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Strategies & Market Trends : The coming US dollar crisis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Follies who wrote (9269)	6/27/2008 1:04:13 AM
From: Gary Mohilner	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 71406

Dale, I believe it's all a matter of how you want to interpret pollution. If our exhaust gasses are five times cleaner then the worst country, but on a per capita basis because we're so much wealthier and more mobile we produce ten times the gasses, are we bigger or smaller polluters. In this example while all we produced was far cleaner, by the numbers we produced twice as much. In terms of solid wastes, I've read we by far create more trash than anywhere else in the world, we may process it better than others, but we still produce more than anyone else and rarely is it processed in such a manner as to put most of it to productive use. True we recycle much, but there are ways to get a lot out of what's not recycled, but we're not doing it. In terms of being wasteful, we probably use far more energy per capita then anywhere else in the world. Don't get me wrong, I like having a good sized home and reasonably sized and powerful car. In other places in the world energy efficient lighting can be found everywhere, try finding a T-5 lamp in a store, even the T-8's I had installed over a dozen years ago can't be found anywhere, we're still using the old T-12's that not only use far more energy, but produce much lower quality light. Our building standards require far more heating and cooling then standards in other countries and we seem in no rush to change that. Regardless of what we build, it's fine to build equipment that's more and less efficient, there are no regulations that require some minimal standard. If it were up to me, no given piece of equipment serving the same function as another piece of equipment could be more then 10% more wasteful than the most efficient unit. This might eliminate top loading washing machines completely as they generally use both substantially more electricity and water, but all the front loaders would all be within 10% of one another. If someone produced a machine that was over 10% more efficient than the one that's currently most efficient, all manufacturers would have a limited amount of time to bring their machines into compliance, or drop marketing the product. It's just my opinion, but if we want to make things better, we need to mandate that improvement be constantly made. I certainly don't know, but I suspect a decade from now carbon nanotubes could replace all sorts of things from computer chips to flat screens to lamps. My belief is they'll do it because they use so much less energy and can do the job as well or better. Gary