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When sacred cows collide, you get hamburger.

One of the difficulties of being a Greenie is that you have so many things that you just can’t talk about.

For instance, Recycling is supposed to be an unalloyed good, but the reality is that most “recycling” is actually bogus “Waste to Energy” conversion, which is a fancy term for incineration. Every program in the country that balyhoos fabulous waste recovery numbers is relying on incineration to make it all work.

But incineration just takes the heavy metals that would have gone safely into a landfill and sends them up the smokestack. Scrubbers are good, but will only get you so far. Massive amounts of mercury escape these incinerators every day. If any other industry had this level of mercury emissions, they would be shut down immediately.

So the Greenies either have to condemn incineration, and eviscerate their carefully constructed recycling programs, or look the other way, and let the mercury spew into the environment. If you guessed that they took the expedient, unprincipled way out, you win the Kewpie Doll. They make up some cock-and-bull story about how the mercury deposits on the landscape as a harmless compound, but then admit that this “harmless” compound leads to bioaccumulation of mercury in fish and wildlife, which does not sound so harmless at all.

The Green Weenies are going to have to choose. Either they are going to have to give up on recycling or let mercury despoil the environment. They cannot have one without the other. This is just the first example of how the “ideals” of environmentalism have become ossified into special interests that accomplish the exact opposite of what was intended. Expect much more of this as the Environmental Movement matures.