How green?
It isn’t just the conjecture peddled as scientific fact that really gets to me; it’s the quantum of the unremitting misery emanating of the eco-fascists that has me reaching for the firstly a whiskey bottle & then a firearm. However yesterday, the supposedly ‘independent’ Climate Change Committee announced that the UK needs by 2050 to cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 80% & completely ‘decarbonised’ our power sector by 2030. So whilst the lights will continue to burn in Quangos offices, the rest of us will be living in complete darkness.
To illustrate my point here, I noticed a piece in the Chicago Tribune while a was there a few days ago where they (with they assistance of local sustainability groups – I promise I am not making this up) were trying to identify their ‘greenest citizen’ & came up with one Ken Dunn who it transpires, is
Greener than the social worker who last year commuted 16 miles a day by bike in the dead of winter.
Greener than the woman whose rooftop solar panels generate so much electricity she donates the excess to Commonwealth Edison.
Greener than the Chicago apartment-dweller who composts his own urine and excrement.
Wow! Ken must live in a mud hut & spend a lot of his year wearing nothing but wode. Well not exactly, but
Dunn produces only 3,800 pounds of carbon dioxide a year, as compared with the 44,000 pounds produced by the average American… stated another way, Dunn is already living at roughly the level of carbon emissions that scientists at the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change say the average human must achieve by 2100 if we are to avoid dangerous effects of global warming.
However…
For the most part, the top contestants frequently rode bikes instead of driving, kept the heat down in the winter, grew some of their own food, went without air-conditioning and airplane travel, and spent little on clothes and entertainment.
But…
Dunn pulled ahead of the others in part because he uses a wood-burning furnace, which produces local air pollution but lowers carbon emissions significantly. He also had an advantage in that he eats expired and discarded food he acquires from stores and restaurants
So to meet United Nations targets, you wont be allowed to travel anymore, forget buying a new pair of jeans & your diet will consist of soon to be rotting vegetables
Better still, Ken scored so highly on the green-o-meter that he beat one Sayre Vickers into second place. Vickers
makes his own furniture from discarded wood
doesn’t have running water and…
hauls his 3 gallons a day from the bathroom one floor below.
However to top that, Vickers'
toilet is a bucket, with a 30-gallon garbage can nearby for storing human waste layered with sawdust. Vickers has a friend in the suburbs who allows him to park the cans when they fill up. The contents decompose, forming compost.
Well I guess that with solves the problem of unwelcome guests popping round unannounced for a cup of tea. Or to put this another way, as Obnoxio The Clown says...
Enough. Just ... enough. We've had the blatant lies about the allegedly warming planet shoved down our throat for long enough. We have people telling us to cut down on eating what we want to eat for the sake of Gaia. We have people flying around the world telling the rest of us not to fly around the world. We have weapons-grade cock-ends telling us that we must use wind energy because it reduces our carbon footprint, despite the fact that it just leads to a requirement for more backup power from "non-green" sources. We have other weapons-grade cock-ends telling us that despite the "green-ness" of nuclear power generation, we shouldn't use that. We have people raving on about peak oil without any f*cking consideration of economics. Yadda, yadda, f*cking yadda.
I said a couple of years ago that a point would come where people would get sick of all the wolf-crying and we might well just ignore a genuine crisis, because we'd all be sick of the enviro-weenies w*nking off about every little thing. Well, I hereby declare that for me, that point has just arrived.
"Senior scientists", take your alarmism and go f*ck yourselves.
Comments
Reached that point about 2 years ago and if I had the 10 grand I too would convert the house to wood burning, difficult to turn down free fuel in my line of work!
Posted by: TimC | October 8, 2008 9:18 AM
For a Number of years i used to supply a friend who had a wood burner central heating boiler with all the cheap crappy pallet companys delivered paper on and refused to take back he would cut them up with a chain saw, one small van load would keep him going for a week and we got rid of the pallets and i got a couple of pints out of it.
Posted by: ajdshootist | October 8, 2008 10:17 AM
I seem to recall that wood-burning stoves are illegal in the EU because ... guess what? ... of greenhouse gas emmissions!
(A year or two back, the newspapers were saying that the traditional pizza ovens were being banned in Italy, due to these regulations. Like the Italians are going to take any notice of that...)
Posted by: Simon Jester | October 8, 2008 11:22 AM
Twenty years ago anyone living in Chicago who ate discarded food, peed in a bucket and saved their own excrement in a 30 gallon garbage can would have been confined in a padded cell once they came to the attention of a government social worker.
Posted by: Bomber Harris | October 8, 2008 4:47 PM
It would be even greener for this twit to kill himself, have his body converted into biodiesel, and allow me to run my Chevy Suburban on it for a few miles.
His carbon footprint comes to an abrupt permanent value of zero once I finish driving.
Save the Planet! Kill Yourself!
Posted by: Kristopher | October 8, 2008 8:02 PM
These people in any other times would be locked up to make them safe, for themselves as well as us. Most wood/coal domestic fires do not burn fully, giving rise to pollution so is no good for many of us, perhaps some knob end could invent a device packed with poisonous precious metals to convert the unburnt hydrocarbons to CO2??
Assholes
Posted by: Chris Edwards | October 8, 2008 9:39 PM
I agree with Kristopher; the greenest thing would be an extinction event.
Everyone clap, Ken has turned the wheel of history back to ancient Egypt! Woo! If only we could all live like Ugandan refugees.
Posted by: Eugene | October 8, 2008 10:03 PM
Pallet wood does indeed burn wonderfully well. Makes for a great bonfire on the beach! But as for burning it in a stove or fireplace, it becomes a problem. Pallets are generally made from the cheapest Pine that can be found, really full of sap. The sap does not burn off completely, and a lot of it ends up deposited in the flue, right up to the top of the chimney. I had a coworker that took pallet wood home, burned a lot of it in his fireplace. One night, his neighbors called the fire department, as he had a chimney fire from all of that built up sap. Someone made a home video of it, and it looked like the flame from a jet engine! They saved his house, but there was a lot of heat damage, and the chimney had to be destroyed and rebuilt.
As you all can tell, I don't give a fig about the carbon footprint nonsense, only about fire safety. The world has been heating and cooling on it's own for 3.8 billion years before we came along. And I don't think we can be blamed for the global warming now occurring on Mars, either.
Posted by: Bob in San Diego | October 9, 2008 8:29 AM
Wood burners in the UK attract 0 carbon tax as they are apparently carbon neutral, burning wood releases the same amount of co2 into the air as leaving it to rot on the floor would. It also attracts a lower rate of VAT for purchase and install of the heaters/burners.
Posted by: TimC | October 9, 2008 9:33 AM
Wood burners in the UK attract 0 carbon tax as they are apparently carbon neutral, burning wood releases the same amount of co2 into the air as leaving it to rot on the floor would. It also attracts a lower rate of VAT for purchase and install of the heaters/burners.
Posted by: TimC | October 9, 2008 9:33 AM