Why Seattle's bag tax and polystyrene ban are a bad ideas

I am not sure a totally buy this opinion piece... I hate plastic bags! I invariably will buy 1 or 2 items at a drug store only to have to fight to keep the clerk from putting my purchase in a plastic bag.

Full story in the Seattle Times is HERE

"When the currently free bags are taxed at 20 cents, we will buy reusable bags, probably by the millions. Most of these (generally made in China) are made from woven or flat sheet fabric polypropylene (type 5 plastic). It is extremely durable, but unlike the bag it will replace (type 2 plastic), it is not generally recyclable. Furthermore, because each one of these reusable bags requires as much as 300 times more resources to produce than a "bad" bag, it is entirely possible that the bag tax will result in an increase in oil use and carbon emissions.

The ban will not result in the disappearance of polystyrene foam. The vast majority of it will still be packed around all the things we order online. The city's own study shows that the ban will cause higher costs (69 percent more), more energy use (114 percent more), more carbon emissions (134 percent more) and more generated waste (140 percent more). What are we gaining here?"

Houston Resists Recycling, and Independent Streak Is Cited

Ah, this brings out the curmudgeon in me. Something "environmentalist" that really helps the environment and reduce reliance on foreign resources - recycling - that is not taken advantage of. I wonder how many of my neighbors that never have a recycling bin out (we always have 3+) for our bi-weekly pick-up are worried about fictional environmental problems while they throw out their paper and cans? Houston does not accept glass (e.g. Dave's beer bottles) which we must hall to another town to recycle.

See full article in the New York Times HERE (thanks to Eric)

The city’s shimmering skyline may wear the label of the world’s energy capital, but deep in Houston’s Dumpsters lies a less glamorous superlative: It is the worst recycler among the United States’ 30 largest cities.

Houston recycles just 2.6 percent of its total waste, according to a study this year by Waste News, a trade magazine. By comparison, San Francisco and New York recycle 69 percent and 34 percent of their waste respectively. Moreover, 25,000 Houston residents have been waiting as long as 10 years to get recycling bins from the city.

Wind might have a big impact on our wallets

Barbara and I power our home with wind power. Per Steffy that makes us part of the green crowd and La-Z-Boy environmentalists.

Steffy argues that wind is costly and unreliable and should not make up such a big part of Texas' generation capacity.

He quotes ERCOT, the government entity the manages Texas' electrical grid, as using a cost of $48/MW-hr of wind generated power.

This compares with:
Solar: $180-$230 / MW-hr (per Texas Comptroller's office)
Nuclear/Coal/Renewable: $15-$60 / MW-hr (per Cato Institute)
Conventionally Generate Electricity: $5-$18 / MW-hr, most less than $10 (per Cnet)

Click HERE for Loren Steffy's column

Offshore drilling safer, but small spills routine

Although offshore spills totalled only 2,256 barrels last year (94,752 gallons in ALL the waters surrounding the U.S.) the risk of oil drilling continues to be used as a fake arguement against opening up our east and west coasts to offshore drilling.

As stated in the story, natural (non-human caused) seepage spills 1,700 barrels as day - 26 million gallons a year into the same ocean.

So, in 2007, one of the busiest offshore drilling years on record, human related spills made up just 0.4% of all oil released into the oceans.

Click HERE for full story

Drilling opponents such as Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., have raised the specter of another disaster like Santa Barbara, which fouled beaches and killed thousands of dolphins, seals, birds and other wildlife.

"The technology of the drilling industry may have improved, but offshore drilling is a dirty business and it still leads to oil spills due to failed equipment, aberrant weather or human error on a frequent basis," Feinstein said.

Last year, the industry spilled 2,256 barrels of oil, fuels and chemicals, and during the first half of this year, offshore operators are on a similar course, having spilled 1,114 barrels in five incidents.

The amount spilled by industry pales in comparison with seepage from natural fissures — an estimated 1,700 barrels per day off the coast of North America, regulators note.

Pickens' Plan

Good old T. Boone has issued a plan to cut oil imports by 38% in the next 10 years. In summary he want to use wind power to replace the 22% chunk of electricity generation that uses natural gas and use natural gas to fuel vehicles instead of oil derived gasoline and diesel.

Click HERE for the website.

I read and was inspired by T. Boone Pickens' autobiography when I was a kid. It is good to see this trailblazer still at it.

Global Warming Mongers Brainwashing our Kids!

This article is published in the Heartland Institute's way too anti-environmentalist newsletter. However, it scares me that kids are being brainwashed and frightened with the human caused global warming hoax.

I am amused that they are apparently taught to abbreviate the great evil the same as a slightly lesser evil: Global Warming (G.W.) = G.W. Bush?

Click HERE for the full story

Steria’s Teachings

Global warming “means that if we don’t fix the climate, everything will be destroyed and we won’t be able to survive,” two students wrote. Others found their global warming lessons similarly frightening (all transcriptions are as the students wrote and sent them, uncorrected):

• “I think your fools for denying G.W. you know it could kill us all & you’re just adding to it. I want you to help stop G.W. not increase it.”

• “We are going to tell you about global warming. I don’t care if you don’t want to read, but I’m making you read it you horrible people.”

• “We feel that it is wrong what you are doing. We know that you know that global warming is NOT we repeat NOT a myth, And we think it is selfish that you would take money over yours and your peers lives.”

Study: Global warming may spark more kidney stones

For the full story, click HERE

The next time you feel a sharp, cramping pain in your lower abdomen, spare a thought for your personal carbon footprint.

That's the message from Dallas scientists who predict that as the planet warms during the coming century people will sweat more, not drink enough water to compensate, and therefore develop more kidney stones

The Sunspot Enigma: The Sun is “Dead”—What Does it Mean for Earth?

Read the full story HERE

Dark spots, some as large as 50,000 miles in diameter, typically move across the surface of the sun, contracting and expanding as they go. These strange and powerful phenomena are known as sunspots, but now they are all gone. Not even solar physicists know why it’s happening and what this odd solar silence might be indicating for our future.

In the past, they observed that the sun once went 50 years without producing sunspots. That period coincided with a little ice age on Earth that lasted from 1650 to 1700. Coincidence? Some scientists say it was, but many worry that it wasn’t.

Geophysicist Phil Chapman said pictures from the US Solar and Heliospheric Observatory also show that there are currently no spots on the sun. He also noted that the world cooled quickly between January last year and January this year, by about 0.7C.

Doomed to a fatal delusion over climate change

Click HERE for the editorial in the Australian Herald Sun


"The patient had also developed the belief that, due to climate change, his own water consumption could lead within days to the deaths of millions of people through exhaustion of water supplies."

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Indeed, so fast are the world's emissions growing -- by 3.1 per cent a year thanks mostly to these two giants -- that the 20 per cent cuts Rudd demands of Australians by 2020 would be swallowed up in just 28 days. That's how little our multi-billions of dollars in sacrifices will matter.

Risk: The Science and Politics of Fear

"Everyone who digs into a delicious meal of all-natural organically grown produce is swallowing thousands of chemicals whose effects on the human body aren't fully understood and whose interaction with other chemicals is mysterious," writes a certain Dan Gardner

Why are the safest and healthiest people in history living in a culture of fear?

You Have Nothing To Fear But Fear Itself. In the year following September 11th 1,595 people died on America’s roads, as a direct result of having fled the airports to be safe from terrorism. The homicide rate in England was fourteen times higher in the Middle Ages than it is now. Worldwide, there are fewer than eighty unprovoked shark attacks per year. Poorly wired Christmas tree lights claim more victims than sharks.

Click HERE for story in the Ottawa Citizen

Click HERE for Amazon.com

White House in climate change "cover up"

Full story is HERE

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A leading U.S. Senate Democrat accused the Bush administration on Tuesday of a "cover-up" aimed at stopping the Environmental Protection Agency from tackling greenhouse emissions.

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Funny how most media do not preface the phrase "greenhouse emissions" with words like "supposed," "theoretical" of "so-called" - which most media would do with a theory favored by conservatives. And there is no doubt that major impact on global warming by humans is an unproven theory - the debate is NOT over!