©2008-2012 Roedy Green, Canadian Mind ProductsCanada’s green house gas emissions have increased by 30% since 1990.
~ CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) News 2007-12-07
For millions of years, on average, one species became extinct every century.… We are now heaving more than a thousand different species of animals and plants off the planet every year.
~ Douglas Adams (born: 1952-03-11 died: 2001-05-11 at age: 49), author of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and Last Chance to See
It wasn’t the Exxon Valdez captain’s driving that caused the Alaskan oil spill. It was yours.
~ Greenpeace advertisement New York Times 1990-02-25
One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.
~ Woody Allen (born: 1935-12-01 age: 76)
Monsanto should not have to vouchsafe the safety of biotech food. Our interest is in selling as much of it as possible. Assuring its safety is the F.D.A.’s job.
~ Philip Angell Monsanto’s director of corporate communications. Playing God in the Garden New York Times Magazine, 1998-10-25
One of the biggest flaws in the common conception of the future is that the future is something that happens to us, not something we create.
~ Michael Anissimov (born: 1995 age: 16)
Contrary to popular belief, we do not face a choice between economy and ecology, It is often said that protecting the environment would constrain or even undermine economic growth. In fact, the opposite is true: unless we protect resources and the earth’s natural capital, we shall not be able to sustain economic growth.
~ Kofi Annan (born: 1938-04-08 age: 73) Secretary General of the United Nations
Don’t blow it — good planets are hard to find.
~ Anonymous
Inspect every piece of pseudoscience and you will find a security blanket, a thumb to suck, a skirt to hold. What have we to offer in exchange? Uncertainty! Insecurity!
~ Isaac Asimov (born: 1920-01-02 died: 1992-03-06 at age: 72) Russian-born American scientist and prolific writer
A small grove massacred to the last ash,
An oak with heart-rot, give away the show:
This great society is going to smash;
They cannot fool us with how fast they go,
How much they cost each other and the gods.
A culture is no better than its woods.
~ Wystan Hugh Auden (born: 1907-02-21 died: 1973-09-29 at age: 66) A Culture Is No Better Than Its Woods
It is not possible for us to agree to the destruction of land that sustains us.
~ Chief Marilyn Baptiste of the Xeni Gwe’tin first nation
There have been more than 30,000 oil wells drilled in the Gulf of Mexico in the last 50 years. This is the first time something like this has ever happened [BP Deepwater Horizon oil spill], and we need to get to the bottom of it, find out what happened, make sure it doesn’t happen again. But I think it is very reasonable to continue to drill.
~ Haley Barbour (born: 1947-10-22 age: 64) Republican governor of Mississippi and shill for the oil industry.Granted the Deepwater Horizon spill was the biggest spill in US history, but there were hundreds of smaller spills. The oil industry has publicly admitted the oil industry has no tools to stop a deep water spill, save a relief bore that takes months to complete. That is the issue. There is no mystery that we need to “get to the bottom of”.
Can you think of any problem, in any area of human endeavour, on any scale, from microscopic to global, whose long-term solution is in any demonstrable way aided, assisted, or advanced by further increases in population, locally, nationally, or globally?
~ Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (born: 1923-03-21 age: 88)
The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function.
~ Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (born: 1923-03-21 age: 88)
You cannot sustain population growth and / or growth in the rates of consumption of resources.
~ Dr. Albert A. Bartlett (born: 1923-03-21 age: 88)
I’m ashamed of what happened in the White House yesterday. I think it is a tragedy of the first proportion that a private corporation can be subjected to what I would characterize as a shakedown. In this case a $20 billion shakedown.
~ Joe Barton (born: 1949-09-15 age: 62) Republican Representative for Texas, the potential head of Energy and Commerce committee along with rival John Shimkus.Barton believes it is unfair to ask BP to clean up its own oil spill and to compensate those damaged by it. To him it is a random act of God, and thus the taxpayers should pick up the tab. Not surprisingly Barton receives more over-the-table contributions from big oil than any other politician. He has roughly a four-year old’s understanding of science. He denies plate tectonics. He thinks Jesus placed the oil for Americans to find it. He denies global warming, but simultaneously thinks it will solve the energy crisis.
The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think.
~ Gregory Bateson (born: 1904-05-09 died: 1980-07-04 at age: 76)
Global warming threatens the survival of our species.
~ Lucien Bouchard (born: 1938-12-22 age: 73) Environment minister in the Conservative Mulroney administration of Canada
We’ve embarked on the beginning of the last day of the age of oil.
~ Mike Bowlin (born: 1943-02-20 age: 68) Chairman and CEO (Chief Executive Officer) of ARCO petroleum
What they [Jim deMint and the oil lobby] do care about is the precedent. If they open up ANWR (Arctic National Wildlife Refuge), they’ll think they can do anything to the environment — anything at all. Drilling in Yosemite? In the Grand Canyon? What’s next?
~ Barbara Boxer (born: 1940-11-11 age: 71) Democratic senator from California
Wear protective gear, and you are fired!
~ BP
The public interest requires doing today those things that men of intelligence and good will would wish, five or ten years hence, had been done.
~ Edmund Burke (born: 1729-01-12 died: 1797-07-09 at age: 68)
Discovery peaked 30 years ago. It takes no feat of the imagination. It takes no feat of intellect to conclude we now face the corresponding peak in production in 2005.
~ Gordon Campbell , geologist, addressing the British House of Commons.
Humanity is conducting an unintended, uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose ultimate consequences could be second only to global nuclear war.
~ Environment Canada (born: 1971 age: 40) (The Canadian equivalent of the EPA (Environmental Protection Agency))
One way to open your eyes is to ask yourself, “What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again?”
~ Rachel Carson (born: 1907-05-27 died: 1964-04-14 at age: 56)
Only within the moment of time represented by the present century has one species — man — acquired significant power to alter the nature of his world.
~ Rachel Carson (born: 1907-05-27 died: 1964-04-14 at age: 56)If it were any other species but ours, there would be no doubt that the condition was pathological.
The control of nature is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man. The concepts and practices of applied entomology for the most part date from that Stone Age of science. It is our alarming misfortune that so primitive a science has armed itself with the most modem and terrible weapons, and that in turning them against the insects it has also turned them against the earth.
~ Rachel Carson (born: 1907-05-27 died: 1964-04-14 at age: 56)
The “control of nature” is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and the convenience of man.
~ Rachel Carson (born: 1907-05-27 died: 1964-04-14 at age: 56)
We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road — the one less traveled by — offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth.
~ Rachel Carson (born: 1907-05-27 died: 1964-04-14 at age: 56)
During the 1960s, we used twice as much oil as during the 1950s. And in each of those decades, more oil was consumed than in all of mankind’s previous history.
~ President Jimmy Carter (born: 1924-10-01 age: 87) 1977-04-18
Takeover consists in diverting some fraction of the earth’s life-supporting capacity from supporting other kinds of life to supporting our kind. Our pre-Sapiens ancestors, with their simple stone tools and fire, took over for human use, organic materials that would otherwise have been consumed by insects, carnivores or bacteria. From about 10,000 years ago, our earliest horticulturalist ancestors began take over land upon which to grow crops for human consumption. That land would otherwise have supported trees, shrubs or wild grasses and all the animals dependent thereon — but fewer humans. As the expanding generations replaced each other, Homo sapiens took over more and more of the surface of this planet, essentially at the expense of its other inhabitants.
~ William Catton Jr. (born: 1926-01-15 age: 86), Overshoot 1980
From the point of view of the other species on earth, we humans are as welcome as Viking invaders or pancreas cancer.
Only the extinct don’t change.
~ Chris Chandler
Man has been endowed with reason, with the power to create, so that he can add to what he’s been given. But up to now he hasn’t been a creator, only a destroyer. Forests keep disappearing, rivers dry up, wild lifes become extinct, the climate’s ruined and the land grows poorer and uglier every day.
~ Anton Chekhov (born: 1860-01-29 died: 1904-07-15 at age: 44)
Environmental policies are driven by a kind of emotional spiritualism that threatens the very foundation of our society. There is increasing evidence of a government-sponsored religion in America. This religion, a cloudy mixture of new-age mysticism, Native American folklore, and primitive Earth worship, is being promoted and enforced by the Clinton administration in violation of our rights and freedoms.
~ Helen Chenoweth-Hage (born: 1938-01-27 died: 2006-10-02 at age: 68) Rep, R-Idaho, testifying to congress about her delusions. She has such a sectarian view of the world, that she can only grasp science in terms of warring cults.
We are investing millions in alternative energy.
~ Chevron (born: 1911 age: 100)On the other paw, in 2010 they invested $21.8 billion in fossil fuels. Millions is the cost of two homes or less than the advertising budget Chevron spent lying that it is an environmentally responsible company.
Switching to light-coloured roofs and roadways would have the equivalent effect on greenhouse gas emissions to taking one billion cars off the road for eleven years.
~ Dr. Steven Chu (born: 1948-02-28 age: 63) US Secretary of Energy, Nobel Prize Winner in Physics 1997
The biggest gains, in terms of decreasing the country’s energy bill, the amount of carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere, and our dependency on foreign oil, will come from energy efficiency and conservation in the next 20 years. Make no doubt about it. That’s where everybody who has really thought about the problem thinks the biggest gains can be and should be.
~ Dr. Steven Chu (born: 1948-02-28 age: 63) Secretary of Energy for the USA, 1997 Nobel Prize winner.
The Panama Canal must double its capacity.
~ Zurich Insurance Company (born: 1872 age: 139)The world got by without any Panama Canal for most of its history. What they mean is, if the capacity of the Panama Canal were doubled, the new capacity could be profitably sold. This is not the same thing as need.
Believing as I do that man in the distant future will be a far more perfect creature than he now is, it is an intolerable thought that he and all other sentient beings are doomed to complete annihilation after such long-continued slow progress.
~ Charles Darwin (born: 1809-02-12 died: 1882-04-19 at age: 73)
16% of global warming in caused by forestry practices.
~ Guy Dauncey (born: 1948 age: 63)
If everyone lived the way people do in Vancouver, we would need three more entire planets to support us.
~ Guy Dauncey (born: 1948 age: 63)
If we continue business as usual we are on schedule for a 6°C (11°F) global temperature increase by the end of the century. That means the end of civilisation and all the world ecologies.
~ Guy Dauncey (born: 1948 age: 63)
We need to reduce fossil fuel use by 100% by 2020 to avoid a 2°C (4°F) global temperature increase.
~ Guy Dauncey (born: 1948 age: 63)
We accept it as normal that people who have never been on the land, who have no history or connection to the country, may legally secure the right to come in and, by the very nature of their enterprises, leave in their wake a cultural and physical landscape utterly transformed and desecrated. What’s more, in granting such mining concessions, often initially for trivial sums to speculators from distant cities, companies cobbled together with less history than my dog, the government places no cultural or market value on the land itself.
~ Wade Davis (born: 1953-12-14 age: 58) in lecture 4 of the 2009 CBC Ideas lectures.
It’s never been proven that air toxics are hazardous to people.
~ Tom DeLay (born: 1947-04-08 age: 64) former Republican House Majority Leader, and shill for the oil industry, cited in the Houston Chronicle 1990-10-27By definition, something toxic is hazardous. That is what toxic means.
Learning is not compulsory… neither is survival.
~ Dr. W. (William) Edwards Deming (born: 1900-10-14 died: 1993-12-20 at age: 93)
You do not have to change: survival is not mandatory.
~ Dr. W. (William) Edwards Deming (born: 1900-10-14 died: 1993-12-20 at age: 93) On Overcoming Resistance to Change
But my bill, the Drill Now Act, would actually expedite the whole process, let the Interior Department move ahead quicker… it would stop the radical environmental lawyers from delaying for years with frivolous lawsuits the leasing of the property.
~ Jim deMint (born: 1951-09-02 age: 60) Senator from South Carolina and shill for the oil industry.
In parts of Montana, salt concentrations in soil water, have reached those double those of seawater.
~ Jared Diamond (born: 1937-09-10 age: 74) Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed page 47
Natural selection is engineering; sexual selection is art.
~ What Females Want and Males Will Do a PBS (Public Broadcasting System) Nature Documentary.
Plants with leaves no more efficient than today’s solar cells could out-compete real plants, crowding the biosphere with an inedible foliage. Tough omnivorous bacteria could out-compete real bacteria: They could spread like blowing pollen, replicate swiftly, and reduce the biosphere to dust in a matter of days. Dangerous replicators could easily be too tough, small, and rapidly spreading to stop — at least if we make no preparation. We have trouble enough controlling viruses and fruit flies.
~ Eric Drexler (born: 1955-04-25 age: 56) Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology
But we are almost certainly going to miss our [global warming] deadline. We cannot get the 10 lost years back, and by the time a new global agreement to replace the Kyoto accord is negotiated and put into effect, there will probably not be enough time left to stop the warming short of the point where we must not go.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.So humanity is doomed by its own stupidity, like a monkey in a trap holding a banana refusing to let go to free itself.
The military profession, especially is the long-established great powers, is deeply pessimistic about the likelihood that people and countries will behave well under stress. Professional officers are trained to think in terms of emergent threats, and this [climate change] is as big a threat as you are going to find. Never mind what the pundits are telling the public about the perils of climate change; where the military strategists telling their governments This will tell us a great deal about the probable shape of the future, although it may not tell any anything that we want to hear.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) Climate Wars page 5The surprise is the old walruses in the military are the ones clammering for action on climate change. This is because, unlike business that thinks only 3 months ahead, they routinely plan for contingencies 50 years into the future.
The real requirement, if we are to avoid runaway global warming, is probably 80% by 2030, and almost no burning whatever of fossil fuels (coal, gas and oil) by 2050.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.
The scientists are really scared. Their [global warming] observations over the past two or three years suggest that everything is happening a lot faster than their climate models predicted.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.
There is a point of no return after which warming becomes unstoppable — and we are probably going to sail right through it. It is the point at which anthropogenic (human-caused) warming triggers huge releases of carbon dioxide from warming oceans, or similar releases of both carbon dioxide and methane from melting permafrost, or both. Most climate scientists think that point lies not far beyond 2°C (4°F) C hotter.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) Harsh Truths 2008-12-08 based on 18 months of 70 interviews in a dozen countries.
This is a world [the world after climate change] where people are starting to starve, but it is not always the familiar scene of helpless peasant societies facing famine with numb resignation. Some of the victims now are fully developed, technologically competent countries, and their people will not watch their children starve, so long as there is any recourse, however illegitimate, that might save them. So the lucky countries in the northern tier that can still feed themselves — but that have little or no food to spare — must be able to turn back hordes of hungry refugees, quite probably by force. They must also be able to deal with neighbours who try to extort food by threats — and these desperate neighbours may even have nuclear weapons. Appeals to reason will be pointless, as it is reasonable for nations to do anything they can to avoid mass starvation.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) Climate Wars page 4Consider how badly the USA has behaved in its desperate pursuit of oil. Nations will behave even worse to avoid mass starvation.
This is a world [the world after climate change] in which food imports are no longer available at any price, as there is a global food shortage. But even then there are relative winners and relative losers: the highest-latitude countries — northern Europe, Russia, Canada — are still getting adequate rainfall and are able to feed themselves, while those in the mid-latitudes are in serious trouble. Even the United States has lost a large amount of crop-growing area as the rain fails to fall over the high plains west of the Mississippi, persistent droughts beset the southeast, and the rivers that provide irrigation water to the Central Valley of California cease to flow in the summertime. Countries of smaller size, like Spain, Italy and Turkey, on the northern side of the Mediterranean, (not to mention those on the southern side), find that their entire land area is turning into desert, and that they can no longer feed their population. The northeastern monsoon that brought rain to the north Chinese plain has failed, and the rivers that watered southern China have suffered the same fate as those that provided California’s water now: they only flow in the wintertime.
~ Gwynne Dyer (born: 1943-04-17 age: 68) Climate Wars page 4
I’d put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don’t have to wait ’til oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
~ Thomas Alva Edison (born: 1847-02-11 died: 1931-10-18 at age: 84)
The sun, the moon and the stars would have disappeared long ago, had they happened to be within reach of predatory human hands.
~ Havelock Ellis (born: 1859-02-02 died: 1939-07-08 at age: 80) .
Algae are amazing little critters.
~ ExxonMobil (born: 1999-11-30 age: 12) in a TV commercial.If ExxonMobil wants to claim expertise in biofuels, the first thing they need to learn is that algae are plants not creatures.
The best evidence indicates that we need to reduce ourCO₂ emissions by 70% by 2050. [Kyoto round one aims for only 6%]. If you own a four-wheel drive, and replace it with a hybrid fuel car, you can achieve a cut of that magnitude in a day, rather than half a century. If your electricity provider offers a green option, for the cost of a daily cup of coffee, you will be able to make equally major cuts in your household emissions. And if you vote for a politician who has a deep commitment to reducingCO₂ emissions, you might change the world.
~ Tim Flannery (born: 1956-01-28 age: 56), The Weather Makers
Although they [light and medium trucks] have only 5% of the transportation market…, they account for fully 35% of greenhouse gas emissions from freight transportation.
~ David Suzuki Foundation (born: 1990 age: 21) 2002-09
Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle, and even then most of this energy is needed to move the vehicle itself, which typically weighs 20 times more than its passengers.
~ David Suzuki Foundation (born: 1990 age: 21) 2002-09In contrast, a bicycle weighs about 1/8 of the weight of its rider, and it can get as low as 1/50.
A penny saved is a penny earned.
~ Benjamin Franklin (born: 1706-01-17 died: 1790-04-17 at age: 84)It is also true that every barrel of oil you save in energy efficiency saves you from buying a barrel of oil from OPEC (the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries).
Do more with less.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)
Pollution is nothing but the resources we are not harvesting. We allow them to disperse because we’ve been ignorant of their value.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)
The earth is like a spaceship that didn’t come with an operating manual.
~ Richard Buckminster (Bucky) Fuller (born: 1895-07-12 died: 1983-07-01 at age: 87)
It would take only 10% of the federal lands in Nevada to generate sufficient solar energy to completely power the entire USA.
~ National Geographic (born: 1888-01-27 age: 124) Eco-Engineering: Solar Engine
Humans react to danger when it is immediate, immoral, visible… Global warming does not press any of those buttons.
~ Daniel Todd Gilbert (born: 1957-11-05 age: 54) rough paraphrase., Professor of Psychology at Harvard
We humans can look deep into future and predict what will happen, but then turn around and do nothing about it.
~ Daniel Todd Gilbert (born: 1957-11-05 age: 54), Professor of Psychology at Harvard
Our brains have been finely tuned to be hypervigilant at spotting dangers in a world we no longer inhabit, while the world we live in today presents us with abundant dangers we do not see, hear, taste, or smell. The brain’s threat response system is buffaloed time after time.
Although the human brain is extremely alert to threats it can sense, our brain is unsuited for the ones we face on the ecological front: these are dangers that come on gradually, or at the microscopic level, or globally. Our brain has been exquisitely tuned to notice changes in light, sound, pressure, and the like within a narrow range — the zone of perception that tigers and reckless drivers come in. These trigger our get-out-of-the-way system to react in milliseconds; we sense these familiar threats as clearly as we see a match light up a dark room. Ecological dangers, though, we notice as poorly as we see the difference that a match makes in a well-lit room.
~ Daniel Goleman (born: 1946-03-07 age: 65) Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything Read online page 33
Shipping by sea produces 1/60 the emissions of shipping by air and about 1/5 that of trucking. ~ Daniel Goleman (born: 1946-03-07 age: 65) Ecological Intelligence: How Knowing the Hidden Impacts of What We Buy Can Change Everything Read online page 54.Shipping is about 1/6 that of trains. In other words, shipping is better than trains and trains are better than trucks.
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun. As a result, the earth has a fever. And the fever is rising. The experts have told us it is not a passing affliction that will heal by itself. We asked for a second opinion. And a third. And a fourth. And the consistent conclusion, restated with increasing alarm, is that something basic is wrong. We are what is wrong, and we must make it right.
~ Al Gore (born: 1948-03-31 age: 63) Nobel Peace Prize Acceptance Speech, Oslo, Norway 2007-12-10
Producing usable oil from the tar sands is a dirty, energy-intensive process — tar sands production generates between three to five times more greenhouse gas emissions that conventional oil extraction.
~ Greenpeace
I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose.
~ J.B.S. Haldane (born: 1892-11-05 died: 1964-12-01 at age: 72)
Global warming has already triggered a sea level rise that could reach from 6 metres (19.69 ft) to 25 metres (82.02 ft).
~ James E. Hansen (born: 1941-03-29 age: 70) Is there Still Time to Avoid Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference with Global Climate Change
If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilisation developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleoclimate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm… If the present overshoot of this targetCO₂ is not brief, there is a possibility of seeding irreversible catastrophic effects.
~ James Hansen (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) along with 14 other scientists in Science 2005-06-03Analogously, you can’t do it until you need glasses, because by the time you need glasses, you have set in motion an irreversible process that leads not only to blindness but to death. Because we did nothing in 2005, the action we need to take is now ever more drastic.
The most difficult task, phase-out over the next 20-25 years of coal use that does not captureCO₂, is Herculean, yet feasible when compared with the efforts that went into World War II. The stakes, for all life on the planet, surpass those of any previous crisis. The greatest danger is continued ignorance and denial, which could make tragic consequences unavoidable.
~ James Hansen (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) along with 14 other scientists in Science 2005-06-03Why did business people rise to the occasion to fight Nazi Germany, but fund FUD (Fear Uncertainty and Doubt) to delay dealing with global warming? They saw WW II as an economic windfall, but see the even bigger threat of global warming as purely a liability ignoring the huge opportunities for an exploding world market who will have no choice but to buy green energy. They still don’t get it that profits fall to zero when global warming decimates workers and customers.
If you factor in the cost of the military to protect our petroleum assets in the middle east, gasoline costs us $7 a gallon. We have to reduce our dependence on foreign oil.
~ Gary Hart (born: 1936-11-28 age: 75) of The Last Word TV show on MSNBC 2010-11-21What an arrogant, imperialistic, but at least candid American! He refers to the oil in the middle east as belonging to the USA. I suppose it does now in a sense, stolen, now that Obama had the big auction to sell off all of Iraq’s oil reserves to American and European oil companies on the very day he announced the pullout.
A species may eat a particular bacterium, phytoplankton, smaller fish, or plant in an area. Lacking a predator, these species/populations will overgrow and alter the area’s biology, overwhelming and driving to extinction dozens or hundreds or thousands of other local species.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60) Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture page 24The more species, the greater the biodiversity, the more stable an ecosystem is. When you start killing off half the species, the ecosystem becomes much more fragile, and more susceptible to complete collapse from even minor disturbances.
Because nitrous oxide [released by nitrate-fertilised soil] is 296 times stronger thanCO₂ at global warming, and methane [cow farts] is about 23 times as potent asCO₂, the combined greenhouse effect of our livestock worldwide is greater than the sum total of all the cars, trains, busses, trucks, ships, airplanes and jets.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60) Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture page 33We have no choice but to reduce our consumption of meat, to use it more like a condiment, the way the Chinese do. The first step is to stop the astronomical agricultural subsidies on fodder and meat to let it gradually rise to its true market price.
When the Europeans first arrived in North America, the average depth of the topsoil was 53.34 cm (21 in), and it was rich in the types of symbiotic organisms necessary for plant roots to absorb minerals from the soil. Today North America averages around 15.24 cm (6 in) of topsoil and most if it is exhausted of nutrients and much is devoid of life.
~ Thom Hartmann (born: 1951-05-07 age: 60) Threshold: The Crisis of Western Culture page 22As any gardener can tell you, you can’t get soil much thinner than 45.72 cm (18 in) and still grow a decent crop of vegetables. Yet, even knowing the rate of erosion, farmers persist in the agricultural practices that strip the soil. They refuse to look ahead any more than one year.
Climate change is no longer a doomsday prophecy, it’s a reality.
~ Astrid Heiberg (born: 1936-04-14 age: 75) president of the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies
Early ecologists soon realised that, since humans are organisms, ecology should include the study of the relationship between humans and the rest of the biosphere. … We don’t often tend to think about the social sciences (history, economics and politics) as subcategories of ecology. But since people are organisms, it is apparent that we must first understand the principles of ecology if we are to make sense of the events in the human world.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 61) The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies
The industrial civilisation is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity, and that are about to become scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for even a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have know it in the twentieth century.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 61) The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies
We are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have will be how we adjust to this new regime. That choice — not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives — will have profound ethical and political ramifications.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 61) The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies
We have unintentionally, begun to disturb massive planetary systems that have kept much of the world climate relatively hospitable to civilisation for the last 10,000 years. We are heating the deep oceans, which leads to more frequent and intense El Niño weather patterns. The time of the seasons is noticeably altered and most of the Earth’s glaciers are retreating at accelerating rates. The potential effects are catastrophic. They include the drowning of coastal cities and whole island nations, as a result of rising sea levels and intensified storms; the proliferation of disease-spreading insects into new regions, resulting in cases of malaria perhaps doubling in tropical regions and increasing 100-fold elsewhere; and the loss of forests and wildlife that depend upon a stable climate, leading to vastly increased extinction rates and the collapse of entire ecosystems.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 61)
When a caterpillar eats a leaf, then a thrush eats the caterpillar, or when a hawk eats the thrush only 5 to 20% of usable energy is transferred from one level to the next. … Thus herbivores will account for a much smaller fraction of the biomass [than plants], and the carnivores for a still smaller fraction.
~ Richard Heinberg (born: 1950-10-21 age: 61) on why carnivores starve first when food gets tight.
When the price of carbon reaches $100 a tonne, then it will become an economically viable business proposition to start takingCO₂ out of the atmosphere and sequestering it underground.
~ Thomas Homer-Dixon (born: 1956 age: 55) in Energy and Climate Change: A Sustainable Future?
Around the world people are dying, ecosystems are crumbling, and economies face ruin because of climate change, and all Bush and the oil industry can think of is how to maximise their profits and continue business as usual.
~ Paul Horsman , Greenpeace spokesperson
We should have no concern for the environment, because, after the great flood with Noah, God promised that He would never ruin the earth again.
~ James Inhofe (born: 1934-11-17 age: 77) Republican Senator for OklahomaInhofe is spewing Christian bafflegab to cover up the fact that he is a big oil shill. He may or may not believe his own drivel. Even if you take this biblical prediction seriously, it says nothing about the possibility of humans, corporations or Satan deliberately bringing on global climate change/floods by releasing massive quantities ofCO₂ into the atmosphere. If you read the promise inGenesis 9:11 , it says “neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth”. All Jehovah promises is not to do to destroy the earth by flood; he leaves open all other means including parching it.
The one thing oil companies are good at is making money. You have to hit them [BP] in the heart, in the place if they had a heart [money].
~ Keith Jones father of one of the workers killed in the Deepwater Horizon explosion
Within 6 hours deserts receive more energy from the sun that humankind consumes in 1 year.
~ Dr. Gerhard Knies (born: 1935-12-01 age: 76)
In the central North Pacific, plastic outweighs surface zooplankton 6 to 1.
~ Thomas M. Kostigen , reported in Discover Magazine. Since he wrote that, according to the movie Tapped, by 2009 it had increased to increased to 46 to 1.
If you drill, there’s going to be a spill. It’s axiomatic.
~ Dennis Kucinich (born: 1946-10-06 age: 65) Democratic member of congress for Ohio
Nuclear waste is a heavy burden to lay on our children and their children and their children’s children and their children’s children’s children and their children’s children’s children’s children…
~ Rufina M. Laws
Mountain Pine bark beetles need -37°C (-35°F) for three days to freeze to death. Unfortunately, with global warming, that no longer happens in British Columbia [Canada]. This means the population of the beetles have exploded. They have destroyed more forests than all the environmentalists put together have saved.
~ Mark Leiren-Young (born: 1962 age: 49)
Humanity is a virus that destroys any community it touches.
~ Link an android in the The Human Factor episode of The Outer Limits played by Zack Ward (born: 1970-08-31 age: 41)
By 2040, the Sahara will be moving into Europe, and Berlin will be as hot as Baghdad. Atlanta will end up a kudzu jungle. Phoenix will become uninhabitable, as will parts of Beijing (desert), Miami (rising seas) and London (floods). Food shortages will drive millions of people north, raising political tensions.
~ James Lovelock (born: 1919-07-26 age: 92)Lovelock is more pessimistic than the consensus, because he thinks man will refuse to take significant action to ameliorate global warming. So far, he has been right.
Our future is like that of the passengers on a small pleasure boat sailing quietly above the Niagara Falls, not knowing that the engines are about to fail.
~ James Lovelock (born: 1919-07-26 age: 92)
The Earth’s population will be culled from today’s 6.6 billion to as few as 500 million, with most of the survivors living in the far latitudes — Canada, Iceland, Scandinavia, the Arctic Basin.
~ James Lovelock (born: 1919-07-26 age: 92) on the effects of global climate change.
Economies are supposed to serve human ends… not the other way round. We forget at our peril that markets make a good servant, a bad master and a worse religion.
~ Amory Lovins (born: 1947-11-13 age: 64)
It might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century to cut global warming down to size.
~ Jerry Mahlman (born: 1940-02-21 age: 71), director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton (born: 1940-02-21 age: 71)
There is compelling evidence to indicate that climate change is occurring and that the atmosphere will continue to warm at an unprecedented rate throughout the 21st Century. A scientific consensus holds that a large part of this warming is attributable to human activities, primarily through the concentration ofCO₂ and other greenhouse gases. Change will be intensified and accelerated by the diminution of natural carbon-capture processes (such as forests and marine life) and the reduction of the polar ice-caps. Uncertainty remains as to the precise rate and character of expected changes over the next century. Climate science is complex, with linear cause and effect relationships not yet readily apparent; therefore, the consequences of climate change will vary in their impact in time, incidence and geographical extent. It may be a very unstable and unpredictable process, involving both progressive evolution and sudden instabilities. Major consequences are likely to include melting icecaps, thermal expansion of the oceans, and changes to ocean currents and flows, with seawater becoming more acidic asCO₂ transfers from the atmosphere. On land, some regions will experience desertification, others will experience permanent inundation, and tundra and permafrost are likely to melt and release methane, possibly in large amounts. Global climate change will reduce land for habitation and will result in changing patterns of agriculture and fertility, while tropical diseases, like malaria, are also likely to move North and into temperate zones. There will be an increased risk of extreme weather events, threatening densely populated littoral, urban and farming regions with eccentric growing seasons, flooding and storm damage. Climate change will remain highly politicized: although the relationship between causes and effects is likely to be increasingly understood as more evidence and computing power becomes available, responses will be contested and affected by self-interest.
The British Military DCDC Global Strategic Trends Programme 2007-2036
Don’t it always seem to go
That you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?
They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.
~ Joni Mitchell (born: 1943-11-07 age: 68), Big Yellow Taxi
Until now I believed that the nation which has done most to sabotage a new climate change agreement was the United States. I was wrong. The real villain is Canada. Unless we can stop it, the harm done by Canada in December 2009 will outweigh a century of good works.
~ George Monbiot (born: 1963-01-27 age: 49) The Urgent Threat to World Peace is… Canada 2009-12-01
A 1.5 litres/100km (3 mpg) increase in the auto and light truck fleet is worth 158,968,347 litres (1,000,000 barrels) of oil a day.
~ Ernest Moniz , Professor of Physics, born 1938
The use of solar energy has not been opened up because the oil industry does not own the sun.
~ Ralph Nader (born: 1934-02-27 age: 77) 1980
Loads of chemicals and hazardous wastes have been introduced into the atmosphere that didn’t even exist in 1948. The environmental condition of the planet is far worse than it was 42 years ago.
~ Gaylord Nelson (born: 1916-06-04 died: 2005-07-03 at age: 89)
Technological possibilities are irresistible to man. If man can go to the moon, he will. If he can control the climate, he will.
~ John von Neumann (born: 1903-12-28 died: 1957-02-08 at age: 53)
This is the moment when we must come together to save this planet. Let us resolve that we will not leave our children a world where the oceans rise and famine spreads and terrible storms devastate our lands.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
We can’t drive our SUV (Sport Utility Vehicle)s and eat as much as we want and keep our homes on 22°C (72°F) at all times… and then just expect that other countries are going to say OK. That’s not leadership. That’s not going to happen.
~ Barack Obama (born: 1961-08-04 age: 50)
Climate change is real.
~ Marvin Odum (born: 1958-12-13 age: 53), CEO Shell Oil, in CBC interview with Peter Mansbridge, 2010-05-01
Many people have the impression that there is significant scientific disagreement about global climate change. It’s time to lay that misapprehension to rest. There is a scientific consensus on the fact that Earth’s climate is heating up and human activities are part of the reason. We need to stop repeating nonsense about the uncertainty of global warming and start talking seriously about the right approach to address it.
~ Naomi Oreskes , 2004-12-26 science historian
We shouldn’t be feeding corn to SUVs when people are starving.
~ Oxfam
Pangloss is admired and Cassandra is despised and ignored. But as the Trojans were to learn to their sorrow, Cassandra was right, and had she been heeded, the toil of the appropriate preparation for the coming adversity would have been insignificant measured against the devastation that followed a brief season of blissful and ignorant optimism… Today, Cassandra holds advanced degrees in biology, ecology, climatology and other theoretical and applied environmental sciences.
~ Dr. Ernest Partridge (born: 1935-05-14 age: 76) Perilous Optimism
When a women breast feeds her infant, she is dumping her lifetime supply of pollutants into her baby. If she were to bottle her breast milk, it would be illegal to carry it across state lines because it is so polluted. Pollutants concentrate with each level of the food chain. Every time you eat a pound of swordfish, a fish 6 levels up the food chain, you eat the concentrated contaminants collected from the sea water by 453.59 tonnes (500 tons) of diatoms.
~ Dr. Roger Payne in the Sir David Attenborough documentary Planet Earth
I think there are a substantial number of [climate change] scientists who have manipulated data, so that they will have dollars rolling into their, to their projects.
~ Rick Perry (born: 1950-03-04 age: 61) source.Perry later admitted he had no evidence to support this claim. Can you trust someone who makes such serious accusations based on a hunch as a president?
After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy — 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do — as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases.
~ Michael Pollan (born: 1955-02-06 age: 57) Farmer In Chief New York Times 2008-10-12
America ships tons of sugar cookies to Denmark, and Denmark ships tons of sugar cookies to America. Wouldn’t it be more efficient just to swap recipes?
~ Michael Pollan (born: 1955-02-06 age: 57) author of In Defense of Food
Climate change, energy depletion, food shortages, resource wars, species extinction — these are not the problem, they are only the symptoms. The singular root problem that causes all these horrifying threats to mankind is overpopulation.
So — logically — the solution that will eliminate these threats is simply to reduce the population of humans on this planet to a sustainable number.
Yet, no one proposes this obvious solution. No one is even willing to discuss it.
It is the elephant in every room.
Except here.
~ PopulationElephant.com
Treat the earth well: it was not given to you by your parents, it was loaned to you by your children. We do not inherit the Earth from our Ancestors, we borrow it from our Children.
~ Native American proverb
We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
~ Native American Proverb
If you’ve seen one redwood tree, you’ve seen them all.
~ Ronald Reagan (born: 1911-02-06 died: 2004-06-05 at age: 93)
The environment should be put in the priority category of our national security. Defense of our resources is just as important as defense abroad. Otherwise what is there to defend?
~ Robert Redford (born: 1936-08-18 age: 75) Yosemite National Park dedication 1985
Colorado has a 3 percent growth rate. That’s like a third world country with no birth control.
~ Jim Reidhead Larimer County Land Use Center, Denver Post 1998-05-02
Rising ocean temperatures linked by some studies to tropical storms are very likely a result of global warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions, according to new research. The lead author of the new study, Benjamin D. Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory of the Energy Department, said the findings suggested that further warming would probably make hurricanes stronger in coming decades… The researchers compared a century of observed temperature changes with those produced in more than 80 computer simulations of how oceans respond to natural and human influences on the climate. The simulations were generated on 22 different computer models at 15 different research centers. The simulations correctly mimicked the cooling caused by plumes from volcanic eruptions, which temporarily block the sun. At the same time, the authors said, the only warming influence that could explain the changes in the oceans was the buildup of heat-trapping smokestack and tailpipe gases in the air.
~ Andrew C. Revkin Study Links Tropical Ocean Warming to Greenhouse Gases, New York Times 2008-09-06
2/3 of the land in Los Angeles is covered in roads and parking lots. Further the asphalt absorbs almost all of the sun’s energy, warming the city by 10°C (18°F) relative to the surrounding areas. Even a child could come up with a more efficient transportation system.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
2005 was the most destructive hurricane season on record. 2008 was second. The longest lived hurricane on record was Bertha in 2008. Hurricanes are fueled by warm ocean water. In 2004-03 the first-ever reported hurricane in the South Atlantic hit southern Brazil. The record 11 hottest years have all been in the last 13 years. It amazing how many people pretend to deny global warming in the face of such facts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
4% enriched uranium cost about $1,000 per pound or $2,200 per kg. (In contrast, weapons grade is 90% pure U-235.) Why is it so expensive? Because it takes so much fossil fuel energy to mine it and enrich it. The process is just as dirty and emits just as much greenhouse gas as any other use of fossil fuels. It also implies, we can’t currently mine and enrich uranium without oil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
54% of greenhouse gas emissions are under municipal control. Even if you can’t get county, state, province, country or the international agencies to act, there is still plenty you can do locally.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
9/11 killed 3500 people. In response, the USA spent over a trillion dollars. In 2005, global warming killed 14,000 people in France alone. In response, the USA decided to pretend there was no such thing as global warming so they could procrastinate any action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
95% of Canada’s budget in Afghanistan is for killing Muslims and destroying buildings. 5% is for clinics and schools. Guess which part gets 95% of the TV coverage. If you are cynical, you might think even that 5% is purely for P.R. to sell the war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A car could be thought of as an artificial horse. You would think as such it would be smaller, lighter, more fuel-efficient and pollute less that a natural horse. Yet even a Smart Car weighs 0.73 tonne (0.80 ton) whereas a horse is only about 400 kg (881.85 lbs). It sounds like car manufacturers have been coasting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A car weighs 20 times more than its passenger. Get serious! Imagine an egg cup that weighed 20 times more than an egg. Imagine a bicycle that weighed 20 times more than its passenger. Imagine a canoe that weighed 20 times more than its passenger. Imagine an elevator that weighed 20 times more than its passengers. Imagine an horse that weighed 20 times more than its rider. There is no need for cars to be anywhere near that heavy (and hence consuming anywhere near that much fuel). Some bicycles weigh as little as 1/50 the weight of the passenger and use no gas at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A coal-fired electric plant in the USA burns an entire trainload of coal every 12 hours.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A commercial for Zurich insurance intones “The Panama canal must triple its capacity” as if it were a pregnant elephant. This is foolish. As oil runs out, as we accept we can’t expel CO₂ anymore, we have to stop shipping so much tonnage all around the earth. We need instead to figure out how to acquire locally the things we need.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A corporation will happily bribe politicians to enact policies that will make earth uninhabitable if they think it will improve the next quarter profit by 1%. They are like children with super powers and no conscience or thought for the morrow.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A disposable diaper takes 236.59 mls (8 fl oz) of crude oil to make the outside cover. It sits at least 500 years in landfill, far longer than the child will live. It requires felling four mature trees to create the absorbent pads for one child’s supply of diapers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.
A documentary promoting nuclear power explained that we have no choice but to go nuclear because we need to increase electric production by 50% in the next few years. Granted, if we destroyed the environment to produce this electricity, we would have no trouble selling it. On the other hand, if production dropped by 50%, nobody would die. We would simply find ways to use electricity more efficiently.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A few generations ago, parents would sacrifice everything to give their children an education, a farm or a new country with political freedom and economic opportunity. However, today, parents seem unwilling to make even the most minor sacrifices for subsequent generations, most notably sacrifices to deal with global warming, alternative energy and pollution. What changed? One factor is the rise of Christian end-of-times cults. These loons believe God is about to destroy the world, so there is no point in doing anything to sustain it. Another is the generation gulf. Young people’s fashion, speech, tattoos, piercings, music etc. are so repulsive to their parents, parents come to hate their kids.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A Jeep Grand Cherokee has a 3.6 litre engine. That is 70 times bigger than needed to transport a human. Americans stress that a vital part of defence is reducing dependence on foreign oil. Why is a Jeep Grand Cherokee owner not pelted with eggs as a traitor?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A lawnmower produces more emissions per hour than a car. They have no emission controls.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A major block to solving the energy crunch is confusing energy wants with energy needs. We humans have been hosting an extravagant energy party. We burn energy primarily for demonstrating status with conspicuous consumption, e.g. 400 horsepower cars to transport a single human to work. Those are energy wants, not energy needs. We idiotically equate parsimonious use of energy with lack of manliness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A nuclear power plant contains as much radiation as 250 nuclear bombs. To prevent the stored spent fuel from releasing radiation requires it to be continuously cooled with refrigerated water. Without an uninterrupted source of electricity, the water will boil off in a few days and the spent fuel will overheat and vent.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A parable: Miss Canada was traveling across Canada by train. She was doing her nails when the train derailed. The conductor appeared through the smoke and debris and said, Miss, you must get off the train immediately. There was a chlorine tank car and it is leaking the deadly poison gas. Miss Canada whined, But I can’t. I’ll ruin my high heels and my nails aren’t dry yet. The conductor shouted, Look you stupid bimbo. You don’t understand. If don’t get out of here pronto, you will die! No, you don’t understand. Do you know how much these heels cost?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)The parable is about the bimbo reaction of the average Canadian to global climate change.
A parable: There was once a man who sold one of his kidneys for $50,000 US. He was very enthusiastic about this as a way of earning money. He was planning to sell his organs one by one. His friends pointed out, Don’t be an idiot. You can’t donate your other kidney or your heart or your liver… You will die! You are such a worry wart! I read on the Internet you don’t need any of your internal organs. Senator Jim Inhofe and Dick Cheney both survive without a heart… No they don’t. That is just a figure of speech. They don’t even have artificial hearts. By the time I sell my heart they will have perfected artificial ones. You can always count on scientists to invent anything we need.This parable is about twits who want to continue using fossil fuels even in the knowledge it will be fatal. They just can’t give up the money.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A simple chemistry lesson: The basic building block of nitrogen fertilisers is ammoniaNH₄ . Ammonia is created by the Haber process, discovered in 1908. The nitrogen N₂ comes from the air. The hydrogen comes from methane (natural gas)CH₄ . They are combined under high temperature and pressure in the presence of various catalysts. The important point to take away from this lesson is, when you run out of natural gas, you run out of cheap fertiliser.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A single virus or bacterium can’t hurt anything, but when they multiply into the billions, all doing the same thing, purely as a side effect of their existence, they bring down elephants. Similarly, when humans breed into the billions, our daily activities kill a planet in a couple of centuries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A squirt of water and a blast of warm air, would be more effective, and environmentally friendly than a wad of toilet paper.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A technological high wire balancing act has allowed us to push the population well beyond what is sustainable. It is criminally irresponsible to encourage couples to balloon the population further. Further, we must stop harassing those responsible people who forgo having children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A tiny foreign species of water plant invades your pond, and it doubles the area covered each day. Let’s say it takes 6 months to cover half the pond. How long will it take it to cover the entire surface? Answer: one more day.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
A traditional society uses carrots and sticks to ensure its members act in ways that help that society to flourish. However, in North America, corporations have usurped this function for the goal of increasing profit. They teach that disposable is cool, and conspicuous waste is how to prove your worth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
About 1/3 of theCO₂ greenhouse gas we pump into the air dissolves in the ocean making a weak carbonic acid solution similar to Coca-Cola. It dissolves the tiny skeletons of the plankton that produce most of the world’s oxygen. If you have ever kept tropical fish (marine or fresh) you know how exquisitely sensitive they are to pH (acidity). We are foolishly flipping off the switch to life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to Dr. Peter D. Ward in Under a Green Sky: Global Warming, the Mass Extinctions of the Past, and What They Can Tell Us About Our Future one of the great mass extinctions of the past was triggered by global warming stopping the ocean conveyor (large ocean currents). The oceans stagnated and gave off hydrogen sulphideH₂S , (a gas more toxic than hydrogen cyanideHCN) in such massive quantities that it killed off 90% of all life on earth, both plants and animals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to Nova, all the world’s mountain glaciers will be gone in 50 to 100 years. Glaciers store water and release it evenly throughout the year. Without them, you have alternating floods and droughts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to Nova, over the next 100 years, as the oceans warm, they will expand, raising the ocean level by about 33 cm (12.99 in). All the mountain glaciers will melt, raising it by another 33 cm (12.99 in). Much of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets will melt raising it by another 33 cm (12.99 in), for a total of 1 metre (39.37 in). That does not sound like much until you consider that 100 million people will be flooded out. It will cost trillions to built coastal defences. There will be millions of refugees creating political turmoil. And that is the most optimistic scenario.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to Nova, today’sCO₂ levels are much higher than they have been at any time in the last 500,000 years. We are in no way prepared to put up with even a tiny fraction of the crazy weather that came down during the last 500,000 years and we are begging for much worse with our utterly out-of-controlCO₂ emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
According to the History Channel, one of the few things man will leave as a legacy that will last more than 1000 years after he goes extinct is the Andalusian sheep dog, which will keep on herding and protecting sheep.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Addiction to oil is an apt term. A heroin addict is concerned only with the short term pleasure of consuming his drug. He ignores the fact his habit is destroying his health and will eventually kill him. He discards all decency in his quest for the drug, and has no concern for the effect his habit is having on others. The oil-addicted society is concerned only about the price of gasoline and tooling around in cars today, deliberately ignoring the fact they are killing the entire planet with the consequent greenhouse gases. They send soldiers into third world countries to steal oil from people who have nothing else, then deliberately waste it with status displays such as gas-guzzling SUVs or Hummers or commute to work alone in overpowered vehicles capable of seating eight, like a heroin addict going on a binge.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Adolph Hitler and Ronald Reagan each lead the world off for a decade chasing his personal delusions. Hitler’s were racial; Reagan’s were environmental. Reagan will do far more lasting damage.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
All modern humans descended from a group of 2000 people who lived 70,000 years ago, and most of us descended from an even smaller group of 150 people. 2000 is about the enrollment of my high school. It amazing how so few people notice how alike we all are and that you can’t help but marry a not-that-distant cousin.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
All the fish and crabs have died in a dead zone off the coast of Oregon. The problem is not pollution, but hypoxia — lack of oxygenO₂. Global warming is interfering with the processes that oxygenate the oceans and stimulating bacteria that consume oxygen. The oxygen levels are zero on the bottom. For details see the Changing Sea One Ocean episode of the The Nature Of Things.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Amateurs spend untold hours building and restoring custom cars. The results are usually flashier and faster, but almost never lighter, more fuel-efficient or cleaner.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America and China’s massive increase in coal-burning and consequent CO₂ emissions and pollution is an act of war against the entire planet. Purely out of self defence, it is necessary for other countries to unite to derail both the American and Chinese economies. What America and China are doing is as foolhardy as smoking in a fireworks factory. American industry, out of short term financial gain, coal-burning on a stupendous scale is safe. Americans are so besotted with Christian wishful thinking, they believe the lies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
America is going to need some massive kick in the ass to make it abandon fossil fuels and get on with clean energy. If they don’t get that kick, they are going to kill themselves off with global warming. So ironically, a massive terrorist attack that destroyed all the oil refineries, pipelines and fossil fuel electric generation plants in the country would be a blessing in disguise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American are such fools they attempt to settle scientific questions by political affiliation. Republicans are dragging their country to hell simply because reject anything that liberals believe. Liberals are generally well educated and believe science. Republicans thus mindlessly reject the findings of science on such matters as peak oil, global climate change, water conservation and extinction of species, because they are liberal ideas and liberal ideas have cooties.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
American potato farmers, more than anyone, know how saturated their products are in pesticides. They don’t eat them. They grow organically for their own families.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans (and Canadians) are hell bent on extinguishing themselves via global climate change. They refuse to take even token action to save themselves. If vandals figured out how to simultaneously destroy all the passenger cars in North America, they might save these idiotic lemmings from themselves. That would never happen, but I doubt anything less would snap North Americans out of their stupor.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are extremely reluctant to embrace green technology. The bright side of this is the world will leave them in the dust — a nation of candle and buggy whip manufacturers. They have been too powerful in the past, throwing their economic and military weight around.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans are like a woman with diabetes who has just discovered a cache of chocolate caramels. She can’t eat them anyway. Americans imagine if they scrounge enough oil or natural gas, they can still get for the next century. They close their eyes to the reality that they can’t burn those fossil fuels because of the absolutely unacceptable effects of the greenhouse gases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans have sealed their doom. Of out stupendous greed and stupidity they refused to act on global warming. Now Russia is building giant fleets to extract arctic oil and gas, and China is consuming even more fossil fuels than the USA. What the USA does now is more or less irrelevant. It could not happen to more deserving fools. They are as stupid as monkeys who refuse to let go of a banana to escape a trap. Canada, especially Prime Minister Steven Harper, deserves the same cow pies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans imagine that green technology is some mysterious uncharted rocket science. They forget the Danes, Dutch, Germans and Japanese have been using it successfully on a massive scale for decades. Americans could implement it next month just by phoning in an order.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans imagine they own the Louisiana wetlands and they have the right to destroy them with oil, pesticides, fertiliser runoff… in their insane drive for production. Americans are the sons of illegal immigrants from Europe who came in droves and robbed, killed and enslaved the people who were there already taking reasonably good care of the land.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans pride themselves on being the most innovative people in the world, yet they are behind China, India, Europe and the OPEC nations in developing solar technology. American are clinging to the energy technology of the 19th century. They even cling to the inefficient reciprocating combustion engine invented in 1862. Their stupendous conceit and pride hides their predicament from them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans pump 80,000 different industrial chemicals into the environment. They don’t seem to get it that their food and water comes from that same environment they are treating as a toxic dump site. They close their eyes tight and even refuse to even test the effects of the chemicals. It is like someone pouring their waste household chemicals into the cornflakes and wondering why they don’t feel as chipper as they used to.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Americans refer to Canada’s tar sands as “our oil sands”. Excuse me, but the last I checked, Canada was still a separate country. The sands are coated with bitumen tar not oil. These Americans are trying to make it sound as if the oil is just lying on the ground waiting to be scooped up. It requires astronomical amounts of natural gas to make steam to melt the solid tar. This is low grade, high-environmental impact fuel.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Amphibians (frogs and salamanders) are the barometer of environmental health. 1/3 of all amphibian species are facing imminent extinction. There has not been such a mass extinction in 65 million years, since the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An African uses 15.14 litres (4 US gallons) of water a day. An American uses that much every time he flushes the toilet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An American is someone who takes his children on a road trip by bundling them in the back of a gas-guzzling SUV, and driving them thousands of miles while they watch cartoons on DVD (Digital Video Disk).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
An environmental traitor asks himself, how big a car can I afford? An environmental patriot asks himself, how small a vehicle will get the job done? Americans live under the delusion a pickup truck is a suitable commuter vehicle and an SUV is necessary to buy groceries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
ANGA (America’s Natural Gas Alliance) funds ads claiming natural gas is completely safe. They have conveniently ignored that natural gas (methaneCH₄ ) it is a potent greenhouse gas and burns to formCO₂ the major greenhouse gas causing global warming, a threat according to Environment Canada, second only to global nuclear war. They also forgot to mention that an LNG (Liquid Natural Gas) tanker igniting would create an explosion big enough to wipe out the core of major city.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
ANGA funds ads promoting natural gas a necessary adjunct to solar and wind energy because the sun sets and the wind does not always blow. This is not true. Because people sleep you need to generate much less energy at night. When the wind is not blowing here, it is blowing somewhere else. By networking with a power grid, you have continuous power, without any energy from greenhouse gas-producing natural gas. Further, we are learning so store energy in molten salt and massive batteries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
ANGA has swamped the air waves with propaganda promoting natural gas as the solution to the energy crisis. Promoting natural gas in place of coal is like an alcoholic touting wine in place of whiskey as the solution to alcoholism. Natural Gas is a fossil fuel. It emitsCO₂ just like any other fossil fuel (though less than coal), and as such has to be 100% eliminated. At best, it is short term stop gap.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Animals have two simple goals:Humans are animals, so you would expect them to behave the same way. However, corporations and peer pressure have persuaded them to behave insanely without even noticing, for example:
- Survive.
- See to it their offspring survive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Taking enjoyment is trashing the environment that sustains them and future generations.
- Deliberately wasting scarce resources.
- Consuming non-renewable resources as quickly as possible.
- Treating environmental vandalism as a badge of masculinity rather than a symptom of mental illness.
Anthropologists tell us that whenever humans experience even a temporary bounty, they celebrate by increasing the population. The problem is, when the bounty ends, it brings chaos that often sends a culture totally extinct since the population has become completely dependent on the bounty. The green revolution has brought planetary abundance, and in usual manner, humanity has exploded its population. Since the green revolution depends on cheap oil, it will end in the not too distant future. Humanity will be gnashing its collective teeth at its idiotic fecundity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Any city that grows without limit eventually experiences a catastrophic collapse. Economics falsely asserts this can’t happen. They falsely claim constant growth is necessary.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Any idiot can sail through life with a $10,000 in the bank. However, it takes exceptional skill to live on $500 a month or even $30 a month the way people in the third world routinely pull off. Yet, oddly, we most admire the deadbeat who coasts through life without effort who inherited wealth and contribute nothing to society at large. Oddly, we admire most those who most trash the environment with energy-wasting lifestyles. It is irrational to revere those who act counter to your self interest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Anything less than 100% recycling is not sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Anything that grows without bounds is by definition cancerous. We humans think our cities are beautiful, like a demented old woman coddling the cancers in her breasts as divine manifestations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Arch villain Dominic Greene and the Quantum organisation in the James Bond film Quantum of Solace is a thinly disguised Bechtel Corporation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Archaeologists can tell you about all manner of civilisations that suddenly went extinct because they destroyed the natural environment that sustained them. The difference is, we are now doing the same thing they did, but on a planetary level. When we fail, we will fail spectacularly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) For details see Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed by Professor Jared Diamond
Arctic sea ice is melting much faster than even the most optimistic computer climate models predicted. Oddly, the scientists refer to this as the computer models being too conservative. They don’t mean conservative in the sense of erring on the side of safety. They mean erring on the side of predicting too little change. You could also say they mean conservative in the sense of too much conservative, Christian-right, god-will-rescue-us-from-any-folly, wishful thinking.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As oil runs out, inefficient vehicles such as aircraft, cars and trucks will fade away to be replaced by trains/subways/skytrains, sailing ships and human-powered vehicles (including human-powered vehicles with a small electric assist). Computers will guide trains and sailing ships with much greater safety than we enjoy today in any form of transport.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As the oil runs out, what about coal? Optimists imagine that higher energy prices will make it economic to exploit those high-sulphur, hard-to-extract, impure coal deposits enough to last us another 200 years. However, the giant machines needed to mine coal consume 757.08 litres (4.76 barrels) of diesel fuel an hour. If you can’t get back more energy than you spend mining, processing and transporting the coal, no matter how high the price of coal climbs, mining coal is still not an economically viable proposition. According to John Gever in Beyond Oil, if current trends continue, by 2040, it will cost $1.00 to extract every $0.50 worth of energy from coal. This means coal will buy us only a few more decades. Further, coal it is about the worst fuel imaginable when it comes to greenhouse and toxic gas emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
As the price of oil rises, locally grown food becomes cheaper than food flown in. There is a tipping point and suddenly locally grown food becomes the economic mainstream. People looking ahead will buy up local farmland.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
At current levels of output, coal reserves can be expected to last 500 years.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)see lecture by Dr. Albert A. Bartlett.
The first catch is only half that reserve is recoverable. The second catch is energy consumption is not sitting still. It has been doubling approximately every decade. Even those enormous reserves would be gobbled up in 51 years with modest 5% coal reserves growth. The third catch is burning all that coal would cause mass extinction through global warming.
How long will the coal really last? See thecalculator .
At the Copenhagen U.N. climate conference in 2008-12, Canada won an award — the Colossal Fossil, for Stephen Harper’s exceptional work blocking action on climate change not just in Canada but also in other countries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Auto manufactures, particularly Volkswagen, place TV ads to encourage people to commit ecological crimes — namely drive about aimlessly at high speed for long periods of time spewing greenhouse gases and gobbling up earth’s last reserves of fossil fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Back in the 1950s and 1960s every household had a giant blue can of Crisco used mainly for making pie crusts. It was pure trans fat. Why? Hydrogenated fats gave the pies a longer shelf life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because less and less water falls on the Colorado mountains each year, the Hoover dam will stop supplying water to Las Vegas and San Diego, and electricity to Los Angeles in 2017.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of man’s political inability to control overfishing, according to Dr. Boris Worm, he will have driven every single species of edible fish to collapse by 2048. Collapse is defined as population below 10% of normal without the ability to ever recover, leading to eventual extinction. Man is such as insatiably greedy animal. He is driving not only the ocean fish, but himself to extinction with it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of peak oil, the price of fuels have to eventually rise out of sight. This means food imported from more that a few kilometres away will be prohibitively expensive. This means the new trendy will be growing vegetables in your front yard and raising chickens, rabbits and ducks in the back.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Because of the increasing pollution from burning fossil fuels, the lung capacity of ten year olds is dropping about 10% per decade. Surely that is reason enough to stop using these fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Before a couple tackle the difficult job of raising a child, they should cut their teeth on something easier like integrating an alcoholic homeless person back into society.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Before civilisation, acquisitiveness was limited by how much you could carry. Today, technology has allowed people to accumulate mansions full of stuff, not to mention storage lockers full. Before civilisation, your energy footprint was limited by how many calories your could burn with your muscles. Today, technology lets you burn hundreds of horsepower with your vehicle, not to mention your furnace, hot water heater and electric appliances. Some people have private jets, heated pools, multiple homes and many other imaginative ways of deliberately and extravagantly trash the earth with the help of technology. The truly odd thing is people do this to impress their fellows. Surely we should spit on, if not incarcerate, such planetary traitors, not envy them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Boxes of cereal, cookies, razor blades etc. only half full is not just a matter of cheating consumers; it is a matter of deliberately wasting fuel transporting half empty boxes around the planet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Boycotting gas is pointless. It has no effect on the bottom line of the oil companies. It is simply postponing purchases a few days. Boycotting driving on the other hand would work, as would trading up to a smaller more fuel efficient vehicle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
BP exploited the Bush-Cheney lack of regulation. They gambled and lost taking shortcuts with safety. If they go bankrupt paying off their losses, that it how capitalism is supposed to work. Companies that employ money-losing strategies are supposed to go broke.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
BP used a toxic dispersant Corexit to hide the oil, even after the government told them not to. BP is falsely claiming the dispersed oil is gone. That is claiming like dirt disappears when you sweep it under the carpet. The purpose of the dispersant was to confuse the government whose fines are based on the amount of oil spilled and to avoid liability for cleaning it up. They are such scumbags!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Britain and Germany have already reached their Kyoto targets. Canada and the USA lamely bleat it is too difficult to even try. How can you help but be ashamed to be a citizen of such loser countries?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Building more roads to deal with congestion won’t work because of the increasing cost of real estate. In many urban areas roads consume the bulk of the space as it is. The solutions I think will work include:
- Taxing people for road use, especially in rush hour. This will discourage frivolous trips and encourage shifting trips out of rush hour where feasible, including commuting to work. You pay extra to use congested roads and congested times. You get a computerised, itemised bill once a month.
- Taxing people for driving with empty seats. They can car pool, pick up riders (everyone acts like a taxi if they want) or use a vehicle with fewer seats.
- Smaller, narrower, lighter vehicles, including partially or fully human powered. It should be possible to get three lanes of such traffic in the same space we now get one.
- Computer controlled vehicles. They are more attentive, so you can pack vehicles close together at least between computer-driven vehicles. To get maximum benefit, you must exclude human drivers, or put them in their own lane. Computer don’t do stupid things that lock up traffic. They let passengers do something entertaining or sleep.
- Telecommuting. You work from home, and might only go into the office once a week. That office need not be downtown. It could be located in a commercial area closer to your home. The meetings might even happen in a common room at one of the homes or apartments of the employees rotating to account for availability. For things like bulk printing you use a local printing service rather than maintaining an office with your own equipment.
The big problem fixing gridlock is primarily a political problem, not a technical one. Much as people hate gridlock, they are unwilling to make the tiniest sacrifice to be rid of it. They want other people to sacrifice, but not them. They will object to the congestion tax, losing the right to drive a car 100 times heavier than necessary to prove their manliness and wealth, losing the right to drive manually any way they please (e.g. rapidly changing lanes, which triggers freeze) and losing the right to have a permanent office away from home to escape to each day. When the gridlock pain gets bad enough, perhaps some city will implement these ideas. Then tourists will see the advantages, and take the ideas back home.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Business has only one concern — short term profit. It has no concept of long-term sustainability. Therefore business should not be making any decisions affecting environmental sustainability.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Butterflies, snowflakes, Janis Joplin, men on death row… We are attracted because we know these things will be here only a short time. I look on our wildly unsustainable human civilisation the same way.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Canada and the USA rightly should bear a larger burden than other countries for cleaning up CO₂ in the atmosphere for several reasons:~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- They emit more than other nations.
- Emissions have drastically increased since 1990, 21.60 gigatonnes (23.81 gigatons) to 30.60 gigatonnes (33.73 gigatons) in 2010, an increase of 42%. Granted much of this is China doing with its coal plants, but Canada and the USA got a 100 year head start, so most of the CO₂ up there is ours.
- Unlike other countries, they have been emitting for the last century. CO₂ is cumulative.
- They plan to exploit the Alberta tar sands in future creating an even worse mess.
Canada has absurd prostitution laws. Prostitution is legal, but if a prostitute tries to assess the danger of a potential client before hopping into his vehicle, she breaks the law. If she tries to protect herself with an alarm system or shared premises with other prostitutes or a bodyguard she breaks the law. If she pays a driver to watch out for her, she breaks the law. If she even spends some of the money she makes on raising her children, she breaks the law.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Canada’s tar sands are the dirtiest environmentally of any form of oil extraction. They massively pollute land, water and the global atmosphere with greenhouse gases. The problem is huge quantities of super heated steam from natural gas are needed to heat the tar sands up enough for the bitumen in them to melt and flow. You get greenhouse gas emissions from the natural gas burning, creating the energy used to pump the viscous tar, creating the energy to refine the tar, and when the oil/gasoline is finally burned. The steam condenses and the oily slurry is dumped into nearby rivers. However, despite these environmental drawbacks, the USA projects it will get most of its oil from the Canadian tar sands in 2012. Canadians have no choice in the matter.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Canadians and Americans like to think of themselves as futuristic and environmentally conscious, yet compared with the Europeans and Japanese, we are in the dark ages. We are literally in last place as developed nations go. This is economic suicide.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Car racing is the ultimate fuck you sport. It emits toxic fumes; it emits annoying noise you can hear for miles, it emits greenhouse gases; it emits noxious odours. The drivers are not even athletes; sometimes they are even obese. It burns money like a cocaine habit. It is the sport of bratty, indulged Arab-prince children who revel in vandalising the environment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Cars travel with 80% of their capacity unused. Could you image a bus, truck, ferry, airplane or train operating that wastefully? In some countries nearly every car acts as a taxi, picking up paying hitchhikers, on its way to its destination. The fees pay for gas and maintenance. Before they would do likewise, North Americans would want some technology to let the driver and passenger have some assurance of safety and to handle payment without the danger of cash. The reward for the driver could also be access to HOV (High Occupancy Vehicle) lanes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Carter mandated improved fuel efficiency. It improved 50% in a few years. Subsequent presidents did nothing in that regard. The result, no improvement since. Clearly leaving fuel efficiency up to the car companies does not work.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Cheering the economic boom of fracking is like cheering the rapid growth of a cancer tumor.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Chevrolet advertises that is planting enough trees to eventually offset 8 megatonnes (8.82 megatons) ofCO₂. To put that in perspective, the cars GM (Genetically Modified) sold in 2010 produce 34 megatonnes (37.48 megatons) each year. They are compensating for 23% of the mess they make.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
China doubles its output of wind power every year. They surpassed the USA long ago. The USA’s democracy has been hijacked by the oil industry who have done all they could to block alternative energy. The key problem is the Citizens United Roberts supreme court decision to allow corporations to buy politicians with unlimited secret funds.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christian arrogance gets in the way of common sense. For example, Christian scientists floated the idea there had to be something unique about earth having water, even though they knew perfectly well hydrogen and oxygen are some of the commonest elements in the universe. They got that nutty idea from the bible where they were assured the earth was the centre of the universe, and the universe was created solely for man’s pleasure.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians are the biggest roadblock to the survival of mankind. Not only do they refuse to take responsibility for protecting life on earth, they interfere with others who do. The problem is they are deluded into thinking their god will clean up after every mess man makes, and prevent anything seriously terrible from happening even though there is no evidence he has ever done so.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians are the most useless ninnies. Consider a problem like global warming. Some Christians, based on no evidence at all, deny there is a problem. They trust their god would never allow such a dreadful thing to happen, so there is nothing to do. Another group of them say, “Glory. The world is ending. I caint hardly wait to have lunch with Jesus”. Another group of the Christians say, “if only we were not such wicked people, this dreadful fate would not befall us. Our god is punishing us. We are doomed, so there is nothing to do”. Arrgh! Would these nincompoops please get out the way of people who do want to take effective action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Christians believe their god carefully concocted the formula for earth’s atmosphere to create the optimum climate for humans. Yet these same Christians have no concern at all when they massively upset that balance with CO₂ and other greenhouse gas emissions. Isn’t that sort of like spitting in their god’s face? Why would not their god punish them for vandalising his handiwork? Even the scientists say you can’t do this without dire consequences.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Chrysler deserves the ultimate BS award for advertising their Jeep SUV as “solar powered” on the grounds it has a sun roof.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Clean coal that you see advertised so often on TV is a fraud. It does not yet exist. Coal fired electric generation plants are the #2 source of green house gas emissions in the USA. There is not a single clean coal plant in the USA that captures or sequestersCO₂ . The other problem with coal is sulphur emissions which cause acid rain which kill forests and fish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Climate change denier Lord Nigel Lawson assures us that oil will never run out. Why does he think that? In the 1930’s, scientists predicted oil would run out in 40 years. They were wrong. They failed to account for offshore oil. Therefore they must be wrong now, and Lawson’s guts must be right. That’s a bit like refusing the advice of today’s cardiologists because of an error doctors made in the 1930’s. Lawson pretends to ignore the fact that today we have much better instruments to measure the remaining oil. He also pretends to ignore there have been no significant new finds since the 1970’s. We are burning oil far faster than we can find new oil. That cannot go on indefinitely. The man is a scoundrel.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Consider how much we humans have given up by overpopulating. Almost nobody can afford a house with 40 hectares (98.84 acres) surrounding it. Japanese people resort to robotic pets since real ones are not permitted in tight quarters. We have wars over water and land to grow food in Africa and Israel. We have destroyed the very forests that purify the air we breathe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Coral reefs cover only 0.5% of the ocean bottom, yet harbour ¼ of all fish species. Corals are extremely sensitive to ocean temperature. Global warming from greenhouse gas emissions is rapidly wiping them out.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Corn as biofuel is a fraud. It produces moreCO₂ than regular gasoline since there is so muchCO₂ released tending the corn and distilling the ethanol. It only makes sense economically because of the $5 billion a year in American agricultural subsidies originally intended to ensure plentiful, inexpensive food. Further, taking land from agricultural production for biofuel creates food shortages and increases food prices. And finally burning the corn is 81% more efficient than making it into ethanol.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Corn-based biofuels are a phony green energy solution because:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- They require huge amounts of oil-based fertilisers.
- Fertiliser run-off creates dead-zones of water deprived of oxygen.
- They require huge amounts of fuel for the farm machinery, processing and transport.
- They displace food crops pushing up the price of food.
- They are only economic because of the massive government subsidies. You have to invest more energy than you get back.
Corporate executives, and oil company shills like George W. Bush in the USA and Stephen Harper in Canada love to whine about the impossibly onerous 1% extra cost it will take to deal with global warming. Yet oddly, they have no concern at all about economist Stern’s estimated 20% cost of the consequences of doing nothing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Corporations mindlessly seek profit. They trample the environment, but that is just a side effect. If we consumers arranged things so that corporations made more profit when they behaved responsibly, they would be model citizens. It is thus up to us to avoid buying products and services that damage the environment. We are in control, but suffer under the illusion that corporations desperately want to harm the environment to spite us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
CO₂ emissions are just as aspect of destruction of the ecosystems and habitats that support us. Focusing too narrowly on greenhouse gas emissions may lead us to some cockamamie purely technological solutions that leaves the big problems untouched.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Crack addicts can’t stop consuming until every last grain of the cocaine is gone. Even though we don’t even have enough oil to pass on to our grandchildren, we still consume it frantically with the same uncontrolled desire of the crack addict. It is greedy, selfish and self-destructive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Crocodiles have endured longer than any other large animals. They have survived extinction events that wiped out most other species. The secret of their success is their extremely efficient use of energy. They can go for years without food if necessary. If we want to survive the tough times ahead, we too will have to become masters of energy efficiency.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Dawn Dishwashing Liquid TV ads claim they donate $1 from the sale of every bottle to helping clean up wildlife caught in oil spills. I had been buying this product feeling virtuous until I read the fine print. (I can read the bottom line on a reading eye chart. I had trouble reading Dawn’s disclaimer.) It turns out they do no such thing. Only if you visit their website and pass a gauntlet of tests do they donate the $1. Further they cap their donations at $500,000 no matter how much soap they sell. Their detergent donations cleaned up 75,000 waterfowl. The gauntlet includes:
- Selecting the correct browser. The HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) is non-standard and does not work with most browsers.
- Taking a vision test to read a serial number on the bottom of the detergent bottle in faint dot etching.
- Taking a typing test to type a string of nonsense correctly.
What Dawn has done is unforgivable, effectively using fraudulent advertising to steal people’s donations to help oil-soaked wildlife. The executives responsible should be criminally prosecuted and forced to pay up the $1 on every bottle as promised. Note the website says, more truthfully “one bottle can = $1 to save wildlife”, where the TV ads fraudulently claim “one bottle = $1 to save wildlife”. They should also be required to place ads confessing to the net amount per bottle they actually donated.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Democracy is breaking down in Canada. Nobody wants more pesticides in food or less meat inspection but that is what the Conservative government is giving them. The problem is the system of legalised bribery where corporations can bribe politicians with massive direct and indirect campaign contributions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Denying global warming does not protect such fools from the consequences of it any more than denying arsenic is poisonous will allow gobbling it without effect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Despite our flash-in-the-pan short stay of our species on earth, humans will still leave ample evidence in the sediments of our passing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Dick Cheney is an international war criminal, mostly for his activities surrounding the Iraq war. However the damage he did there pales with the damage he will do for generations to come by exempting the natural gas industry from all clean water, clean air and most other environmental laws.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Do the math. Anything less than 100% recycling cannot be indefinitely sustained.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Dropping a birth control pill into the toilet is about the most harmful thing you can do to wild fish. The pills work even better on fish than people.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Drug cartels happily kill off their customers with adulterated and dangerous drugs. Consider that, legally, the sole purpose of a corporation is profit. It should not be a surprise when they resort to lying and spreading disinformation about global climate change, motivated solely by profit, even though they know their actions will eventually kill billions of people and wipe out thousands of species.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Drugs are strenuously tested to make sure they are safe. Before they get on the market, drug companies have to prove they are safe. Chemicals that make their way into food are not tested at all. To get them off the market, some altruistic soul has to prove they are dangerous. I think we have this backwards. Why do I think this?
- Everyone is exposed to the chemicals. Only the people prescribed to medications are exposed to the drugs.
- There is a pressing need for the drugs. There is no need at all for people to ingest the chemicals. They get them as a sloppy side effect.
- The dose of a drug is precisely controlled. Nobody even measures exposure to a chemical; it can vary widely.
- A drug is typically only used a short time. Chemical exposure builds up over a lifetime.
- Normally other species are not exposed to drugs, but they most certainly are to chemicals.
- It is difficult to monitor all the possible interactions between drugs. The are so many chemicals it is impossible to begin to think about it.
- People give consent to taking drugs. They don’t give consent to absorbing chemicals.
- Drugs were designed to go into human bodies. Most chemicals were not.
If anything should be tested, it should be the chemicals. We have stupidly closed our eyes and ignored the danger. This is yet another case of flagrant corporate irresponsibility motivated by profit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
During the Gadafi ouster, a man from Libya mentioned that he had 70 cousins, a number of whom he had never seen. To avoid a population explosion, you must not have more than 4 first cousins.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Each year, Americans discard 38 billion aluminum cans, discard, not recycle. This would be enough to create an aluminum dome covering New York City.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.
Each year, our species burns fossil fuel that took nature 300 years of sunlight to create. Because we have cut down half our rainforests, we are makingCO₂ 600 times faster than nature can capture the carbon back into new fossil fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Earth is facing an extremely serious problem. Scientists are not professional persuaders. They publish their findings in journals read only by other scientists, written in highly technical language. They describe. They don’t proscribe what our species must do to survive. The professional persuaders (which include: politicians, shills who pose as scientists and media people) have nearly all been bought, directly or indirectly, by big oil and big coal to deny, lie or confuse global climate change. The environmentalists, largely volunteers without skill in the arts of persuasion, are left to extol the truth, on a mite-sized budget compared with big coal and big oil. Naturally, the liars are prevailing. The shills are foolish people who see only the money. They don’t realise they are planetary traitors condemning their grandchildren and descendants to death or never being born.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Economists are certifiably and criminally insane. They believe it is a Good Thing™ if people consume and waste more, burn more fossil fuel, pollute more, emit more CO₂ and have more babies. That ignores the reality of a finite supply of fossil fuel, finite supply of arable land, finite atmosphere and finite oceans. What you can get away with on a small scale is not what you can get away with when all 7 billion people do it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Economists have an odd view of what is desirable. To them, the purpose of life is to increase economic activity, any activity, even including things like more vandalism repairs, more funerals, more pollution, more soil erosion, more deforestation, more conspicuous consumption, more hospital care, more inefficiency, more waste… I call this locust mentality. Economists refuse to notice how their frantic efforts to stimulate short-term economic activity destroy the very substrate the enables sustained economic activity. They refuse to look even a decade into the future about how their actions harm economic activity, much less the environment or human welfare.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Economists have the same naïve world view as medieval Europeans. They believe the earth has an infinitely large surface with infinite resources that can sustain endless economic growth. If the world were the size of a basketball, the biosphere would be thinner than a layer of varnish, hardly infinite.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Energy density measures how much energy you can get out of a given weight of fuel. The higher it is, the more compact the fuel is and the less energy you waste carting it around. The best batteries (lithium thionyl chloride) hold 2.5 Megajoules of energy in every kilogram of fuel, methanol (biofuel) holds 19.7 MJoules/Kg, gasoline holds 43.54 MJoules/Kg, propane holds 49.6 MJoules/Kg. and hydrogen holds a whopping 143 MJoules/Kg. Uranium is in a totally different league with 88,250,000 MJoules/Kg. What does this mean? Batteries have a long way to go before they are efficient for long distance transportation. Hydrogen is the most efficient fuel for long distance transportation. We should get on with hydrogen powered cars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Energy experts tell us that solar panels are too expensive, even though all you would need is a few square meters per person. What they means is humanity is too stupid to save itself by spending a penny more for energy than they do now for dirty fossil fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Environmentalists wring their hands at the shrinking habitat for wildlife, yet they refuse to point their fingers at the true culprits — those who breed all those babies that necessarily push wildlife off their traditional lands. Rampant motherhood is killing the planet. We must stop treating it as synonymous with unassailable virtue. It is a form of egotistical greed — trying to shape posterity in your own image, to hell with everyone else.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Ethanol is a joke. It takes more energy to create it than you get back. You need fertiliser, water pumps, tractors, trucks, distillers… The distillation process alone consumes massive amounts of natural gas. You might as well use the natural gas as fuel directly. Economically ethanol makes sense only because big agriculture bribes the government to give it huge subsidies. The other major problem is corn grown for ethanol displaces crops grown for food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even a child understands that you can’t run into a furiously burning house to retrieve a painting. It does not matter how much it costs. You can’t do it, and even if you could, it would not be worth sacrificing your life in the attempt. Yet only one person is a thousand seems to understand the same principle also applies to global warming. Most people are quite happy to sacrifice their lives and the lives of their children and grandchildren for some relatively trivia economic advantage. They are behaving like the passengers on the Titanic who refused to take action to save themselves because they had convinced themselves it was impossible for anything terrible to happen to them and because taking such action would have been inconvenient.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even announcers on the BBC (British Broadcasting corporation) world service promote the lie that a substantial proportion of the world’s scientists think global warming is a hoax, or at least that man has nothing to do with it. These twits would find some eccentric on the web who claimed to believe the moon was made of green cheese, and from that conclude the butterfat proportion of the moon was a raging scientific controversy. Even with a grade 9 understanding of science, you can prove for yourself theCO₂ increase (which Svante Arrhennius discovered back in the 1800s to raise global temperature) is man made. Research the figures for how much coal, oil and natural gas man has burned each year since the start of the industrial revolution. Look up the figures for how muchCO₂ you get from burning each kilogram of coal, oil or natural gas. Make a spreadsheet to multiply and add to find out how muchCO₂ in total was generated. From the total mass of the atmosphere and the percentage of in the atmosphere that is CO₂, compute the total amount ofCO₂ it contains today. The climate deniers claim the amount added by burning is negligible compared to the total amount there. Do your own work, then nobody can bamboozle you.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even as it is, there are millions of people who could live anywhere on earth they pleased, and carry on their livelihood with electronic communications. They could pick where to live based on climate, low cost of living, pristine environment, picturesque vistas, recreation opportunities… It won’t be long before people start leaving countries that interfere with the net neutrality of Internet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even if mankind drives itself extinct in 30 years, it is still fortunate to have a seat at this point in time to watch the spectacle. After all, you went to movies and read books about the fall of Rome and found it fascinating.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even now that everyone understands the negative effects of fertiliser runoff, pesticides and herbicides, home owners persist in saturating their lawns and gardens with them. The airwaves are still packed with advertisements extolling these ecological crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even relatively sane Republicans like Mitt Romney claim that global warming is a matter of belief, like whether you accept the holy trinity. It is not opinion or belief, it is hard science. Corporations who imagine procrastinating action will help their profits have been spreading FUD using the Republicans as their mouthpieces. Even back in the 1800s science knew the greenhouse heating effect ofCO₂ on the atmosphere. This is a totally phony controversy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even though scientists predicted the global-warming drought, extreme heat and wildfires in western Australia, when the 2009-02 wildfires exploded through New South Wales fanned by the 47°C (117°F) heat, the media never once mentioned global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even with the recent temporary drop, Americans are up in arms at high oil prices and the way America is hostage to foreign oil. The biggest single buyer of oil on the planet is the US military. They have bid the prices up with their wasteful consumption of oil. An aircraft carrier gets about 58,804 litres/100km (0.004 mpg). Using fuel efficiently and protecting the environment are simply not on the military’s radar.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even with the technology of 2011, we can create buildings that use 90% less electricity, 90% less fossil fuel and 90% less water than usual. If by some magic all buildings were replaced by green technology, that would be equivalent to having ten times the electricity, fossil fuel and water at 90% less cost. Americans have a hang up. They think doing more with less is effeminate. A major piece of the solution to the energy crunch is right under their noses, but they refuse to consider it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Even without modern technology, Easter Islanders were able to wipe out all the trees, then all the birds then most of the edible shellfish before the islanders decimated themselves down to about 100 people. Granted, it took them 200 years to accomplish the destruction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every American born takes about 0.40 hectare (1 acre) of land out of food production to house him, provide stores, provide an office, provide roads… Even at a modest growth rate of 1.1%, the population will double by 2050. We will have double the people to support and 1,214,056.93 sq kms (468,750 sq miles) less farmland to do it on. The Christian notion be fruitful and multiply is suicidal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every calorie of food grown requires 10 calories of fossil fuel energy. The bad news is, as energy runs out, food supplies will inevitably decline in step.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every creature attempts to convert all the biomass on planet earth into copies of itself. It does this mindlessly, even though success means a nightmare. Even intelligent heterosexual humans do it, quite successfully. I find it revolting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every flush of a toilet wastes 15 litres (3.96 US gallons) of water — an entire day’s ration of water in the third world. There are three things we could do use the water more efficiently.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Don’t flush for just a pee.
- Allow you to choose the volume of the flush.
- Mount the holding tank in the ceiling so you get far more pressure. You can then use less volume of water per flush.
Every food is effectively a drug you take in massive doses. It is wise to avoid taking each food for a week or so to learn what its benefits and negative side effects are. You might be surprised to learn that some of the foods you crave most have completely unacceptable side effects.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every second, the sun produces more energy that all the energy generated by man since the dawn of time.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every second, the sun releases millions of times more energy than has ever been produced on earth. This suggests to me, if we need energy, we should figure out how to cleanly harvest it from space. There is far more there than we could ever use.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every species goesextinct eventually, even if it takes 400 million years. This generation is fortunate to be present to watch the spectacle of spectacles, bigger than the downfall of Rome, the extinction of homo sapiens by what effectively amounts to mass suicide/mass stupidity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Every time you double the earth’s population, you more than double difficultly of solving global problems. You have to make do with even fewer resources, since some have been consumed by previous generations. It is like a housewife trying to figure out how to feed more and more people with less and less money each month.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Everybody knows what happens when month after month you take more out of a bank account than you put in. The same is true in nature. We are eroding topsoil 30 times faster than it is being replenished. We are emptying aquifers 160% faster than they are replenished. The giant Ogalla aquifer will be unproductive within decades.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Everyone knows the consequences of heroin or methamphetamine addiction. Addicts destroy their health. Addicts are utterly miserable. What motivates people to do such a stupid thing? It is the lure of immediate pleasure. Some people have a brain defect that makes them ignore consequences. All they think about is now. A similar defect makes the majority of human kind procrastinate taking action on global warming and the end of oil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Exxon claims their algae biofuel “absorbsCO₂” and hence helps reduce greenhouse gases, but they don’t tell you that when you burn the biofuel all theCO₂ is released again, making the fuel carbon neutral, with no netCO₂ reduction. This sort of dissembling and lying from big energy is the norm.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Exxon Mobile uses a pathologically narrow-minded decision-making process. To decide what do to about global warming they compute that opposing all measures to ameliorate it and lying to the public about the dangers of global warming will help them make more profit selling oil and gas in the next quarter. In their view, the fact that global warming leads to mass extinction of most of life on earth is irrelevant. That procrastinating greenhouse gas reduction until it is too late is similarly irrelevant. Even the long term bankruptcy of Exxon is irrelevant. All that matters is the next quarter profit. They behave like some sci-if super computer gone amok.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Factory farming in the USA is losing about 5.08 cm (2 in) of topsoil a year. It takes 500 years for even 2 cm (0.79 in) of it to replenish. The problem is much worse in other countries, particularly China. Economics pushes farmers to plant slopes which erode much faster. When the top soil is eroded away that land will no longer support crops at a time when there will be far more mouths to feed than today. We are idiots completely ignoring the consequences of our rapacious farming methods all to chase a quick buck.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Few humans realise what a destructive species we are. We are a newcomer to planet earth. Other species have survived for millions of years of whatever nature could throw at them before we came along. And we are managing to send about a third of them extinct without even trying.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Few people would go to the local park to poison the squirrels and birds. But these same people would not think twice about driving an SUV that belchesCO₂ which will build up and wipe out entire species.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Five of the worst fire years in history have been since 1999 in the American southwest. The fire season is now two months longer. The droughts fueling the fires are exactly what the global climate change scientists predicted.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For every 1.0 kcal (dieting calorie) of food, it takes 10.0 kcal of fossil fuel energy for the fertiliser, pesticides, irrigation and delivery. This means, when we run out of oil, we also run out of food if we don’t have a replacement energy source in place.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For many decades, politicians have been decrying American dependence on foreign oil. What they really want is unregulated offshore drilling. What would work much more effectively is energy conservation, energy efficiency and green energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For millions of years, earth was covered with ice 1 km (0.62 mile) thick. The temperature was -50°C (-58°F). Then volcanoes released massive amounts of CO₂. Within a few hundred years all the ice melted and the temperature soared to 50°C (122°F) . Idiotic humans are repeating the experiment releasing massive amounts of CO₂ . They know darn well what will happen, but they do it anyway. All they care about is themselves, and their temporary convenience, not their grandchildren or children. No other creature plots to murder all successive generations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For millions of years, man lived sustainably, then suddenly, in the name of progress, he got it into his head to burn oil and coal, to poison the water and air, to bloat the population, to level the forests, to despoil even the remotest parts of earth and to inject massive quantities of green house gasses into the atmosphere to wipe out more species than the asteroid that ended the age of the dinosaur. Man bleats “I have no choice. The economy makes me do it.” And this suicidal loon dares to call himself more advanced than his predecessors?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For most animals, the odds of an early death are overwhelming, yet they are not discouraged. The odds of the human race going extinct in the next century are high too, but if we allow ourselves to become discouraged, we will have no chance at all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For most of the last 10,000 years the earth has been in equilibrium, radiating out into space the exact same amount of heat as it absorbed. However, today, due to green house gas warming, the earth now absorbs 1.8 watts more per square meter than it radiates. It does not sound like much, but it amounts to roughly running a toaster 24/7 on every 1,011.71 sq metres (¼ acre) plot of the planet. However, this heat does not dissipate; it steadily accumulates, hour by hour, day by day, year by year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For most people, a global average temperature rise of 3°C (5°F) does not sound alarming. They don’t understand that the warming is uneven, mostly over the continents which will rise 6°C (11°F). The maximum annual temperature will increase considerably more. Paris will have the temperature of Algiers, Moscow the temperature of Paris, San Francisco the temperature of Tijuana and New York the temperature of Charleston, and Houston the temperature of some obscure dusty town in southern Mexico.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For oil to be useful, you must make more money selling it than you spend extracting it. Naturally, oil companies extract the easy oil first. Must of we count as reserves are not economically viable or are just marginal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
For the human species to be sustainable, couples must have an average of 2.00 children surviving to adulthood. If they have less, the population dies out. If they have more, you get environmental collapse, war, pestilence and famine. Religions, pressing for greater market share, irresponsibly urge their adherents to breed as much as possible. If some couples have more than two children it necessitates others having fewer. Only China seem to understand just how anti-social overbreeding is.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
FOX News clowns, Glenn Beck and Sean Hannity have been campaigning against reusable canvas shopping bags. They advocate double bagging in plastic even for light loads. They gave two reasons for this anti-environmental anti-common-sense position:
- It is more manly to use plastic.
- They wish to annoy liberals which they confuse with environmentalists.
I think they are stark raving nuts. They are like a Saturday Night Live skit. It would be poetic justice if a sea turtle assassinated the pair, at the seashore, with a plastic bag.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Frogs have survived whatever nature could throw at them for 200 million years. Now frog species are going extinct left and right. Why? because we humans are spreading the herbicide atrazine, a chemical similar to frog sex hormones on our fields. Even microscopic doses make male frogs develop eggs in their testes or develop ovaries. Farmers don’t seem to realise they need frogs for purely economic reasons to help control insects.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
From the point of view of a new disease organism, our technological civilisation seems custom-tailored to help it spread. We transport diseases around the entire planet within hours on airliners; we move them around in food transported tens of thousands of miles; we congregate in tight spaces like buses, elevators and office buildings each day to exchange microorganisms. Even our greeting ritual, the handshake, exchanges more germs than had we ritually drunk each other’s urine. We have undone all we have evolved/learned in millions of years to control disease, namely live in small groups and be wary of contact with strangers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
From the point of view of bears, humans are like new kind of very territorial superbeaver that drastically transforms the landscape with its burrows.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
From the point of view of greenhouse gasCO₂ emissions, you can’t get a dirtier fuel than coal. It is worse than any other fuel. This is because it is made of almost pure carbon. You would never guess that from the TV ads touting coal as a clean fuel.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
From the point of view of the environment, a recession is a minor reprieve in man’s attack on it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Genes drive animals to attempt to maximise the population, even if it means utter misery for the individuals. Even with our much vaunted intelligence, we humans are as equally driven as locusts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Given what hell planet earth will be with twice the population, and what a heaven it could be with half the population, you’d think sheer greed would reverse the population explosion. However Catholics don’t think that way. They are willing to destroy the earth with a locust swarm of humanity so long as it ends with more Catholics than Muslims.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Glacier National Park in Wyoming used to have 150 glaciers in the time of Theodore Roosevelt. Today they are only 35 left. At the current rate of melting, they will all be gone by 2030. This is not just a matter of higher temperatures, it is a matter of insufficient water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Glaciers are melting so fast, if you plant a stake at the edge of the glacier and come back a day or even a hour later you can see the receding.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Glaciers melting, record temperatures, bigger and nastier hurricanes, massive flooding, bigger and nastier tornadoes… all as predicted and still the Americans studiously ignore global warming. It reminds me a bit of the story of Pharaoh in the bible unable to take a hint.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming and water shortages will soon leave half the world without enough water to grow food. Wasting water becomes tantamount to murder. Think of all the ways people most extravagantly waste water — golf courses, lawns, living in a desert, 30-minute showers, chowing down on beef… It takes 8,952 liters of water to raise 1 kilogram of beef (5,214 gallons per pound).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming deniers are global mega-vandals. It is a crime that requires a monumental ego and corruption beyond measure. It is several steps beyond genocide. It attempts to exterminate not only all humans, but all species.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming deniers are like smokers, on being told they have lung cancer, scour the Internet for 1950s tobacco company propaganda, and crank speculation claiming smoking is harmless, then add another pack a day.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming deniers have no evidence whatsoever to back up their position. It is based purely on wishful thinking. They simply refuse to believe that seriously bad news could be true. They are the sort of people who refuse to vacate their homes before a forest fire or serious flood. They won’t act until the flames are licking at the front door. They are the sort of people who would deny that an asteroid were headed for earth, even if they could see it in a telescope. They claim that catastrophic bad news is never true, but what they mean is, when religious cranks predict the end of the earth, they are always wrong.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming deniers, such as the Conservative Party of Canada, are like smokers who claim smoking is harmless. They like smoking so they lie to themselves and others about its dangers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global Warming is a misnomer. Houston in July now averages 34°C (94°F) . Jacking that up to 41°C (106°F), with spikes up to 49°C (121°F) is not what I would call warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming is not a monster under the bed. If won’t go away if you refuse to believe in its existence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Global warming means more ocean flooding for at least three reasons:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Ice caps and glaciers melt raising the water level.
- Warm water expands raising the water level.
- The extra heat energy fuels bigger storms and hurricanes.
Global warming presents more of a threat than all terrorist and military threats throughout history combined, but the USA refuses to act because it might cost money or be inconvenient. I don’t imagine anyone refused to defend against Japan in WW II on grounds it would cost money or be inconvenient. The problem is the term global warming sounds so benign and Hollywood has played wolf so many times before that the public think of global warming as not even as serious as killer bees or the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Gordon Brown, when he was Prime Minister of the UK, pointed out that the Copenhagen Climate Conference is the last chance mankind has to get its act together on global warming. “There is no Plan B.” Logically, Brown should have ordered Mi5 to assassinate any world leaders who fail to co-operate. I can’t imagine a better justification for murder/war than preventing the extinction of mankind. If, out of squeamishness, climate change deniers are permitted to prevail, they will kill us all.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Here in Victoria, the grass is lushest in the cool damp days of February. Yet no one cuts it. They just enjoy it and the crocuses and snowdrops poking through. Later in the year, when it is much more difficult to keep a lawn green, competitive lawn growing season starts with all its rituals of cutting, illegal watering and fertilising. In North America lawn is the biggest crop, bigger even than corn or wheat. Oddly, gardeners discard the entire crop, perhaps as some sort of unconscious religious sacrifice.
grass
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
GreenMillionaire.com advertises a free book that will tell you ways to save money by going green. This sounds to good to be true. It is. In the fine print, they tell you that ordering the book automatically subscribes you to a an issue magazine.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Greenwashing is rampant. I saw five TV commercials in a row featuring windmills, all from companies that don’t have anything at all to do with wind energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Have those loons who talk about “conquering nature” ever thought about what would happen if they succeeded?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Have you ever noticed that the more preposterously outsized a vehicle is, the more its driver expects everyone to defer to him on the road. I think people who use the roads most efficiently should get priority.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Here are ways, most likely first, that man will kill off at least 2 billion people in the next century.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Global warming.
- Running out of oil and not having alternative energy in place. We will have to stop using oil and coal even before they run out because of greenhouse gas emissions. Our agriculture is currently based on fossil fuels, for both energy and fertiliser.
- Monsanto carelessly buggering around with genetic engineering of plants and releasing freakish genes into the wild. They already made one world-killing error that someone else caught in the nick of time.
- Nuclear war
- Unexpected side effects of destroying or altering habitats, most importantly anything that kills off the plankton.
- Chain reaction from wiping out species to include lowly species upon which we unwittingly completely depend.
- Genetically engineered plague.
- Poisoning of water, air and soil with chemicals more deleterious than we ever dreamed.
- Artificial intelligence smarter than man that decides we are expendable.
- Breakdown of social order, triggered by food shortages, water shortages, terrorism, war, corrupt governments, selfish/bigoted/racist philosophies, or corporatocracy.
Hormones are incredibly potent. The sum total of all testosterone in all men on earth is only 35 kg (77.16 lbs), yet we dump trainloads of chemicals that mimic human and animal hormones into the environment. No wonder male frogs are producing eggs and boy children are now rare in some communities.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Hormones make people attempt to procreate even when there is less than a 1 in 10 chance the child will reach adulthood. We are little different from insects is that respect. Religious traditions and pressure from relatives push people to breed even when the environment clearly cannot sustain the additional population. Child bearing is one area where people are insanely selfish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Houses are much bigger than they were in the 1950s, even though families are smaller. They are so big just to house stuff. Instead of hobbies like gardening or home canning, people now go mindlessly shopping to collect more stuff to fill their houses.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How can this be? France and Italy had no benefit of modern urban planners, yet created entire countries a delight to the eye with livable cities. We in Canada and the USA, had the benefit of urban planning, and the experience of Europe, yet we decided to create eyesore countries of strip malls and forbidding cities.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How do you know a disinfectant is less harmful than the bacteria it purports to kill?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How is it possible that so many people believe the lie that all the scientists in the world have conspired to create fake data, and fake papers to perpetrate a hoax that it would be wise to reduce greenhouse gases to prevent global warming? Don’t these twits know the effect ofCO₂ on global warming was discovered back in the 1800’s? Don’t these idiots know there has never been a conspiracy of scientists involving more than a handful of people? Don’t these loons know there is zero evidence to support this mother of all conspiracy theories? How do they explain why every peer-reviewed scientist is on board if there were not solid science behind what they were telling you? What flaw has anyone found in their published literature? None! Why would every peer-reviewed magazine risk its reputation perpetrating such a hoax, including ones established for hundreds of years? Don’t Americans notice that the main conspiracy theorist shill is Fred Singer, a man without credentials who sold his soul to big tobacco to testify second hand smoke is harmless? Only a people whose brains have been softened by creationism could fall prey to such a flimsy scam. The fossil fuel people are funding the conspiracy theory FUD. There is no comparable group to fund a hoax. Finally, when was the last time the fossil fuel corporations told you the truth about anything? Recall the BP oil spill. When was the last time the world’s scientists lied to you en masse. Never! It is odd. Americans trust scientists with their lives in every other sphere. Why do they suddenly distrust them on global warming and greenhouse gas emissions?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
How long will it be before humans are as scrupulous about reducing their environmental footprint as they are about their futile religious ceremonies?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Huge dead zones have formed in the oceans all over the earth. The entire Baltic Sea has become one. There is one off the coast of Oregon. A dead zone has no dissolved oxygen whatsoever. This means no animal life of any kind can survive there. There are no fish, jellyfish, crustaceans, clams, corals, crabs, shrimps, larvae…. Of course blue-green algae can thrive since they don’t consume oxygen. These zones are growing rapidly, as a complex side effect of global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Human intuition thinks that if something has not happened in a while, it probably won’t likely happen again. However, nature confounds that intuition. The longer since an earthquake, the more probable a big one, ditto for volcanoes and hurricanes. Frequent small earthquakes relieve stress, preventing a big one. Small eruptions vent pressure, preventing a big one. Small hurricanes use up the heat in the ocean water, preventing a big one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humanity is facing a problem bigger than any other in recorded history. Scientists tell us we must stop using fossil fuels now! Even if we did that, we are still in for a very nasty climate change ride. The CO₂ we have already emitted will continue to heat up the earth. Business is incapable of looking at anything other than the next quarter profits. Corporations such as BP and Shell don’t give a fig if climate change makes the world uninhabitable. Corporations have used paid shills (e.g. Republicans) to convince the sheep-people who make up the majority of the population that there is nothing to worry about. Eventually, the problem will be obvious even to the aggressively stupid, but by then it will be far too late to do anything about it. I feel like a proverbial lemming watching my fellows heading relentlessly for the cliff. The corporation is like Frankenstein’s monster that has turned on its creators.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans (and other animals) are cursed with a biological urge to fill the universe with copies of their own DNA (Deoxyribonucleic Acid), even if doing so makes the carriers of those copies utterly miserable from the effects of overpopulation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans are afraid of sharks even though only about one person per year is eaten by a shark and humans kill 100,000 sharks. Similarly, Americans are afraid of Afghans and Iraqis with similar kill ratios.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans are such contradictory creatures. Some blast endangered whooping cranes out of the air with shotguns. Others dress up in crane costumes and spend endless hours in ultralight aircraft teaching the cranes to fly and migrate. Some shoot harpoons into whales for the sheer joy of killing. Others risk their lives to help free beached whales or whales caught up in nets.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans constantly brag they are the most intelligent creatures on earth. What sort of intelligence destroys the very planet that sustains it?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans drive other species to extinction by hunting, by taking over their habitat, by carrying diseases, by bringing in invasive species in from afar, by competing for food, by polluting, by causing climate change… Instead of homo sapiens perhaps we should have called ourselves homo deleotus.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans go to great lengths to protect their offspring from germs, sexual predators, terrorists and drugs, but do utterly nothing to protect them from dangers even more likely to seriously harm them such as global warming, environmental collapse, nuclear war and junk food.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans have lost their survival instinct. They have plenty of money for oversized cars, video games and drugs, but none for cleaning up global warming, clean water and clean air.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans nearly always underestimate the cumulative effect of repeated action.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans refuse to accept that when they increase population density, they can’t continue to behave as if they had no neighbours. Some of the changes include:
- Formal identification and cameras to make up for the anonymity of large numbers.
- You can’t dump just anything into the sewer system.
- Restrictions on weapons and other instruments of crime.
- Limitations on noise, smoke and air pollutants.
- Laws to control commerce to prevent cheating and adulterating. Reputation is no longer sufficient.
If you find such restrictions onerous, stop having so many babies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans resist all attempts at population control because they have a deep-seated biological urge to fill the universe with copies of their own DNA, damn the consequences to their offspring or anyone else.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans suffer from mass snootiness that deludes them into ignoring the fact that humans too are animals. They want to believe, contrary to evidence, that the ordinary rules of life for animals do not apply to humans, for example, that humans can have a population explosion without a corresponding environmental collapse and ensuing population collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Humans usually overreact to danger or threats to their lives. They panic and stop thinking. However, on some issues they grossly under react, because the danger is not viscerally apparent. These include:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Republicans blocking measures to control greenhouse gasses which will result in the loss of billions of lives, all for minuscule short term financial benefit to the politicians.
- Republicans blocking measures to prepare for the end of oil which will result is the loss of billions of lives when oil-based agriculture collapses, resulting in the loss of billions of lives, again all for the minuscule short term benefit to the politicians.
- Preparing for the massive earthquakes known to regularly recur all along the west coast of North America.
- Protecting fish stocks. At the current rate the edible fish species will be extinct by 2050. That is the only source of protein for a sizeable chunk of the world’s population.
- Protecting the soil. Any civilisation that allows its soil to erode away collapses the instant the soil is no longer deep enough to support crops.
Humans will spend a fortune to impress their friends, but won’t spend an extra 5% for poison-free, non-manufactured food for their children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am amazed how many people are convinced disaster can never befall them personally, even if they flagrantly ignore the danger signals. They imagine a god will come to rescue them, even though this has never happened to anyone before, (except in urban legends). They imagine their government will come to rescue them, even when they saw Katrina, a disaster than affected only a small fraction of the USA, completely overwhelm its government. Those who cheerfully do all they can to trash the environment will be the ones screaming loudest a the unfairness of the universe when they get smacked in the chops when some part of the environment collapses under the strain.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am angry at couples who spend tens of thousands of dollars on fertility treatments when the world is already overpopulated and when there are already so many babies and children going without parents.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am becoming resigned to living in the last century when man was the dominant life form on planet earth. Man is far too self-centred, far too concerned with instant gratification, far too willing to impose suffering on others for trivial gain to himself, to do what he needs to do to survive. I do my best to goad my species to appropriate action while I simultaneously console myself with thoughts of how quiet and beautiful earth will become again without him.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am sick to death of the lame excuses from the oil companies claiming they can’t reign in or clean up oil spills because of bad weather. When else, but during extreme weather, are oil rigs ripped from their moorings? They need to install redundant technology that will automatically clamp off the flow of oil if ever power or control is lost.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am so revolted by my species, its greed, its warring, its sadism, its poisoning of the environment, its cruelty to other species, its refusal to think ahead more than a few months, its superstition… It is best humans go extinct as soon as possible. I just hope we can take ourselves out cleanly without wiping out nearly all the other species in the process.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am spitting angry with motorists for flatly refusing to reduce the size of their vehicles, buy more fuel-efficient vehicles, plan trips more carefully and share the roads with human-powered and low power vehicles. They don’t give a damn than they are polluting, guzzling the earth’s last oil and pumping out greenhouse gases causing global warming. Something about cars makes people ten times more selfish than normal. They are creating a hell to punish themselves. Cities are already gridlocked and in a decade there will be seven times as many cars on the roads. Perhaps gridlock will pry these bastards out of their pollution machines.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am surprised that anyone would ever buy a Kraft or General Foods product knowing their parent company Philip Morris Tobacco, aka Altria, lied to its customers about the dangers of tobacco, thus killing them off. Similarly I am astounded anyone would ever again trust Nestlé after they lied to their customers about infant formula in ways that killed their infant customers. Why would you ever give a company that tried to kill you a second chance?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I am thoroughly ashamed to be human because of the way we humans refuse to limit our population, the way we rape the environment, the way we treat other species with such cruelty. Humans have the capacity to think ahead and avert catastrophe, but refuse to do so, because they are so short sighted, petty, greedy and corrupt. Only a few times in my life have I heard anyone else express such sentiments. Perhaps it is considered dangerous to do so, like criticising the home team or criticising America.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I could imagine a steward on the Titanic who urged the orchestra to play on, and the people to keep dancing, fully aware there were not enough lifeboats for all. Meanwhile, he plotted his own escape plan. This is how government leaders are behaving. They have long ago given up trying to prevent global warming. All they do is plot their personal survival plans. Global warming, for them, is primarily a military problem, how to deal with the starving desperate mobs and how to grow food on the last bits of arable land on earth without those mobs uprooting it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I desperately want my species to grow up and start taking proper care of this beautiful planet. However, I think the odds of that happening are remote. The majority of humans are irrationally selfish. They take a perverse pleasure in ecological vandalism. So I hope humans go extinct quickly, before they take most of the other species with them. Once humans are gone, the earth will recover, mind you without a full complement of species, within a millennium.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t care how desperately Albertans want the jobs and wealth from the tar sands. They don’t have the right to kill me and billions of others like me in the process. The riches have so entranced them, that they ignore the price is climate change megadeath of this and subsequent generations. Religious faith is falsely assuring them there are no serious consequences.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I don’t understand this naïve trust people have in corporations, claiming they need even less oversight than individuals. Corporations have proved themselves negligent by triggering the biggest mass extinction event since the end of the dinosaurs, brought on global warming and destroyed the forests which act as the lungs of our planet just to mention three of their major eco-crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I feel no joy when a baby is born into an anti-environmental culture like the Chinese or American. The child will probably grow up to adopt the national goal of subduing nature as if it were some mortal enemy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I feel so overwhelmed. I am just a silly monkey, whose attention leaps from the profound to the trivial. It is embarrassing the personal trivia my mind blows up to cosmic proportions and dire threats to my entire planet that I deliberately block out because they make me feel too uncomfortable. I am nowhere near up to the task of being a responsible citizen of planet earth, but my monkey brain, is all I have.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I find it hard to understand how people can overcome the embarrassment of riding motorcycles, when then let out a noise like a giant fart that lasts for minutes at a time and can be heard for blocks. It is like cyclists installing whoopee cushions in their bicycle seats. Perhaps Mattel could come out with such a device so brats could pretend to be riding motorcycles.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I found it greatly comforting to learn that if man disappeared, it would take only 500 years for our suburbs to be replaced by forests. Our suppression of earth requires daily frantic busyness.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I kid you not, a friend of a friend refused to participate in the Earth Hour lights out, because she believed global warming was caused by undersea volcanoes and that it would thus be more natural to leave her lights on.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I saw a woman wrestling with plastic grocery bags that broke and spilled tins of food onto the sidewalk. Why did she resist using reusable canvas bags? They won’t break. They carry much more. They would be easier on her hands. They wouldn’t breed under her sink like coat hangers. They wouldn’t clog land fills for generations. Perhaps it is some remnant of Veblen’s conspicuous consumption that drives her to suffer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I started my computer career designing high voltage transmission lines for BC Hydro. We designed them conservatively. We wanted to make very, very sure they would not fall down, even in freakishly hot, cold, icy or windy weather. So we designed for the worst cases plus a fat safety factor. Oddly the oil companies use the word conservative in precisely the reverse sense when talking about policies to deal with global warming. What they mean by conservative is doing nothing, spending nothing, presuming the best possible case or relying on technology not yet invented, in other words what most people would call cavalier or wildly optimistic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I think it most likely that mankind will go extinct or at least endangered some time in the next couple of centuries. With our cleverness we humans have created so many booby traps for ourselves including:
- nuclear war
- global warming
- environmental collapse
- pollution
- biowarfare
- soil erosion
- overpopulation
- dependence on oil
The essential problem is humans, like other animals, are extremely selfish, but our technology has magnified the effects by millions of times. Similarly, humans enjoy the suffering of others. For example, we fund and glorify groups of young men who travel to remote spots on the globe to kill people without anyone being capable of giving a reason for it. It appears is it butchery for the joy of butchery. Similarly, humans are rarely willing to make even small sacrifices for the common good.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I value the life of a whale much higher than the life of a human, especially a Republican.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I was once captured and tortured by withholding water. I wished with every bone in my body they would just get it over with and kill me. It is at least a thousand times more unpleasant than you would ever imagine. I would far sooner be eaten alive by tigers than repeat the experience. The way the world is going, you make get to experience water deprivation for yourself. Overpopulation, global warming, profligate use of water, depleting our water capital in glaciers and aquifers, and pollution means even now means there is not enough water to go around in many parts of the world. Unless we shape up in a major way, this will only get worse and worse. Even if fear of personal water deprivation does motivate you, wanting to avoid the violence fighting over dwindling water supplies may.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I wonder how the global warming deniers explain the fact that the coal industry is spending so much on research on how to burn coal without emittingCO₂.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Idiots on the media say things like “We have to do something about global warming, but only if it has no impact on prosperity.” That’s like saying I refuse to vacate my house threatened by raging wildfire because I don’t want to spend money on a motel. Get serious! We have spent two centuries working 24/7 creating this problem. We are not going to wriggle out of it without spending big bucks, bigger even than Iraq war bucks.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If a large asteroid were discovered on track to obliterate earth in 40 years, given man’s track record with global warming, you could expect prominent Republicans to declare it a hoax. Countries would fight with each other, each claiming someone else should fund a solution. We would do nothing until it was too late.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If anything deserves to be a capital crime, using lies to induce billions of people into committing suicide should surely be such a crime. This is what the Koch brothers Charles and David, Trey Parker (South Park) and Jim Inhofe do openly, tricking people into doing nothing to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to ameliorate global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If anything grows at 5% a year, in 70 years it grows 32-fold. So, for example, if your city council aims for 5% industrial/population growth a year, in one lifetime it would need 32 times as many sewage treatment plants as it has today.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If everyone shrank their word processing margins a tad, or reduced the type a point size, we would save millions of tons of trees every year.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If humans wiped out most other species, the earth itself would die, taking humans with it. If humans wiped themselves out, the earth would carry on much better than today.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If lawsuits and other liabilities from the oil spill bankrupted BP, other oil companies would ever after do whatever it takes to ensure they don’t have a similar major spill. The trick to making companies behave responsibly is to ensure the behaviour you want from them is optimally profitable and the behaviour you don’t want is extremely expensive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If people persist in having more than two children per couple, they are inevitably condemning some of the next generations to die of starvation, disease or war. Some couples (gay and straight) help compensate for these population pigs by having less than two children. The problem is, society still shuns the childless or single childed (or those who adopt) as second class, when in actuality they are altruistic compensating for the sins of the overbreeders.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If people understood just how serious global warming is, they would demand the death penalty for people driving with more than one unoccupied seat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If terrorists were adulterating the food with something that caused 11% of the population to develop diabetes, there would be a hue and cry to stop the bounders. But when McDonalds, Wendy’s and Burger King are doing it, it is ho hum.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If the average temperature of the earth heats up 6°C (11°F), the effect is much bigger than it sounds. 70.8% of the earth is covered by ocean. The air over the ocean will not heat up much, meaning the air over the continents will have to heat up much more than 6°C (11°F) to create that average. The heating is uneven over the latitudes. The poles and the equatorial regions will heat up much more than the average. Further, the peak temperatures will rise much more than the average temperatures. And to top it off, just a bit of extra heat gives hurricanes massively extra punch.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If we did not have a population explosion, all manner of global problems would become tractable, from energy shortages, to pollution, to food shortages, to climate change, to water shortages, to habitat destruction to collapse of the oceanic ecosystems, to the death of the Amazon jungle. But there are people who fiercely promote overpopulation, demand that people raise children who don’t like children, demand people have more children than they can afford and interfere with any form of birth control. These people are motivated by religious superstitions. They are far more dangerous to mankind than any serial killer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If we don’t solve the alternative energy problem, nature will solve it for us. Before we discovered oil, the planet was able to support 1 billion people. We will have a sharp die back of 8 people in 9. The odds are you will be one of those who die.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If we want an end to oil spills, we have to get the oil companies’ attention with a $10,000 per barrel fine for oil released. Effective technology to prevent spills will magically appear.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you are a typical human, chances are you have done absolutely nothing to help make your planet sustainable. You have left it up to others, who have also done nothing. You may even be one of those conspicuous wasters like Glenn Beck who uses extra plastic bags and drives an SUV just to irritate environmentalists. The consequences of this mass irresponsibility are coming to roost, probably within a decade after I die. If then, when you find yourself, in abject misery because of some environmental collapse, please imagine me taunting you with “I told you so”. If by chance, you did take reasonable action, don’t you feel ever so much better that your predicament is not your fault?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you are feeling depressed at your inability to save mankind from its folly, consider what mankind has done to this planet, and what it would do to an entire galaxy if it managed to avoid extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you are in a hospital and someone stands on your oxygen hose and refuses to get off, giggling with glee, you might be able to claim self defence if you shot him. Yet lunatics endanger even more people by releasing greenhouse gases, and the law prohibits you from even whacking them across the knees with a baseball bat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you bike instead of drive:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- You will be doing your part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
- You will be healthier. Biking is an exercise program that requires no willpower. You get your exercise as a side effect of commuting.
- You will be saving the cost of car payments, gas and insurance.
- You will be doing your part to reduce dependence on foreign oil.
- You will be using less road space, reducing the need to pave over land.
- You will never again have to deal with that crooked repair shop.
If you burn wood, you release CO₂. It is only once a replacement tree grows to maturity do you pay back the carbon debt.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you buy a car, particularly an overpowered or oversized one, you are saying “I am a selfish pig. My convenience is far more important than subjecting everyone in my city to the fumes from my car and everyone on my planet to itsCO₂ emissions. I don’t care if my car contributes to gridlock and makes other people’s cars almost too frustrating to drive. Fuck everyone else. I don’t give a damn about anyone but myself.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you designed a toilet system for a two-story house, you could hide the common tank in the attic. It would provide super-pressure for all the toilets in the house. You could use less water and use just the precise amount of water needed per flush.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you did something each year to reduce a pollutant by only 1%, within a century, you would have eliminated 63% of it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you discovered that a corporation were actively plotting to kill your children and grandchildren, would you continue to patronise them? Then why are you patronising the oil and coal companies who are, with malicious intent, and profit motive, trying to turn earth to a cinder with ever-increasing greenhouse gas emissions?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you don’t want to help preserve the planet, please leave.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you encountered a controversy about the French Revolution, about which you new nothing, and you discovered 99% of historians held one view and 1% a dissenting view. On what grounds, could you justify asserting with absolute certainty that the majority view was wrong? I would think you would have to do some study first. This is what Republicans refuse to do about global warming. But then, they are not confused, just lying because they are paid to.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you factory farm chickens, packing them indoors cheek by jowl so they can barely move, any disease will roar through the entire flock. Overpopulation is effectively factory farming humans in similar overcrowded conditions. We are sitting ducks for the first epidemic that comes along.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you pilot a row boat, you don’t have to think that far ahead. The boat is not going very fast, and it responds quickly to a turning oar. However, if you pilot a cruise ship, you have to think kilometers ahead because it takes that long to stop and that long to respond to a turned rudder. Mankind evolved for millions of years when we lived in small bands where we just dealt with the problems of the day. Now that we live in a giant global civilisation with massive inertia, we absolutely must learn to think centuries ahead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you think you and your descendants are going to survive the next 100 years without drastic changes to your life style, you are kidding yourself.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you track a parcel on its way to you from the other side of the continent, you will watch it meandering around an extremely indirect route. You would think with automated sorting equipment and so many flights and trucks it should be possible for parcels to go pretty well directly to their destinations. Instead, UPS (Uninterruptible Power Supply) for example takes all its parcels to one central point, sorts them, then fans them out to their destinations and makes no use of any flights but its own.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you use a hair dryer, over its lifetime, you will consume 0.68 tonne (¾ ton) of coal for the electricity to run it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.
If you wanted to watch the end of the dinosaurs, you would need a time machine to take you back 65 million years. However, if you wanted to watch the end of the amphibians or end of the large mammals, you already have a ring-side seat. We are in the middle of the biggest mass extinction since the KT event, and we humans are causing it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you went to visit a friend in hospital, would you cut his oxygen flow in half, reduce his IV drip in half, and double the morphine pump rate without first asking a doctor if this were a wise thing to do? Of course not! Yet humans, as a whole, have done something far more irresponsible to spaceship earth’s life support systems without consulting experts, namely cutting down half the planet’s forests, draining half the wetlands, and doubling the amount of green-house-gas-producing nitrogen entering the soil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you were a child who had access to the world of odours only through artificial flavours, you might think that strawberries smelled like vomit and grapes smelled like paint thinner.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you were on ten-year return voyage to Mars, you would want to make very sure the life support systems created oxygen at least as fast as you consumed it, and absorbed theCO₂ at least as fast as you breathed it out. For a twenty-year voyage, you would be even more careful. Yet back here on earth, we pay no attention that the earth can’t anywhere near absorb our explodingCO₂ production. It takes 7 trees just to handle theCO₂ breathed out by one person. We are destroying trees and creating humans an accelerating pace. And those seven trees don’t begin to cover theCO₂ we create with cars, furnaces and electric generation plants. We are living on borrowed time. What we are doing is not sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you were watching Jeopardy, and Alex Trebek said “No, the first world war was in 1929” millions of people would write to complain. Yet when equally incorrect assertions appear on TV, in books or even in school lectures, almost nobody complains, because this is religiously protected misinformation, with even higher sacred cow status than the existence of Santa Claus. We don’t realise how ridiculous it is, because we are so familiar with the religious myths. It is just as silly as if Christians started asserting John McCain were 200 years old, and pounced on anyone who dared suggest otherwise, providing of course no evidence at all for this bizarre assertion.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you wipe out a disease, you necessarily put additional pressure on the population explosion. You should not do it without a companion offsetting population control program.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you work to protect the environment, avoid wars, persuade corporations to treat their customers fairly, push for equal civil rights for all, work for economic opportunity all over the planet or call for the ethical treatment of animals, you will find that the majority of people oppose you, and for reasons even they don’t understand. They will often be furious with you and claim they are going to kill you, again for reasons they seem incapable of articulating. We are one peculiar species. I know this from first hand experience.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If you work to save the environment, you might manage to put out 1 billionth of the effort needed for success — six times your fair share of the job. If you despair and do nothing, you have become part of the problem, implicitly discouraging others from taking action. Even if you fail, you will feel much better about failing if you have put out your best effort. You won’t have to kick yourself for inaction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If your country were spending money 3,000,000 times faster than it was taking it in, you would surely feel alarmed. We are burning oil 3,000,000 times faster than nature produces it; why are you not similarly concerned?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If your house smells as industrially clean as a mall washroom, your guests will know you are an ecological vandal. You do the most damage to the environment with detergents, degreasers, stain removers and pesticides. Look for green alternatives.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
If your parents were environmentally irresponsible and had more than two children, you and your siblings can compensate to correct the mini population explosion by limiting yourself to four children among you.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine a couple came to you and told you they going to double the size of their already overcrowded family with mega-fertility treatments from 7 to 14. You might ask “How you going to provide and care for them all?” They answer, “We never think about that. God will provide.” You might consider them somewhat irresponsible. Yet politicians offer incentives to have more babies in an attempt to double the population of their state. Clergy harangue their flocks to double the population of their sect (and as a consequence, of the entire planet), and almost nobody even politely asks them to stop.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine a future where every species has sufficient habit to guarantee its continued survival.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine a group of people trapped in a rickety elevator and the cable has snapped. They are plummeting down ever faster. The Republicans and Christians reassure the others that there is nothing to be concerned about. It is perfectly safe. See, nothing too painful has happened yet. God would never let anything terrible happen. They are like Americans facing a world in environmental collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine a man with twenty terminal diseases who refuses to stop smoking, heavy drinking and taking recreational drugs. He is insanely optimistic about his chances, based on the observation he hasn’t died yet despite a lifetime of abusing his body. He is like a Republican facing a world in environmental collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine a planet about 75 light years from earth, just next door by astronomical standards. From that vantage point, what is special about earth? Earth is just one of nine planets circling around one of the 5000 suns within 75 light years. However, since emissions from earth that left in 1934 are just arriving, it appears that earth has just started to emit radio waves after 4 billion years of silence. Also the atmosphere has suddenly started to change with drastically increasedCO₂ and methane, presumably a side effect of the activities of lifeforms there.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine being in a car. When you take your foot off the gas, the car still accelerates. When you hit the brakes, nothing happens. This is like today’s technological society accelerating to its destruction with overpopulation, over-production and environmental collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine if cars stopped running. It might be gas costs became too high, Iran blocked oil shipments through the Straits of Hormuz, a solar flare fried their electronic ignition systems or people came to their senses realising emitting greenhouse gases is tantamount to suicide. How would you cope? Some people might use bicycles with trailers to go shopping. Others might hire young people to run errands for them. Many would discover they could do their work mostly from home using telecommuting. You might decide to do most of your shopping locally. You might rely on retailers to deliver goods by cart, perhaps drawn by horses, donkeys, large dogs or goats. You would send your kids to local music teachers and local recreational facilities so they could get there on foot. You might tear up the lawn and plant something you could eat or trade with your neighbours for fresh produce. It would be inconvenient, but not the end of the world.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine if the churches of the world instead of preaching “go forth and multiply” had preached “bring children into the world only when both you and the planet can support them”. Imagine the world population were only one billion instead of 7 billion. Instead of having used ½ the world’s oil, we would have used only 1/14th. We would have 7 times as much water per person. We would have 7 times as much land per person to grow food. There would be 7 times as many tons of minerals per person. There would have been no need for the Afghan or Iraq resource wars. Countries would not need nuclear arsenals since the competition for resources would be so much more relaxed. There would be 1/7 as much pollution. The oceans would have 7 times as much fish per person. Humans are no different than other animals. They make themselves miserable by mindless overbreeding. We behave with no more intelligence than tent caterpillars, locusts or lemmings on course for a 30% growth in population by 2050.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine you lived in an apartment without garbage collection service. The only thing you could do with your waste was pile it up in a corner of your apartment until you could think of something better to do with it. Well, that’s the way planet earth works. There is no away to throw stuff to.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Imagine you owned a forest. A guy came up to you and said, “Tell you what. I will clearcut all the trees in your forest, leave slash all over, and give you $5 per tree. Whadaya say?” You would probably tell him to do something impossible and obscene with his head. But what if your family owned the forest? Same thing. What if you had a club that had bought the forest? You used it for hiking, fishing, hunting…. Same thing, right? But what if you worked for the government. With a tiny bribe for yourself, you would say “Deal!, but don’t talk too much about this, ok?”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In 1859 there was a solar storm three times bigger than the one that wiped out Québec for weeks. Even though we know events like this happen randomly every 500 years or so, our technological society would collapse at such as assault. Again and again we see corporations totally incapable of looking ahead more than the current quarter. This deliberate blindness is an aberration in the human species. The people who built Stonehenge, the pyramids, Machu Picchu, Mont Saint Michel… certainly did not think that way.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In 1964 Stanley Kubrick directed a movie called Dr. Strangelove. In one scene, Peter Sellers, playing Group Captain Lionel Mandrake, tries to persuade a soldier to shoot a Coca Cola machine to get dime to phone in the recall codes need to prevent an inadvertent nuclear war. At first he refuses. Finally, he relents and says “You’ll have the Coca Cola company to answer for this.”
The environmental movement as a whole remind me of that soldier. They all insist on playing politely, strictly by the rules, rules that have been rigged against them, even when global climate change threatens an imminent mass extinction event. The Republicans with their mindless fixation on money, that overrides even the survival instinct, have managed to persuade the Christians to trust that their god would never allow such a thing to happen because he only allows the awful things in Revelation to happen. There is no time left. As a result of Republican/big oil/big coal stalling, no matter what we do now, at least millions will die. If we play hardball, perhaps we can avoid billions more dying and wiping out 95% of earth’s species. Recall that people were reluctant to assassinate Hitler. That sort of thing was simply not done. I think history will look back on the environmental movement as far too timid given the danger. Because the effects are still off a bit into the future does not mean efforts to stop them should be wishy-washy. Imagine what you would be prepared to do to stop some Republican pervert from burning a child to death before eyes in your back yard. Prevention is so much preferable to revenge. There is not much you can do to punish Republican than is worse than the actual global warming effects of their own greed and stupidity. I am not suggesting mindless violence like 9/11, just fighting fire with fire, using tactics comparably nasty and dirty to the ones the Republicans use, escalating as necessary. Imagine what Karl Rove would do if he were on the side of planet earth. We have to win this one. This is a fight for your and your descendants’ survival. In this situation, it is ok to fight dirty.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In 1968 there were 30 dead people for every person alive. By 2012, the population had exploded so quickly there were only 15 dead people for every person alive.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In 1969, on Vancouver Island where I live we grew 70% of our own food. I remember my grandmother growing oats, potatoes wheat and fodder for the cows. Today we grow less than 5%. Oil is rapidly depleting, which means increasing transportation costs. We will be forced by economics to growing most of our own food again. Unfortunately, we have paved over much of that farmland and we have many more mouths to feed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In 1975 I invented a dual furnace thermostat that automatically turned down the heat when people went out or went to sleep. It used people sensors instead of timers. It cut the gas bill for my four bedroom home in half. To my frustration, I could not even give the idea away. Nobody was interested. Today the idea might be reinvented at even lower cost using wireless sensors and cheaper electronics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In 6 billion years, the sun will run out of hydrogen, and expand into a red giant and absorb planet earth. So that settles the fate of life on earth. The question that remains is, must we wipe out life on earth ahead of schedule?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In a country where nearly everyone is morbidly obese, an all-you-can-eat restaurant is the moral equivalent of a crack house.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In a precapitalist society, people attempt to create sustainable abundance. If they notice game getting scarce, they hunt elsewhere to let them replenish. In a capitalist society, people attempt to create scarcity. The more endangered a species of tuna is, the higher the price it will fetch, so the more intensely it is hunted. In Africa, the more endangered a species of bush meat is, the higher the price it will fetch in the city, leading to its rapid extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In Alberta, Canada, Monsanto was experimenting with new strains of genetically modified canola (an oil seed). Pollen drifted to a neighbour’s field contaminating his organic strains. Monsanto then abused its power and successfully sued the farmer, Percy Schmeiser, for stealing their patented genetic materials. This is a bit like man who lets his dog roam the neighbourhood inseminating females, then claiming he owns all the puppies. It seems to me, it was Monsanto hurting Mr. Schmeiser, not the reverse. It is disgraceful that the legal system sided with Monsanto. It makes so sense unless you presume Monsanto bribed the necessary officials.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In Argentina, soy farmers burn square miles of forests every day. Why? So they can grow soy for ten years before the soil is utterly depleted, and blows away unable to grow even weeds. We desperately need these forests as the lungs of the earth. There are nowhere near enough trees as it is to absorb all theCO₂ we have already produced.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In Canada or the USA an architect designs for the cheapest possible cost and spews out yet another strip mall. The builder is rewarded with a small profit. Yet the millions of people who suffer from having to look at this eyesore over its lifetime seem to have no say in the matter. This is surrender to the God of Commerce on a mass scale.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In Canada, 2011 is already the worst fire season since 1919. Americans are have major trouble with fires in the south west. Rush Limbaugh persists in saying the global warming is a hoax. He hopes you won’t notice the fires and ice melting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In Germany, there are more people building windmills than building cars. Why are we North Americans so reluctant to get on with alternative energy, knowing full well there is an exploding captive market for it? Why do we so desperately want to be the Johnny-come-lately?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In nature, any creature that wasted energy would soon find itself extinct. Humans are no exception.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In New York City. people sometimes have parties the night before they vacate a rental premises, or earlier to convince the landlord to break the lease. They trash the place. Humans are holding a global trashing party to destroy our planet. We won’t be living here much longer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In one sense, I am a traitor to my species. I want to see far fewer humans and far more of every other species. We have been overly successful in the short term. In another sense, I act like a parent to my species. I constantly cajole the population to think about the long term.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In one summer, in France 10 times as many people died from global warming than died on 9/11. Which is the bigger threat?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In some societies, parents prefer to have male children. It might be wise not to interfere. Why?
- They will have fewer children overall, e.g. people who keep having children until they get a boy, can get one on the first try.
- With fewer female babies, there will be fewer mothers and fewer babies in future. The excess boys will not be reproducing.
- As females get rarer, it is possible their status will rise, as it did in the Gold Rush days. This may be what it takes so shake up some rigid patriarchal societies.
It is hard enough to get people to control their rabbit instincts. Let us not interfere with sex selection as a means of population control that does not need a hard sell.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In some US cities, 70% of the land area is devoted to automobiles. I think this constitutes an unwelcome pest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In Star Trek, the more improbable an event, the more surely it will occur to rescue the crew. This belief in a benevolent universe infects otherwise sane people, and leads them to imagine they can ignore global climate change because somehow the problem must fix itself at the last minute.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the 1300s, famine and the plague wiped out half the population of Europe. The underlying cause was climate change.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the deep oceans are huge deposits ofCH₄ methane, held in molecular cages called clathrates. The cold and pressure hold them stable. However, 53 million years ago, the earth warmed much as it is now, and they suddenly burped and escaped causing a runaway greenhouse effect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the early 1900s, vendors adulterated flour with chalk. Nobody today thinks it unreasonable to prevent them from doing that. However, many think it unreasonable to block trans-fats which are thousands of times more harmful to health.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the Enbridge tar sands pipeline debate, everyone is in denial that burning the Alberta tar sands deposit, anywhere on earth, would be suicidal because of the massive greenhouse gas emissions. Even trillions of dollars are useless if you and your descendants are dead. Even millions of jobs are useless if there are no people left to take them. You won’t die directly from the heat; you will die from disruption of global agriculture and global civilisation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the four million year history of planet earth, two species stand out for their ability to make it unusable for other species, cyano-bacteria and man.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the Irish potato famine, within weeks, a spore wiped out all potato plants of the Lumper variety. Since the Irish planted nothing but Lumper potatoes, an eighth of the Irish starved to death. You’d think we would have learned the lesson about putting all our eggs in one basket and the danger of monoculture. Yet today, we are repeating the same mistake, this time world wide, with the Russet Burbank, the potato variety used for French fries.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the United States, because of the power of the coal lobby, coal fired plants get much bigger subsidies than solar. It does not matter that solar is clean, emits no greenhouse gases and uses free fuel delivered free by nature in perpetuity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In the waters off Los Angeles, there are 600 times as much plastic in the oceans as plankton.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In this age of global warming, the once wholesome recreation of a Sunday drive has become an ecological crime.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In times past when a civilisation wore out its soils and poisoned its rivers it just quietly died. It had almost no effect on any other civilisation. But now with globalization and world trade at twenty times what it was in the 1970s, it ties the earth together in one unified global civilisation. When it goes, the whole thing will go down more or less simultaneously.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
In WW II, any person or corporation who cheated in a way that hurt the war effort was looked on as a traitor, even if they cheated in a way that exploited a legal loophole. Since global climate change is far more likely to exterminate us than Hitler ever was, we need to revive this same scornful attitude toward people and corporations who try to subvert carbon reduction, including cheating on cap and trade credits, spreading FUD and bribing politicians to derailCO₂ emission reduction efforts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Infiniti announced their new models have 29% more power, and 19% greater fuel economy. In other words they are gratuitously polluting at least 29% more than they need to with the current technology.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Insects outnumber humans 200,000,000 to one. The good news is, no matter how hard we humans try to drive ourselves extinct, we will unlikely take all the insects with us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Inuit and native people can’t have it both ways — using modern motorboats, winch driven nets, exploding harpoons and guns with the traditional attitude that man has a right to kill as much as he pleases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Invasive species are species that move into a new habitat and wreck havoc by overpopulating and displacing many other species. They don’t have a natural predator. Examples include zebra mussels in the Great Lakes, cane toads in Australia, the brown snake in Guam, flying silver Asian carp in the Mississippi and of course humans out of Africa.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Investors shy away from solar preferring coal because the start-up costs are higher. Several things could change that:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- Germans or Chinese mass producing cheap solar plants.
- Price of fossil fuels rises, or becomes unpredictable. With solar there are no fuel costs.
- The public suddenly catches on they are committing suicide by permittingCO₂ emissions and other pollutants from coal fired plants.
- Government investment in solar as an economy stimulus.
- China becomes the new super power, and decides for the world, coal is killing us and must go.
Ironically, after an environmental collapse, it is the people with sons in street gangs who have the best chance of survival.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is a myth that a frog placed in warm water, slowly heated will allow itself to cook to death. It will jump out. Frogs have a much better sense of self-preservation than humans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is all but certain man will go extinct within the next century or two. The interesting question is, how much of the rest of the tree of life will he take with him when he goes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is already too late. Even if we cut greenhouse gas emissions to zero today, we are still screwed. Global warming will continue from the effects of all the gases we have already emitted. All we can do now is make our fate somewhat less hellish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is amazing the earth has lasted as long as it has when nearly all human actions are environment-destroying and violence-encouraging.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is amusing how much trouble Americans take to prevent a terrorist from bringing in even a baby bottle full of explosives. Simultaneously though, American cities invite nuclear waste, nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons into the heart of their city harbours onboard nuclear submarines that refuse safety inspection. They also invite LNG supertankers into their harbours. If one of these ever blew, (perhaps triggered by a small terrorist bomb or missile) it would take out the entire city core.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is clear the Japanese were not ready for the 2011-03-11 earthquake. Yet an almost identical quake and tsunami is overdue off the north west coast of the USA. Americans are much less prepared than the Japanese were. Why? I suggest it is Christian wishful thinking. Christians imagine their god will protect them, even if the geological record shows he regularly smites the area with tsunamis. It is a bit like a young shrimp refusing to prepare for low tide because he personally has not yet experienced one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is environmentally irresponsible to use our limited supplies of oil to produce plastic bottles to contain soaps and shampoos then toss them away into land fills after only one use. We should be refilling reusable containers, glass or plastic, at the stores, or recycling the containers the way we used to with glass pop bottles back in the 1950s. What we are doing is malicious grand theft from future generations.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is hard to watch the earth deteriorate at the hand of environmental Philistines. There is some comfort in knowing they will suffer first and hardest from their vandalism.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is heart warming the way people will pull out all the stops to help a whale, dolphin or sea turtle in distress. But it odd, people won’t make the tiniest sacrifice to keep those same species from going extinct.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is inconceivable to me than anyone who had ever walked along Oregon’s incomparable beaches would want to ruin them with oil spills, but the majority of Americans do. Barbarians like that don’t deserve to live amid such natural wonder.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is ironic that sleasebag speculators cranking up gas prices are providing the pressure that may finally persuade America to go green.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is odd that Canadians are so relaxed about climate change when the predictions are Canada will be hit with temperature increases twice that of the global average.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is poetic justice that after waging years of environmental war on Afghanistan and Iraq that the USA would, in a fit of greed, attack itself with a massive oil spill, and refusing to make BP clean it up.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is quite amazing how many thousands of hours of nature shows can be made filming nothing but watching other species eat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It is theft and assault when one generation builds a nuclear power plant or a building that is not property designed to stand up to natural disasters such as earthquakes, tsunamis, hurricanes, tornados… It should be unconstitutional for a generation to set up booby traps for posterity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It requires the hubris of a TV faith healer to imagine there must be a way to double and redouble the productivity of an acre of soil endlessly as the population grows. The amount of energy from the sun is the same. The chemistry of chlorophyll is the same. How can we ignore the soils are getting worse each year from erosion and salinisation? How can we ignore that massive amounts of arable land are removed from production to serve other purposes? Surely we know much of the advances of the green revolution will reverse as oil runs out. If human ingenuity can solve any problem, why are we not seeing continuous improvement?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It take only 2°C (36°F) of global warming and the Amazon rainforest will die back. Economists bleat it would be too expensive to reduceCO₂ emissions sufficiently to avoid this. I ask, but what cost do you place on the earth losing its lungs?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It takes 7 trees to recycle the exhalations of one human. That does not count theCO₂ generated by cars, electric power generation agriculture or goods transport to support that person.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It used to be the aged always envied the young. This has changed. The aged now pity the young because the young will have to live with the consequences of the environmental collapse, a result of the irresponsibility of the older generations. They young despair and hold the older generations in contempt for their eco-crimes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Its no coincidence that the majority of people blocking action on climate change are older, wealthy males. They don’t care what happens to our planet. They will soon be dead. What matters to them is the incremental prestige of making a bit more money out of the old economy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
It’s spooky the way mankind has decided to commit suicide by climate change at roughly the same time I would die of natural causes anyway. It’s odd that most of the people who care about global warming are my age or higher. Perhaps the younger people who are destined to suffer most living through the tribulations, are thus the ones most in denial.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
I’m glad scientists are studying weather on other planets. We are learning that earth’s relatively mild conditions are not the universal norm, but rather a delicate balance that man is busy tipping.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
James E. Hansen of The Goddard Institute for Space Studies, when he studied the paleontological record, discovered that when the world’s glaciers start to melt, they melt very quickly resulting in a rise in sea level of 1 metre (39.37 in) every 20 years. Even a rise of 2 metres (6.56 ft) would inundate many cities including London and New York. The Vancouver International Airport would have to be abandoned. The current planning is based on overly optimistic estimates made before this was known.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Japan is the home of the most earthquake-savvy engineers in the world. Yet five of their nuclear power plants failed to maintain cooling of the nuclear fuel after the 2011-03-10 earthquake, something that was supposed to be all but impossible. It seems logical to presume nuclear power plants in North America would be even more vulnerable to a big one.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Jeep Wrangler advertises their SUV is a wind-powered, solar-powered driving machine. That is a lie on all three counts. It is not even a hybrid. It is gas-guzzling, greenhouse gas-spewing, completely conventional SUV.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Joe: Stay away from Los Angeles. They hate anything marine: fish, seals, even us dolphins.
Rosalie: What makes you say that?
Joe: They grind up plastic and dump it in the water, so that it is so thick there is 600 times as much as plankton! You can’t breathe. It clogs the gills of the fish. Who wants to eat dead fish? Yuck! They also litter the surface of the water with plastic rings that snare turtles, fish and sea birds, either choking them to death or squeezing them to death over months. Those humans are so sadistic. What did the sea turtles ever do to them?
Rosalie: That’s pretty bad, but even far out to sea that crap outweighs the plankton 6 to 1.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Just Don’t Get It Department
Ford created a hybrid then jacked up the horsepower to discard the advantages of greater mileage and lower pollution. Because urban roads are more congested every year, you need less, not more horsepower.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Just what will it take for the public to stop kidding themselves about global warming, imagining if they ignore it will cease to exist?
- Florida vacation property flooded out.
- the World Trade Center site under water.
- a couple of Katrina-sized hurricanes a year to hit the USA.
- a dust bowl sized drought in the American heartland.
- over a million refugees in north eastern India and Pakistan fleeing the flood plains.
- death of most of the world’s forests.
- death of all the planet’s coral reefs where rich American tourists used to go snorkeling.
- mass extinctions of most species, including nice cuddly mammals.
- death of most fish in the oceans, replaced by giant poisonous jelly fish, as already happened to the coastal waters of Japan.
- stinking algal blooms on waterways and lakes.
- crop failures all over the world from drought and freakish weather.
“Noah, how long can you tread water?”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Klebsiella planticola is a microorganism found on the roots of every plant species on earth. It helps them absorb nutrients. A company in Oregon decided to genetically modify the organism to produce alcohol from plant waste for biofuel, then sell the remaining sludge as fertiliser. By happenstance, Michael Holmes, a student needing a project for his PhD thesis, decided to test the new lifeform for toxicity, and discovered that it killed any plant it touched by producing twenty times more alcohol on its roots than it could withstand. What looked like such a great green idea on paper turned out to be a bioweapon that could have killed all plant life on earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Kübler-Ross said that there are five stages of grief:Most of the world, in particular the leaders of Canada and the USA are stuck in stage (1) when it comes to dealing with the end of the oil free ride and environmental degradation caused by overpopulation and our environmentally-hostile life style. People feel supernaturally entitled to continue living as we have this last century despite the overwhelming evidence we cannot.
- Denial
- Anger
- Bargaining
- Depression
- Acceptance
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Lay people can’t seem to grasp how familiar, apparently innocuous gasses like O₂ oxygen, CO₂ carbon dioxide, H₂S hydrogen sulphide, CH₄ methane, O₃ ozone, N₂O nitrous oxide etc. become lethal if the global atmospheric concentration wanders out of a fairly narrow safe band either directly or through the greenhouse effect. CO₂ carbon dioxide (pop fizz) can kill you just as dead as HCN hydrogen cyanide (gas chamber).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Lay people don’t have the proper respect forCO₂. They think of it as the innocuous gas that gives soft drinks their fizz. But millions of years ago when the sun shone only 1/3 as brightly as it does today,CO₂ kept the world warm. In other words it has the power to heat our planet comparable to the sun being three times hotter. Excess amounts on other planets makes them so hot, lead melts.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Lay people pooh-pooh the predictions of a 6°C (11°F) increase in average temperature. However, recall that the little ice age in 1650 where there was mass starvation because it was too cold for crops was only an average of 2°C (4°F) cooler. 6°C (11°F) is a massively big deal! Billions of people will die. A small increase in average temperature generates a huge change in maximum temperature.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Let us say that you have been seduced by some global warming denier or other. Perhaps you think there might be only a 1 in 50 chance than the majority of scientists are correct about global warming. That’s about the odds you might have a heart attack in the next year. Even with those odds, because the consequences are so dire, you still take action, you still buy your health insurance. So surely you should take some action on global warming by the same reasoning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Let us say that you have been seduced by some global warming denier or other. A green economy is still a good thing. It will be cleaner, quieter, healthier, better smelling and better looking. It won’t be hostage to foreign oil. It will be more resistant to terrorist disruption. You and your grandchildren will live in world where there are still and abundance of trees, birds and frogs.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Let’s say you needed a wheelbarrow and you went to you local garden supply store. The salesman showed you a bright red shiny model capable of toting 50 kg (110.23 lbs) of soil, except the wheelbarrow itself weighed 1 tonne (1.10 tons). You would think they were utterly mad. Yet when you go to your local car dealer to buy a device to tote a person to work, that is roughly what they try to sell you.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Let’s say you wanted to know the temperature of the earth 50,000 years ago. You would go to Antarctica, drill down through 50,000 layers of ice, collect a sample, find a bubble in it and measure the proportion ofCO₂ in it. Then, using math discovered in the 1800s, you could calculate the temperature, the moreCO₂, the higher the temperature. But wait, isn’t that the exact same math scientists use to predict global warming based on greenhouse gas emissions? Yes. The global warming deniers are quite happy with the math when it is used to compute past temperatures but reject it when it is used to predict future temperatures. But that does not make sense. Lies don’t have to make sense.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Living near heavy traffic doubles your odds of a heart attack.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Locusts have population explosions, like what humans are doing but on a smaller scale and shorter time span, where they swarm in billions and eat everything in their path. They keep moving on to new resources until the population reaches its peak and the resources are gone, then there is a sudden population collapse.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Logically, if you saw someone trashing the environment, you should be able to attack them and plead not only self defence, but defence of all the people he was, perhaps unconsciously, trying to poison or kill with his attack on the environment. The law does not yet see it this way. It is more concerned about intent than effect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Looking back on previous generations, the main thing I wanted of them was not to drive animals extinct and not to destroy natural habitat. I could care less about their battles and empires. Future generations may judge us similarly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Man has created ever-expanding dead zones in the coastal waters of the oceans all over the world where there is not sufficient oxygen for fish or other sea creatures to survive. There are a few species such as giant jelly fish and vampire squids from hell (Vampyroteuthis infernalis, a living fossil, the predecessor to both squid and octopus) that have evolved to live in low oxygen conditions. It seems odd we humans are bequeathing the oceans to creatures we don’t like all that much.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Man is such a Hollywood animal. He is a Don Knotts latecomer with a bad back, small dull teeth, without claws, without armour, not particularly good vision, hearing or smell, unable to outrun any predator, not prolific… Yet he prevailed, taking over the earth then taking revenge for his relative inadequacy by kicking most of the other animals and plants into extinction.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Mankind is setting himself up for some unimaginable grief because he cannot understand global warming. The layman personally experiences a wide local temperature swings throughout a year, and so can’t appreciate what a catastrophe even a few degrees change in average global temperature implies. To the willfully ignorant, global warming sounds a bit like Monty Python’s comfy chair torture device. Were it not for Hollywood, he would similarly pooh-pooh the global havoc a meteorite a small fraction of the size of the earth can do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Manunkind wiped out 99% of blue whales. You can’t justify that even with the most extreme capitalistic values. Capitalism would maximise profit, which would still require a substantial population of whales. Humans would rather have less than someone else have more, so they deliberately destroy resources. I don’t know of any other species that does that.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Many business people have decided dealing with global warming is hopeless, so they have decided to lie to everyone else that there is no emergency, so that they can loot, drink and be merry in the last days of techno civilisation.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Many men choose environmental destruction, e.g. poaching and overfishing to demonstrate their masculinity.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Many people are under the delusion hydrogen is a new energy source. It is not. It is merely a clean way of transporting energy. To make hydrogen, you need natural gas and steam (created by burning oil).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Many people look forward to the warmer winters caused by global climate change. The downside is if you have warm winters, all the precipitation comes as rain which runs off. Come summer there is no snow pack to melt and keep the rivers flowing and cool. That means fish die and water shortages.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Man’s paralysis in the face of global warming makes as much sense as refusing to get out of the way of an avalanche because it would disrupt a poker game.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Meetings about global problems such as war, global warming, water conservation, clean energy are attended primarily by the elderly. Most of these people will die before the effects of these problems manifest. People of that age care less about themselves and very much about the future generations. The young are too busy with selfish pursuits to may much attention. To the young, the heavy effects of global warming being 20 years in the future are about as relevant as the extinction of the Sun. To the elderly, this is just an eyeblink of time.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Men of Stephen Harper’s generation are deciding to do nothing about global warming imagining it will slightly increase their personal wealth. The people who have to live with the consequences, have no say. No other creature, save corporate man, sacrifices the next generation for the current.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Michael Pollan wrote extensively in The Botany of Desire: A Plant’s-Eye View of the World about Monsanto’s New Leaf genetically engineered potatoes that generate their own BT insecticide. He left out two key facts.
It make me wonder if Monsanto somehow corrupted Mr. Pollan and his poet’s soul.
- Every part of the New Leaf plant is always saturated in BT. Yet, when you spray BT, you only apply it when it is needed, and you don’t apply it near harvest.
- Pollan listed the horrifying list of pesticides applied in sequence to ordinary potatoes to control a dozen different pests. One of the pesticides is so toxic no one can even enter the field for 8 days. He then compared that horrible soup with the allegedly pesticide-free New Leaf. But the New Leaf built-in BT handles only one of the pests, the Colorado potato beetle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Monsanto has managed to sell a schizophrenic view of its genetically modified foods. They are sufficiently revolutionary to merit patents, but allegedly with no different from ordinary produce, thus not meriting a label. Monsanto is arguably the most evil corporation on earth. They will stop at nothing to force GM food down our throats, even if they have serious health consequences, just like a tobacco company. They have bought the politicians to permit them to sell their products without informing consumers they are buying experimental foods. I think the way to fight back is to create inexpensive test kits to allow consumers to detect various types of GM foods in the supermarket, and make a fuss. Supermarkets will then either start labeling the products or dropping them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Monsanto’s goal is to lock farmers in, and make them buy more and more insecticide or patented terminator-gene genetically modified seed each year. For a bug or fungus, Monsanto’s vision of monoculture is ideal. An an enormous army of bugs focuses all its efforts on breaking the defences of but a single variety of plant. Once even one bug cracks the defenses, they get the entire crop. The way out of Monsanto’s grip is to give up monoculture.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.
More land in North American is devoted to lawn than any other crop, even wheat or corn.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most animals do their best to be an inconspicuous as possible, to modify their environment as little as possible. I would love to see a mainstream architectural aesthetic develop along these same lines.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most grandmothers would brave a grizzly bear to save a grandchild. Yet it is a rare grandmother who will make a few sacrifices to take up a green lifestyle to save her grandchildren from climate change, projected by the Canadian Department of the Environment as second in horror only to global nuclear war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most of mankind’s problems stem from his monumental conceit and self-centredness. He believes in religions that preposterously flatter him that the entire universe was created solely for his benefit and he is the center of it. He believes no other species matters at all. He steals lands from them, and enslaves them, and even tortures them without even allowing the interests of those other species to be heard. In the process, he forgets that he too is an animal just as dependent on the other animals, plants, water, air and soil as any other animal.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most people have a very rosy and naïve view of what global climate change will mean to them. They might imagine it would be like an extended vacation in Cuba. At worst, it will mean having to buy an air conditioner. The reality is it will be a nightmare comparable to global nuclear war. There will be massive global food shortages, and utterly desperate, angry people from the south, who have nothing to lose, pouring north to seek food. Billions of people will die. It is too late now to avert it. All we can do is make it somewhat less hellish.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most people think that creating the thermonuclear bomb was mankind’s biggest mistake, the invention most likely to lead to his demise. I have another candidate, the corporation. With an effect similar to absentee landlords, corporations blind those who run and own businesses to the consequences of their actions. Corporations are happily destroying their own and man’s life support system — the biosphere. They have no more common sense than tent caterpillars.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Most species have been thriving on earth for millions of years before the advent of humans. They don’t need our help or interference to survive; they just need us to leave them alone with adequate pristine habitat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Much as I don’t like the noise, I have to applaud people who have given up cars for motorcycles. They are doing their part to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and conserve fossil fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Much of our energy use masquerades as need. As oil runs out, everyone is going to have to drastically cut back on their energy use. Forget cars. Forget heated/cooled homes. Forget lighted rooms. You don’t like it? That’s irrelevant. If we haven’t developed an alternative, there will simply be no energy to squander.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
My dad used a horse named Roanie for transport. It could find food and water for itself. It could find its own way home. It could automatically avoid obstacles and collisions. How long before cars get that smart? Will people start treating their cars as pets, buying them treats, grooming them? We have enough auto-eroticism already.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Natural gas is cleaner than other fossil fuels, but it still emits 50.30 grams ofCO₂ greenhouse gas per megajoule of energy produced. Green energy sources produce none. To compare, automobile gasoline emits 67.07, fuel oil emits 81.26 and anthracite coal emits 97.59 almost twice as much as natural gas. source. A megajoule is sufficient heat energy to boil dry about 400 mls (1.69 US cups) of water.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nature conservancy is a bit like an egg relay race. I anyone drops the egg, it is game over. If each generation does its part, the nature we enjoy today will continue to exist to delight thousands of years from now.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nature gave Monsanto a swift kick in the pants. Monsanto makes genetically-modified canola seeds that are immune to Monsanto’s patented herbicide, Roundup. However, via the pollen, genes jump to mustard-relative weeds in the field, conferring on them resistance to the herbicide.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nature has learned that anything less than 100% recycling is not sustainable.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nature teaches us that to be sustainable, you must recycle absolutely everything.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nearly everyone imagines that stopping the population explosion is impossible save via some global catastrophe. What about simply having fewer babies? Refraining from having babies is considerably easier than refraining from smoking. Excess population is far more dangerous to the planet than smoking. If people had half as many babies as usual, in a generation we would have reduced the global population in half, thus turning intractable global problems into solvable ones.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nearly the articles Google mentioned the first three pages of results on Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth were from climate change denier shills. Does that mean Google too has been corrupted, or just that the shills are more vocal than real scientists?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
News about the environment is so bleak. Keep in mind that projections are based on everyone continuing to behave as they always have. Even the laziest student gets busy the night before exams. Unfortunately, the earth has so much inertia that even if you drastically mend your ways, it can be centuries before you reap your reward.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Nitrous oxide (N₂O ) is 296 times as potent a greenhouse gas asCO₂ . Yet the world agrifuel corporations plan to triple the amount of nitrogen entering the world’s soil, a process which releases N₂O. Even as it is, almost half of green house gases come from agricultural monoculture, and its attendant long distance transportation and fertilised production. Nitrogen fertiliser is made using natural gas, whose production has already peaked in North America. The world adds the equivalent of the entire population of North America every 6 years. We are already seriously short of food. Agrifuel diverts food from feeding people to feeding SUV s for the conspicuously-consuming wealthy. The bottom line is agrifuel is a dead end, pun intended.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
No animal but man sacrifices future generations of its species for its short-term pleasure.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
No others species but humans and the domestic goat do something to the environment that prevents future generations from living there.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Non-scientists tell me they think global warming is a hoax, because Y2K fizzled. In 2012 when the Mayan calendar ends its cycle probably nothing will happen either despite predictions from flakes like Greg Braden. The H1N1 flu epidemic did not turn nearly bad as Fox news said it would. So all predictions of catastrophe are false. The difference is, the consensus of climate scientists are warning you about global warming in understated terms. The other crises were manufactured by a hysteria-loving media.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
North Americans are confident their comfortable life styles will never change. If they traveled in the third world, they could see just how different things can become when populations rise and supplies of oil dwindle. If they read about the other planets of our solar system, they would appreciate just how inhospitable a planet can get when the delicate balances are disturbed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Notice that the global warming deniers have three characteristics in common:
- They are highly addicted to money.
- They are in their sunset years.
- They are pathological liars. They have a history of shilling.
They don’t care what happen to everyone after they are gone. All they care about is extracting a few more dollars out of the universe by hook or by crook before they die.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Numerous chemicals most of which are toxic, carcinogenic as well as teratogenic (they include benzene, toluene, ethyl benzene, xylene, ethylene glycol (antifreeze), diesel fuel, naphthalene (moth ball) compounds, boric acid, arsenic, poly nuclear organic hydrocarbons, only to name a few of 500-odd chemicals used), are pumped into boreholes at high pressure to release natural gas (called shale gas) trapped in layers of underground rock. How can pumping all that much poisoned water into the ground water possibly be harmless? Further this is the dirtiest form of energy vis a vis greenhouse gas emissions since it releases methane CH₄ green house gas more than an order of magnitude potent than CO₂ .
The oil industry excuses the environmental damage of tar sands and shale fracking on the grounds of energy security. But guess who actually benefits from the drilling? China is buying the tar sands oil. Saudi Arabia owns most of the off shore drilling.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Obama and the Republicans have done a great thing for the environment without meaning to. To repay campaign contributions they have allowed Wall street to speculate in oil futures without regulation. Even though oil supplies are way up, which would normally lower gas prices, the speculation has sent gas prices through the roof. Americans are environmental pigs. The only thing that will induce them to conserve gas and energy is high prices. So ironically Republican greed will stimulate the growth of green alternatives and efficiency technology that they despise.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Ocean ice has a way of melting very slowly at first, then faster and faster, until suddenly it is all gone. Why? Snow reflects 87% of the heat from the sun. But after it melts and exposes a bit of ocean, the water reflects only 7%. In other words, when ice melts, the earth’s surface turns instantly from the best reflector to the best absorber of heat. Technically, this is referred to as the albedo effect. In the arctic, much of the lost ice will not be regenerated for millennia, because the open ocean absorbs too much heat. The arctic is more melted today that it has been at any time in the last million years. Because of albedo, there is no way to refreeze the arctic; all we can do now is prevent it from melting even more.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Oddly, a terrorist attack on the Alberta tar sands would be about the best thing that could happen to Canada, the USA and the planet as a whole, though it would be quite unpleasant for Alberta. Making the area radio active for a century would delay exploitation of the fields until we had the technology for carbon sequestration. It would be the kick in the pants the USA needed to deal with its oil addiction and get on with alternative energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Of all containers, milk bottles take up the most space in landfills. Why then are they exempt from recycling and recycling fees?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Oil executives are happy to sacrifice lives to squeeze out a few extra dollars profit. They are lucky that environmentalists don’t share that same casual disregard for human life or they would all find themselves assassinated in various amusing ways.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Oil executives testified they can safely deep water drill in the Gulf of Mexico. This is bald-faced lying. If this is indeed so, let them demonstrate this skill by rapidly cleaning up the BP spill. The have already admitted they have no technology to deal with a deep water leak.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Oil executives testified they planned to double oil production by 2050. That is preposterous on at least two grounds:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- We have already hit peak oil, there is not enough oil left to double production.
- It is mandatory to reduce greenhouse gas emissions to zero. Doubling them would do as much damage as a global nuclear war.
Oil exploration is a bit like an Easter egg hunt. To start, you gather the easy-to-find eggs, and then work your way to the harder-to-find ones. You can always find one more egg, but it takes increasingly more time and effort until it reaches a point the game isn’t worth the candle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
On 1957-10-14 the USSR (Union of Soviet Socialist Republics) launched Sputnik, the planet’s first satellite. Prior to that, America has no interest in space. The day after Sputnik, the US made space a top priority, and surprised everyone by landing on the moon 11 years and 9 months later. Something similar happened when the Japanese started producing cars of superior quality to those produced by Detroit. I would hope it happens yet again when China demonstrates some spectacular solar and wind energy equipment or India does the same thing with mind-boggling electric commuter vehicles. It obvious to me the US is already badly lagging in alternative energy, held back mainly by the evil machinations of big oil. What is it going to take to jump-start the USA one more time?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
On 2012-01-01 a pollution tax came into effect in the European Union. It was designed to reduce carbon emissions by taxing the pollution of flights into and out of Europe. The United States House passed a bill making it illegal for airlines to pay the tax. So it is clear the USA is not only unwilling to reduce its own pollution, it wants to stop anyone else from taking action. It wants the entire world to join in its mass suicide. I think that is more than sufficient justification to provoke a nuclear terrorist attack on America, but at least the Americans are now being honest about their suicidal intentions. Before, they pretended they were in favour of reduced greenhouse gas emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64) source
On a per capita basis, Canada is the worst nation when it comes to greenhouse gas emissions. This is due to dirty oils sands extraction, high car ownership, and high fuel use for heating in the winter. BC, on the west coast, is the cleanest province, a surprise given it currently has a right wing government.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
On the matter of oil addiction, climate change and the need to eliminate greenhouse gas emissions, North Americans are like a 4-pack a day smoker whose cardiologist has told him he must quit cold turkey or die. Quitting is highly unpleasant, so he pretends the doctor does not know what he is talking about, or he may say to himself “I’ll take a mature, reasonable, ‘balanced’ approach and cut down to 3½ packs a day.” However, that’s nowhere near sufficient. He will die anyway of stubbornness, foolishness, self-indulgence and self-deception.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Once three brothers made a huge Halloween score of 3 pillow cases of candy each. This was effectively an infinite amount of candy. They gorged themselves to the point of making themselves sick. They thought it would last forever, but, to their surprise it was totally gone in 2 months. This is much how humans are treating their massive inheritance of oil. They are squandering it, imagining it could never run out. Some twits have even claimed it can’t run out because it renews itself faster than it can be exploited, even though they have plenty of evidence to the contrary in the form of wells no longer producing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One downside of biofuels is they mean increased fertiliser use. Fertiliser runoff creates dead zones of water without oxygen.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the few cheerful bits of news about the future of earth is that the USA is making itself more and more irrelevant. It is abandoning technological innovation to other countries. It is rapidly going bankrupt, so its influence as a world power is waning. It currently gets a free ride from all other countries because they all use the US dollar as the petrodollar (to buy and sell oil and oil futures). That won’t last much longer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the most odious things about humans is their extreme species chauvinism. Nothing else counts but humans or human convenience. Humans steal the ancestral lands of elephants then shoot the elephants and call them thieves when they try to feed off their own land. When a bear kills a human it is labeled a dangerous rogue. When a human kills a bear, he is labeled a hunter. Human treat other species as chattels, much the way they treat slaves. Even when humans argue for the preservation of endangered species they argue purely in terms of human benefit. Nothing but a human has any inherent right to life, not even species more intelligent than humans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One of the theories about what wiped out the dinosaurs was their own flatulence. The methaneCH₄ in their mighty farts disrupted the ozone layer.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
One way to avoid being overwhelmed with the probability that humanity will fail to protect the environment sufficiently for civilisation to persist, is to look upon it the way you look upon your personal mortality. You do the best you can in the time you’ve got.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Only a psychopath who deeply hates children could vote Republican. He is willing to level the forests, pollute the rivers, radically alter the climate and erode away the soil for a tiny personal financial gain, while leaving the coming generations bereft. That is the typical absurdly selfish behaviour of psychopaths.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Only an American would seriously propose manufacturing and installing billions of artificial trees to capture CO₂ instead of just leaving the natural forests in place.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Originally, earth’s atmosphere had no oxygen. It was the activity of cyanobacteria that cranked it up to 21%. If through some idiocy, we bumped off the cyanobacteria, the level would drop back down again.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Our earth is in such bad shape right now, it cannot survive with people actively trying to harm it or doing nothing to protect it. Earth can no longer afford to support parasites who dedicate their lives exclusively to selfish pleasures or trivia such as fashion, shopping, money, sports, cars, video games or hunting. Caring for planet earth is like chores needed to maintain a house. It works fine if everyone does their bit.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Our energy problem looks much bigger than it really is because we have allowed our habits of squandering energy in the service of conspicuous consumption to masquerade as need.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Our kids are going to say “What were you thinking! Didn’t you know about global warming? Why didn’t you do anything? What was so all-fired important that you procrastinated our very survival? What you did is unforgivable.”
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Over earth’s history, the percentage of oxygen in the atmosphere has varied from 0 to 30%. Right now it is 21%. We humans need it to stay put. That’s why we have to pressurise jets to provide extra oxygen when we fly. The ratio is not some god-given constant. It is delicately balanced by the actions of trillions of tiny plants and animals. We can screw up the balance by inadvertently killing off insignificant tiny creatures.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Over the last decade the US military spent well over $2 trillion dollars trying to ensure control of oil in the middle east. I will leave it up to you to decide just how well they succeeded. How much further ahead would America be if instead they had invested that $2 trillion in alternative energy — clean nuclear, solar, wind, geothermal, tidal… then sold the technology to an energy-hungry world? The way it is now, the US has no clean technology and is just as reliant on OPEC oil as ever. They will have to spend trillions more to buy the new technology from China, Europe, India and, surprise, OPEC.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Paleontologists have studied effects on animals and plants of various extremes inCO₂ andO₂ over millions of years. It is absolute folly to imagine that somehow the laws of nature have changed and the earth will no longer react as it has in past to greenhouse gases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Paying a carbon offset fee is a bit like paying a fine for the right to molest children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People are always calling for culls to some species or other. The most seriously over-populated animal is homo-sapiens, yet humans oppose even the most humane means of reducing that excess, such as birth control pills. They even demand subsidies for hard core breeders.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People chastise me for getting emotional about global warming. How much bigger an emergency do you need than the extinction of man and most large mammals to justify some emotion and arm waving?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People don’t get it yet. Those flagrantly emitting greenhouse gases are trying to kill you or your grandkids. They need to be dealt with like any other serial killers — arrest and incarcerate them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People have been burned so many times by corporations lying to them they are reacting to electrical smart meters as if there were some sort of bugging scheme. These new meters will eventually allow environmentally friendly things such as:
- Giving you a cheaper rate on electricity if you use it outside peak hours.
- Automatically turning off optional devices like hot water heaters during peak hours.
- By reducing peak usage, the electric utility can delay or avoid building new coal, oil, gas power plants or damning new rivers saving both money and the environment.
- Reading your meter without having to send out a service man in a truck, especially convenient where one tenant is moving out and another moving in.
- The electric company knows precisely which premises have power and the quality of that power without having to wait for telephone complaints.
The electrical system is vulnerable during peak hours since there is so little spare capacity. Even a small disturbance can bring down the whole thing as happened on 2011-09-08 in Arizona. I consider it a serious ecological crime to spread misinformation about these meters. This is one of the rare times when a technology is both profitable for the electric utilities and good for the environment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People have no problem understanding how animals overpopulate, and destroy their environment and suffer a population crash, but they are absolutely blind when the exact same thing happens to humans
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People love to smash things, and feel virtuous about it. It is thus odd that eco-vandalism against overpowered or oversized vehicles is not yet commonplace.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People use cars and houses to display status. This is why they so stubbornly refuse to make them energy efficient. Conspicuous waste the essence of status display.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People who have children take such a huge risk. The odds are pretty poor for having a child who is a net benefit to the planet. Most of the time they spawn an airhead consumer whose biggest concern is how they look.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People who like to deceive themselves that global warming is a hoax when they see snow in their back yards forget that Antarctica gets almost no snow because it is too cold.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
People who live in deserts are risk takers. All it takes is for power, water or transportation systems to fail, and they can die within days if they are not well prepared. The faith people have that these systems will always be there for them outstrips religious belief. It helps to travel internationally to learn their functioning is not guaranteed.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Perhaps we should rename our species homo visum brevis for our species’ propensity for over-exploiting resources and focusing only on short-term gain.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Planet earth has enormous inertia. By the time the abuse we have been heaping on it leads to visibly unacceptable conditions, it will be far too late to change it back without centuries of extreme effort.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Planets can’t support continuous civilisation; it is too exhausting.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Polyanna futurists who subscribe to the Tinkerbell theory of manifestation are such idiots. They claim, for example, that because people like cars, guaranteed cars will be a major part of our future. All that is necessary to ensure this is that we like cars. Similarly they say we need abundant clean energy, therefore it will automatically manifest. We need not make any effort or even concern ourselves with how. But consider how many other things we like: e.g. clean oceans, rivers, lakes and streams teaming with fish. They don’t happen without major effort and sacrifice. These futurists remind me of the Swedish preacher in the The Emigrants who assured the flock God would make them all speak English without effort as soon as they stepped off the boat into America.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Popular wisdom now understands that America (and Canada) are addicted to oil. An addiction to alcohol, cocaine or oil are similar:
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- The addict makes endless excuses to postpone withdrawal.
- The addict, every day, uses more and more.
- The addict endangers the lives of loved ones in pursuit of the addiction.
Popular wisdom says there should be balance between the needs of industry and the environment. Industry has had its way 99% of the time for the last 200 years. Balance would require the environmentalists get their way 99% of the time for the next 200.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
President Carter reduced oil consumption in the USA so that imports of foreign oil dropped from 8 million barrels a day to 4 million. His successor, Ronald Reagan, at the urging of the oil companies, dismantled all his conservation measures, even the White House solar panels. Now it is up to 11 million barrels a day. Most Americans look on Reagan fondly. I see him as a traitor to his planet, an ecological Judas.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Procrastination is the national sport of the USA. They dilly dally about energy efficiency, in particular rail transit, naïvely hoping the problem will go away. They are wasting money now on inefficient trucks. When they finally relent and build the rail, they will have to do it with energy that costs many times what it does now.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Proctor & Gamble’s Dawn dishwashing detergent fraudulently advertises they donate $1 for every bottle to dishwashing detergent sold to help clean wildlife damaged by oil spills. This is a lie. In the ultra-fine print they tell you they donate only if you go to a website and negotiate a gauntlet designed to discourage you, including browser specific html, an eyesight test and a typing test. Finally, they confess in the fine print that they will donate no more that $500,000 no matter how many bottles they sell. Granted, their offer did seem too good to be true. This is really sick, ripping off animals hurt by the BP oil spill.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Rejecting the carbon tax is the adult equivalent of refusing to eat your vegetables.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Religious leaders assert that behaving well sets the bar and encourages others to behave well. If you behave badly, it gives an excuse for others to behave badly. Canada’s Prime Minister Harper and environment minister Peter Kent disingenuously assert the opposite. They claim the more Canada emits greenhouse gasses the more it will encourage others to cut back. What an absurd excuse for toadying to the oil companies.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Republicans have the odd notion that the extinction events of the past that wiped out 95% of species were natural, thus it would be perfectly ok with us humans if similar events happened again today. They would mean either the extinction of man, or at least the deaths of most of us. It is not the end of the universe, but it hardly what you would call acceptable to mankind.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Republicans tell us that the $3,000 billion they have spent on the Iraq war is good for the economy, but spending $10 billion to implement this year’s Kyoto target would break the economy. It is clearly not the amount bothering them, but rather whether they are the ones who get the money. Consider also that all you get back from the investment in the Iraq war is some large holes drilled into the other side of the globe. In contrast, every penny invested in clean energy will save you over and over in reduced foreign oil imports.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Rich people usually prefer to be chauffeured. I trust when cars are smart enough to drive themselves, people will give up driving without too much fuss, especially when they can arrive faster, safer and cheaper.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Right now Americans associate noisy and overpowered with masculine. We need instead to associate noisy with farting and overpowered with obesity. Instead, we need to associate silence with futuristic.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Rush Limbaugh has successfully spread the notion that Snowmageddon disproves global climate change. How dare this ignoramus sell such lies for the coal industry! What he has done in tantamount to genocide. Antarctica gets no snow because it is too cold for moisture to evaporate. Washington DC had simultaneously the warmest and snowiest winter ever. Such extreme weather is exactly what the climatologists predicted. He is a murderer is the same sense as a psychopath who convinces people that it is safe to return into garage filled with carbon monoxide.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
S.C. Johnson makes a plastic uterus that sprays you with noxious-smelling chemicals every time you walk by. It has no effect on bed bugs, mosquitos or house flies. But here is the amusing part. They want you to pay money on an ongoing basis to have one of these things installed in your house.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientists are extremely embarrassed about showing emotion. They are fond of British ironic understatement. For example, they refer to an extinction event that wipes out 1/3 of all species on earth as a disruption. So it is no surprise they selected the terms global warming and climate change to describe what ordinary people would have called climate chaos, climate collapse or climactic Armageddon.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientists know thatCO₂ is extremely powerful. 635 million years ago, over a span of a mere 200 years,CO₂ from volcanoes raised the average temperature of the earth from -50°C (-58°F) to 50°C (122°F).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Scientists now think the meteor than smashed into the Yucatan peninsula wiped out most life on earth first wiped out the cocoliths — the tiny plankton that photosynthesise sunlight that triggered all the other extinctions. They are the base of the food chain. We are so casual these days about killing off plankton or causing plankton blooms. That is like playing with your oxygen hose when you are in the hospital.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Senator James Inhofe is a bumpkin when it comes to medicine and science. Very few people would trust him to tinker with the their life support system in a hospital, yet the majority of people in Oklahoma entrust him with the life support systems of the entire planet, even though he has less understanding of them than your average second grader. This represents a death wish on the part of Americans, a retreat into medieval superstition.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Siegfried Fred Singer (born: 1924-09-27 age: 87) is arguably the most unprincipled man on the planet. He studied physics then pontificated, for a fee, saying whatever he was paid to say, posing as an expert on an astounding range of subjects such as:
- That second hand smoke is safe.
- That global warming is a hoax.
- That nuclear energy is safe.
- That DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane) is good for birds.
One of his sources of income is Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church, another ExxonMobil and another RJ Reynolds Tobacco.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Simply cutting your meat consumption by 20% has the equivalent beneficial impact on greenhouse gas reduction as getting rid of your SUV and buying a hybrid.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Since global warming hurts us all, what cars people buy is no longer purely a personal decision.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Since we are looking for long term solutions to energy, we should not be too focused on the current prices of immature energy technologies. We should be trying to extrapolate where the prices will be after the technologies mature.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Some argue that whaling by indigenous people must be harmless since whales flourished before the coming of the white man. They forget there are many more indigenous people hunting now, and that they now use modern speed boats, guns, exploding harpoons, sonar etc. It is no longer a fair contest.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Some day earth will look back on this era as a short but nasty case of humans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Some environmentalists are promoting nuclear power as green energy. We may have to resort to that simply because the demons who run the corporations have stalled all the other alternatives. It has a major problem. As a nuclear plant ages, it becomes less profitable. It becomes harder and harder to find the funds to maintain the plant properly to keep it safe. Similarly, nuclear waste must be managed for thousands of years. During that time it generates no income to pay for the upkeep. Corporations, being the profit seeking automatons they are, just abandon messes when they cease to be profitable. Because of this corporate irresponsibility, nuclear power appears to be much less expensive than it really is when you factor in the cost of eternal mothballing.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Some people go all gooey inside when they hear readings from the bible. Some go gooey on hearing the strains of their national anthem. I go all gooey when someone talks about preserving our planet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Some people so hate the earth than sustains them that they refuse to even use a biodegradable shampoo. They are like a thug who brags he is unusually manly because he likes to belt his mother in the stomach after she serves him Christmas dinner. There is no room for saboteurs like this on Spaceship Earth. We need to find a way to toss these bastards overboard.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
St. Boniface had ancient holy oaks felled in the 8th century as way of smiting pagans who revered them. You might say he is the patron saint of Republicans and other anti-environmentalists.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
St. Patrick was made a saint because he allegedly got rid of all the snakes in Ireland. The pagans there venerated them because they were so helpful keeping down the rodents that ate their crops. That is why he got rid of them, as a sort of ecological warfare, fueled by a Christian phobia of snakes. So St. Patrick is the patron saint of species extinction, vandals and poachers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Stephen Harper and the Conservatives have betrayed Canada by relinquishing the right of Canada to keep its own water. If the US wants it, we have to pump it to them even if we need it to sustain our environment or for our own needs. What is even more disgusting is what the Americans will do with it — squander it watering desert golf courses, polluting it with industrial processes that make no attempt to conserve water and flushing it down toilets 15 litres (3.96 US gallons) at a time just to flush away a 50 mls (1.69 fl oz) of urine. 15 litres (3.96 US gallons) of water is all it takes to sustain all needs of an African for a day. Harper is to the environment what Hitler was to Jews. His manic destructiveness must be fueled by some deep-rooted insanity. It is too hateful and contemptuous to be explained away by purely accepting bribes.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Subaru bragging that its Forester, or Ford bragging that its Escape is the most fuel efficient SUV is a bit like McDonalds advertising that their quadruple McBacon & McCheese burger with jumbo fries and 1500 ml Coke is the most health-conscious meal in its class.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Substances like LSD (d-Lysergic Acid Diethylamide), plutonium, and estrogen hormone-mimetics (e.g. Bisphenol A) can cause damaging effects in even the most minute concentrations. Government environmental regulators are stuck in the thinking of the 1800s when scientists believed dilution made any poison safe.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Sustainable growth is an oxymoron. Unfortunately, even the green technology sectors don’t understand that.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Sustained growth on a planet is mathematically impossible.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Switching from cars to bicycles is an incredible win:
- Bicycles need no fuel.
- Bicycles put out no pollutants or greenhouse gases.
- Bicycles are quiet.
- Bicycles mean fewer cars; fewer cars mean less congestion.
- Bicycle accidents are almost never fatal (unless a car is involved.)
- They give people cardio exercise that keeps the arteries clear.
- Bicycles don’t require wide streets or freeways.
- Bicycles are much cheaper than cars, as are the repairs and maintenance.
Everyone should visit the Netherlands to see how pleasant a carless society is. Paris goes carless three days a week. As fossil fuels become increasingly rare and expensive, and as the absolute necessity for curbing greenhouse gases sinks in, we will all be giving up our cars for bicycles (perhaps electric assisted for the disabled or elderly).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Talking about balancing the global warming with the economy is insane. If you don’t get on top of global warming, you won’t have an economy. Dealing with global warming is not optional, no matter how much it costs, unless of course you consider survival optional.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Technological/commercial man is so conceited that he seriously entertains the notion he is the most intelligent being in the entire universe. Yet his reign will last no more than 300 years, one of the shortest ever before he destroys himself and a good chunk of his planet in the process. Even the dinosaurs were not so stupid as to deliberately destroy themselves.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
Technology allows man to live cheek by jowl in densities nature never imagined for hominids. The result is man spends much of his time mulling over the murder of his fellows. TV dramas have evolved to almost exclusively depict grisly murders. Sitcoms are about verbal insult. Reality TV is about injury.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The actions needed to reign in climate change are like heart medicine. They are both expensive. The difference is, if you refuse heart medicine, you die. If you refuse to take action on climate change, your grandchildren and most of the species on earth will die. On 2009-11-02, Americans elected a slate of Republican/Tea Party legislators who promised no compromises to repeal any legislation to counter climate change and to block anyone from trying to stop it. This tells you something dark and twisted about American values. They not only want American to commit suicide, they want to take the whole planet and most of its species down with them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The albedo effect creates an accelerated runaway melting of the polar caps. Sea ice formed at is bright white and reflects most of the sun’s heat back into space, helping to preserve the ice. Sea ice formed at is grey, absorbing more of the sun’s energy, helping to melt the ice. Once the ice is melted, the dark sea water has very low albedo and absorbs most of the sun’s energy helping to rapidly melt any remaining floating ice. The net effect is, once the ice caps start to warm, they melt ever more rapidly.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Alberta tar sands are the filthiest source of oil on earth. Separating the oil from the sand requires unbelievable amounts of energy. The process requires huge amounts of water which is usually polluted afterward. Not only the finished oil produces greenhouse gases, the production produces vast amounts as well. The Conservative federal and provincial governments give massive subsidies to encourage exploitation of the resource. This is a ecological assault on the entire planet. At the very, least everyone should boycott all Alberta goods and services, especially tar sands petroleum.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The American Oil and Gas industry is swamping the airwaves with dishonest ads telling people that cap and trade taxes on oil or gas would destroy jobs. They repeatedly lie that these would be heavy new taxes rather than a shift on how taxes are collected. They break no law with these lies, but they destroy the entire planet with them by encouraging a torrent of greenhouse gas emissions and flagrant waste of fossil fuels.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The atmosphere is incredibly thin. If you shrank the earth down to the size of a billiard ball, it would be so smooth you could not feel the contours of the mountains or oceans. The oceans would be just a damp slick. The atmosphere would be just a thin film.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The average American family uses 870 litres (5.47 barrels) a day, not counting the water used for agriculture, grazing and industry. When the population of America doubles, where is double the clean drinking water to come from? How are the sewers to handle double the amount of feces? Where is double the housing to come from? Where is double the food to come from? How are the roads to handle double the traffic? Where is double the electric power generation to come from? Where will double the oil come from? What will it be like with more than double the pollution as energy converts to coal? American cannot even house the people it has now. Without any solutions in hand, the priests and imams whip their flocks to breed ever faster in a mad race to hell on earth.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The average North American needs 14 times as many trees to absorb theCO₂ emissions (primarily from burning fuels) as does an African. The USA thus has the population equivalent of 4.3 billion Africans when it comes to global warming. The scary part is, much of the third world are learning to live like Americans too — the net effect is like a lethal population explosion. The really scary part is we have nowhere near enough trees even as it is, and we are killing them off at an unprecedented rate.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The average pair of blue jeans have already logged over 41,842.94 km (26,000 miles) in the air before you put them on.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64), source National Geographic video The Human Footprint.
The big problem with cars is they take huge amounts of expensive real estate for roads and parking. There is no more urban land, so the only way to escape gridlock is to use computer-controlled cars that can be safely packed bumper to bumper, door to door, at high speeds. Cars can drive themselves to high-density parking when they are not needed, or cars can be shared in various types of pool so they don’t need to be parked, just used by someone else. The problem is by the time the political problems are solved to allow such a system, the price of fuel and greenhouse gas emissions will force us to abandon cars and trucks of any description. The car wastes huge amounts of energy with its rubber tires, and dragging about a massive power train/batteries relative to the payload. In contrast, the electric train does not have to generate energy onboard because it can tap into the electric grid.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The biggest perk of living in the Eastern United States must be all the colourful birds that visit your back yard. Yet the people of the region seem intent on driving these birds to extinction by dozens of means. They don’t deserve to be custodians of such a treasure.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Canadians and Americans have turned their backs on green technology. They would rather exploit the tar sands and pretend that global warming is a Communist conspiracy to trick them into polluting less. Happily, the rest of the world is not so stupid. The Japanese, Chinese, Indians and Europeans are creating the next generation of efficient green technologies and innovative transportation. We are falling behind. We will be technology beggars having to licence the patents from them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Christians have the concept of Original Sin. There is an analogous concept primal guilt when considering the environment. Just being alive, you damage the environment every time you flush the toilet, have a bath, eat agribusiness-produced food, ride in a car…
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The climate change deniers have for the most part stopped denying thatCO₂ levels are higher than they have been in 40 times the span that human civilisation has been on earth. Humanity has never seen anything like this before. Ice ages are commonplace by comparison. They now claim the levels are natural and normal. How do you know that is BS? Scientists have calculated that humans are putting 100 times moreCO₂ into the air than volcanoes are. We have business records of how much fossil fuel we are burning, and we can calculate how muchCO₂ that generates. Further, when fossil fuels burn, then consume oxygen. When volcanoes spew CO₂ they don’t There is a corresponding measured decrease in oxygen that jibes with our computation of CO₂ effects of burning.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The coal lobby has told everyone that there is enough coal to last 200 years. That is true only if:
- There is absolutely no growth in coal usage.
- The three million new Americans born each year will use no coal whatsoever in their lives.
- Coal won’t take up any slack as oil gets more expensive and rare.
- America will refuse to sell coal to China.
- No coal will be used to generate the electricity to charge the batteries of the coming electric cars.
How long will the coal really last? See thecalculator .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Columbia glacier is retreating at 0.80 km (½ mile) a year, 8 times faster than it was 30 years ago. Yet the media insist on calling this the apparent retreat of the glacier, as though there were some doubt it was retreating.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The cosmic injustice of global warming is that the nations that did the least to cause it will suffer most.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The cost of sustainable agriculture that does not require pesticides, avoids soil erosion and does not require massive doses of chemical pesticides would increase the cost of agriculture, but it need only cause a small increase in the price of food. The reason is that farmers take only a small slice of each supermarket dollar.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The damage fossil fuels do with greenhouse gas emissions is not built into the price. There is no economic incentive to offer clean energy. The solution is politically unpopular yet refusing to enact is mass suicide. We must built the damage into the cost, namely a pollution tax on gasoline, oil and natural gas and use it to subsidise clean energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Dark Side Of Christmas
Christmas is most environmentally destructive of our traditions. We buy mountains of kitschy junk we don’t need. We cook more food that we can, much less should eat. We cut down trees and discard or burn the wood. We fill our trash bins to the brim. We fly half way round the world, pig out, then fly back the next day. It is an all-out assault on our planet. The Catholic Church busies itself attempting to block those trying to stop bullies who target gay teens and children. Got to uphold those Christmas family values!
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Dow Jones is an index of how fast man is destroying the environment.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The easiest way to reduce the number of deaths due to cancer is to increase the number of deaths due to diabetes and cardiovascular disease. So take care interpreting statistics.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The electric car takes 25 times as much energy as an electric kettle. If the electric car were to replace the gasoline car, the electric grid could not sustain the immense extra load to recharge them. A much bigger change is required, namely using much smaller, lighter vehicles, perhaps more along the lines of the Segway, the electric bicycle or a small single-passenger pod, computer-driven at densities impossible for human drivers.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The enemies of the environment in Canada are:
- the Conservative Party.
- NAFTA (North America Free Trade Agreement)
- SPP (Security and Prosperity Partnership), morphing its name yet again to NASRA (North American Standards and Regulatory Area)
- TILMA (Trade, Investment and Labour Mobility Agreement).
The intent of all these innocuous sounding initiatives is to subvert Canadian sovereignty to regulate the environment and commerce and hand it over to American corporations. You would not believe what sovereignty Canada has already given away to the Americans. Our water is already signed away. Our right to regulate pesticides and poisons in food have already been given away to US corporations. Harper lies and claims all we have given away is the right to differ on quality standards for jellybeans.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Enron scam worked by leaving costs off the books. The entire agribusiness industry is doing the same thing. They are leaving out the costs of soil depletion, aquifer destruction, water pollution, destruction of biodiversity, soil salinisation and leaking of artificial genes into wild populations. Ancient civilisations were more careful than we are about soil erosion, and gradually as the soil was lost, yields dropped, to the point where entire civilisation collapsed. This has happened time after time. Any uncorrected soil erosion will eventually result in fields incapable of growing crops.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Enron scam worked by leaving costs off the books. The entire fossil fuel business is pulling a similar scam by ignoring the costs of greenhouse gas emissions, the choking of the oceans with discarded plastic that becomes a gill-choking confetti, the destruction of eco-systems with oil spills and the pollution of the aquifers and waterways with petro-chemicals.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The exact same people who shilled for the tobacco companies and posed as experts to testify tobacco was harmless hired themselves out to the oil companies to pose as experts to tell lies about global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The excuses for refusing to get on with clean energy and green house gas reduction remind me of the lame excuses people use for continuing to smoke.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The exercise program you are most likely to persist with is getting rid of your car and doing your transportation by foot or bicycle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Fable of the Pet Lion
There was once a family that considered the possibility of acquiring a pet lion. Father was most excited about it. We’ll be rich he said. People will come from miles around to see it and we can soak them all. Mother was worried it might poop on the rug. Don’t worry your silly little head about that, said father, There has to be technology to solve that. Oh father how wonderful! Christie and I can go for lion rides. All the girls at my school will be so jealous, chimed in daughter Condoleeza. Envious!, mother corrected. Mother fretted about the cost of feeding the lion. The males eat 7.03 kg (15½ lbs) a day, she explained. But think of the money! father reiterated. Father prevailed and they bought a huge male lion with a magnificent shaggy mane and Christie and Condoleeza went for a lion ride. But due to human error, the lion was hungry, having missed three meals, and ate both girls, even their hair and bones.
The moral of the story is don’t be so enamoured of the attractions of something that you blind yourself to its obvious downsides, such getting all exciting about burning the Alberta tar sands because it will make you rich, then studiously ignore the fact doing that will release so much CO₂ it will kill billions of people with uncontrolled global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The fact that there is a trucking industry is a consequence of politics, not engineering. The trucking energy pays nothing for the road bed. It is provided free to all vehicles by government subsidy. Gasoline would have to be taxed $3 a gallon more to cover the cost of buying and maintaining the road beds, as it is in Europe. If the costs of wars to take oil from third world countries were factored in, it would cost $7 a gallon. Competing technologies are at a competitive disadvantage because they have to fund their own roadbeds. The real estate devoted to road beds in the USA is huge, 160,000 sq kms (61,776.35 sq miles), almost as much area as used to grow wheat.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
- The first homo sapiens walked the earth 200,000 years ago.
- It took until 1804 for the global population to reach 1 billion.
- 123 years later in 1927, it reached 2 billion.
- 33 years later in 1960, it reached 3 billion.
- 14 years later in 1974 it reached 4 billion.
- 13 years later in 1987 it reached 5 billion.
- 12 years later in 1999 it reached 6 billion.
- Today it reached 7 billion.
- In 2025 it is projected to hit 8 billion.
You can see the problem, called exponential growth. The more people there are, the more people there are having babies and the faster the population grows. The only remotely palatable solution is to lower the birth rate. Each family must have fewer than two children.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The first thing the Republicans announced on taking over the house was scraping an energy-efficiency program for the house building that had cut fuel bills 23%. They consider energy efficiency liberal and limp wristed. What idiots! Wasting energy is what pudgy couch potatoes do.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The five cowboys of the apocalypse are cars, chainsaws, cattle, coal and cement. These are the major means man is using to crank up the global thermostat withCO₂ .
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The fundamental problem in the first world is that advertisers have convinced us to seek happiness in more stuff instead of in relationships. In chasing stuff, people become isolated, and hence seek still more stuff to fill the void. In consuming stuff, people destroy the earth that sustains them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The funny thing about ignorant people is they learn a tiny bit about science, then start claiming they know more about the subject than the scientists who taught them the little they know.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The genius of cap and trade is that it uses greed to rope unscrupulous people who normally could care less about sustainability into selling the idea of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Ghawar oil field in Saudi Arabia, was the largest ever found. At today’s rates of consumption it would be gone in 11 days.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The glaciers of the Himalayas are melting so quickly, that within a few decades, the Ganges will no longer flow all year round from the meltwater. It will dry up completely.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The gloomiest fact about the future of the environment is those who control its fate, the economists and capitalists, are incapable of seeing anything except money. They don’t give a flying fig about the environment other that as it affects the flow of money. The complementary cheering fact is, without the environment, there is no economy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The good news about global warming is, if we went extinct today, it could take nature as little as 100,000 years to undo the damage we have done so far.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The good news is there a lot of low-hanging fruit to be gathered in terms of improving the efficiency (mileage) of the automobile. Because, up-to-now, gasoline was so cheap, nobody bothered to make cars efficient.
- Less than 10% of the fuel energy burned in automobiles is translated into forward motion of the vehicle.
- Cars weigh about 20 times more than the passengers.
- A combustion engine gets only 20% efficiency, i.e., it wastes 80% of the energy in the fuel as heat.
When you also consider other classes of transport such as trains, subways, buses and one or two-passenger vehicles, the outlook for higher efficiencies are even better. In contrast, a bicycle weighs about 1/8 of the weight of its rider, and it can get as low as 1/50.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The greenhouse gas equations apply also to other planets. In fact NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) is toying with the idea of deliberately using green house gases to warm up Mars. The conspiracy theorists who claim global warming is a hoax concocted by a secret conspiracy of all the world’s peer-review published scientists have not yet come up with an explanation for why these equations would apply to other planets, but not earth where they were originally derived.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The History Channel aired a documentary called Ax Men glorifying the loggers of Oregon as manly men. In one scene the loggers came across an old growth tree. The other loggers came running to excitedly look at it. Such trees are quite rare. Of course they killed and piled it with the other trees which looked like table legs in comparison. One logger noted that 20 years ago all trees were that way. The dramatic tension in the documentary came from the fact the loggers were behind quota in felling trees. To me, it was like watching a documentary the guards who ran the Nazi concentration camps worrying about meeting quotas. These people had no concept what they were doing to the planet. Like Nazis, they placed no value whatsoever on their victims.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The History channel and the National Geographic Channel are involved in a conspiracy to confuse the public about global warming. Presumably because oil money is funding them, they are willing to trick Americans to commit mass suicide. They keep pooh-poohing global warming as a fringe/theoretical/potential problem then creating documentary after documentary on phony looming disasters such as the earth stopping spinning, the sun suddenly going nova, or a plague sweeping the earth that turns people into zombies (I kid you not).
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The History Channel billed a documentary on the end of oil with the words “In this scenario, the world’s oil supply runs out”. Huh? Is there a scenario where it does not run out?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The holy grail of energy would generate unlimited power, produce no pollution, not interfere with climate, require no fuel, take up no real estate, be free, freely accessible to all countries and reliable for billions of years. Guess what. We already have it, the sun.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The hottest year on record was 2005. The second hottest year was a tie between 1998 and 2007. The top ten hottest years all occurred since 1990. Oddly, among Republicans, only 49% accept that the earth is warming, down from 62% in a former Pew Poll. To Republicans, global warming has become a religious issue, completely divorced from scientific fact.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The human genome has about 3 billion base pairs. It takes about 750 megabytes to encode them in a computer. In contrast, a small hard disk for a desktop computer is about 120 gigabytes or 120,000 megabytes or 160 times bigger than required to contain the a human genome. In contrast, the specifications for an Airbus take about 1 terabyte or 1,000,000 megabytes or 1333 times more than the human genome. Yet humans exhibit far more complex behaviours than Airbuses. This means nature is still way ahead of us in the efficiency of its blueprints.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The ice cover of earth is inherently unstable. If the earth gets colder, the ice formed becomes both whiter and more extensive. This in turn increases the albedo (reflectivity) of the earth, making it colder still in a vicious circle. Conversely if the earth warms, from increasedCO₂ levels, the ice formed becomes both greyer and less extensive. This in turn decreases the albedo of the earth, making it warmer still in a vicious circle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The ignorance, stupidity and malice of the global warming deniers is beyond appalling. The most idiotic are those who imagine all the world’s scientists are in on some massive conspiracy including Svante Arrhenius, the great Swedish chemist, born in 1859, who discovered theCO₂ global warming effect.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The intent of carbon credits and carbon taxes is to penalise those who emit carbon to discourage them from doing it. Those who oppose such measures want to keep emitting carbon as usual. Further, they refuse to pay any penalty for doing so. They are spoiled, clueless brats who don’t get it that business as usual is no longer a viable option.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Irish potato famine killed one in eight people. The Irish caused it with monoculture, growing but a single species of potato, the Lumper. When a fungus came along it was susceptible to, the entire crop died. Today, we are still very big on monoculture, growing the Russett Burbank potato.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Italians have the lowest birth rate in the world. If even they can tell the Pope to stuff his suicidal birth control policy, surely other Christians can too.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Japanese Eliica, an eight wheeled electric car, travels at 370 km/hr (229.91 mph) using half the energy of a comparable gasoline-powered car, yet the perception persists that electric vehicles are suitable only for playing golf.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Khutzeymateen Grizzly Bear Sanctuary restores my faith in human nature. In 1995, the BC government reserved the drainage basin of a major river as a sanctuary purely for the benefit of grizzly bears. Human access is severely limited. The prime real estate they chose was bear heaven, with abundant vegetation and salmon. Usually humans donate only castoffs that have no value to them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The lack of cosmic justice is galling when self-centred environmental pigs in their conspicuous consumption status displays (aka Hummers) spewCO₂ greenhouse gas into the air that causes unprecedented droughts in Kenya for people who own nothing but a few goats. The droughts kill all their livestock and plants.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The latest figures on Antarctic ice melting are much larger than formerly expected. Instead of 60.96 cm (24 in), we are talking 1.83 metres (6 ft) to 60.96 metres (200 ft). This means coastal cities will have to be abandoned, nuclear power plants and military bases will have to be relocated. If you look at a map of China, it is one giant green, easily-flooded, coastal plain. Yet in all this, Canada insists on stimulating greenhouse gas emissions with government subsidies. We are flipping crazy. ~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The latest science tells us the redline forCO₂ is 350 ppm. That is the maximum level that will sustain life on earth and sustain technological civilisation. We have already hit 390 ppm. The negative effects are delayed. If we are to survive, it is no longer enough to stop putting moreCO₂ into the air, we have to start removing it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The lawn is the strangest form of agriculture. It consumes huge amounts of labour, fertiliser, pesticide, herbicide and water; yet the weekly crop is discarded at great expense. Its function is conspicuous waste, i.e. status display. This vanity makes humans into ecological morons.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The laws governing taxis result in taxis traveling long distances without passengers. This is insane. We need to burn the laws and start over with the goal of transporting the most people with the least gas.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The laws of physics won’t allow the population of earth to keep growing indefinitely. Guaranteed, it will stop. We humans have no choice in that, only in how it stops. We can limit our birth rate, or if we refuse to do that, nature will stop the growth for us with starvation, epidemics and wars for living space and resources.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The Louisiana wetlands are the homelands of birds that migrate over the globe. By deliberately destroying the wetlands, America are effectively shooting other people’s wildlife over the fence.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The main difference between man and animal is that man deliberately wastes energy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The manufacture of cement is the #3 source ofCO₂ emissions.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The melting of the permafrost in Russia and Canada is more of a big deal than you might imagine. As they melt, they release methaneCH₄ which as a greenhouse gas 30 times more potent than CO₂. This warms the atmosphere further in a vicious circle.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The men and women who lived through WW II made huge sacrifices to protect their country and their children. If you study history, humans throughout the ages, no matter what the odds, will do whatever it takes to ensure the survival of their children. But today we have a castrated generation who refuses to even put up with minor inconvenience to look out for the survival of the next generation who are threatened by global climate change and environmental degradation, a foe much more deadly than Hitler ever was. People today have allowed themselves to be hypnotised into apathy, convinced that all action is futile. We all have equal time in each day. We all have a voice box. We all have seen endless examples of how individuals who take action inspire others to join in. We have no excuse for apathy.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The mincing and burning of coal to product electricity is the #1 user of water in the USA.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The more I study, the less likely it appears rational people will be able to stop mankind’s mad suicidal dash to extinction. The question is not will man go extinct soon, but precisely when, and how many other species will he take with him? We all have seats to watch this bizarre spectacle. If it happens after you die, it is not a personal catastrophe, but it still distressing. If you are young, it is a personal tragedy. It will cut short your life.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The most amazing thing I ever read was Bernard C. Till’s Masters thesis about nematode worms. He used a computer to simulate the interconnections of the approximately 300 neurons in the worm, including the S-shaped trigger functions in the synapses. What blew me away completely was the simulated worm exhibited all the known behaviours of real worms. He discovered that nature uses a control program for animal behaviour that is encoded incredibly compactly compared with the way computer scientists usually do it. It also means that animals are much less complicated than we suppose.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The most cowardly people, when they hear bad news, pretend it can’t be true, simply because it frightens them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The most dangerous machine for producing energy is not a nuclear power plant, but a coal plant, perfectly functioning according to spec. It belches out greenhouse gases.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The most frustrating thing about humanity is they insist on waiting until global warming is too advanced to reverse before they will even begin to act. A species that short-sighted fully deserves extinction. However, it is most distressing that these twits will take down all the large mammals and many other species with them.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The most successful recycling program on the planet started with two years of educating the children. They in turn educated their parents.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The National Geographic channel broadcast a rather silly episode of Aftermath about what it would be like if the planet Earth slowed its rotation to a standstill over five years. Given there is no mechanism by which this could happen, this is a bit like the fairy tale The Three Sillies. It just distracts attention about real environmental problems.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The National Geographic Documentary Aftermath: Population Zero explores what would happen if humans were to suddenly vanish from earth. It makes the heart glad to know that earth is capable of healing most of the damage we humans have done to it within a century. It is just too bad we humans are so intent on destroying the very planet that sustains us.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The National Geographic has sold out. They present Christian myth as scientific fact. They present phony disaster scenarios, such as what would happen if the earth suddenly stopped spinning or the sun suddenly went nova. They ignore real environmental issues like global warming. They have arguably become the largest purveyor of scientific FUD on the planet.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The natural gas companies lie that natural gas in the safe clean fuel of the future. Granted it does burn cleaner than furnace oil, and it is cheaper, but it is far from safe or clean. If natural gas tanker were to blow in a harbour, the effect would be similar to small nuke going off. It would obliterate the core of the city. Natural gas is very flammable, similar to hydrogen. Everyone has seen how even a small gas leak can level an entire apartment block. Further natural gas, just like oil, when it burns, creates carbon dioxide (CO₂ ) the main greenhouse gas that causes global warming. When natural gas leaks, the 95% methane (CH₄) in it acts as a greenhouse gas in its own right 23 times as potent as carbon dioxide. It is an interim, temporary solution at best. Given the current levels of CO₂, we should not be burning any natural gas at all at this point.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The natural gas industry has been deceiving people about just how wonderful natural gas is as a fuel. It is certainly cleaner than coal or oil, but we can’t continue to use it because of greenhouse gases. The industry suggest that theCO₂ can be removed at the well site and sequestered. Yes, dissolvedCO₂ , could potentially be removed, but that would do nothing about theCO₂ produced when it burns which is the much bigger problem. They keep referring to it as a clean fuel as if there were no problem with the products of its combustion. It turns into pureCO₂ , the #1 greenhouse gas. It has nice qualities such as abundance in North America, easy to ship by pipeline and low sulphur, but we still can’t use it.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The notion that man did not cause the recent rapid rise in carbon dioxide is absurd. We know how much of the various kinds of fossil fuel we burned, so we can calculate how much carbon dioxide we released into the atmosphere.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The notion that the measured, rapidCO₂ buildup came from something other that man’s is absurd. We know how much fossil fuel we, as a species, burned each year. We know to at least three decimal places how muchCO₂ each kilogram of gasoline, natural gas, coal etc. is produced on burning. So we also know quite accurately how muchCO₂ mankind has created with fossil fuel burning over the last hundred years.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The ocean near the Vesuvius volcano has naturally had highCO₂ level for millennia, levels that we expect will occur all over the oceans from greenhouse gas emissions by the end of the century. Sea grass grows happily, but fish cannot spawn successfully. So we know exactly what to expect from our refusal to curb greenhouse gas emissions. We are increasing theCO₂ level ten times faster that at any time in earth’s history. The last time this happened, theCO₂ acidification wiped the corals out, along with all the fish that depend on them. It took them 10 million years to recover.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The oceans will rise at least 1 metre (39.37 in) over the next century displacing 140 million people. We will lose the rich coastal plain farmlands where they lived. We will have to find some place for them all to live, and some place to grow food for them. It is unlikely they can be accommodated without heavy duty violence. This is just the tip of the iceberg of population displacements caused by global warming.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The oil and natural gas lobbies love to brag about how dependent America is on oil and natural gas. They claim this is a Good Thing™ But what it really means is we have refused to plan for an alternative as fossil fuels run out and as we have to discontinue them to avoid global warming. We are all going to be screwed and they are smiling because they will corner the market on money as fuel prices go through the roof. There is not much point is being filthy rich if you are also dead.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The oil companies talk about the overwhelming economic benefit of the Enbridge tar sands pipeline across BC. They mean the overwhelming benefit to them. After the construction is over, it would take only a skeleton crew to monitor the pipeline. Over time, monitoring would be handled more and more by electronics. The job boom would come only after a spill. There are no jobs refining. As the economic benefits wane, the ecological dangers escalate as China and the USA demand an ever larger flow of oil.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The opponents of the environment are brain damaged. They can think no further than 3 months into the future. They are, like babies, attracted by baubles, who scream and scream if they don’t get what they want. They are incapable of thinking about the big picture or the long term consequences. It is up to adults to keep things away from babies that would hurt them, and the same with these adult babies. Like Alzheimers patients they can at first glance look powerful and functional, even intimidating, but we must be firm with them. Since they are fixated on money, it is of primary importance to make sure they lose most of their money every time they harm the environment. They are waging war against the planet that sustains us. You don’t have to fight with Marquis of Queensbury rules in a war.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The power industry say that America must double its capacity in the next few years. This is nonsense. What they mean is, if the power were available, they would have no trouble selling it. With even token efforts we could reduce the per capita electric power usage each year. Power industry people focus only on how to produce more power and how to stimulate demand for it. They close their eyes wide shut to the drawbacks of doing so.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The problem with pressurised water nuclear reactors like the General Electric reactors in Fukushima, is they need power to keep them cool. If something goes wrong with the reactor, you have to get that electricity from somewhere else. If you have an earthquake or a tsunami, that can cut off the supply from elsewhere. If you have a battery, you have to arrange another source of power before its loses its charge. If you have a generator, you have to keep it fueled. The meltdowns in Japan happened because of a failure to arrange sufficient power to keep the damaged reactors cool.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The proponents of the tar sands pipeline and tankers to China claim their technology will ensure there will be an oil spill no more often than every 15,000 years. This is nonsense. These same companies spill oil hundreds of times a year. What they mean is, if the technology were always used per spec, and the technology never failed, and nothing unexpected ever happened that the technology was not designed to handle, and the climate stayed the same as it is now, and there were no human errors, and no captain got drunk, and no navigators abandoned the bridge for a quickie, and all contractors will never dream of substituting cheap, poor quality materials, then the technology could in theory give that level of protection at least for spills bigger than Deepwater Horizon. Smaller ones are negligible. It is a bald lie for oil companies to promise better safety than they can demonstrate. Why should we be destroying our environment so that China can pollute the atmosphere with greenhouse gases from tar sands oil and roast us all?
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The public are still idiotically concerned with stimulating and coddling the oil industry. It must be shut down and replaced, now. That cannot happen if the law makes it more economic for energy companies to avoid change.
~ Roedy (born: 1948-02-04 age: 64)
The silliest example of greenwashing is the Jeep Wrangler ad that claims their SUV is both wind and solar powered. Bullshit! Absolute bullshit! It is not remotely true even metaphorically. SUV
