It goes to eleven

The government has been limp in its battle to stop illegal immigration, but now the environmentalists are getting involved:

 National forests and parks — long popular with Mexican marijuana-growing cartels — have become home to some of the most polluted pockets of wilderness in America because of the toxic chemicals needed to eke lucrative harvests from rocky mountainsides, federal officials said.

Weed and bug sprays, some long banned in the U.S., have been smuggled to the marijuana farms. Plant growth hormones have been dumped into streams, and the water has then been diverted for miles in PVC pipes.

Maybe now there will be more movication to keep this scum out our country. These drug cartels are heavily armed. I wonder if the gun-control people people can get them to drop their weapons?

This article, entitled, "Flat-Screen TV Gas 'a Climate Time Bomb'" attempts to paint a bad picture but lacks any scientific data. No surprise here.

A greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride, used to make the TVs, is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.

Okay, sounds bad, right? But wait...

But no one yet knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by industry, a report in Britain's The Guardian said.

Ah, so there is no data to scientifically prove any kind of threat!

Prather's research shows production of the gas, which remains in the atmosphere for 550 years, is "exploding".

It is expected to double by next year, from the current 4,000 tons produced annually.

But unlike other key greenhouse gases — such as carbon dioxide, sulphur hexafluoride (SF6) and perfluorocarbons (PFCs) — emissions of the gas are not restricted under the Kyoto protocol or similar agreements, The Guardian report said.

Prather and his colleague Juno Hsu — writing in the journal Geophysical Research Letters — said this year's production of nitrogen trifluoride is equivalent to 67 million tons of carbon dioxide

Here's my take (not that anyone asked for it): Companies who make televisions attempt to do so for a profit. If they waste the materials used to make the televisions, then that cuts into their profits. Therefore it would be expected they would not waste nitrogen trifluoride. Can it escape into the atmosphere? Sure, but as the article states there is no data about this. Should toxic substances be controlled and kept out of the environment? Sure, but let us see some real, factual, scientific data about this substance before the enviro wackos push in to promote their socialist, anti-free market, anti-business alarmist agenda.

Carbon dioxide, which occurs naturally and is exhausted when we breathe, has been tagged as some global threat, but it remains to be scientifically proven if humans can really change the climate. Therefore comparing nitrogen trifluoride to carbon dioxide here is half-baked at best.

So again we have an article designed to mislead people and promote an agenda rather than provide useful information based on facts. Thanks MSM! I'm glad your numbers are down. That make's Rush Limbaugh's $400 million look even better.

Today's Wall Street Journal printed a story about Governer Schwarzenegger's request of the population to discontinue use of fireworks because of the possibility of them causing forrest fires.

Okay, that sounds fair enough, so what's the problem?

"His request is worrying the state's sellers of fireworks - virtually all of which are noinprofits and charities, as mandated by municipal laws.

Many schools, churches youth sports leagues and other groups rely on fireworks sales for a significant chunk of their income."

This sounds exactly like the government scheme where taxes are levied on tobbaco products in order to pay for healthcare for kids. One difference, however, is that these charities aren't forced to sell fireworks as their sole source of income.

msnbc.com provides this report about a trial recycling program at Best Buy:

Under pressure to help dispose some of the electronic waste it helped create, Best Buy Co. is testing a free program that will offer consumers a convenient way to ensure millions of obsolescent TVs, old computers and other unwanted gadgets don’t poison the nation’s dumps.

By selling electronics which will eventually end up as trash, it could be argued that Best Buy did contribute to creating waste, but Best Buy is under no obligation to provide this program. The author's jab of, "...the electronics easte it helped create" just bothers me, even if there is truth. Why? Because I know the agenda of these people.

My main gripe with the article, however, is that there absolutely no mention of what exactly will happen to the trash after Best Buy receives it. Does the reporter think that the world is all perfect and pretty and the trash will magically disappear without any impact to anyone?  Probably, otherwise they might have dug deeper to learn the truth, whatever it is.

The reality is that trash of this nature can often take one of two routes: It is disposed of by an intricate process of disassembly and recovery of materials in a manner where toxic chemicals are contained as much as possible. This is expensive.  One other route is that the trash is shipped to poor countries and it's torn apart there with often great impact to the environment as the materials are burned or otherwise released into the environment as people seek the quickest and easiest ways to get at the raw materials.

So msnbc.com, which is it?

First the article takes a jab at a big electronics retailer, but then falls flat in seeking the real truth of the matter. Typical.

Thanks for the shallow, two-bit story. This is no surprise.

I read Postsecret every week. Here's an interesting one:

The postcard says, "I hope energy costs continue to rise-- People will never change just because it is right."

This caught my attention for several reasons. First, we have an environmentalist admitting that they want energy costs to go up, because this is seen as a means of reducing consumption and therefore 'saving the globe'. That's fine but ironic that the person wanted to make this statement anonymously. Why did the person feel the need to hide? To me, that shows the fraud of their ways.  Second, the statement admits that people won't change their ways just because some greenist wants them to. This suggests that people are either lazy, or don't buy into the environmentalists' agenda, or both.

Finally, I have to agree that no matter how flawed and ignorant of the free-market this statement is, I agree with it to a certain extent. Specifically, if people would cut down on buying cheap crap from China that they don't need and start saving money instead, maybe they'd be a little better off. I believe in a free market system, but personal responsibility is something that many people have forgotten about.

This report shows that global temperatures have reached a 100 year low, wiping out 100 years of temperature gains.

How much you wanna bet you won't see this on the Evening News or in your local newspaper? The people who believe in so-called global warming are unwilling to see the truth because it doesn't fit their agenda of oppressing business and individual liberty.

A remarkable editorial article appeared in the January 2, 2008 Wall Street Journal. Entitled “Bye Bye, Light Bulb”, the article provided facts and commentary on the new light bulb efficiency requirements that will hit us in 2012. Thanks again to my father for clipping this for me, as I have not the time to read the whole paper every day.

“…the energy bill passed by Congress and signed by President Bush sets energy-efficiency standards for light bulbs that traditional incandescent bulbs cannot meet.”

The average uninformed consumer on the street, or any 5th grader, would likely believe that Congress passed this legislation to ban standard light bulbs in the name of using less energy and therefore saving the environment. I will not detail the problems with this whole underlying realm of false logic. What is more important is to ask this:

Why are the liberals not crying that a €26.976 billion company was able to lobby Congress to pass a law that makes it illegal to buy anything else but a product that this company happens to sell?

The answer, if course, is that it’s OK to wipe out the competition if it’s done in the name of ‘green’, even if there’s no scientific basis for any of it.

“Yes, the $3 bulb lasts longer. Yes, it cuts your electricity bill. Mr. Moorehead [of Phillips] says that when every one of those four billion light sockets has an energy-saving bulb in it, the country will be saving $18 billion a year on its electric bill. That’s $4.50 per bulb – and the bulb makers are standing by to make sure a substantial portion of those ‘savings’ get transformed into profits for them.”

Where is the liberal outrage here?  One of the biggest electronics makers in the world pushed to pass legislation in order to enrich itself. If Dick Cheney was anyhow connected with Phillips, I’m sure that we would have heard about how ‘big electronics’ was screwing the consumer and that the poorest amongst us would most deeply hit.

The thing that makes me mad is that we have yet another blinding example of government limiting consumer choice. I’m all for saving energy, but give me the choice!

I thought the liberals were all about choice?

The biggest outrage here is not the two examples of liberal hypocrisy, but Americans getting ----ed again by the politicians who continue to pass pointless laws instead of worrying about how to enforce the existing laws.

Oh, and the new high-efficiency bulbs are full of mercury, whereas the incandescent bulbs are free from this pollutant.  I guess this will be the foundation of another environmental crisis that the liberals and politicians can save us from in a decade. It sounds strikingly familiar to the scenario in which Congress said that banks weren't giving enough loans to high-risk hone buyers which helped lead to the increased default rate on home loans which Congress now wants to fix by enacting more laws.

Thanks again to my elected officials for representing me so well, you clueless morons.

Two thoughts for today's post:

1) I was driving down a major freeway in Houston today and passed a cluttered shopping center with many different kinds of stores in it. This is a typical sight in Houston, like any other city. One small portion on the large multi-business sign caught my eye: "Solar power". I thought this was neat because it's a sign that solar power is more and more a viable energy source. The fact that someone is running a small business dealing in solar power is a great sign. I have always been fascinated by solar power so this caught my eye.

2) The government has mandated that your analog TV will be useless. You will have to buy a converter box to make it work correctly after February 17, 2009. Will this spur a mass dumping of analog CRT-based televisions? If so, are we prepared to deal with the environmental impact of this? CRT displays contain lead. I hadn't heard any commentary on this prospect but this dawned on my this morning while waiting for the coffee to brew.

The government is providing coupons to reimburse part of the cost of buying a converter box, so this will prolong the life of many CRT-based televisions. We plan to buy at least 2 converter boxes because I have to intent of giving up my analog TVs or getting a cable or satellite connection. Heck, I've had my 19" Viewsonic CRT computer monitor for 10 years now and it still works fine and looks great.

In the grand scheme of things, I suppose it's good that CRTs are on the way out due to their lead content and power consumption, but there is little data to be quickly found on the bad chemicals in LCD display panels, if any.

These are some environmentalists I can respect:

"Two anti-whaling activists held on a Japanese whaling ship have been handed over to an Australian fisheries patrol ship near Antarctica, Canberra said on Friday."

Unlike some of the phonies in the petroleum and water areas, these whale guys are honest about their beliefs. Plus, the whole idea of whaling for "research" seems like a total crock of crap to me. It's well documented how some Asian cultures hold animal products to have some kind of special hocus-pocus powers, and I suspect that's the lure here. I would hate to see a species disappear just because 10 million 60-year old Asian guys think whale oil is going to give them all hard-ons.

This article in today's Wall Street Journal discusses the operatoin of desalination plants in California and how the environmentalists are opposed to them. While there is no question that there are environmental impacts when operating a desal plant, they appear to be minimal based on what the article discusses. This appears to be just another attempt by the environmentalists to have people revert back to a more primitive form of life. In this case, it would be a more primitive existence by using less water. That's fine if they want to work toward that goal, but they should be honest about their intents. Remind me of this.

What would you think when a car with gas mileage of 50 miles per gallon is produced, but is called an environmental nightmare?

I thought that we needed to raise the standard for fuel emmissions in order to consume less gasoline.  This one point that Rush Lumbaugh made today during his radio program.

The story from startribune.com says:

"The potential impact of Tata's Nano has given environmentalist nightmares, with visions of the tiny cars clogging India's already-choked roads and collectively spewing millions of tons of carbon dioxide into the air."

It would appear that at least one environmentalist isn't so much concerned with pollution as he/she is with denying the masses access to affordable transporation. I have no problem with a person holding that view, but at least be honest about your core beliefs, buddy.