Category Archives: Global Warming

Via Listverse

If the road to hell is paved with good intentions then the road to climategeddon must be paved with pages from the green agenda. For the past couple of decades, armchair environmentalists and image-conscious politicians have been pushing through planet-saving initiatives that are often anything but. Initiatives like:

10 • Carbon Offsetting

Let’s say you’re environmentally-conscious but need to fly. Enter carbon offsetting: for the price of a coffee you can pay some third world farmer to quit burning coal, or some company to plant enough trees to cancel out the emissions from your trip.

If it sounds too good to be true, that’s because it is. The whole practice of carbon offsetting is so fundamentally flawed that eco-writer George Monbiot compared it to pushing food around your plate “to create the impression you have eaten it.” The numbers simply don’t add up: if we in the West decided to offset even fifty percent of our emissions targets, developing nations would have to magically start emitting negative amounts of carbon. Commercial offsetting is no better; investigations routinely find companies fudging their figures, or outright lying. With no industry standard, there’s nothing to measure improvements against; meaning companies can claim whatever they like.

9 • Organic Food

Organic foods are routinely billed as environmentally friendly and chemical free; despite being neither. All the nasty stuff we use in agriculture was developed to solve efficiency problems; take it away and you’re back to square one. A liter of organic milk, for example, can require up to eighty percent more land to produce than regular milk. This means deforestation, destruction of habitats and other things you don’t associate with organic. But wait, it gets worse: multiple studies have found high levels of pesticide in supposedly-organic food; while researchers have concluded eating it is no healthier and its production may lead to increased pollution. The chasm between what we expect and what we get from organic food has gotten so wide even die hard Greens have dropped it in favor of local and sustainable.

8 • Water Conservation

If you’re in possession of a Y chromosome, you’ve probably experienced the waterless urinals in McDonald’s. Insofar as you were thinking about such things, they maybe even seemed like a good idea; after all, saving that much water must be a good thing, right?

Well, not if you want to work without the constant stench of urine. Turns out stagnant pee doesn’t react well with copper piping; and by that we mean it chews right through. Chicago City Hall wound up decommissioning their waterless urinals after that exact situation led to waste flooding the toilets. But what about day-to-day conservation, like in your home? Yeah, maybe—if your neighbors are flushing nonstop. In Germany people have gotten so good at keeping water usage down their sewers are getting backed up, forcing the utility companies to blast insane amounts of water through just to keep them working. As a result, water rates are skyrocketing—while little to no benefit is provided to the environment.

7 • Insulation

According to one green group, a single town with below-average insulation can waste as much energy in a year as the BP oil spill. By my maths, that’s something like the equivalent of a bazillion oil spills happening annually. No wonder governments are subsidizing home insulation.

Which is great, so long as people buy the right type. See, skinning cats and insulating houses have one thing in common: there’s no one way to do it. Some methods, such as mineral wool or denim, are super-green—others, involving blown hydrofluorocarbons, are like punching Mother Nature in the face. It’s estimated this poisonous junk has a global warming potential nearly 1,500 times that of carbon dioxide, meaning it’ll take roughly ten lifetimes to settle your environmental debt. Even worse, as demand for insulation grows, so does production, leading to more pollution and so on and so on until Armageddon.

6 • Wind Turbines

As anyone who’s ever lived below an RnB-obsessed neighbor knows, hearing stuff you don’t want to hear can be irritating as hell. Same applies to wind turbines.

To date no study has found a correlation between turbines and physical illness, though there may be an interesting mental one. According to that link, while people living near community-owned turbines rarely report health problems, people who have had them forced on their village often do. Complaints often focus on the low-level humming noise and shadow flicker a sun-blocking side effect officially classed as an annoyance, but probably enough to send most of us into a blind murderous rage. Obviously they could just start building these turbines further away or go the Denmark route and give local people a stake in them, but that’s probably too much to ask.

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Related articles

• 10 Problems With the Green Agenda (listverse.com)
• Entergy buys carbon credits for Super Bowl; Maybe the money should have been spent making sure the power was reliable (junkscience.com)