Are we becoming too "Green"?

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Phoebe Pikeposted 13 years ago
I know a lot of people say we aren't doing enough to protect the environment, while others say we do too much, which side do you belong to and why?
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  junksellerposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Forget about what "people" say. Virtually every single major scientific institute on the planet is saying it. People are entirely welcome to ignore the collected mass of scientific knowledge and evidence that supports their claim, but doing so is pure folly.
  
  It isn't just about the climate changing, as it always has, it is the rate at which it is changing, which is as best we know unprecedented. Also, even natural climate change happens for a reason; Earth's orbit, solar activity, etc. In our case none of those natural variables explain the change we are seeing. Furthermore, no one is necessarily saying that we are going to destroy the planet, but potential consequences such as sea level rise, water shortages, and/or shifts in food production capacity can have very significant impacts on dense population groups. Especially poor ones.
  
  What can be done is to halt the emissions of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere and to continue to increase our understanding of these very complex relationships.
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  weholdthesetruthsposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  It would be nice if you'd learn science, instead of political dogma.
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  junksellerposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  It'd be nice if you learned civilized discussion, instead of denigration. Insults are the purview of a weak mind.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  And yet you just negated your own point by insulting him. How sad.
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  junksellerposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Not really. Criticizing for a reason is different than criticizing without reason. He didn't engage my argument and instead levied an insult without merit.
  
  I was criticizing the action (unwarranted denigration) he put on the table.
  
  And I then made a generic statement about ad hominem attacks being the actions of those who do not have legitimate arguments.
  
  Maybe you are a little right. Maybe it was a bit too insultury, but then I have seen enough insults come from weholdthesetruths to not care too much about being polite to him (or her). I apologize if it de-civilized this board a bit.
  
  Pease don't be sad. Haha.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Perhaps, I have not read enough posts by weholdthesetruths to develop a negative stigma. I can understand having a bias against a person, as I have many myself towards certain, unnamed persons.
  
  True, though. He did not contribute with a counter-argument, but instead made a personal attack. I did not view it in the same respect as you did, and I only recognized his statement/attack.
  
  Although, if he had presented a scientific argument, it may have made his insult, um... less insulting. Alas, that is not the case and the situation is what it currently is. Some people only want to post for the sake of posting, and that is often what happens. I suppose that those people are best to just be ignored. Eventually, they may understand that their statements really don't affect intelligent people, (like yourself).
  
  As of late though, I have taken up to looking at their presentation of mockery in a humorous light. To make a statement like that about someone online, as if they know them personally, only makes the mocker appear to be foolish. Example: these people don't know me and it would take a lot of traveling and hard effort on their part to find evidence to back up any insult, (that is, if they wanted to make a truthful insult).
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  junksellerposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Well, normally I would just ignore someone who I see as being unreasonable.
  
  But in this case, his post was pure insult, with no attempt at all made to make a point, and it was put straight to me and not really in the flow of the larger discussion, so I did. Though as you said it is probably best to leave it be.
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  CHRIS57posted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "Green" is not simply about environmental issues.
  "Green" is the synonym for an upcoming industrial revolution. And as it was with all industrial changes, there is a trigger.
  
  The trigger is energy cost. Market prices for energy are going up because of growing global demand, especially from developing economies and at the same time instability in the OPEC club (Libya...)
  So it is all about money. You better get a car with high mpg, you better not use too much electricity, you better not use too much airconditioning in summer time and you should insulate your home in winter time - that is what saves you money.
  Of course saving energy requires investment, new car, new insulation, more public transportation, new renewable energy (windfarming, solar photovoltaic) - Guess what investment does? Pushes economy, creates new industries, new products.
  
  The US uses almost twice as much energy per capita as Japan and almost 3 times as much as Germany, 2 economies with comparable industrialisation. Lot´s to do for the US to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint.
  
  To me all this "Green" discussion is just a self regulating mechanism of human demand for prosperity and healthy life. For many years only the more and more sophisticated use of industrial production was in focus. Today we have to reduce energy cost and if we do it right, our high skills in industrial production will help to reduce energy consumption and even more reduce the carbon footprint.
  
  This is a chance, not something to lamet about.
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  Druid Dudeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  There have been programs on which graphically show how much waste one person generates in their lifetime. Totally astounding. Then, consider that the U.S. is considered the most wasteful of all the nations. Sad...just plain sad.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Yes, but China emits the most carbon into the atmosphere annually. The average American puts 80 tons of carbon into the atmosphere each year. The global average is 17 tons per year.
  
  I happy to say that I only put 19 tons into the atmosphere per year. Oh, wait, I'm not happy anymore. 19 tons is almost equal twenty school buses...
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  hottopicsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Not critisizing, but how do you know you only put out 19 tons of carbon?
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  Jeff Berndtposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I'm kinda curious about that myself...
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  james_foreclosureposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  i don't think it's possible to be "too green" - we have been damaging our planet for ages, destroying the ecosystem and emitting toxic gasses into the ozone... remember "An Inconvenient Truth"? it's perhaps the only good thing al gore has done since leaving the oval office as VP.
  
  i think we personally need to be doing more... especially with gas consumption.
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  ForYourInfoposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  We do a lot to destroy our beautiful environment and speak a lot about protecting it.
  In reality we do not sacrifice our momentary comfort forgetting that it is going to ruin ourselves only.
  I think it is really time that we should do something.
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  Marisa Wrightposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Google the Pacific Gyre. It's a garbage patch as big as Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, and it's not just on the surface - it goes miles down. Fish and seagulls around the Pacific are dying in large numbers with plastic in their gullets.
  
  Whether climate change is natural or man-made, there are lots of other ways we're doing dreadful harm to our environment.
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  kwade tweelingposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Both. Much of the "Green Movement" is political maneuvering. Not much done and a lot said.
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  IntimatEvolutionposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  We can never be too green. We haven't even gone completely green yet.
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barryrutherfordposted 13 years ago
We need to do a lot more to compensate for the 250 years since the Industrial Revolution where we started pumping noxious gasesinto the atmosphere
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  But isn't the world naturally warming up and cooling down? And what more can be done?
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  There is a lot more to being green than climate change.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I will extend Holden's thought:
  
  Going Green is about cleaning up the Earth's environment. It is about preserving what we have on Earth, such as rain-forests and oil. Going Green means investing in alternative energies technologies that will cut back on how much we take from the Earth.
  
  I am sure that there can be more done about going Green. However, it think that it is also too much too soon. If this trend had been started 20 years ago and gradually introduced, I think that there would have been better "results" produced.
  
  People like fads, but Green should not be a fad. Green is typically a lifestyle, a way to live. In another twenty years I expect that people will move on from being Green and will find a new movement to follow. Those who are genuinely concerned for this planet may become the minority, while the rest find something else to follow.
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  Jim Hunterposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  How old is the Earth?
  
  Millions of years old?
  
  But we are destroying it in a century and a half?
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  4.54 billion, actually.
  
  The Earth will survive anything we throw at it. It took only ten million years for it to recover from the Permian mass extinction that killed 96% of marine species and 70% of terrestrial vertebrates.
  
  The problem is that we are rendering it uninhabitable for ourselves. If we're stupid enough to keep it up, then clearly we deserve to go extinct, but some of us like to think that we're smarter than that. We'd be a pitifully short lived species if we aren't. Most species last about 10 million years, we haven't even made it to 200,000.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  If there were survivors from a human extinction then, a few thousand years down the road they would just build everything back up to what it was. I can say that because humans are creatures of comfort. We search to have the best in life and are miserable when we think we have less.
  
  I am not sure if I would "volley" for a mass human extinction, my survival instinct says no. Logically, it would be an improvement for our planet, but in reality, if humans were wiped out things would actually get worse. Think of all the nuclear plants and such things.
  
  Speaking of nuclear plants, should they be ditched all together? To state the obvious, they aren't really green, and are dangerous if they melt-down.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "If there were survivors from a human extinction then, a few thousand years down the road they would just build everything back up to what it was."
  
  Probably yes, although the degree of our success would depend a bit on how messed up the climate is. If we lose Greenland's ice sheet, for example, it will first take hundreds of years to actually melt down to nothing, and the resulting higher sea levels would last for thousands of years. A more serious long term problem would be desertification. This is what the planet could look like by 2100 on a moderate emissions scenario (700ppm by 2100 - we're currently on track to reach 1000ppm by 2100):
  
  Just as a reference point, the driest it got during the 30's Dust Bowl was -6.
  
  Desertification is possible to reverse, but difficult. For example, much of the Middle East used to be fertile farmland and conifer forest, but it was deforested to build ancient cities and salinized by bad irrigation practices and 3000 years later, it still hasn't recovered.
  
  "I am not sure if I would "volley" for a mass human extinction, my survival instinct says no."
  
  I'm opposed to mass extinction of humans - that's why I'm an environmentalist. We're not as independent of Earth's natural systems as we think we are, and if those systems break down, we're screwed. If we deliberately break them down through our own greed and short-sightedness, we're both screwed and monumentally stupid.
  
  "Logically, it would be an improvement for our planet, but in reality, if humans were wiped out things would actually get worse. Think of all the nuclear plants and such things. "
  
  There's a really interesting book called "The World After Us" that describes what would happen if every human on the planet vanished tomorrow. Radioactive lumps of melted nuclear plant would definitely be one of our longest lasting legacies. Another is plastics, some of which are, as far as we know, essentially indestructible and could stick around for hundreds of thousands of years after we disappear, until something evolves the ability to eat them or they get stuck in some geologic process along the lines of the one that turns concentrated dead plants and animals into oil.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I was actually quite worried when I saw you quoting me, because in many forums when people quote one another it is to degrade another person statement. I was relieved when I continued reading on.
  
  I will have to check out the book mentioned. Thank you for extending my thoughts.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "I was actually quite worried when I saw you quoting me, because in many forums when people quote one another it is to degrade another person statement."
  
  Oh, I do that often enough, but in this case I think we're in essential agreement.
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  Debby Bruckposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Thanks for these figures and map. "If there were survivors from a human extinction then, a few thousand years down the road they would just build everything back up to what it was."
  
  Something tells me the human mind cannot comprehend the enormity of scale, the numbers in years and the statistics in a tangible visceral manner that touches his inner being. Only the here and now of how a person lives in his or her environment, with some input from the internet, videos, articles etc impacts the person at that gut level where s/he takes action. When it comes to security, health and basic needs in the present time, that takes precedence over what happens in the future, unless a person intellectualizes and foresees what could happen.
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  logic,commonsenseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  kerryg, you are right on! Nature will continue on it's path whether we are in the way or not. This planet has face far more cataclysmic events that we can possibly imagine and yet it continues on.
  We can only control what is happening to ourselves by controlling ourselves. Government can pass all the laws it wants. The bottom line is each of us has to think about how we are contributing, positively or negatively. I am not a "greenie", but I am a conservationist. Have been since grade school, where we were taught common sense conservation, not the extremist crap that goes on now that encourages violence and the destruction of other people's livelihood and property.
  Do companies pollute? Absolutely! If that is a problem for one, then they need to make sure they don't work for that company. If enough don't want to work there, they will have no employees, and will go out of business. So I guess in other words, the employees are polluting. Same way with vehicles. If people don't want to pollute, they need to quit driving and start riding bicycles. Whoops, can't do that, bicycles are made in those factories that are supplied by polluting industries. Guess we have to walk then. Whoops, when we walk we fart, so now we are putting methane in the atmosphere. Guess we should just die and all the pollution will go away. Hmmm, the volcanoes will still erupt and the earth will still open up and plants and animals will still decay, so where will we be?
  Gist of it is, do as much as you can, based on your own conscience. We cannot control everything, just what we personally do.
  Course the elitists here, will disagree, but then they know what's best for me and everyone else so that should be of no suprise.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "Gist of it is, do as much as you can, based on your own conscience. We cannot control everything, just what we personally do."
  
  I agree with this, but it's important not to create false equivalencies. Just because there is no perfectly "green" action doesn't mean it is pointless to try to become more green.
  
  To use your example, you'll fart just as much driving a car as you will walking, and an average car uses substantially more raw materials from factories supplied by polluting industries than an average bike does, so it's still by far the least green option of the three, even before you actually turn it on and start shooting carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, and unburned hydrocarbons out of its tailpipe.
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  Jeff Berndtposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "The problem is that we are rendering it uninhabitable for ourselves."
  Exactly so. The planet was fine before we arrived, and it'll be fine after we're gone (whether we ruin it for ourselves or some astronomical or geological event does the job for us).
  "If we're stupid enough to keep it up, then clearly we deserve to go extinct, but some of us like to think that we're smarter than that."
  Well, some of us are smarter than that, but there are many many stupid stupid people in the world. Also, there are many people who just don't give a darn for anything beyond their own lives, or those of their immediate descendents. They seem not to care about their many-great grandchildren.
  Further, there are the folks who genuinely believe that it would be a Good Thing to wreck the Earth for human habitation, because it would hasten the Apocalypse, when they will receive their Heavenly reward.
  This may or may not be scripturaly supported (and I don't want to needlessly widen the debate), but just in my own humble opinion, if we wreck the planet that god gave us dominon over, won't He think that we've been pretty darn ungrateful?
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  Maembeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  That's one of the silliest arguments I've ever heard and I've been posting here for weeks.
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  RachaelLeflerposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  indeed.
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  RachaelLeflerposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Well I mean, this whole thread is a silly argument.
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  The Earth is about 4.5 billion years old. It has seen many, many cycles of heating and cooling.
  
  Don't let the alarmists scare you. There is nothing to see here.
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  Ralph Deedsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Yep.
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Mighty Momposted 13 years ago
We won't be too green until we are 100% green.
We, as a global community, as a country, and as individuals, have much more greening to do.
Many people are not incented by "doing the right thing for others."
There are financial benefits to going green as well.
You save real $$$ when you drive a fuel efficient car, use energy efficient appliances and install solar panels on your roof.
There are a zillion little ways we can all become greener.
And not a single excuse why we don't!
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I agree.
  
  Another major issue is this: factories and coal plants produce more carbon in the atmosphere than all of the cars in America running at the same time.
  
  OH! I just found a way to calculate your carbon footprint. Here That could help some people go more Green.
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Joy56posted 13 years ago
well the schools here are teaching the kids to be very very green........ the next generation of adults, should do a better job of things.

They do go a bit far in the schools, ah but sure, tis better to more green than less green
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  weholdthesetruthsposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Schools are teaching dogma, not facts.
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Can you give an example of the dogma? I'm curious on your perspective on what the schools are teaching.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  weholdthesetruths: I am requesting this in the nicest possible way:
  
  Could you, maybe show evidence to support this claim?
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  Jeff Berndtposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Support your assertions or you're not contributing to the discussion; you're just throwing rocks.
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wheelinalloverposted 13 years ago
My take on this is when it takes more infinite resources to make green technology its time to pack it up. I probably understand living green better than most people, I actually lived much of my childhood using nothing but what mother nature provided. The only thing I remember using which could hurt the environment was fire. Cleaning the forest of combustible material might have saved a forest fire so it was a trade off.
For the first time in my life I will be taking down a living tree in a few weeks. It's still alive but dying and it has become a danger to my neighbors house. There is no other reason I would ever cut down a living tree.
I guess you would have to say within what I can afford I am as green as I can get.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Being Green is not all about the technology. Being Green can be a simple as recycling, or walking instead of driving.
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barryrutherfordposted 13 years ago
If you look athe average temperature of the earth one can see a gradual but constant rise of hotter days on average taken together collectively since the 1850's. 2010 happenend to be the hottest year globally on average.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Maybe some validation over the enthusiasts of the supposed 2012 Mayan Calender event? Perhaps what those Mayans were talking about all along was global warming.
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2uesdayposted 13 years ago
Being green is just a term, it is really about respect for the world you live in, the world that supports you and hopefully the future generations.
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BobbiRantposted 13 years ago
There are Enough resources for man's needs, but Not for his Greed! That sums that up nicely. If we used things wisely, but, alas, in order to gain fabulous wealth, conservation is out the window.
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DonDWestposted 13 years ago
I am sorry if this makes me sound like a right-wing extremist, but I will accept being labelled a right-wing extremist, for now. . .

I feel a lot of the environmental movement is filled with corruption. I don't have any evidence, mainly because I don't have access or the means to acquire such evidence, but my intuition tells me this movement is leading my generation down a path of economic suicide.

My intuition tells me this "green movement" is being used to brain wash my generation into accepting and living in squalid like conditions. I believe the rich and privileged in society are using the "green movement" as a weapon, so we can all live like the Chinese. When I see YouTube videos of young adults happy in their 90 foot squalid "micro-studios", I want to puke. Our parents generation wouldn't accept working the rest of their lives for this 3rd world condition hood and neither should we. . .

I find it hypocritical how "green movements" are often pushed on the young, by the old who own two or three homes, while the young are renting a tiny apartment due mostly to economic conditions. I can't help but feel this "green movement" is being used to create a young sacrificial proletariat, and I don't like it. I don't like it at all.

People seem to be forgetting that while you're "downsizing" to your tiny squalid conditions, the houses and land don't exactly disappear. Who do you think scoops them up once you're gone? The rich, that's who, who then pick them up at bargain prices and often pollute even more than an ordinary person.

My father was able to afford a four bedroom house off one wage, I'm sorry if it makes me greedy for wanting and desiring the same. In many ways, I consider the environmental movement the great betrayal of the liberal class. If we cared half as much about fuzzy animals as we do humans, maybe there would be less wars.

I think this phony environmental movement is all about greedy rich people who want it all for themselves, and want their workers to live in barracks like China.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Several points:
  
  1. If we continue on the "business-as-usual" path we're currently on that is projected to land us at 1000ppm by 2100, you're essentially destroying your home in exchange for the short term profits of wealthy corporations anyway. Why not take charge of your future and try to turn things around?
  
  2. North America doesn't have enough oil resources of its own to become energy independent, unless you count tar sands and shale oil, which are both extremely environmentally destructive to extract. Why not focus on developing clean, domestic energy sources instead of throwing more and more military and diplomatic efforts into ensuring our continued access to foreign energy sources, most of which are controlled by unstable dictators? Again, advocating business-as-usual emphasis on fossil fuel energy would benefit wealthy multinational corporations far more than ordinary citizens.
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  DonDWestposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I understand where you're coming from in terms of dependence on crude oil, but I'm a tad confused how a lot of the ideas put out by "green movements" help towards addressing that issue. A lot of it seems like propaganda and brains washing toward making us accept less. The whole ideal comes across as regressive in my mind. I'm progressive; I believe you can live an abundant life without oil. I know so, because I've built wealth by cutting oil.
  
  There are a lot of contradictions in the "green movement" as well: One of them in the CO2 theory. For starters, CO2 isn't a toxic substance; it's a necessary component for photosynthesis. Once I get that argument cleared with the "scientists", their next point is that "it's the high concentration of CO2 that's toxic." My rebuttal to that is simple, "then how the heck does bunching humans up, in squalid like conditions, reduce CO2 concentration? Wouldn't that increase CO2 concentration? Shouldn’t we spread out instead?" Then they mention that would increase oil consumption, but that's mute point, because oil exhaust is CO, not CO2.
  
  The people who often ruthlessly try to defend such positions are those with Master's degree or above that often they work for major corporations or the government. The entire CO2 theory comes across as rather suspect to me. Science involves a lot of skepticism. In my opinion, such a radical theory as this shouldn't be preached unless you're 99.99% certain, because the sacrifices involved could prove enormous. Presently, the theory is filled with more holes than Swiss cheese.
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  If you have no evidence to back up your statements then isn't it all speculation anyways? When I view your above statements, I do not feel inclined to believe them but, maybe that is because I am on the "greener" side of this discussion.
  
  There are many resources on the internet that provide information about CO2 emmissions. Carbon emissions are not a fairy tale and is a very serious matter. Reducing your carbon footprint is about more than buying into corporate corruption. It is proven that a CFL light bulb will save money, as well as energy.The less energy that is used means less electricity consumed, which amounts to less coal burned and carbon released in the atmosphere.
  
  Green was not something cooked up in the labs of a corporation. The damage that we are doing to the Earth's environment is very real. People are not ignorant and took notice of this. These people, I presume, took action and decided to preserve what was left of the Earth.
  In fact, here is a link on the subject of the Green movement and how is started: http://webecoist.com/2008/08/17/a-brief … -movement/
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  If you can point me to where a respected scientist has claimed that CO2 is "toxic" (except in very high concentrations of 10,000ppm or more), I would be interested in reading that. Scientists say that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which is an entirely different thing and which has been accepted by most scientists since the early 1900s. Also, auto emissions include both carbon monoxide and carbon dioxide, as well as nitrogen oxides and unburned hydrocarbons.
  
  The argument whether urban areas or rural areas are more green is actually still raging. The theory behind urban advocates is that urban areas have better mass transit and more walkability. My Seattle relatives can easily walk or take a bus anywhere they need to be, whereas my rural Nebraska family has to drive to get anywhere. On the other hand, urban areas need most of their food and raw materials shipped in, whereas rural areas were traditionally, at least, more self-sufficient. In modern times, you'd be surprised by the number of farmers I know who couldn't grow a tomato to save their lives and buy all their food at the grocery store just like a city slicker.
  
  "In my opinion, such a radical theory as this shouldn't be preached unless you're 99.99% certain, because the sacrifices involved could prove enormous."
  
  It's not that radical. The scientific principles behind it, as I said, have been pretty well established for more than 100 years. Additionally, if scientists are correct about the results of rising atmospheric CO2 levels, then the cost of adaptation will be far, far higher than the cost of mitigation.
  
  If we stay on or near our current emissions path, scientists estimate we'll be at 1,000ppm by 2100, with the following effects:
  
  * Staggeringly high temperature rise, especially over land — some 10°F over much of the United States
  * Sea level rise of 3 to 7 feet, rising some 6 to 12 inches (or more) each decade thereafter
  * Dust Bowls over the U.S. SW and many other heavily populated regions around the globe
  * Massive species loss on land and sea — 50% or more of all life
  * More severe hurricanes — especially in the Gulf
  
  http://climateprogress.org/2009/03/22/a … igh-water/
  
  Studies by organizations including the IPCC, the McKinsey Global Institute, and the International Energy Agency have found that mitigation (maxing out CO2 levels at 450ppm and dropping back toward 350ppm thereafter) would have a net cost of 1% of global GDP or less per year, and some studies have even found net economic benefit. The costs of adaptation, on the other hand... well, depending on the exact mix of impacts that we get, the sky is potentially the limit.
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  weholdthesetruthsposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  You're mistaken. It's about power and control, not about "rich people wanting workers". It's about a political class that believes it is so moral, so righteous, so wise, and so superior to you, that it has a right to control your life for you. It is no different from the "rich must be controlled" and "capitalists must be controlled" crowd, whose only interest is obtaining absolute control over their fellow humans.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  In other words, the extreme capitalist right wing.
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  DonDWestposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  You're naive to think globalist corporate employers wouldn't dream to have American and Canadian workers living like the average Chinese. They always talk about how China is an ideal form of capitalism. What employer wouldn't want a dubious and complacent worker who loves his box and his 2 dollars a day? Globalist corporate employers can use the "environmental movement" as a means to accomplish such a goal, just saying. . .
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  Jeff Berndtposted 13 years agoin reply to this
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thirdmilleniumposted 13 years ago
Even the darkest green is not too green
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I take it that was either a poetry, or you like the color green. Either way I like the post thirdmillenium.
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  thirdmillenium, why do you feel that way? I posted this forum to hear people's opinions and reasons behind those feelings.
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Mikeydoesposted 13 years ago
We are doing too much when it involves the wrong things. And not enough when it comes to doing the right things.
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Rafiniposted 13 years ago
Too green? Did I hear that correctly? I dunno about too green...but definitely too irresponsible and too wasteful, still. Going green was supposed to resolve those issues....
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  Alexander Peaseposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Ah, yes, the classical "going green is supposed to resolve--issues" argument. Things will only be resolved if people want them to be resolved. If people take action.
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  Rafiniposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I dunno....recycling costs just as much as it's supposed to save - is it worth it? doesn't seem like it to me, but then again, if it keeps some junk out of the landfill that would be worth it no matter the cost - right? hmmm....
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Yes of course, absolutely every thing revolves around money doesn't it.
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  Rafiniposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  well, do you have a better reason? (I don't believe the earth will run out of resources - at least not as long as humans are still alive and kicking!)
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Don't you really!
  Even discounting oil, we're rapidly doing away with tropical rain forest, increasing desertification of much needed arable land.
  How about clean drinking water? That's getting harder and harder to find.
  Do we just keep building roads, wider and faster.
  
  Even with resources such as aluminium, cheap and plentiful (and much cheaper to recycle than to mine) there is a huge cost in land.
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  Rafiniposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  So, what's your better reason for going green? Cuz from what I can tell, going green doesn't affect tropical rain forests, arable land, or drinking water. As for oil, if the earth runs out of oil something else will come along to take it's place because it's purpose in existence will have come to an end.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "Cuz from what I can tell, going green doesn't affect tropical rain forests, arable land, or drinking water."
  
  Yes, it does.
  
  Obviously there are greenwashed products that don't (corn and soy ethanol come to mind as supposedly "green" products that manage to destroy the rainforest, degrade the soil, and pollute drinking water), but strict green standards have all sorts of requirements designed to minimize or prevent habitat destruction, soil degradation, unsustainable water use, etc.
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  Rafiniposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Ok. (I don't mind recycling, but at times think it's gone overboard)
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Think of MacDonalds slashing and burning rain forest for cheap beef for their cheap burgers, then abandoning it after a few years when the fertility has gone.
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readytoescapeposted 13 years ago
At the moment, given the current level of technology or lack thereof, simply put going energy Green will make you Blue by putting you in the Red.

And to start the inevitable argument, there is not one green technology that is commercially viable. I offer this perspective from the technical aspect as an electrical system construction manager with over 25 years experience installing systems from over 30K volts to controls systems of 12 volts including “green systems.” All the Green systems of which I have installed proved to be long on promise and short on delivery. I am also a well-schooled marine mechanic.

The only serious solar power concept is thermal, however the current pricing structure of the most efficient glycol systems is astronomic and promised savings are never realized. And even these “Green” systems require the use of electricity for control and back up. So far solar electricity is currently a pipe dream for anything other than tickle charging batteries. These systems also require conventional electrical power.

The huge push for adding ethanol in fuels is more of a folly of subsidy than viable option. Ethanol use at the current ten percent levels induces engine damage especially in marine systems and vehicles with non-metallic fuel lines. The drive to get higher ethanol levels will only cause more damage for more people, increasing repair bills across a wider spectrum and reduce engine efficiency.

Okay let the festivities begin
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Not one!
  Not walking or cycling over driving.
  Not recycling over making from new.
  Not using low energy electrical appliances over high energy.
  
  Do you not think that many green technologies are expensive because they are trying to apply high tech solutions to low tech problems.
  For instance, why the need to use glycol in solar heating systems?
  As for solar electricity, though I believe places like California do quite well with solar generation, there are more practical and universally applicable methods of green generation.
  I think a lot of the problems with green energy are political rather than practical. Here in the UK the government has decided that the only form of green energy we should have is wind generation, totally ignoring the fact that we are a small island surrounded by sea which unlike wind never stops moving.
  
  I strongly disagree with your statement that there is not one green technology that is commercially viable.
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  readytoescapeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Well you can disagree as much as you would like, or “think” what you will, but it doesn’t change the fact that Green ENERGY is not yet a commercially viable option.
  
  Perhaps you should enlighten your self a bit more rather than recite the canon of the Flower Power Generation.
  
  Apparently I have to prove my point.
  
  Why Glycol? Propylene Glycol (Glycol) is used in solar thermal systems because it is a liquid that attain and retain heat faster and longer than water. Glycol transfers heat faster and more efficiently than water. Glycol attains and sustains higher temperatures (280 degrees) than water a fact that provides efficiency for heating without equipment related pressure issues and failures caused by boiling water. Glycol also doesn’t freeze like water, which can create catastrophic equipment failure and other property damage as a result. Glycol is also an organic compound also used as a food additive not a dangerous chemical.
  
  Hum? Average Quality Solar thermal water heating systems (Shuco or equivalent) installed cost roughly $11,000.00 (plus financing costs). The Average new 40-50 gallon electric water heater costs about $300.00, cost to operate depending upon your electricity rates are $350.00 to $450.00 per year. At the higher rate it will take 23.77 YEARS to equal just the initial solar thermal system expense excluding financing.
  
  I would say it is pretty conclusive that even the best solar power system available, which is thermal, as above, is not exactly financially viable. Solar electricity is anywhere from 8 to 12 times more expensive and much less efficient. The largest residential solar electric system I have seen was priced over $112,000 and would only provide enough stand-alone electricity to operate a home’s 110 volt consumption for 6 to12 hours. That means nothing larger than your refrigerator will operate without dramatically reducing the storage capacity.
  
  Walking? How about a twenty-mile one-way commute to work? Let see avg. person walks at 3.1 mph, hum, 12.9 hours walking, 8 hours working, that leaves 3.1 hours in the 24 hour day to eat, sleep, live. NO Thanks.
  
  Bike riding? Average 8-12 mph (though unsustainable for long periods by the average person) drops to 5 mph over time duration. Adds 3-5 more hours to “free time” NO Thanks.
  
  Oh and please quote in context, as below. My initial post addressed Green Energy, not other methods or concepts.
  
  “At the moment, given the current level of technology or lack thereof, simply put going energy Green will make you Blue by putting you in the Red.”
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  junksellerposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  If green energy was not viable, people would not buy it. Even if it is more expensive that doesn't make it unviable. People make those sorts of choices all the time.
  
  Your $11,000 complex glycol solar water heating system is one end of the spectrum. A passive system in a region with high insolation can be installed for 2-3k and give you a return on investment in years. I just priced an active system for Austin with Rheem and it gave me a return on investment in 5 years. Their calculator is probably a little advantageous, but Austin does have high rebates/tax incentives, relatively high energy costs, and good insolation, so they could be right.
  
  A $112,000 dollar solar panel system somehow being inadequate is ridiculous. Was it a flying house or something? That large of a system should have put out about 14kW. They should have been able to run half the neighborhood.
  
  There is a wide spectrum of variables in which these systems operate. High insolation areas, well designed efficient houses, rebate and incentive programs, as well as high local energy costs can all reduce the return on investment. The opposite of those variables can make a system economically prohibitive. It is important to recognize these differences to appropriately apply technological solutions.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  "At the moment, given the current level of technology or lack thereof, simply put going energy Green will make you Blue by putting you in the Red."
  
  Maybe, but you could say the same for oil.
  
  Can you truthfully say the oil industry is "commercially viable" when it receives tens of billions of dollars annually in government subsidies, incentives, and tax breaks, not including billions more in indirect subsidies such as investing in new roads rather than mass transit?
  
  Europeans, who also subsidize oil companies but much less than the US, have routinely paid $8-10 per gallon for years. As a result, they have invested much more in alternative energy, mass transit, and other efforts to reduce their dependence on foreign oil and use only about half the oil per capita that Americans do, yet have almost identical standards of living.
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John Holdenposted 13 years ago
Perhaps you should enlighten your self a bit more than just recite the anti alternative lobby creed.
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readytoescapeposted 13 years ago
Lol typical

Can’t win the discussion, try to change the argument
Can’t defeat or refute the message, so attack the messenger.

In the immortal words of Ron White “You can’t fix stupid”

I really hope this doesn’t apply to you.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Well unfortunately, I was looking for a discussion, not to win or lose but to learn. You however saw it as a challenge and opportunity to prove your superiority.
  
  Therefore, no play. Go prove your superiority to yourself.
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superwagsposted 13 years ago
No, we are not becoming too green. There's a way further we could go. Being green is about more than just emitted carbon too, remember.

There are plenty of things which need to be debated on this point; I'm not someone who thiinks that the best way of addressing emissions is Kyoto/ Copenhagen, for instance - but that something needs to change in our collective attitudes is not really up for debate.
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Hi super,
  
  You wrote, "There are plenty of things which need to be debated on this point; I'm not someone who thiinks that the best way of addressing emissions is Kyoto/ Copenhagen, for instance - but that something needs to change in our collective attitudes is not really up for debate."
  
  Just live your life. Enjoy it. All too soon it will be over. And the Earth will be just fine.
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dutchman1951posted 13 years ago
To Green...only if you stay to long in the woods and let the cudzu overtake you!.....just kiddin

I honestly do not think we can be to Green, the Earth is all we have, we loose it- we do not exhist. We have no choice but to protect it.
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  I am always impressed by the weaklings who believe we have it within our power to destroy the Earth. I often wonder if this illusion of grandeur is to compensate for a certain lack in other areas.
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  recommend1posted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Impotence of many forms is usually displayed by the need to always include an insult in posts, you seem to have this issue.
  
  If you have not been out much then I guess you will not have seen the wholesale destruction of vast areas of our planet.
  
  Working underwater for many years I have seen the seabed in whole 'seas' go from an abundance of life of all kinds to bare mud filled deserts over just two decades, vast areas of agricultural land supporting generations of people engulfed by desert.
  
  I guess you won't have understood that the increasingly rapid mass extinction of species has been seen as a normal precursor to every major event that has seen the dominant species disappear.
  
  I guess you think that because an inept politician screwed up it means that it all just goes away as your masters want. But hten I guess you don't care anyway because it is your kids who will have to deal with it, not you ?
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Let me just say I do not believe you.
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  recommend1posted 13 years agoin reply to this
  That is what I said, you should get out more and look for yourself.
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Hi recommend1,
  
  Let us agree to disagree. For me the environmental movement is just the newest home for people who want to limit growth through the power of greater state tyranny.
  
  We cannot destroy the earth. We cannot even make it unlivable, save for brief periods, and then only with limited results.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  So it's OK to make the planet unlivable for a few years!
  Exactly how many years would that be?
  Even if only for one year that wouldn't matter to us because we wouldn't be around to see it recover.
  I actually want my grand children to live
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  The only way to make portions of the planet unlivable is to implement socialism's policies. That works every time it is tried. Consider the worst examples and you will see they all occur under communism which is the political arm of the socialist economic model.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Total bunkum!
  So you think socialism is responsible for the massive consumption of oil?
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  No. That is growth. And we could do much better by completely embracing nuclear power. We also have enormous coal deposits. We should be using coal for far more than just powering up Government Motors Obama-egg-cart-cars.
  
  For real examples of environmental destruction look to the Workers' Paradises like the Soviet Union, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Poland... You know, the places where socialists have been totally in charge the longest.
  
  After the fall of the Evil Empire (Thank you Mr. Reagan) those places are being cleaned up by, gasp, capitalists.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Soviet Union = state capitalism, not socialism.
  likewise, the others that you name.
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Hi John,
  
  Only in the mind of a fellow traveler.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  ???
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  sn53Anonposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  LOL. Never mind John.
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  John Holdenposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  It's OK, generally I don't.
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  Ralph Deedsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  BP's gulf oil spill was due to socialism? Likewise the Japanese nuclear disaster? Natural gas fracking polluting well water and streams another case of socialism? How about pre-EPA Los Angeles smog? Socialism again? I've heard it leads to erectile dysfunction as well.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Does Volcanoes put chemicals in the water when they errupt near the ocean? Ralph yes the spill wasn't good but it is all cleaned up now! nature has a way of fixing itself. As far as nuclear energy, Not many people died from Nuclear disasters, Can we improve them...yes certainly! more people die in car accidents should we stop driving? No, we try and make improvements. As far as your fracturing causing the water to be contaminated, that is a flat out lie! the government has done tests on these things and found no evidence of such! I also seen the video of the water igniting but that did not have anything to do with fracturing! It sometimes happens from gases being built in the well, very rare but has nothing to do with fracturing. below is a link for you about the myths of fracturing, I found it very useful!
  
  http://blog.energytomorrow.org/2010/11/ … 5Qod3VaGJw
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  
  Fracking does cause methane to enter the water aquifers:
  
  http://www.philly.com/philly/news/Duke_ … sites.html
  
  And even if it didn't, how smart is it to poison billions of gallons of water in order to have cheap energy? Water is necessary for life. Natural gas is not.
  
  We are not nearly green enough.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Although the study establishes a correlation between fracking and methane contamination, it draws no firm conclusions about causation. In addition, it suggests that well casings may ultimately be to blame rather than fracking.
  
  If you actually read the authors paper, it’s pretty clear they don’t see this as terribly profound concern. They sympathize with people who have private wells very close to drilling sites, but that’s about it.
  
  Fracking has been used so widely, and for so long, that people who understand geoscience generally find the notion that “fracking poorly understood” to be absurd. The number of fraced wells is in the millions, and the environmental penalty for doing so seems quite small (albeit non-zero).
  
  The wells are thousands of feet deep, the ground water hundreds of feet deep, and the size of the fractures tens of feet long. Worry that the fracs will connect the shale to the groundwater seems about as sensible as worrying that Tiger Woods will hit you with a golf ball, when he’s playing on a course 2 miles away.
  
  With re: to the fracking chemicals themselves – they are a small part of the overall flow. It’s not surprising that they can’t be detected, since they account for a tiny fraction of the injected water.
  
  To say that this paper “suggests that well casings may ultimately be to blame rather than fracking” is quite the understatement. The authors, in the restrained language appropriate for published papers, all but insist that this is the case. They speculate that fracking may increase the liklihood of casing failure, but they consider the assumption that the fracs fail to connect the shale to groundwater to be quite reasonable, and simply in need of more thorough verification.
  
  If you read the article linked below (warning, you will have the entire two pages) the authors are actually quoted as saying “It’s leaky well casings”
  
  At the end of the day, the authors have fairly mild and reasonable suggestions – full disclosure of chemicals being used, further study of the geochemistry, and *possibly* moving regulation of the practice to the federal level. They certainly don’t call for any widespread halting of fracking.
  
  I guess I would like to see an “anti-strip-mining-for-coal” movement that is at least as strong as the “anti-frac” movement. This fracking business seems to have captured the publics attention, and thus forced the gas industry to meet standards 100X more stringent than what the coal industry gets away with. I suspect that that anti-frac crowd actually is unaware that coal is the dominant fuel source for the grid, and is not likely to be replaced by wind or solar anytime in the next 50 years.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Where did you copy and paste this from? I find it very hard to believe that the same person who wrote this:
  
  "Does Volcanoes put chemicals in the water when they errupt near the ocean? Ralph yes the spill wasn't good but it is all cleaned up now! nature has a way of fixing itself. As far as nuclear energy, Not many people died from Nuclear disasters, Can we improve them...yes certainly! more people die in car accidents should we stop driving? No, we try and make improvements. As far as your fracturing causing the water to be contaminated, that is a flat out lie! the government has done tests on these things and found no evidence of such! I also seen the video of the water igniting but that did not have anything to do with fracturing! "
  
  also wrote what I see above. At least post a link to your sources.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Here is where I received the information from. They are sound rebuttals to your erroneous claims! You can not argue with logic so you attack with names? guess that is what happens when you can not refute the response.
  
  Here is the link with responses that I thought were a perfect answer for your misinformed post.
  
  http://blogs.forbes.com/williampentland … amination/
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  Ralph Deedsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Here's the article. It says pretty much the opposite.
  
  Gas Fracking Linked with Water Contamination
  May. 9 2011 - 5:37 pm | 2,933 views | 0 recommendations | 12 comments
  
  Clean drinking water...not self-evident for ev...
  
  The use of hydraulic fracturing to extract natural gas from shale formations may increase methane contamination of private drinking water supplies in surrounding areas, according to a study published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
  
  The study provides the first systematic evidence of methane contamination of private drinking water supplies in areas where shale gas extraction is occurring.
  
  A team of researchers at Duke University led by Robert Jackson, an environmental chemist, and Stephen Osborn, a post-doctoral fellow, analyzed groundwater samples from more than 60 private wells in Pennsylvania and upstate New York. The findings:
  
  [M]ethane concentrations were found to be 17‐times higher on average in areas with active drilling and extraction than in non‐active areas, with some drinking‐water wells having concentrations of methane well above the “immediate action” hazard level.
  
  The research team found that 85 percent of the wells tested in Pennsylvania and upstate New York had some amount of methane. Within about 3,000 feet of a drilling site, the concentration of methane in well water rose precipitously.
  
  That is the bad news. There is also good – or at least better than bad – news, namely that the study “found no evidence of contamination from hydraulic fracturing fluids or saline produced waters.”
  
  Large amounts of methane in confined areas like homes or basements has in extreme cases resulted in explosions and asphyxiation. As a result, public health concerns related to methane have usually focused on the risks of explosions and flammability and, in very high concentrations, asphyxiation. But beyond these dangers, methane is not typically viewed as a health hazard. The researchers from Duke emphasize in an accompanying paper on the policy implications of their study that:
  
  Methane is not regulated as a contaminant in public water systems through the EPA’s National Primary Drinking Water Regulations (NPDWR). Methane in drinking water is also, to our knowledge, unregulated by any state in the United States.
  
  This may soon change if future research suggests that low concentrations of methane in drinking water can lead to health problems.
  
  By the way, please quit calling my comments "lies."
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Again the article states no conclusive evidence and even your NY times has said such. They claim it is the well casing. Please read everything again and you will see, I want to see proof! show proof and that will end it! you only post something that bends in your favor, I want irrefutable proof. Until then you have squat!
  
  Ralph sorry a lot of what you post is LIES! or should I say half truths. You claimed the repubs were looking to eliminate Social security, that was a LIE! I can list many others or Half truths if you will. You never give solid facts. only some link to a left paper. Anyone can find anything these days on the net to refute anything.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  
  LOL. So true.
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  Ralph Deedsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Bye, Bye, Danny. Let us know when you are ready for an adult discussion.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I guess you do not have an adult answer to my post so you want to dismiss it. This is the MO of your type. I know this already Ralph. Again show proof and then I will admit.
  
  Mr. Wilson on the other hand has actually brought up some info that may change my mind. I will do more research into this as what he has posted has me thinking. If this could be dangerous then we need to take every precaution so people do not get hurt.
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  My god! The arrogance of the man, if he thinks it's dangerous then we need to take precautions!
  
  Since when were you elected leader?
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  A car is dangerous, do we stop driving? Flying has accidents do we stop flying? heating your house in the winter with natural gas or oil is dangerous should we freeze? Please John with your ridiculous rants! Be a real man and live life! seems your afraid of your own shadow and want everyone else to be afraid.
  
  Many things in life are dangerous. If we live by your mentality and not have people profit from their inventions and follow your socialist views we wouldn't invent much! I do not see things negatively as you...I thank god for that. I know you probably do not believe in God either.
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  That's good Danny, you managed to twist right out of addressing the point I made and turned it into something else . . . again.
  
  Remember, I asked who you are to tell us whether to be alarmed or not.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Obviously They have not stopped them from doing the fracking so I guess the Authorities believe it to be OK. If it was very bad I'm certain they would have stopped them. I just see things for what they are John, I'm not a leader or law maker. You only see what you want and believe everything just appears. Your way of thinking would work if everyone lived in the jungle and lived off the land! This is 2011 and we strive to make things better! John the Poor over here can get shelter, food, air condition, phone, transportation, clothes, toys etc... Our homeless compared to many other countries poor is like living in a penthouse in their country! And guess what if they truly wanted to better themselves they can! we even have grants! all you need to do is want it enough! Again yes some people like the handicapped and people with medical problems should get assistance but many here are F'ing lazy! they think it is owed to them! How can you have equality when they do not want to earn it?
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Well Danny, what's it like in your little fantasy world were everything has to be s you say?
  Your analysis of my character could not be further from the truth.
  
  I see no way in which you strive to make things better, unless of course you mean better for yourself and beggar the rest.
  
  Do you really believe the carp you write about the poor in your country? You have levels of poverty that would not be tolerated in most western countries.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  please show me those levels with actual proof. As I stated we have many programs in place for the poor. I will be waiting.
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Her's one for you to deny :-
  http://patdollard.com/2010/09/us-povert … -50-years/
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I have never seen anything like that here! I wish they gave actual cities and states those pics came from. Seriously that is totally misleading!
  
  And according to that article Obama is not doing to well and I do not think that is really correct. I really want to know where these tent cities are! Some of pics look like they are from katrina. Sorry John I have never seen anything like that here! If someone can tell us where these pics were taken and when I would love to know.
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  So what if they're from Katrina?
  People are still living in poverty, and where are all the grants etc for the survivors of that catastrophe?
  
  It's a typical third world tactic to hide the poverty stricken from the eyes of the rich.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Here is the NYTimes article that actually treats the matter in an evenhanded way.
  
  http://www.nytimes.com/gwire/2011/05/09 … 87464.html
  
  The New Yorker recently ran a similar article that was largely dismissive of the notion that this process is high-impact. Sorry, but when you fall to the left of the New Yorker and the NYTimes, you might want to reconsider.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Again, the person who wrote this:
  
  "Does Volcanoes put chemicals in the water when they errupt near the ocean? Ralph yes the spill wasn't good but it is all cleaned up now! nature has a way of fixing itself. As far as nuclear energy, Not many people died from Nuclear disasters, Can we improve them...yes certainly! more people die in car accidents should we stop driving? No, we try and make improvements. As far as your fracturing causing the water to be contaminated, that is a flat out lie! the government has done tests on these things and found no evidence of such! I also seen the video of the water igniting but that did not have anything to do with fracturing! "
  
  Is not the same as the person who wrote the post I am replying to. I'm not going to argue with a sockpuppet with multiple authors.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Again no real answers so try and twist away from answering!
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  Ralph Deedsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Sorry, it's not a flat out lie. Drinking water and streams have been contaminated as shown by independent studies. It's possible this can be avoided by strict precautions. GOP stands for "gang of polluters."
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  
  Regarding the "flat out lie":
  
  http://www.businessweek.com/ap/financia … 9C7981.htm
  
  The state of Pennsylvania has fined Chesapeake Energy 1.1 million dollars for contaminating drinking water wells near its fracking operations.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  The state agency said that throughout 2010 it investigated complaints of private water well contamination from residents of Bradford County in northeastern Pennsylvania. The agency said it determined that improper casing and cementing of wells allowed natural gas to seep into groundwater, contaminating the water supply of 16 families.
  
  that is from your article! So it is the well casings, and did they do tests before they started fracking? So you can compare the difference?
  
  This shows, It maybe a problem in wells but many water supplies these days do not have wells. If they have to redo the wells to protect people more, I'm all for that. Like I said before many get killed in car accidents should we stop driving? History has shown we get better with technology and make things better and safer.
  
  If we did not have lobbyist then maybe we would have come up with a better alternative than OIL. They have these lobbyist for big oil and they stop the progression of a way to get of middle east oil!
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  So you are saying that because the well casings failed, it's not fracking that's to blame. That's like saying, because the gun is what released the bullet, the person who pulled the trigger is not to blame.
  
  Part of the problem with hydrofracking is that it created a gold rush that was largely unregulated and overwhelmed the environmental inspectors. The casing failures may have been related to the actual fracking, or maybe they were just shoddy construction by a company that was trying to maximise profits by cutting corners.
  
  The drilling companies want to frack thousands of wells in Pennsylvania over the next few decades. They say they can power America with natural gas this way.
  
  Do we really want companies that can't even case a well properly to be responsible for using a dangerous, wasteful technology like fracking?
  
  In any case, methane intrusion aside, fracking is still a dangerous and stupid technique for reasons I've already given.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  You should look at science more and political propaganda less. Scientific facts are not political in nature. My understanding of the environment is based in science. Yours is firmly based in politics - yet you claim environmentalists are politically motivated?
  
  Try to maintain a logically consistent position.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Does it bother anyone else that two of the authors of this study wrote an Op/Ed piece for philly dot com where they stated:
  
  “the conclusion we take away from our study is that the United States needs to focus on developing alternative, renewable energy resources that are greener and safer.”
  
  ?? That is a political policy position and it’s not possible to conclude this from this study. Are scientists really supposed to be stating that their studies cause an arrival at a public policy position – especially when the study wasn’t even about that and has no data that is even relevant to such a conclusion?
  
  Also doesn’t it seem obvious that this was a political belief these guys held before they did this study, and that it’s it’s untrue that this study is what led them to that belief? And this:
  
  “Instead of just safer, though, we would like to see shale gas become largely unnecessary, along with coal and oil. The faster we develop and adopt renewable energy technologies, the less we will have to worry about whether it’s safe for people to drink their water. We should all be able to raise our glasses to that.”
  
  You see, this is again, not a scientific conclusion, but a political position. And it’s one that couldn’t possibly be derived from the study in question. Again, it’s obvious that these guys have believed this for a long time and that has nothing to do with this study. Also doesn’t it say they don’t really want to fix any problems with gas drilling, they just want it to die?
  
  Does that bother anyone else?
  
  I guess you should practice what you preach.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Hi sockpuppet.
  
  There are many valid reasons to oppose hydrofracking besides the methane intrusion into drinking water supplies. It's a profoundly stupid technology that poisons millions of gallons of water, requires millions of gallons of deadly chemicals, thousands of acres of land, and releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with an effect that is worse than coal.
  
  Having a political position based on a scientific understanding of the facts is one thing. Approaching scientific facts based on your political position is quite different.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Where is your proof that what you claim happens actually happens? Now you want to go against the leftest paper in the united states and say different? SHOW proof.
  
  I guess you have to try and put down people who give irrefutable proof and you have no solid answers. very sad for you!
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  
  I gave you my answer here: "There are many valid reasons to oppose hydrofracking besides the methane intrusion into drinking water supplies. It's a profoundly stupid technology that poisons millions of gallons of water, requires millions of gallons of deadly chemicals, thousands of acres of land, and releases greenhouse gases into the atmosphere with an effect that is worse than coal."
  
  I don't see much point in arguing with a person who is so intellectually lazy that they will copy and paste comments from a website somewhere. You didn't even notice the contradiction between the two comments you cut and pasted, did you? I'll leave it to you to figure out what it is, it's pretty obvious.
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  DannyMaioposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Again where is your proof? You can not answer so you try to distract from the answers given. Like I said Very sad for you!
  
  If I was Lazy I would not have looked up the info. So I do not know where the lazy came in, I guess it is because you have no real proof of your claims! I sent you the link to Forbes, I guess your to lazy to even look at it or is it you have but can not refute the evidence? either way, You have not giving anything but lip service. Show the proof!
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  Ralph Deedsposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  That's what the cigarette companies were saying about lung cancer.
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  PrettyPantherposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  We will not destroy the earth, but it is not unimaginable that we could make it uninhabitable for our own species. The earth will be in existence long after we have left it.
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  uncorrectedvisionposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Humanity has survived unimaginable cataclysms.
  
  http://whyfiles.org/106asteroid/2.html
  http://www.armageddononline.org/volcano.php
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  uncorrectedvision, do you believe we are becoming "too green"?
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  uncorrectedvisionposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Yes.
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  kerrygposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Um, the effects of most of the "unimaginable cataclysms" listed on those two links were pretty localized, and the exceptions mostly happened before we were human.
  
  There is some pretty strong evidence that humans nearly died out about 70,000 years ago (possibly due to massive droughts and/or a supervolcano), but that's our closest known brush with extinction since becoming biologically modern humans about 200,000 years ago.
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  uncorrectedvisionposted 13 years agoin reply to this
  Sorry, I had to cup my hand to my ear to hear the internal contradiction - 70,000 years ago you say?
  
  I also was unaware that you had prohibited catastrophic events following in close("civilizationally" speaking) sequence or even simultaneously. Let me know how you did that.
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Info Bucketposted 13 years ago
No matter how much we become green, it'll take a long period to re-establish the destroyed natural resources@
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Evan G Rogersposted 12 years ago
I just want to put a few things in perspective.

The amount of pollution and greenhouse gases released by transportation-methods BEFORE cars was likely HIGHER than the fleet of today. -- Those horses and other animals crapped and whizzed wherever they felt like it, and they farted out a lot of methane. I have no stats to back this up, and perhaps we put out more GH gasses now, but the "per mile" number is MUCH lower.

The gasses emitted by cars etc has been on a steady decline without much government intervention.

anyway, just a few things to ponder over.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Evan,
  
  Not really. The horses are simply taking solar energy in, in the form of plants, and processing it into kinetic energy, then creating waste in the form of methane or whatever else comes when they fart. It's basically a carbon neutral cycle.
  
  The problem with coal and natural gas is that we are taking solar energy that was stored up over millions of years, buried underground, and we are releasing it all over the course of a few decades.
  
  In the natural carbon cycle, CO2 and other gases are produced by biological processes which are ultimately powered by one single input, the sun. The amount of energy the sun inputs into the system changes minimally from day to day. The CO2 and other gases produced by biological processes is recaptured: absorbed by the oceans or by plants. In a normal situation the carbon level stays basically the same, unless something changes. Over the past few hundred thousand years we've seen a fluctuation of atmospheric carbon from around 180 to 280 ppm. For most of human history the level has stayed around 280, which is why humans have enjoyed a relatively stable, mild climate. That level is now 380 ppm, and that's all due to industrial inputs from burning fossil fuels.
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  Evan G Rogersposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  good point.
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  William R. Wilsonposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  See, socialists aren't all bad.
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  That's awesome. Lolz.
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  But they do eat babies
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  And you know that based on what?
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  John Holdenposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  Sorry Phoebe, entirely tongue in cheek - I am a socialist.
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  Phoebe Pikeposted 12 years agoin reply to this
  I was hoping for a more witty response than that. :p Lolz
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thisisoliposted 12 years ago
I would say we should be using caution. Trying to countarct natural earth cycles really could end in disaster.

There are also plenty of examples of 'Green' initiatives causign more damage than they saved.

I think the best thing anyone can do is make the small difference yourself cut down on overall pollution, recycle, plant a few plants in your garden, if you have enough space, grow a tree

Altering nature and making big changes can have unintended concequences, but the little changes can sometimes help. Also, don't dontate to the latest craze charities, definitely do not donate to groups like PETA. Organizations like the WWF do MUCH more to save endangered species and preserve their habitat.

I avoid any association with 'Green' but I do think there are plenty of things that each of can do to help make teh world a better place
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fit2dayposted 12 years ago
The purpose for environmental efforts should be to make the world a more sustainable place for us all, but when trees and animals become more important than people, that's when it's taken too far.

I think for the most part, many efforts are in vain and everyone wants to jump on the bandwagon. There are large companies that bottle water for instance, stamping environmental logos on the package, when they do more to harm the environment than we could ever imagine.
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