There was a thread posted on a forum I am a member of, this was the Original Poster’s (OP) comments:
Humans, as homo sapiens sapiens, have only altered this planet that we live on for the last 11,000 years. Before that, we were a hunter-gather people, whos population grew when food supplies grew. The fact that we now, as a people, can destroy this Earth is B***s***! Many people have different ideas of what will happen if the Earth get 1 or even 2 degrees hotter but there are many examples of when this was benficial. A good example is the Medevil Warming Period where, many of Europe’s greatest catherals and castles were built. This was possible because of the economic benfits that global warming brought us. Back then, people had liitle understanding of world climate, so they didn’t stunt the growth of the economy allowing the people to live better lives.
Main points that I need to make:
– recycling is most stupid thing ever created
Let’s say that we threw all our food scrapes, plastics, tin cans, and so on into a landfill. At this landfill, much of the decompossable materials would decompose and create methane gas which we can harness to make electricity. The components that do not compose will be collected later as demand increases for those products. This is due to an economic demand, which would then convert our landfills back into economic resources.
-oil is not running out
50 years ago, the Alberta Oil Sands, currently the largest oil deposit, was deemed unextractable. The fact was, at the time it cost of extraction was about 45$ a barrel. 50 years later, the demand of oil has driven the cost of a barrel of oil to 100$ allwoing the oil sands to be extracted. This economic demand drives the amount of supply up.
I think that is it for now…
Obviously, this guy doesn’t get it. He is missing a few things. Quakindude had a great reply, to which sparked mine in return (which is below his).
Quakindude wrote:
/emote ignores thread. OP is obviously off his rocker.
Global warming is more a natural cycle of the planet than our direct involvement. Do wecontribute to accelerating this natural phenomenon? Most likely. Would our cutting out all bad gas emissions stop the inevitable tide of heating, then cooling off, of this planet?
Not even.
Should we have a responsible society that tries to lesson our impact on the environment?
Absolutely.
YES!! Somebody who gets it!
I get so sick of everybody saying that we, humans, are the reason the earth is getting warming. No, really, we aren’t. Think about all the research and evidence that shows how much hotter it was in xxxx-asic or xxxx-zoic eras? It was 40-80% HOTTER then than it is today. It has also been a shit ton colder too. Sure, we might have some sort of impact, but in the grand scheme of things… it ain’t all that much.
I have even heard that while the northern polar cap is shrinking, the southern is growing (although the data is inconclusive as to what it really means, or if the delta is equal/significant between the two poles).
The earth was here before us, and will be here after us. Does that mean we shouldn’t try to conserve? Absolutely not. I agree that we should be conserving energy, just so that we can have it later. If we do little bits here and there, we can extend that 25 years worth of oil to 50, or more (to be honest, even with china, I don’t think we are in THAT much trouble yet…)
There are methods that have been developed (still very new) that could turn coal into oil. There is still LOTS of coal in the world and even the soft coal which doesn’t burn very cleanly could be used to make the oil to be converted to gas, etc. Biodiesel is a viable option. Hell, even regular diesel is better than gasoline.
Ethanol is NOT, plain and simple, it sucks. It is less efficient (~20% less) than gasoline and pretty much with the reduced efficiency you have to burn more, which in the end, produces the same amount or more polutants than normal gasoline. It seemed too good to be true, and it is. Not to mention that I would say less than 15% of cars in this Country, maybe even all of North America (it has been a while, there are stats somewhere) could run on E85. I bet the general public, if educated, would be pretty salty if they knew that it was less efficient and they would probably have to buy a new car, or have some heavy upgrades. I do recall that post-Katrina, the price of ethanol was ~$1 more per gallon than gasoline! I wasn’t aware that the Mid-West corn crop got hammered in that disaster…
Nuclear power. It is cheap, it is safer (we have been doing nuclear things for almost 60 years or better) that it was, and it is cleaner. It just makes sense to me. Everybody freaked after Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, but that was a “long” time ago and ruling out things because we are afraid of things that happened a long time ago, is pretty silly if we want to do something about the oil dependence.
Clean coal power plants are a joke, it would be better transformed into oil as stated above. Natural Gas is very plentiful and a very viable heating option. I know that there are lots of homes still using heating oil (mine for one, basically due to availability). If we work at converting things to that, it would increase the fuel oil supply for other things (Chem Eng, lets get that one and two oil converted to gasoline and diesel! Like yesterday!).
Wind power (although, if you are wanting to set up a wind farm in Minnesota (I think) you have to get on a 612+ year waiting list!). Solar energy (why don’t we have that yet???). All kinds of possibilities.
Hybrid cars are a joke, and a false hope (right now.) The technology is too new to be extremely practical and helpful. The only reason it is “affordable” vs their non-hybrid counterpart is government tax breaks for buying one. electric cars are not powerful enough and don’t have a long enough range yet to satisfy the American consumer.
I think the landfill idea isn’t awful. Food/lawn/bio waste will decompose at a decent rate (which can be accelerated) and the gas collected (I have seen an article about this in popular science or something similar). It makes sense. With that said, the other materials should be separated and stored else where. I think the OP doesn’t realize that he is suggesting is a better form of recycling, which is already practiced to a varied degree in different areas.
