Posted on 12/31/2018 9:34:01 AM PST by rktman
The biggest environmental scare story of 2018 was plastic pollution in the oceans. (It was also, as we shall see – spoiler alert – the year’s biggest lie…)
From BBC’s Blue Planet II to a special issue of National Geographic to a crusading campaign by the Daily Mail to CNN, the story was rarely out of the media. Celebrities from Chris Hemsworth to Cara Delevinge leapt on to the virtue signalling bandwagon. So did politicians such as UK Secretary of the State for the Environment Michael Gove and the European Parliament and US Congress, all announcing new legislation to deal with this alleged scourge.
Suddenly, plastic drinking straws became public enemy number one. No enlightened member of the chatterati could sip a cocktail ever again without pangs of guilt. Nor could they even clean their ears without a shiver of horror at the thought that today’s waxy cotton bud might be tomorrow’s obstruction in the nostril of a baby sea turtle.
(Excerpt) Read more at breitbart.com ...
The entire “green movement” is one big collection of fund-raising lies. Lies to promote fund raising.
And, they do an excellent job of it. Sad to say.
I don’t subscribe to the left’s hysteria, especially climate change BS. However, it seems to me that we do discard a lot of plastic items that do not degrade for many years. I would go so far as to say that the mountains of plastic thrown away each day is more of a environmental problem than the glo-bull warming/climate change hoax.
But... but... Great Pacific Garbage Patch the size of Texas. LOL
I read with glee that the RAINBOW WARRIOR II has been sent to a Bangladesh wrecking beach to be turned into scrap iron.
Rachel Carlson’s book Silent Spring which is basically the most sacred document to modern environmentalism was built on a false premise supported by fraudulent studies. “DDT is probably the single most valuable chemical ever synthesized to prevent disease.” Its first use by the United States military was to get a lice borne typhus epidemic under control in Naples in 1944. The Swiss scientist who discovered its important insecticide properties was awarded the Nobel Prize for physiology and medicine in 1948.
http://www.aei.org/publication/the-rise-fall-rise-and-imminent-fall-of-ddt/
Banning DDT has killed untold millions of kids and elderly from malaria and typhus in poor countries in tropical regions especially. Death and misery is the most prominent feature of modern environmentalism.
It isn’t primarily designed to raise funds; it is designed to raise taxes, and force Westerners to accept a lower standard of living. If the growing middle classes of the two Asian giants with over a billion people each wanted to buy a car, then their already-high pollution levels would skyrocket. Since they know Westerners enjoy a standard of living, they won’t settle for bicycles or packed trains forever.
Ride-sharing in this country is symptomatic of the problem; young Americans with wages falling to meet the rising Third World wages can’t afford cars (never mind families or homes), while the often-foreign drivers (at least in my area in northeastern NJ) can’t afford the cars without “sharing” them - still a step up from being one of 15,000 passengers on a single train in India or Africa.
And do they shed a single tear for the thousands of birds their precious wind turbines and solar panels kill every day? I think not.
I also read someplace this morning that due to the lack or or enforcement of enviro standards, she is leaking a bunch of petro products that are leaching into the sand and making it to the water. Creates a colorful sheen when the light is just right. Greenpeace? Not their problem now.
Sorry folks, while certainly the Greens oversell everything, the reality of plastic in the ocean is NOT an invented scare tactic it is VERY VERY REAL....
The problem is that 90% of it gets there from waste coming from a few handfulls of rivers in Asia and Africa, that no amount of regulation the wester world wants to pass will change.
Unless the WEST is willing to pay for filtering and cleaning these waterways, and educating the people that live there to stop throwing plastic in their rivers, it will keep happening...
But to claim it isn’t a problem or isn’t real is just as GARBAGE argument as the greenies are offering.
This piece oversells the report it claims to site just as flagrantly and ridiculously if not more so than Greenpeace oversells the problem.
Even if the are “mountains” of it...bury it in a land fill. Not a big deal.
Except it isn't our (America's) plastic that ends up in the ocean. A huge amount of that plastic comes from 3rd world countries that don't bother to properly dispose of their garbage.
More than half the plastic in the ocean comes from these five countries
Since human caused climate change is a complete hoax, backed up by fraudulent studies and reasoning, you actually make a valid point. (real problem vs fake problem) I would point out however that plastics tend to degrade quicker than many other more “natural substances” depending on the conditions and type of plastic. Many plastics these days are designed to be “biodegradable”. And I do not know, but are any municipalities in the United States allowed to dump garbage into the ocean these days???
A large percentage of “packing peanuts” are now made out of a rice based plastic that is both edible and dissolves in water. Most Styrofoam food containers are designed to deteriorate to nothing within a year or two. Even items you think would be made to last like plastic buckets and tubs tend to fall to pieces after a year or two if left in the sun or buried. Have you ever tried to use a blue plastic tarp for more than a season or two, or even put some black plastic sheeting under your turf to keep the weeds from sprouting up. The tarps fall to pieces and the plastic sheeting tends to just disappear after awhile.
No one hates garbage and litter left by miscreants on the side of the road more than I do. But modern products tend to disintegrate faster than many goods produced in previous eras when properly disposed of. And if you live in a city like the one where we do, incredible amounts of money are mostly wasted trying to recycle almost everything. While the goals are somewhat admirable, the amount of money spent for little real impact is astonishing.
Contrary to popular opinion, plastic DOES decompose. Exposed to sunlight, the compounds that make up most plastics are gradually degraded and depolymerized, reducing back to its original components, but it is a slow process. Once the depolymerization has proceeded to a point, then bacterial action further reduces the organic compounds back into carbon dioxide and methane, then dispersed into the environment.
Or the process may be greatly accelerated by simply using the discarded plastic products as fuel in an incinerator, and using the heat energy as power source, perhaps to heat water or generate electricity.
For a sure, clean and thorough elimination of plastic waste, a system called Plasma Arc Conversion, deconstructs the structure of ALL organic materials, breaking the majority of all organic waste into hydrogen and carbon monoxide, syngas, by sending it through an electric arc at some 18,000 degrees, which turns most elements into an ion stripped of its valence electrons. Metallic ions fall out of the syngas mix and are trapped in a vitreous compound made up of mostly silica, and is drained away in a thick taffy-like ooze, where it may be further refined into either aggregate, stone-like material that may be used in road building or even formed into bricks for construction, or it may serve as a high-quality ore for many of the metallic elements it contains, perhaps much more concentrated than most ores that are being commercially extracted now.
Meanwhile, the syngas being produced makes an excellent fuel to poser the electric generation plant that produces the sustained plasma arc that maintains the flow of organic material into syngas. This process actually yields MORE syngas than is consumed by by burning it as the source of heat energy for the electricty generation.
Once the technical difficulties get worked out, virtually ALL plastic waste may be then totally recycled, some ending up as the feedstock for synthesis of hydrocarbons through the Fischer-Tropsch process, or by thermal depolymerization, the process by which biomass is converted into various hydrocarbons, which can be done on a commercial basis to dispose of organic matter in such locations as slaughterhouses. Under sufficient heat and pressure, in the presence of sufficient water to make the process work, biomass can be rapidly converted from its original composition into a form of crude oil, kerogen. This process takes a matter of only a few hours to do what takes place at depths beneath the earth’s crust. over a matter of thousands or even millions of years.
Liberal lies...Greenwar and Glo-Bull Warming...
It all turns into gasoline after a couple hundred thousand years so.........................
Lies to promote fund raising ... and hefty pay checks ...
Sorry. Forgot the thanks for the good info.
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