reducing the size of government and recycling redundant and unnecessary government bureaucracies, we will shrink the size of our government footprint, and in turn, help our environment. More government is not the solution to environmental woes, it's the problem. Until we reduce the size of government, our environmental problems will continue to grow.
Orthodoxies are traditional and established beliefs. Most environmental orthodoxies have major drawbacks. They usually overlook the biophysical factors and adaptive practices. The usual orthodoxies of desertification, deforestation, soil erosion, and climate change have major faults. Libertarians believe that orthodoxies are mostly the result of nature, not of human activity!
Rabblerousers bought into the global warming dogma (WGD) at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, fell in love with it and – without waiting for its scientific underpinning – started preparing and implementing economically damaging and freedom endangering measures. They accepted the idea that participating in the global warming game is easy, politically correct and politically profitable, especially when it is obvious that they themselves will not carry the costs of the measures they are advocating and implementing and will not be responsible for their consequences.
There are plenty of arguments indicating that the real threat is not global warming itself. The real threat comes when kleptocrats start playing with the climate and with all of us. Environmentalism and global warming alarmism ask for restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions, which would substantially increase the costs of energy. This would be devastating, because cheap energy is the source of much of our prosperity.
The Global Warming Dogma (GWD) asks for an almost unprecedented expansion of government intrusion into our lives and of government control over us. They tell us how to live, what to do, how to behave, what to consume, what to eat, how to travel, how to spend our holidays and many other things.
Rabblerousers, their bureaucrats as well as many eggheads, who accept the GWD and with it the alarmist view of anthropogenic climate changes, probably hope that – by doing so – they are displaying intelligence, virtue and altruism. Some of them even believe they are saving the Earth. We should tell them that they are merely passive players in the hands of pullpeddlers, of producers of green technologies, of agrobusiness firms producing ethanol, of trading firms dealing in carbon emission permits, etc., who make billions at our costs. There is no altruism there. It is a cold-hearted calculation.
Socialists and radical environmentalists have been trying for decades to reshape communities to conform to their preferred pseudosmart-growth policies. These advocates work to impose land use regulations that would force citizens into denser living arrangements, curtail freedom of choice in housing, discriminate against lower-income citizens, and compel people to pay more for their houses and give up their cars in favor of subways, trolleys, buses, and bicycles.
These efforts - often described as New Urbanism, sustainable development, or open land preservation - have long been resisted by most members of the community due to their negative impact on economic growth, competitiveness, and the standard of living. Communities implementing pseudosmart-growth policies have significantly higher home prices, which precludes moderate-income households from homeownership. In turn, these high home prices have forced buyers to take on excessive levels of mortgage debt, which has contributed to default and foreclosure problems. Libertarians dislike the use of multi-unit apartment buildings in city plans - which they call stack 'em and pack 'em units.
Forest fires are usually caused by lightning, human carelessness, arson, heat waves, droughts, and combustible oils in leaves. The evaporation of water in plants are balanced by water absorbed from the soil. Below this threshold, the plants dry out and under stress release the combustible gas ethylene. Exposure to smoke from burning plants actually promotes germination in other types of plants. Most native animals are adept at surviving wildfires.
Arson is the main cause of forest fires in Greece. Land-grabbers cause fires in order to build new homes. Shepherds put fires in order to create more grassland for their animals. Sodomasochist political rivals put fires to embarrass each other, and to take the attention of voters away from the failing economy. In 1996, the True Path Party of Turkey revealed that Gray Wolves, a Turkish paramilitary organization, were responsible for arson fires in Greek islands!
Barroso’s new light bulbs are a crime against all Europeans. Fluorescent lamps contain highly toxic mercury, and LEDS contain toxic lead and arsenic. Under a perverse legislation, Fourth Reich is forcing its citizens to bring toxic waste into their homes and contaminate the environment.
If a fluorescent lamp is broken, a very small amount of mercury can contaminate the surrounding environment. EPA recommends airing out the location of a fluorescent tube break and using wet paper towels to help pick up the broken glass and fine particles. Any glass and used towels should be disposed of in a sealed plastic bag. Vacuum cleaners can cause the particles to become airborne, and should not be used. But even if the bulbs are not broken, they end up in household garbage, leaving the mercury to ultimately seep into the soil and groundwater.
QUESTIONS
Have you noticed any political bias in green fans?
Do many of your friends believe in the Gorelore of anthropogenic climate change?
Do you think LCAs are workable?
What do you think of the commodity futures on pollution allowances, which are mainly traded on the Chicago Board of Trade?
What environmental orthodoxies do you believe?
Have you noticed any government pollution?
Do you think GWD violates self-ownership?
Have you noticed any trend of New Urbanism in your country?
So, what really happened at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992?
What is your favorite green slogan?
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