Despite the sensational rhetoric, very few people seek to pollute. It’s not good business and all of us want clean air and water. However, when we get sucked into eco-panic, cooler heads seldom prevail. That hysteria costs jobs, and sometimes lives.
The latest eco-panic is global warming. One legislative solution was to mandate the banning of our traditional light bulbs, as they use too much power, and eventually contribute to global warming. That all gets shot to hell IF you believe humans are contributing to “warming” that may or may not be happening. But let’s say it is. Are we knee jerking once again?
These new-and-improved compact fluorescent light bulbs contain a small, but toxic amount of mercury that makes cleanup of a broken one more than just a sweep. After all the positive hype, we’re told that upon breaking one of these bulbs, one must use tape to pick up the glass, ventilate the room, and keep children and pregnant women clear of the area for a few hours. So these light bulbs may friendly to the environment, but they don’t seem to take too kindly to the saps that bought them.
Eco-panic has resulted in policy that runs the gamut from public inconvenience to, dare I imply it: death. Here are some examples….
There was the panic that our use of paper bags at the supermarket resulted in the unnecessary cutting down of trees. With public pressure from environmentalists, paper bags were phased out (at a cost to business, passed down to the consumer), and replaced by the lightweight plastic bags. A few decades later, the same environmentalists are complaining that those petroleum-based plastic bags are winding up in landfills, are not biodegradable, and thus should be phased out and be replaced with… paper bags.
Sometimes environmental hysteria costs lives.
In 1962, former U.S. Bureau of Fisheries employee Rachel Carson published the book “Silent Spring” that contended the use of pesticides was killing off certain species of fish, bugs, trees, and was a carcinogen. She feared that the use of Dichloro-Diphenyl-Trichloroethane (DDT) was upsetting the balance of nature to the point it would not recover.
Regardless of her good intentions, Rachel Carson displayed the typical arrogance. It’s amazing how some, especially today, believe that humans have that much power over the environment. Sure we can alter it. We do so by our very existence, however to assume the Earth cannot recover is the epitome of arrogance.
“Silent Spring” created such a public uproar DDT was banned.
The result? According to the World Health Organization, there are between 300 million and 500 million cases of malaria every year, resulting in more than one million deaths, with about 90% of these deaths occurring in Africa, mostly to children under the age of 5.
Still, the environmental movement must take partial responsibility for halting the use of what many health experts considered to be the greatest lifesaving chemical ever discovered — so great that its inventor, Dr. Paul Muller, was awarded the Nobel Prize in medicine in 1948.
– Joseph L. Bast, Peter J. Hill, and Richard C. Rue (Eco-Sanity, page 100)
And let’s not forget the annual Eastern equine encephalitis and West Nile virus scares. How do we react when one little mosquito is found to have the sometimes-deadly virus in our area? We spray entire neighborhoods, bring the kids inside at dusk, and load up on bug spray. All this because we succumbed to touchy-feely environmentalism.
Good intentions are one thing. Causing unnecessary panic is another.
Environmentalists have more influence than most of us realize. Recently, schoolteachers distributed a fact-challenged Weekly Reader booklet that sent many children home to nightmares where polar bears were drowning due to human-induced global warming.
Eco-saviors claim that biofuels will solve our oil dependence issues, yet Ethanol has sent the price of corn through the roof. Many in the world’s poorer nations starve because they can’t afford what use to be a traditional, affordable staple. But as long as we feel better about ourselves, screw the Third World (again, see DDT).
The eco-friendly Toyota Prius was supposed to be the end-all-be-all when it comes to green commuting. However, we now know that making a Prius causes more environmental damage than manufacturing a Hummer. But as long as we feel better about ourselves, screw facts.
The most recent claim is that use of one of our greatest inventions, the light bulb, may kill us at some point down the road. When that too is proven wrong, don’t hold your breath for apologies from environmentalists.
It was all about good intentions. That’s all that matters.
The production of ethanol actually uses more petroleum on a BTU comparison (the only valid way to compare the two energy sources) than is created.
Additionally, ethanol is inferior in performance, corn production requires more water per acre than any other comparable grain, and ethanol fermentation produces about 160 gallons of vile waste water for every gallon produced.
Farmers are making so much money on corn cultivation (I’m happy for them and hope they don’t get overextended in debt when this boondoggle collapses similar to the sub-prime mess) that they are switching from other crops, when possible, which is raising prices for the crops, like wheat, that are forsaken. The demand for seeds, fertilizer (much of which is manufactured with natural gas) and other products used in crop production is also soaring including their prices.
Whether you burn petroleum or ethanol you produce heat energy to do the work plus the two basic byproducts – water vapor and carbon dioxide probably in similar quantities for the BTUs (think work) performed. Duh!
But as you point out the most important reason to get off ethanol is that we are burning food. This is just a different form of government farm price support as has been going on for many years. Farmers always vote.
A semi-related comment regarding global warming. There is a 16 year old who has a science based look at global warming without financial or political bias. “Ponder the Maunder”, an extra credit project for her Honors Earth Science class can be found at http://home.earthlink.net/~ponderthemaunder/index.html
Here’s a medium-term ray of hope:
there is an ongoing, and so far completely successful, research effort to validate a fusion design called “Focus Fusion”, which sidesteps the huge costs and low returns of the massive Tokamak approach by going tiny. It exploits “plasma instability” instead of fighting it, and would result in small generators, about garage-sized, that provide about 5GW each at about $0.002/kwh, around 1/50 of current pricing. Zero waste or radiation. Electricity is generated directly by squirting charged Helium ions thru a simple solenoid, instead of the “heat engine” steam-plant required by EVERY other fusion (or fission) design. Timeline for production of the ~$250,000 generators, 2015-20.
The consequences of this would be the economic obsolescence of EVERY other generation plant and design, from wind farm to coal-burning to oil or gas generator. It would enable electric cars like the just-launched 130mph TeslaMotors’ Roadster to do 2000+ miles on $1 worth of charge.
The Oil Economy will more or less vanish in anything like present form. Plastic feedstock will probably be the major use, though bio-degradable substitutes (organic plant-grown plastics, basically) may cut away at that, too.
We’ll all have to go back to incandescent bulbs to generate enough heat to hold back the ice sheets.
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