Posted on 02/28/2011 9:36:11 PM PST by MinorityRepublican
Under the rule of the former speaker Nancy Pelosi, a number of steps were taken to reduce the carbon footprint of Congress.
A bit like the Republican party, they are white, seemingly indestructible and bad for the environment. But after an absence of four years, foam plastic coffee cups have made a comeback in the basement coffee shop of the United States Congress building after Republicans began reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats.
The about-turn was announced by a press aide to John Boehner, the speaker of the House of Representatives, who tweeted on Monday morning: "The new majority – plasticware is back".
When the Democrats held the house, the former speaker Nancy Pelosi put the cafeterias at the centre of a plan to hugely reduce the carbon footprint of Congress.
The ancient power plant in Washington DC a few blocks from the Capitol building, which provides heating and cooling for Congress and the supreme court, was converted from coal to natural gas. Compact fluorescent lighting and energy-efficient vending machines were introduced.
In the cafeterias, polystyrene packaging was replaced with trays and utensils made of biodegradable corn starch. Four separate stations were installed for recycling and sorting. A healthier menu was also introduced in 2008, offering cage-free eggs and antibiotic-free beef.
Items deemed compostable waste, such as coffee cups, were sent to a pulper in a lower basement, which squeezed out all the liquid before dispatching the material by truck to a commercial composting site in the suburbs of Washington DC.
There, the waste was mixed with soil, which eventually returned to Capitol Hill to be used as fertiliser on the grounds. Hundreds of tonnes of waste was saved from landfills yearly, Democrats said.
(Excerpt) Read more at guardian.co.uk ...
While the country burned, Pelosi did something completely symbolic and idiotic, signifying the nothingness in her head.
I’m not sure what irritates me more than the use of “carbon footprint” as a generic proxy for environmental virtue. What do the plastic cups and plates have to do with carbon? Nothing! You can argue about which option is best for the environment, but carbon has nothing to do with it.
In Nov. 2010 we “recycled” much of Congress out of office. In 2012 we get to finish the job by taking out the trash in the White House.
There’s an easy way to get rid of them: dissolve them in gasoline!
:)
I’m with you on how the liberals worship the carbon footprint.
It also gets me how they are into the carbon credit stuff too. I never understand that idea, because if the output of carbon is bad, why is it ok to continue to spew out carbon if you have paid for a carbon credit for the privilede of producing carbon? Why does liberal ideology allow you to pay a form of carbon tax but still produce all that evil carbon, if carbon is defined as evil and bad for the environment and all that?????
I hate foam cups. I’ve done litter clean-up activities with kids at the beach and picking up tiny fragments of discarded foam cups is really annoying. I’d rather Congress just use mugs that get washed and re-used.
“...dissolve them in gasoline!”
Napalm Congress???
Get yourself one of those propane weed burners.
You won’t even have to bend over.
Was that the source of the sludge that made the ground that mookie grew her veggies in - TOXIC...
The idea is that a market is created which causes a financial incentive to reduce pollution. If you simply tell a company that they can produce no more than X pollution, they have no incentive to produce less than X. But if they can produce less than X and then sell the difference to someone else, now there is an individual incentive to reduce pollution. Seeing a market, new industries will emerge around innovative solutions to lowering pollution in industrial output.
It is actually a pretty rational concept in theory. The idea of making polluters pay a fair market value for the effects they cause on others is a good one.
Of course, in practice, there are huge problems like where the caps should be set, and for that matter what constitutes pollution in the first place. That’s pretty hard stuff to get right, and then we have to assume people will be honest. People like Al Gore.
They are much more efficient at keeping drinks warm than the alternatives. Blame the litterer, not the cup for the beach clean up...
Sounds like a plan, but I’m not familiar with propane weed burners. I do live in wildfire- prone Southern California, so maybe that’s not a common tool around here.
In that case, I would recommend the hand-held size instead of the tractor-sized version. :-)
She tooled back and forth to California and on jaunts overseas in a 747 she commandeered for her personal use.
(Boehner, when he took over as speaker, said: “over the last 20 years, I have flown back and forth to my district on the commercial aircraft, and I'm going to continue to do that,” Boehner told reporters at a Capitol briefing.
House speakers historically have flown in commercial aircraft,
...
nanny, in one cross country trip, used more ‘cough cough’ carbon footprint that in all the cornstarch eating utensils and other for-show malarkey.
Double talk - not to mention the mansions they live in. Which is fine - just don't tell US how WE must live...
As ‘bummer said: “You can’t HAVE your thermostats on 72 - you can't EAT all the food you want to...” (I don't know anybody who has been able to afford having the furnace on 72 for years, Certainly not I. but I'll be damned if he's gonna tell me how warm I can keep it.
And the excuse, when it was found that he has the Oval Office on 77 (!)? “well, He grew up in Hawaii. He's not used to the cold.”
“scuse me??? He'd been living in the windy city - one of the most brutally cold cities in the country, for 30 years. I'd think his blood was thickened a bit by then.
And need I mention arugula and Kobe beef? I didn't think so. ;o)
I'll bet the carbon footprint of Pelosi's House Jet was greater than that caused by the use of white plastic cups in the basement coffee shop.
“...Pelosi did something completely symbolic and idiotic, signifying the nothingness in her head.”
Can anyone figure out the difference in energy consumption between the production of these styrofoam cups and ONE of Nancy’s military jets weekend flghts round trip between DC and San Francisco? Over the course of one term of Congress, I have to wonder what that difference would be.
“Next on the Republican agenda of environmental retro moves? Lightbulbs. House Republicans introduced a bill last week to repeal the government’s decision to phase out the old energy-inefficient bulbs, which was due to start in 2012.”
AAHHHHH! Can it be???? This was buried towards the end. Do we get our light bulbs back? I hardly dared to dream!!
Next up: high flow toilets! San Francisco is apparently needing to flush its whole sewer system with bleach ‘cause of all the low flows not pushing the waste far enough.
“I hate foam cups. “
But so often you want coffee ‘to go.’ You need something disposable.
>>“...dissolve them in gasoline!”
>
>Napalm Congress???
Thus solving MORE than one problem.
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