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Politics : The Environmentalist Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Peter Dierks who wrote (26291)	12/3/2009 9:20:15 PM
From: Maurice Winn	1 Recommendation Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 36918

Peter, you might want to reconsider your enthusiasm for recycling. It might be doing more environmental harm and costing more money, than simply throwing rubbish on a midden which will be great for archeologists in 1000 years. I was decades ago a recycler, but I have educated myself out of it. Now I simply chuck rubbish in the rubbish unless it has a value worth the recycling cost. Actually, the cost of cutting CO2 emissions isn't much. It's certainly very very far from back to the stone age and poverty. <It takes way more science than what they have done to sentence mankind to poverty for eternity. > The cost is about 25% more energy consumption to liquefy CO2 and pipe it under oceans. At most, energy costs for an economic system with no CO2 emissions are about double the present costs. My lifestyle would not be noticeably affected if I emitted zero CO2, including breathing [I could plant trees to suck up my CO2 from breathing and sequester them]. Life can be better to an almost unlimited extent, even with 6 billion people having a fantastic standard of living and emitting no CO2. But if we get reglaciation, life will not be getting better any time soon. Reglaciation is a far greater hazard than CO2 emissions. Peak People will be in 2037 [barring catastrophes]. Technology will keep improving. It's unlikely that CO2 will get to 500 ppm because technological shifts and population declines will happen before then. As Sheik Yamani used to say, the stone age didn't end because they ran out of stones and the oil age won't end because we run out of oil. Technology and what people want move on. A couple of decades ago, a good standard of living would mean all people having a couple of newspapers a day and lots of books. Now, newspapers are going out of business and will probably be not much use other than as on-line versions in another decade. People who have never bought a newspaper will go from stone age to cyberspace age. That will not mean their standard of living is less than that of people who decades ago had newspapers. We can avoid CO2 emissions without huge costs. The question is whether that's a good idea. Crops grow better with CO2. They need less water. More CO2 is not necessarily a bad thing. Simply moving taxation from incomes to carbon combustion would cut CO2 emissions hugely, with no loss of standard of living. Cutting taxes and wastrel government spending would be a huge economic boost. No more CO2 jamborees for example - that would save a fortune. Mqurice