Another application of the Grecian government formula blows up in their faces.
From EuroNews:
Smog hits Athens as cash-strapped residents choose fire over fuel
Bad news for austerity-stricken Greeks is also proving to be bad news for the environment – specifically the air quality in Athens.
Wood has soared in popularity, with many of the city’s residents using it to heat their houses, after an increase in duty has seen the price of heating oil double in two years.
====================================
Also, via The Raw Story:
Air pollution in Athens has surged in recent days because of people choosing wood over more expensive fuels to heat their homes in the grips of a continuing economic crisis, the environment ministry said Friday.
Particulate matter has been measured at 150 milligrammes per cubic metre, or three times the danger level, especially in the northern and western suburbs of the Greek capital, the ministry said.
The visible smog is reminiscent of that which cloaked the mountain-ringed city before it modernised its cars and buses.
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@The Gray Monk says:
“…This is why in Africa deserts are advancing so fast. Anything the goats don’t destroy is burned as fuel for cooking and heating.”
Not to put too fine a point on it but the deserts in Africa are shrinking and have been for about 30 years. (It is a big secret so keep it under your hat, but even National Geographic noticed! http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html )
This dis-desertification is apparently caused by…. you guessed it! Anthropogenic Global Warming!
Who’d-a-thunk. It is amazing stuff, that AG CO2. Causes deserts and greening at the same time in the same place!
@Crispin – That makes sense. We were told in the 70s that the new ice age was enlarging the Sahara.
Juergen Uhlemann says:
January 2, 2013 at 1:10 pm
“/sarc on
Wood is renewable energy.
Just plant a lots of tree’s. Less fosil fuel and you get a CO2 capture for free.
Our ancestors used wood and did’t cause AGW.
/sarc off ”
Mankind still uses, I think two cubic miles of wood a year for all purposes including burning it.
And one cubic mile of coal. No need to talk of ancestors; wood use has never been greater.
“Btw.: I’ve seen on German TV a report that people just go out and cut tree’s and the government is controlling this. Job creation? They listen out for chainsaws as this is the only way to capture them.”
Germans, especially Greens, have installed millions of wood fueled heatings. Wood theft is rampant; foresters have been listening for the sound of illegal logging with chainsaws for years.
“The wood sellers have also multiplied. Job creation?”
Wood pellet prices have doubled over the past few years; it is now becoming impossible for makers of plywood in Germany to buy scrap wood as every scrap is pressed into pellets and burned.
We should replace plywood with plastic panels or sheet metal.
Crispin in Waterloo says: January 3, 2013 at 6:59 am
This dis-desertification is apparently caused by…. you guessed it! Anthropogenic Global Warming!
========================
Yes, yes, a warmer world shrinks deserts. This is confirmed by paleo-climate studies. At the height of the Holocene Optimum, aka Climatic Optimum, the Sahara was a verdant plain with rivers and lakes, some 4,000-7000 ya. This has to do with increased SST, however, not AGW, which is a fallacious doctrine.
To Jimbo:
You wrote:
If you really want to hammer home your point, remind them that all those cut-down trees
are now no longer absorbing CO^2, thus increasing the content of the “EVIL GREENHOUSE
GAS” in our atmosphere.
GlynnMhor says:
January 2, 2013 at 3:44 pm
Markw complains of “… blaming the victim.”
Well, when the blameworthy include the victims, then that’s what needs to be done.
Being a victim does not automatically absolve one of guilt.
——————————————————————————
Oh, it’s the Greek people’s fault, I get it. They’re lazy, tax avoiding, early retiring, layabouts, is that it? Adopt media stereotypes much?
Nothing to do with the bankster derivative traders in cahoots with corrupt politicians who have sold the people down the river and are currently relieving them of everything they own?
I get where you coming from: a point of wilful, probably invincible ignorance.
Churchill said, after the battle for Crete (I think) – “Greeks do not fight like heroes – heroes fight like Greeks”. I believe the Greek defence of Crete delayed Hitler invading Russia and so helped turn the tide of the war. See Mr. Panos explain it here (please be aware there is a loud expletive very near the start)
(It is a HUMOROUS video – a joke. What is happening in Greece now is VERY far from a joke):
THIS is the point I have made SEVERAL YEARS IN A ROW NOW in comments as the air here in our little suburb has become FOULED with smoke in the evening hours when ostensibly wood (and other combustible materials!!!!) are ‘fed’ into fireplaces in the neighborhood for heat:
EPA ARE YOU LISTENING?
.
THAT’S IF they are burning wood … NOT EVERYBODY APPEARS TO BE BURNING JUST WOOD!
.
Intelligence has driven the collective, Man animal, insane GK
Bingo!
Confirmation of what I am seeing/smelling! (I came in from outdoors just last week and could smell it on my sweatshirt!)
And to think these/this neighborhood was adverted as having “Clean all-electric heat” once upon a time …
EPA ARE YOU LISTENING?
.
I will gladly mail you an article of clothing (of your choice) juiced-up with the smoke from one of these evenings as proof of what is taking place …
.
Today’s made-to-be-throttled (by restricting the air intake) wood-burning heat-producing stove won’t last an hour wide-open-throttle much less 5 hours through the night w/o throttling it back …
Have you ever seen one of these stoves; do you understand their operation?
.
_Jim, Caleb, etc.
What is happening in Greece is an example of the unfortunate environmental consequences which inevitably result when fuel prices are forced high or people are otherwise impoverished.
Downdraft stoves which consume their own smoke were developed by the UK’s Coal Research Establishment (CRE) in the 1980s and have been commercially available from a variety of suppliers since then.
But so what?
People lack the money to buy such stoves when they have to resort to wood-burning because they cannot afford other heating fuel.
Richard
Does Greece have much wood?
As for stove efficiencies, Grecians could seek out those small cheap stoves poor people use, chronicled here several months ago. 😉
Clear example of the worst kind of unintended consequence, the Cobra Effect. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect
Well they reduced measurable co2 emission this way…
Plus with 400M less revenue. The government will have less to spend so reducing c02 even more.
As any added bonus any sane tourist probably wont hang around in a smog filled city for too long. Meaning less tourist income and less revenue.
The bonus is less co2 again.
These guys are like genuis to come up increasing taxes on heating oils
@ur momisugly KiteFreak You are right, to an extent. It is the bankers and the funds who are starving Greece, making sure they get paid back by European taxpayers for the impossible loans they made to a Greek state that never had any hope of paying them back.
But Greek politicians were complicit in this, and have become very wealthy from it all. Also, the bloated and hugely corrupt Greek civil service, who keeps voting in the same thieving politicians, is also complicit. It is not so much laziness, or early retirement, that has caused the problems in Greece. It is massive and endemic corruption, where the private sector work as serfs to feed the public sector middle class and the neo-aristocratic/oligarchic political class.
Isabelle says: January 4, 2013 at 1:48 am
It is massive and endemic corruption
==============================
Indeed, that was the very reason given by the German Government for their refusal to participate in a proposed bailout of Greece some months back.
And the really funny thing is that burning coal and oil helps vegetation. Higher levels of atmospheric Co2 has never failed in at least the last 100 million years.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1193833
@ur momisugly mapainter Germany was involved in the corruption too. If I was a German taxpayer, I would be asking my government very intense questions about why part of the bailout terms offered to Greece was that the Greeks continue to buy overpriced and faulty German military hardware with the newly borrowed money. Why should the German taxpayer bail out the Greek tax payer to pay the German industrialist? Or Frendh for that matter, Dassault were involved in this. I would also ask my government why German, US and French firms are at the forefront of opening up the new oil and gas resources in Greek territorial waters, with income from those fields to go directly to the companies and shareholders rather than being earmarked to pay back the German taxpayer. Make no mistake, I don’t blame the Germans, I still blame my fellow Greeks, but the Germans aren’t totally innocent and their pretence at dislike of Greek corruption is pure hypocrisy.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/greece/9129234/EU-accused-of-hypocrisy-for-1-billion-in-arms-sales-to-Greece.html
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/france-and-germany-to-blame-for-greece-crisis-7218923.html
http://www.zeit.de/2012/02/Ruestung-Griechenland
Well, I thought I would have seen this in the comments, but I don’t:
Doesn’t anyone appreciate the irony of people suffering freezing temps in an effort to keep the earth from warming? Sounds like candidates for the Darwin Award to me.
Reuters – Biofuels cause pollution, not as green as thought – study
http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/01/07/us-climate-biofuels-idUKBRE90601A20130107
Isabelle says: January 5, 2013 at 3:41 am
====================
Sounds like fertile soil for a revolutionof some kind. Form a Jacobin society.