Discussion
I am getting sick of this, it is about time there was a REAL green party to expose all the fake 'seen to be doing something green' rubbish that we are having forced upon us by the environmentally sincere but wholly ignorant.
A local school has just had a wind generator erected, it will save them £300 a year in electricity bills and help the environment. Yeah, right!
It has cost £30,000, so it will take 100 years to pay for itself. The pollution that was caused in the actual manufacture, movement and erection of it, and subsequent maintenance, will take the best part of ten years to recover compared to the pollution it will save.
We have local councils that operate huge recycling schemes, we also have local councils that DO NOT operate recycling schemes...because they have done a proper analysis and concluded that recycling isnt green if they have a fleet of a dozen trucks, crews and management staff to service the scheme. The real greens are those that realise that saving several million tons of rubbish is a drop in the ocean compared to the mere existence of an £80,000 truck and everything that has had to be sacrificed in environmental terms in order for just one truck to exist.
Consider the copper mine in SA that mines the copper ore, consider the smelting plant that turns the ore into copper cable, consider the ship (and the making of that ship) that moves the cable to Europe, consider the factory that makes the cable into truck wiring, then there is the steel, plastics, and all the other stuff that goes into a truck. Consider the factory that makes the truck, consider the workers that make the truck, all going to work in cars, consider those cars being made. And on and on it goes. Fine, that is the way our economy works, and we would all be out of jobs without it.
But please, spare us this bollox about a school wind turbine or recycling being green. I isnt, they create more environmental damage than they save.
The truly green thing to do is dont bother, there is no point in trying to clean something up if the attempt creates more crap than you started with.
Blimey, what an early morning rant!
A local school has just had a wind generator erected, it will save them £300 a year in electricity bills and help the environment. Yeah, right!
It has cost £30,000, so it will take 100 years to pay for itself. The pollution that was caused in the actual manufacture, movement and erection of it, and subsequent maintenance, will take the best part of ten years to recover compared to the pollution it will save.
We have local councils that operate huge recycling schemes, we also have local councils that DO NOT operate recycling schemes...because they have done a proper analysis and concluded that recycling isnt green if they have a fleet of a dozen trucks, crews and management staff to service the scheme. The real greens are those that realise that saving several million tons of rubbish is a drop in the ocean compared to the mere existence of an £80,000 truck and everything that has had to be sacrificed in environmental terms in order for just one truck to exist.
Consider the copper mine in SA that mines the copper ore, consider the smelting plant that turns the ore into copper cable, consider the ship (and the making of that ship) that moves the cable to Europe, consider the factory that makes the cable into truck wiring, then there is the steel, plastics, and all the other stuff that goes into a truck. Consider the factory that makes the truck, consider the workers that make the truck, all going to work in cars, consider those cars being made. And on and on it goes. Fine, that is the way our economy works, and we would all be out of jobs without it.
But please, spare us this bollox about a school wind turbine or recycling being green. I isnt, they create more environmental damage than they save.
The truly green thing to do is dont bother, there is no point in trying to clean something up if the attempt creates more crap than you started with.
Blimey, what an early morning rant!
Balmoral Green said:
Lots of spot on green debunking
Balmoral Green said:Good for the system BG, don't fight it. Ever noticed that Councils don't publish relative energy costs for whatever it is that's made from recycled everything? Guess why.
what an early morning rant!
The whole edifice is a sham. See 'The Skeptical Environmentalist' by Bjorn Lomborg for additional debunks of most green information pollution.
If the neo pinko greens can keep us all worried about little things like recycling sprog's nasal detritus then we won't argue about the major global con tricks like man-made climate change.
One final point ... does the configuration of the school's wind turbine - like its bigger brother bird mincers - require national grid power to keep it turning when the wind disappears? Some of the damn things can't even spool up from rest!
simpo two said:
Nicely put. Any fool can see that sending a bloody great diesel truck to collect a few papers is nonsense.
I'm surprised that there isn't a drive to reduce packaging - and hence remove some of the rubbish at source.
There is. Buy from any farmer's market and you'll get your veg covered in soil in a paper bag. If you take your own reusable bag so much the better.
BG: I'm with you. I am a closet environmentalist I reckon - I try to see past the platitudes, muddled thinking and political correctness and do what's genuinely right. Not always easy. That and I understand trade-offs. Its not terribly enviro-friendly to have two sports cars but there you go!
Having said that - I LOVE wind turbines - I think they look totally cool and I'd like one in my garden. If it generates electricity so much the better - but I don't think I'm doing the planet any good by having one.
IIRC you can get one for about £14K - you simply can't do a CBA that returns value for money at that sort of cost - ever.
Top rant. I was considering something along similar lines when the binmen dropped a load of leaflets through our door this week, extolling (sp?) the virtues of recycling... all printed on shiney white, gloss coated paper & printed in full colour.
A few weeks ago, we also had them attaching large stickers (again, full colour, glossy prints) to the dustbins, advertising use of recycling boxes. In the wake of teh bin round that week was a vertiable ticker-tape parade of peeled-off backings from the stickers which the binmen had simply ripped off and dropped in the street.
The irony is just so bad that it hurts.
Councils are being urged to increase the % of dometic rubbish recycled by central government to meet EU kontrolfreakery targets. All total b0ll0x of course. Just heard on the local radio that my Council Tax is rising to pay for more 'green' recycling boxes.
Also that they may order the binmen to collect once a fortnight and the greenboxmen to collect weekly - reversing the current pattern - to encourage more recycling, if so there'll be a big pile of crap on the municipal offices steps before too long.
What utter utter stupid idiotic pointless pc claptrap.
As posted here, there are better ways of addressing these issues, in reality little to do with anything 'green' and everything to do with common sense.
>> Edited by turbobloke on Thursday 16th December 10:22
Also that they may order the binmen to collect once a fortnight and the greenboxmen to collect weekly - reversing the current pattern - to encourage more recycling, if so there'll be a big pile of crap on the municipal offices steps before too long.
What utter utter stupid idiotic pointless pc claptrap.
As posted here, there are better ways of addressing these issues, in reality little to do with anything 'green' and everything to do with common sense.
>> Edited by turbobloke on Thursday 16th December 10:22
Similar BULLSHIT here in Germany, bottle banks... you even have to separate the colours of glass FFS!!! And then watch when the lorry comes to empty it all... you've guessed..... they tip it all together!!!
Useless moneymaking spin by people who pervert ecology to their controlfreakish ideas...... Note that all greenish politicians are those who don't want cars, but are not willing to give their own up!!!!
Useless moneymaking spin by people who pervert ecology to their controlfreakish ideas...... Note that all greenish politicians are those who don't want cars, but are not willing to give their own up!!!!
Personally I've never quite understood the economic argument. So what if a wind turbine takes 50 squillion years to pay back the initial investment? It's not a cost saving excercise is it?
And yes of course their very manufacture has an environmental impact, but then the last time I checked conventional power stations weren't grown in a field in Wales....
It may not be cost effective for the council to collect up all the glass/rubbish/cans etc, but if it reduces the chances of a landfill site cropping up in my back yard then I am all for it.
And yes of course their very manufacture has an environmental impact, but then the last time I checked conventional power stations weren't grown in a field in Wales....
It may not be cost effective for the council to collect up all the glass/rubbish/cans etc, but if it reduces the chances of a landfill site cropping up in my back yard then I am all for it.
catretriever said:
Personally I've never quite understood the economic argument. So what if a wind turbine takes 50 squillion years to pay back the initial investment? It's not a cost saving excercise is it?
Trouble is, these things are usually "sold" using a ficticious cost saving as one of the primary benefits.
catretriever said:
And yes of course their very manufacture has an environmental impact, but then the last time I checked conventional power stations weren't grown in a field in Wales....
true
catretriever said:
It may not be cost effective for the council to collect up all the glass/rubbish/cans etc, but if it reduces the chances of a landfill site cropping up in my back yard then I am all for it.
I think you may have missed the point that the environmental damage caused in the production of hardware for & running of the schemes means that the net effect of having the scheme may actually be to the detrement of the environment.
pdV6 said:
catretriever said:
It may not be cost effective for the council to collect up all the glass/rubbish/cans etc, but if it reduces the chances of a landfill site cropping up in my back yard then I am all for it.
I think you may have missed the point that the environmental damage caused in the production of hardware for & running of the schemes means that the net effect of having the scheme may actually be to the detrement of the environment.
I understand the point being made about the emmissions from the trucks etc (which is why we need the wind turbines
), but I was trying to illustrate that this is only one of many environmental issues. To my mind the biggest reason to reduce waste for us Brits is that we are simply going to run out of space to put the stuff!Bottom line...
Worry about saving the planet? Bunch of @rse. The planet doesn't need saving.
If a natural or man-made global disaster happens, the higher order life forms (us) may die out but bacteria and maybe some simple stuff like algae will survive - there are strains of bugs that can live in nuclear reactor piles ffs. Then leave, stir occasionally, and after a few aeons Hey Presto evolution has re-populated the planet with multitudinous life forms. Those mental-problem greens who hate humans can pray for a future that doesn't include intelligent bipeds if they like.
Or, more importantly, realise that planet earth / the universe can get very hostile indeed and worry about humans. See above. This gets my vote.
>> Edited by turbobloke on Thursday 16th December 10:55
Worry about saving the planet? Bunch of @rse. The planet doesn't need saving.
If a natural or man-made global disaster happens, the higher order life forms (us) may die out but bacteria and maybe some simple stuff like algae will survive - there are strains of bugs that can live in nuclear reactor piles ffs. Then leave, stir occasionally, and after a few aeons Hey Presto evolution has re-populated the planet with multitudinous life forms. Those mental-problem greens who hate humans can pray for a future that doesn't include intelligent bipeds if they like.
Or, more importantly, realise that planet earth / the universe can get very hostile indeed and worry about humans. See above. This gets my vote.
>> Edited by turbobloke on Thursday 16th December 10:55
pdV6 said:
To my mind the biggest reason to reduce waste for us Brits is that we are simply going to run out of space to put the stuff!
Sure - that's where Simpo's point about reducing the problem at source comes into play, i.e. use less packaging in the first place!
Yep, and a very good point it was too
. I think a big problem with the Public view on these things is that people want a single fix-all answer and refuse to acknowledge that we need to apply all the little ideas....it's like the man at Tesco says "Every Little Helps"
catretriever said:Bio reactors (digesters) can handle some of it, recycle the bits that make energy sense and common sense, burn most of the rest at high temperatures, dump the very small elemen that remains.
To my mind the biggest reason to reduce waste for us Brits is that we are simply going to run out of space to put the stuff!
This approach is only a problem if you believe that shifting carbon dioxide levels cause climate change, when if fact climate change causes carbon dioxide levels to shift. Let's not go down that road on this thread but try Caillon, N., Severinghaus, J.P., Jouzel, J., Barnola, J.-M., Kang, J. and Lipenkov, V.Y. 2003. Timing of atmospheric CO2 and Antarctic Temperature changes across Termination III, Science 299: 1728-1731 (2003). If you can't be bothered
their conclusion, supporting another six or seven similar research papers (none exist that show opposite findings): "CO2 is not the forcing that drives the climatic system" Common sense please every time. Greenwash is the wiorst kind of effluent - information pollution.
turbobloke said:
"CO2 is not the forcing that drives the climatic system"
Common sense please every time. Greenwash is the wiorst kind of effluent - information pollution.
Obviously I've not read any of that research, but the cynic in me, who wonders where these scientists get their funding, suspects that the wording would more likely be that "CO2 cannot be proved to be the driving force in climatic changes", which is not the same thing.
Of course each of us will take our own counsel on these issues. For my part, I don't need to see proof that manmade C02 emmissions are going to radically alter the climate before I decide to do what I can for the environment. So much of it just seems like plain common sense to me in the same way that not dropping litter on the street is common sense if you don't want to live in a shithole. Having said that....I do of course run a gass-guzzling sportscar that is crap for the environment but bloody fantatsic for my selfish pleasure, so please don't think I'm preaching or anything. I'm just as bad at this as anyone else.
TheLemming said:
catretriever said:
To my mind the biggest reason to reduce waste for us Brits is that we are simply going to run out of space to put the stuff!
Never! Have you seen the size of Scotland?
And in the unlikely event that gets full, there's always wales
My vote would go to the South East, except it's already full of cr4p
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