Fairys In The Green Glen. Environmentalist Propaganda Assault.

Debunking Some Popular Environmentalist and 'New Age' Myths and Lies Lex Loeb Contributor Network . Debunking Some Popular Environmentalist And 'New Age' Myths And Lies Common sense is not what it used to be. The environmental and new age movements have worked tirelessly to reset your common sense according to what they perceive to be valid political and social goals. The same people who gave us our new common sense gave us terms like 'political correctness' , 'being green' and 'sustainablity' Taking these buzz word term for granted seems second nature for most of the population. The problem is that few people actually attempt any analysis just in case there may be reason to be skeptical. Why be skeptical? Because the new 'green' morality maybe doing just the opposite of what it's big proponents say it is doing and it maybe costing you far more than you think it is while only achieving negative results There are examples in past civilizations where attempts to do thing properly ended with unintended consequences that proved to be very unhappy. It was only a few hundred years ago that common sense was significantly different than it is today. Doctors over a number of centuries believed that bleeding patients was a cure for a long list of diseases. The ancient Romans believed that lead was a safe useful metal to pipe water into their cities with and they also treasured lead table ware. In some cases the use of lead may have been better than some other alternatives such as having to have major cities rely on local water supplies and not water taken from remote mountain streams by aqueducts For most of the past 3000 years or more mental illness was believed , by common sense, to be caused by the devil and or other evil spirits. With the advent of our modern civilization with all the publishing that goes on, the enormous libraries of information we have and all the academic institutions we have one might think that the age of superstition and unscientific formation of common sense has passed us by. The evidence, however, is to the contrary! It seems that the more printing presses and more means of dissemination information there is that myths and lies can still take a commanding role in common sense. Television, the internet, the radio, the branch library , daily newspapers and magazines seem to have only made populations more susceptible to instant belief in new myths and lies. It is easier not to try thinking about something when someone tells you an expert says it happens to be true. Experts fight with each other to prove they are more expert than the others but those who control much of the fast dissemination of information tend to choose their experts to promote their goals for social order. People seem unaware that some of our worst dictators in the last 100 years only were able to rise to power because Radio and Television and Newspapers were invented, Napoleon would have been ten times as powerful as he was radio at his disposal. Here are some basic Environmental and "new age " myths and lies to consider before believing in the common sense beliefs on the subject. Recycling can waste more resources in some cases than it saves. Somewhere along the line of development of the recycling morality a lot of people got the idea that they should wash out cans, bottles and other containers before recycling. This actually has the detrimental effects of several unexpected consequences . The first is that water resources are being wasted and second is energy and even soap and detergent are being wasted in the enterprise. Multiply hundreds of thousands of people cleaning out cans and bottles to recycle them over time and millions of gallons of water, thousands of cubic feet of gas and thousands of bottles of detergent are being expended. Recycling has other costs. It is true that when a garbage truck comes to pick up garbage it should cost about the same amount to transport it as it does the recycling bins. Actually the dump may be far away but the recycling factories are even further away . Once governments get involved in forcing recycling a lot of market forces are artificially set so it may not be that the cost savings of using recycled aluminum is really much cheaper than creating it from scratch. Market prices for aluminum and the other components in the recycled trash are still set by market and at times the prices are sufficient that people recycling should be paid for their trouble of sorting the materials and not just given free pick up. Other times when recycling materials don't fetch a worthwhile market price recycling may be a energy draining mistake. The environmentalists have opted for recycling as their solution as opposed to using garbage for fuel. Using garbage as fuel maybe the more efficient means of recycling as it requires less sorting , .less energy output because it is possible to get energy back by using it as fuel. The environmentalists have done everything to prevent most burning of garbage even when it can produce significant energy when burned to produce electricity or in a co-generation plant. The fear is air pollution even when that is minimized with new technology. Few Cities have use garbage to produce energy and most that don't instead end up having to burn directly or indirectly coal, gas or petroleum to produce electricity. The same people who gave us global warming foot prints are against one obvious solution to reuse existing carbon. Then they have a new common sense that it is best to let forest fires burn themselves out and then after the fires burn the environmentalist are promoting commonsense that timber that can be salvaged after a forest fire should be left for nature. This common sense just goes beyond absurd. Why? Because salvage timber can satisfy market force demands for wood without having to bid up the price on healthy non burned forests where the common sense naturally causes those who control the lands suitable for logging to rethink about conserving trees when they are worth more money as a result of salvage timber being artificially kept off the market. The same environmentalists who believe in letting forests burn to save their naturalness are against carbon dioxide getting into the atmosphere from burning gasoline or coal Their concern is absolutely absurd since nature can't tell where the co2 came from it can only tell what is in the atmosphere . If carbon dioxide is pollution than exhaling it is just as much of the same crime as driving a gas powered car or letting a forest burn down because it is natural. Another myth or outright lie is that we have run out of landfill space for garbage. Even if there were no recycling at all we really would never run out of space to put trash and just because trash goes into a land fill today does not mean it can't be dug up later and used for recycling materials later if market forces dictate that there is some profit margin in doing so. Common sense is now that disposable grocery bags , both paper and plastic are bad. The idea is that it is wasteful to use something once and throw it away. Reality is that many people re-use disposable bags so they do get recycled in that sense. Plastic bags may not be in demand by recycling companies but that is because we are not allowing burning of garbage to produce electricity. There is no evidence that plastic bags do not compress and take up significant space in landfills. The fact of the mater is petroleum bi-product objects like plastic bags are equivalent to burning some oil or coal to produce electric so it actually makes sense to dispose of them by burning . Why? Because everyone burned prevents to need to pump that much more oil to burn in an electric plant to produce the electric already required by market demand part of it going to heat water to clean out bottles and cans for recycling! Disposable grocery bags, paper and plastic, also provide employment to people here in the USA. These bags are usually made right here in the USA and exported world wide. This is just one more consequence of joining the green moral majority in their PC common sense that really does not necessarily make any sense. Other crazy ideas that have become the new age common sense is the total nonsense of organic produce. Organic is nothing more than sizzle and no steak marketing. It is one of the most successful marketing campaigns in world history just shy of being as successful as some mass religions having been marketed for centuries. The evidence that organic produce is significantly different than mass produced non organic produce is hardly worth the premium price consumers are forced to pay for sizzle with no steak. It used to be that food just had to be "natural " for the marketers to sell it at a higher price. Now it has to be natural, organic and grown by hand by a farmer suffering at the subsistence level for it to have adequate vitamins in it. The sustainabilityInternet movement may actually have the deleterious effect of having farmers waste more energy in producing their crops and in putting more land area into cultivation that could otherwise be left as wild lands. The benefits of buying higher priced labeled organic produce does not necessarily justify the cost of the label and even the label has an economic cost. Nuclear energy is bad is definitely one common sense idea that has been over worked by the environmentalists and new acers. The fact is that it can be more expensive than other existing alternatives including coal . That might not be true if breeder reactors were allowed. Right now the environmentalists require that uranium be mined from the ground as fuel for our plants and general proscriptions against having new plants getting built are preventing what could be an instant alternative energy solution as the technology for nuclear power has advanced a long way in 20 years mostly because of computer engineering power having almost geometric growth. Modeling of system engineering has never been as good as it is today with computer power what it is. The military has effectively and safely used nuclear power on submarines and air craft carriers . The french have successful breeder reactors running. The new nuclear power plant can be the same small unit found on a military ship in your neighborhood with no deleterious effects and automation with a single fuel supply designed to last over 20 years before needing to be refueled. Common sense still puts nuclear power off the table even when it means less efficient ugly farms of wind machines blighting the landscape considering these wind towers can be over 200 ft tall each and collectively kill thousands of birds a year. The commonsense of 'sustainable agriculture" and sustainabilityagersFrench in general turns out to be pure nonsense when given sufficient thought and consideration. There is no proof that agriculture is more sustainable by one means or another again since market forces is what ultimately drives farmers to grow crops. Making it more expensive , more labor intensive to grow crops could lead us back to the time of an agrarian economy. In most of human history it took slaves to run plantations , farmer tenants or share croppers or as in much of Europe, Serfdom. If what the new common sense says causes more human labor to be required to produce crops and prices to be artificially high verses alternatives it can lead to exactly the opposite circumstances...unsustainable agriculture. There is a real risk that billions of people on the planet can be forced into starvation when some bureaucratic office worker is attempting to decide what is sustainable and what is not sustainable. How do they really know what is and is not sustainable? Most of California's agriculture is only sustainable because of migrant labor, What may seem sustainable today might not be tomorrow and it is rather difficult to decide what inputs in cost are better not being wasted. Farmers decide these things in practice. The goal to reduce use of fuel is in a farmer's best interest if it can be done. That is not to say it is necessarily sustainable without a viable alternative. The environmentalists would have done more for agriculture allowing the development of nuclear power as that might have reduced the cost of fuel to farmers or even given them a surplus of electricity to use instead of diesel fuel. One of the worst and most idiotic things the environmentalist have done is in their conservation efforts to save wild elephants. The idiots burned the most of the world's supply of ivory and that backfired making the remaining ivory stock on earth much more precious. Their commonsense and sustainabilitysustainability analysis caused more poaching than ever. Governments who control elephant herds are even more likely to see the ivory tusks on living elephants as a future revenue source. It would have been much better for elephants that instead of burning supply stocks that they just gave the supplies away to those who demanded it at a very low price and flooded the market. The same thing is happening in Asian tiger and bear conservation today. The pretense of doing good can do more harm in the long run because market forces are not controlled by common sense. Few people make money trading commodities since market forces don't obey any obvious common sense perceptions. It does seem that some environmentalists do however use their new commonsense campaigns to attempt to enrich themselves in a major way. It is certainly part of the calculus of Al Gore's Carbon caps and tax programs. Creating artificial scarcity with carbon cap legislation does not necessarily mean that the whole program might not backfire and cause more world wide production of coal and oil to happen. The reason why should be obvious. A manufacturing company in the USA just goes online and finds a Chinese, Indian, Vietnamese , Latin American , or Vietnamese company to manufacture the same goods that used to be made here with electricity put online there. The costs of completely killing manufacturing in the USA with all the manufacturing happening with outsourcing overseas could mean more fossil fuel carbon in the atmosphere and a long term unemployment rate in the USA with high costs for energy due to the taxes imposed which means a lower standard of living and maybe the re-creation of poverty the way we used to have it here in the USA for no reason except to make Al gore more rich and famous. With carbon cap legislation the environmentalists are making the same mistakes they did burning the world supply of ivory. They are causing price signals that will move manufacturing and energy use off shore and then compound that energy use with even more causing the manufactured goods to be needing to be shipped over the seas. It is true that sailing ships can come back with computer masts to efficiently get giant cargo holds here even if the price of oil goes sky high but to build ships like these also takes energy and dismantling of existing ships which is not getting full use of something that already had energy spent on their creation and maintenance. One of the biggest lies is that mass transit is better than the private automobile. It can be in some circumstance and there is no reason why mass transit can't be run by private competing interests as taxi cabs have never gone out of business. Some academics did the numbers that show that the energy saving of light rail systems , trolleys and buses can actually be higher than a fully loaded automobile. Automobiles are not just for passengers they carry cargo and they carry it directly door to door with road access. The energy costs of running buses and trains that are not filled to or over capacity are sometimes not as good as the typical vilified SUV! Common Sense get it wrong again and again. People who have an SUV and don't have to take public transportation can save society money buy buying products in bulk and wasting less packaging. They also can transport a lot more than passengers. Try getting ten bags of groceries in and out of a bus sometime. It takes the single person in a car one trip to the store to get ten bags of groceries and five trips for the bus rider to get the same ten bags of groceries! Worse, Where public transit systems over pay bus drivers to do a union job that others could do for less you have these people driving fancy cars to the bus terminal to go to work and parking them there. Then they go home by car and consume more of their fair share of the earth's resources than their typical passengers. Now is that fair to the environment? If you subscribe to the commonsense logic of environmental political and social correctness than this is a valid concern for you and if so you might have the new common sense but you really are not making any real sense. Once you realize that there are millions of people who blindly believe the same nonsense you do the waste of resources is as bad or worse than not having all those people concerned about 'saving the environment' or anything else. The more one spends time thinking about saving the world the less time one has to think about other things. More of those millions of people thinking this nonsense would be better off trying to spend their time trying to think about solving problems that would help them make a lot more money. Saving fuel with efficient new ideas has a greater environmental impact than any artificial scarcity scheme because less fuel used is more fuel on the market and more fuel on the market is less incentive to produce more at what will temporarily be a lower market price. Market forces can't be controlled with wishful thinking or artificial constrains on consumption or production.. The commonsense that government can go in and control market forces is antithetical to every bit of world political and economic history. The sad fact is that kings and emperors were constantly forced to go out and plunder resources to pay for their various programs and projects or to make investments in developments of new means of production and they did often have to go out to borrow money to do it. The big universal guilt trip that ordinary American lifestyles are destroying the earth are the sort of nonsense that will lead to want in the future where we have none right now. The environmentalist constantly promote the new common sense that private property rights are a wrong against the earth. Some of their biggest proponents are rich land owners who have no intention of giving away any of their resources but they don't mind forcing you off the land. This is what happened in Scotland and Ireland, How is the earth improved when you are not allowed to enjoy living on it as a sovereign in a country where your private property rights are supposed to be as good as theirs? A lot of the new commonsense really boils down to who gets to use the resources at the expense of all the rest of the population with a little in depth analysis. Common sense was dead wrong for most of human history. What makes you think it is any different today? .