Where is the line of absurd environmentalism for you?

[LOG]

How do you, as individual, decide that on this side of the line you are being a good custodian of the planet, and on this side you are a wacko?

For me, if protecting the environment is being particularly harmful in some manner to a group of people, it's probably not something that should be kept around.
Not to say that it's just inconveniencing them slightly, but is causing actual harm on a noticeable level in a large amount of the group.

[jennontheisland]

Reusable toilet paper. (http://living.wallypop.net/wipes.html)

[Death Wizard]

I know many find it cool to be snarky and cynical about this subject, but I just don't see how a person can do too much to preserve this wonderful planet. And that includes hugging trees.

[Bartholomew]

Reusable toilet paper. (http://living.wallypop.net/wipes.html)

Waste less paper, waste more water?

[LOG]

Waste less paper, waste more water?

I would not be comfortable washing them with my other laundry.

[dgiharris]

I know many find it cool to be snarky and cynical about this subject, but I just don't see how a person can do too much to preserve this wonderful planet. And that includes hugging trees.
You know, I used to believe the same thing, and then I received a top level briefing about Russia's environmental problems.

Their environmental dumping was so bad that 1 in 8 people in industrialized areas had birth defects. The most common was the clubbed feet/hand birth defect.

Truth is, even at our most cynical, the US is better than most at environmental issues. Most nations don't care if you dump in the rivers, lakes, or oceans.

Basically, just think about the problems that would be caused if no one used their toilets and instead just pissed and shat in the streets. Or just dumped their garbage 'wherever'. Seriously, in just a matter of days, an entire city would smell like a sewer. Google the 'NY garbage strike of the 80s'. IIRC, in just a few days, the garbage men brought that entire city to its knees.

Applied to the environment, if industry had free reign (like they do in Russia/China) then our birth defects and cancer rates would go through the roof along with a decrease in our life expentancies.

Mel...

[Synonym]

LOG, you are really on a roll this evening. What's next?

You don't own stock in a pharmaceutical company that specializes in blood-pressure medication, by any chance? :rolleyes:

[Synonym]

Nevermind, I think I found it. Holler at me when you get to animal rights. K?

[MacAllister]

Tread carefully, LOG. This is how many inflammatory threads, just this evening?

You're verging on being a fucking troll, and that doesn't generally end well.

[Bartholomew]

Tread carefully, LOG. You're verging on being a fucking troll, and that doesn't generally end well.

Oh my.

Are fucking trolls worse than the usual variety? Is the fucking consensual? Or should we, perhaps, be calling them raping trolls?
Food for thought.
Oh, god, don't ban me! :(

[Don]

Is it trolling if you learn useful things? 'Cause I learned about reusable toilet paper, and heard the wiz say nothing's too extreme to help the planet. So I gotta ask...

Jim, how goes it with the reusable toilet paper? :D

As to pollution, people don't pee in their own pools. It's only when they can get guiltless, unobserved access to others that they let loose in a fit of childishness. Or if they're from out of town and won't have to deal with the mess.

Privately-owned pools are much cleaner than public ones, or those leased out for parties.


That is all.

[Bartholomew]

Is it trolling if you learn useful things? 'Cause I learned about reusable toilet paper, and heard the wiz say nothing's too extreme to help the planet. So I gotta ask...

Jim, how goes it with the reusable toilet paper? :D

As to pollution, people don't pee in their own pools. It's only when they can get guiltless, unobserved access to others that they let loose in a fit of childishness. Or if they're from out of town and won't have to deal with the mess.

Privately-owned pools are much cleaner than public ones, or those leased out for parties.

That is all.

Coal-fired power plants are cleaner that public pools, too.

In fact, pick an object. Bury this object in sick pony dung for a week, and keep that dung warm and moist. This object is still several orders of magnitude cleaner than a public pool. And it probably smells better.

[Death Wizard]

Is it trolling if you learn useful things? 'Cause I learned about reusable toilet paper, and heard the wiz say nothing's too extreme to help the planet. So I gotta ask...

Jim, how goes it with the reusable toilet paper? :D



Quit bringing Jessica Simpson into this. :)

[Dommo]

As an engineer, I find a lot of the environmentalism stuff to be impractical, and ultimately ineffective. It's not that the "idea" is bad, but it's just that people are often unaware of real world limitations.

I work as a facilities engineer, and one of my duties, is to track utility consumption at our different hospitals/clinics. For example, a hospital might use say 1,000,000 KW/hrs a month, which is about the same as say 100 homes. I've had people try to bring up implementing all different types of "green" technologies, but most of it is bullshit. The technology just isn't mature/cheap enough to be used regardless of what many proponents/environmentalists might think.

For example, boiler technology(which is the way that you heat a large a building/provide hot water), is a technology that is 200 years old. It's understood thoroughly, and you can reliably run a boiler for over 50 years provided it's cared for. Also that boiler(especially like a hot water boiler, which is a massively scaled up hot water heater) has like a thermodynamic efficiency of like 90+%, so even if you're using natural gas to boil the water, you're getting an economy of scale that you can't yet achieve using alternative energy sources and you're getting almost every last bit of heat squeezed out of the natural gas when you burn it.

There are environmental things that we've pushed, but they're always grounded in economic/practical reality. For example, the maintenance budget we've got to work with, is really limited, so for us we're trying to get equipment that's really reliable so that our limited maintenance guys can keep up with stuff breaking down. Secondly, we don't want anything too sophisticated, because then we'd need to fork over a ton of money for training, and until we had our guys up to speed, we'd be screwed if something broke.

However, a lot of "waste minimization" types of policies are regularly implemented. An example might be me roaming around a hospital with a thermal imaging camera trying to locate air leaks. It's a lot cheaper to have the guys fix window sills, than to invest a million dollars in a state of the art boiler system. It's better return for us to put down a 100 grand on some quality insulation around our steam pipes/hot water, than to invest in solar panels.

I'm an environmentalist because it's a good way to try to make the most of the funding we get from the federal government. It's in our best interest to reduce waste (be it excessive man hours being dumped on old equipment, huge utility bills, degrading buildings, etc.), but things need to happen gradually.

[poetinahat]

Soooo, OP, when are you going to ask a question about the line between "economic rationalist" and wacko, hey? Or are you going to continue implicitly outlining that insanity is always on the left?

This really is getting tedious.

[dgiharris]

To add to Don's point.

The problem with most Green initiatives is that they really don't crunch numbers or extrapolate all the what ifs in the event that you actually transition to the new Green Technology that is the flavor of the month.

Now don't get me wrong, i'm all for progress and the environment and what naught, but you simply must crunch the numbers.

What good does it do you to have a hydrogen car if producing the actual hydrogen results in more pollution than if you just stuck with gasoline.

I'm supportive of any future technology that will have a net positive effect on the environment. All I ask is that you actually crunch numbers to make sure that is the case.

And unfortunately, most proponents don't crunch numbers. (And by proponents I mean the nebulous 'they' in politics and the media) THey stick to lofty ideas because hey, that is a lot easier to sell. Just be nebulous and emotional and make sweeping statements blaming big oil and coal and the government.

IMO, that actually HURTS the environment more than it helps it. INstead of focusing on effective' green research that can actually make a difference, resources get sucked into ideological ludicris ideas that will never pan out.

Mel...

[Zoombie]

The way I sees it is thus.

We have a lot of people and so much stuff to sustain them with. Some of the stuff is renewable. Some of it is not renewable (yet). At our current level of technology and growth, we cannot sustain our population indefinitely.

The environmentalists that scare me are the ones who think the solution is to...go backwards. To stop using this technology and revert back to a "simpler time".

The problem I have with this is that requires that...uh...pretty much 50% of the people in the world DIE. Being someone who likes being alive, I am against this.

The trick, imo, is not to GO BACK or stay where we are and reduce what we use.

No, the trick is to go FORWARD. Use technology to fix problems.

You know. Do what we've done for the past several THOUSAND YEARS!?

The only difference between fixing the problem of "dangerous animal" and the fixing of the problem of "feeding 2 billion hungry people" is the complexity and size of the issue.

But, back then, we had a spear.

Today, we have genetic engineering, hydroponics, improved understanding of how farming works, and so on and so forth.


So...don't be a luddite.

If you are, I'll punch you.