Todd Wynn writes on his Facebook page:
I am beginning to wonder if the whole world has gone mad and economic logic has just been thrown out the window as irrelevant…..
I distinctly remember when plastic bags were introduced in Oregon grocery stores. I was six or seven years old and I remember my parents and all of my friends’ parents being appalled. In fact, I …
The article he cites goes on to argue why both plastic bags and paper bags are bad for the environment, so naturally the conclusion is that Oregon residents should just grab their groceries in arms, or get one of the new petri dish bags.
George Carlin really sums up this argument well:
And while we are on the subject of environmentalism and Oregon, how’s that “save the spotted owl” thing working out for ya?
Now they’ve gone down the path of “we have to kill the owls to save the owls” since nothing else has worked.
Indeed, maybe the whole world has gone mad. Though, I think it mainly the world that views it through green colored glasses.
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Indeed, maybe the whole world has gone mad. Though, I think it mainly the world that views it through green colored glasses.
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They do a pretty good job of making me mad. Freaking lunatics. paper/plastic/canvass………I can’t imagine people having nothing better to do than to sit around and contemplate the significance of what people use to haul their foodstuffs. And then others lending credence to the people for their contemplation. What is wrong with these people? We’ve literally have had people obsess about how someone else carries their groceries for about 40 years now. I think they’ve killed enough jobs and wasted enough peoples’ time. I think we should re-institute corporeal punishment for such offenses to usefulness.
George Carlin was a planet-wide treasure.
Rest in Peace, George.
James Sexton,
Too much leisure time can indeed be a scourge…idle hands are the devil’s workshop. I am all for corporeal punishment as a manifestation of corporal punishment! :+)
Anne
@ur momisugly Kaboom says:
February 25, 2011 at 2:26 pm
George Carlin was a planet-wide treasure.
Rest in Peace, George.
Well, for those who believe in such things, George is probably guarding the Pearly Gates about now, having beat out St. Peter for the job. 😉
Even the Independent, normally a very warmist lot, couldn’t resist covering the plastic-bags-are-good story this week.
“A cotton bag would have to be re-used 171 times to emit a similar level [of Co2e as a single use plastic bag]”
If I had to use a cloth bag 171 times only the bacteria would be keeping the wretched thing from falling apart. Which didn’t stop them recommending:
“The best solution would be to use a cotton bag several hundred times, probably using it constantly for years.”
Several hundred times….?! That reporter definitely needs to do his own shopping more often.
Dave Stephens says:
February 25, 2011 at 2:10 pm
The way I’ve heard it put is that, as a species, we’re still not far different from those african plains apes we’re said to be descended from, in that our brains are hard-wired to be in a near-permanent state of distress and fear. We’re constantly looking for danger. Now as civilisations grow, for most of their lifetime they’re on the verge of collapse in some way, and their denizens are living close to the edge of sustainability all the time (that meaning, they may just fall over and can’t guarantee continued existence, rather than the modern definition of sustainable to mean “designed by morons”). An low-tech agrarian society runs the risk of starvation every single year, and can easily be wiped out by a relatively small natural disaster. Now we’ve progressed past the agrarian phase in to a high technology phase, we no longer have that constant danger to be aware of, but our brains are still looking for the dangerous thing. In essence, we aren’t built for a life of ease.
I’ve noticed in my travels that environmentalism generally doesn’t have much traction more, ah, politically fraught societies. That is, places where there is a great deal of real danger to be wary of, rather than the made-up danger we have to content ourselves with in the west. Like many things in a mass-production consumerist society, our dangerous things are a pale imitation of reality.
thegoodlocust
“The plastic bag banning … …this is simply a tax on poor people…”
Just a method to augment the proceeds from the other well marketed poor tax, “The Lottery.”
Enough of this plastic bag nonsense, already.
What about the owls ? http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=3510
The thing that puzzles me about the “evils” of plastic bags, which as many have said make great bin liners, is that “they take {insert scary big number} years to break down in a landfill.”
So? Who cares? The bag is buried, it is not blowing around getting stuck in tree branches. It can sit and rot in the ground for millennia, surely? Why is this slow decay when buried such an evil feature of plastic bags?
The lady in this video makes really cool textured “paper” out of plastic bags. I layer several bags to make a bigger page. And I don’t worry about the printed labels on the bags. Still looks cool no matter the color of the bag. I don’t really need the ‘greenies’ telling me how to re-use stuff. I’ve had far more practice than they can even dream of and my stuff turns out way cooler.
They are not appeased at any point. So they should be relegated to the backwaters. They can meet each other there an commiserate over evil humans.
Here’s a case of eco-insanity that I discovered just a few minutes ago.
I went to the pharmacy to buy a Primatene Mist inhaler. Printed on the inhaler’s box was a notice stating that it would not be available after December 31, 2011. Immediately after returning home I checked the internet to try and figure out why they might be pulling such an effective OTC drug off the market. Answer: The ozone layer. They are pulling Primatene Mist off the market because its propellant contains CFCs! This is so absurd that I hardly believe it myself. Can anyone verify?
Many years ago I bought a large parcel of land very cheaply. The reason for the cheap price was the trees on the land were specifically grown to make paper. The trees had a useful life of 20 years after which they would deteriorate and rot.
Time came for the trees to be cut down. The greenies stepped in and eventually had a ruling made to forbid the tree felling.
Bottom line is that after 25 years the trees started falling down by themselves and started rotting. In 1983 the whole area was gutted by a bush fire – the remaining trees were burned down to the roots.
I truly miss George Carlin. I quoted this routine for years after it was shown on HBO. I think of it every time I see the “forever in a landfill” filtered water commercial. I ask my liberal idiot friends, “So what? What is wrong with plastic bottles?” No one can give me a good reason other than they are unsightly. I see nature using them for condos in the woods and have seen a whole ecosystem in one that washed up on shore, complete with barnacles, algae and little fish hiding inside to avoid being eaten by bigger fish.
Having shown that clip here, this is now officially the coolest website I frequent. 🙂
Now they’ve gone down the path of “we have to kill the owls to save the owls” since nothing else has worked.
The irony is that barred owls and Spotted owls can mate.
They are the same f**king species.
Dave Stephens says:
February 25, 2011 at 2:10 pm
Agreed with most of your rant Dave but you went way off-track with the “tap water never hurt anyone” bit. Tap water actually sickens about a million people a year with everything from rota and rhino virus to crpto and giardia. The first commercial use of Chlorine was to kill soldiers in trenches. Then the brain-trust decided to put it into our drinking water to “purify” it. Great for washing your truck but don’t drink that crap!
About the owl story: It’s a good thing there were no conservationists around 50,000 years ago, or we’d still be killing off “modern” humans to preserve Neanderthals.
You know, like in Libya…oops.
“Just as dirty as airport gropers not changing gloves.”
Hadn’t thought about that. They are passing germs from person to person and need to change gloves between each passenger. Everyone should insist on it. Otherwise the inspection could end up killing a lot of people if one passenger is carrier.
“A cotton bag would have to be re-used 171 times to emit a similar level [of Co2e as a single use plastic bag]“
That seems very unlikely. There is a fair amount of energy used to produce a cotton bag and transport it for sale. Again lots of energy used to keep it as clean as a plastic bag. You get a lot of bags out of very little oil, and they can be transported in large numbers using very little space.
Imagine a hospital re-using cotten gloves for surgery. Why should food be treated less hygenically?
When we lived in Riverside, California and had a single stream recycling program we put an open paper bag inside a plastic bag under the sink for trash and garbage. The paper bag held more and the plastic bag around the bottom prevented wet-caused rupture of the paper bag. Now we’re in eastern Washington State and get to separate our recyclables, and they only take about half of what we recycled in California.
When are these green idiots going to learn for every action there is a reaction. Leave the Owls alone for Gods sake!
On the Plastic bags, We shop a different Super markets and they all have 6 to 9 weeks degrading plastic, We stuff them behind the fridge, they even get flaky and fall apart there never mind in the land fill. We use the bags as garbage liners as well as recycling to a fault. What is insane is if we didn’t do that we would buy small glad bags to do the same bloody thing! And we wont use paper bags because that means more trees have to be chopped down. Green’s make up your minds and let the people like myself who really are environmentally friendly and caring alone. Environmentalist there own worsted enemy and have become a dislikeable menace to their themselves and alienated people like me who has ALWAYS tried to do what is right for the environment in action and deed.
Watch a few minutes of James Hansen being interviewed by David Letterman. Both are yuppies to the extreme. Wealthy and sarcastic. Be patient, force yourself to watch it to the end. How would you describe Hansen and Letterman’s personality?
If you believe you are the messiah and you are saving the world, then lying and distorting the data is acceptable as believe you are on a mission.
Comment:
James Hansen is the head the Earth Science Division of NASA which constructs the climate models and the creates the GISS world temperature data that is used to create the hockey stick. The GISS temperature data which is roughly .25C higher than the satellite data is James Hansen’s group’s creation. The altering of past climate data is done by James Hansen’s group. The Real Climate blog is run by Gavin Schmidt an employee of Hansen, on company time. Do see the underlying problem a possible conflict of interest. Watch the David Letterman interview. Is James Hansen a scientist? Has anyone watched a video of the scientist Henrick Svensmark?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henrik_Svensmark
The head “green people” are advocating spending trillions of dollars which we do not have on problem which is not a problem. There are multiple published papers that show the entire biosphere increases in size and productivity as a direct result to an increased in atmospheric CO2. We are carbon based life forms. (Yes or no?) Plants eat CO2. (Yes or no?) Plants make more effective use of water by reducing the number of stomata when the CO2 increases. (Yes or no?) There is less desertification when CO2 levels are higher and more when it is less. (Yes or no?) Increased atmospheric CO2 is scientifically beneficial to biosphere. That is a scientific fact.
The biosphere also expands when the planet warms and contracts when the planet cools. This is related to the planet being 70% covered with water (total precipitations increases when the planet warms and is reduced when it cools) and there being massive ice sheets at both poles. When the planet warms most of the warming occurs at higher latitudes where life is limited due to the cold and massive ice sheets. That statement is also a scientific fact.
Warming period is over, unfortunately over. There are numerous papers warning of the new cooling trend.
There are multiple scientific reasons why the IPCC warming prediction is incorrect by a factor of 5. Cloud cover increases when the planet warms so the planet’s response to a change in forcing is negative not positive.
Roughly 80% of the twentieth century warming was caused by a reduction in planetary cloud cover. Enric Palle published a series of papers that measured the reduction in planetary cloud cover by satellite measurement and by measuring changes in the brightness of the moon. In those papers he calculated that roughly 60 to 80% of the 20th century warming was caused by a change in planetary cloud cover.
The reduction in planetary cloud cover was caused by a mechanism called electroscavenging which is the name for a mechanism where by solar wind bursts create a space charge differential in the ionosphere which creates a voltage potential which removes cloud forming ions. There are other papers by solar specialists that note there were a very high number of solar wind bursts in the later half of the 20th century and planetary temperature changes correlate with the frequency and magnitude of the wind bursts.
The sun has abruptly moved to a low magnetic cycle. In the past the planet has cooled when the sun moved to a low magnetic cycle. There is in the paleoclimatic record cycles of warming and cooling that all correlate with the longer term solar magnetic cycle changes. The Solar magnetic cycle activity was the highest in 8000 years at the end of the 20th century. The late Gerald Bond tracked solar magnetic and climate temperature warming and cooling for 22 cycles through the Holocene interglacial period and into the glacial period. What we are living through has happened before. After the warming period the planet abruptly cools. There is a short interglacial period of roughly 10,000 years followed by a very long abrupt glacial period that is 100,000 years long. We are at the end of the current integlacial period the Holocene.
Physics does not pick sides. Hansen is incorrect and ignores obvious data in multiple published papers that shows the extreme AGW paradigm is absolutely incorrect because he is a messiah (Hansen is not the messiah, he actually just has a large ego like David Letterman.) rather than a scientist.
Reusable fiber bags work better than your arms.
William says:
February 25, 2011 at 5:00 pm
Watch a few minutes of James Hansen being interviewed by David Letterman.
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I understand your noble cause, but there’s no way I could bring myself to watching either a$$bag for any length of time. My stomach’s a bit queasy as it is.
“black
Reusable Grocery Bags could pose more of a health hazard than improve the Green environment—with 97% never washed, holding items that have been placed in grocery carts, conveyor belts, and raw meats and food, bacteria abounds. Among the plethora of bacteria discovered in reusable bags–50% contain Coliform bacteria, at least 12% E. Coli bacteria.
Researchers at two universities–University of Arizona and Loma Linda University–questioned grocery store shoppers who were headed into stores in the states of California and Arizona. The question at large: whether shoppers wash those reusable grocery bags that are supposed to save our environment and lend us all a “greener” planet. ”
http://www.wacktrap.com/health/physical-health/health-threats/reusable-grocery-bags-carry-e-coli-and-bacteria-contamination