Is it really green?

I remember when stores first started saying, "Paper or plastic?"- I had the following conversation more than once:
"Plastic."
"I guess you don't care about the Earth."
"Actually, if not reused and recycled properly, paper bags are worse for the planet than plastic."
"That's not true! What do you know about it, anyway?"
"I work in the industry."
"Well, the Vice President says using paper bags is one of the things we can do to save the planet. Who knows more about it, you or Al Gore?"
"Well..."
"GOODBYEHAVEANICEDAY!" (slam)
According to the Daily Mail, I did know more about it than Al Gore- paper bags need to be reused three times to fall below the environmental impact level of plastic bags- and that's assuming you didn't reuse the plastic bag. And that's simply not possible, because the paper handles come off of an third of them between the store and the car- I've learned to stoop and waddle when using paper bags, so that when they rip or the straps fail they'll only have a inch to fall, and hopefully the groceries won't break open.

Then came the cloth bags, with things like "I heart the Earth" on them- now there's a reusable bag that's definitely an improvement over the plastic! Or maybe not... "As a greater amount of energy goes into making a cloth carrier than a polythene one, a cotton bag has to be used 131 times before it has the same environmental impact than its plastic counterpart. And if a plastic bag is re-used as a bin liner, a cotton bag has to be used 173 times - nearly every day of the year - before its ecological impact is as low as a plastic bag on a host of factors including greenhouse gas emissions over its lifetime." I don't know how they got "nearly every day of the year", but if you normally shop once a week, you'd have to use the same cloth bag for three and a half years just to break even with the plastic bag. And that doesn't count the environmental impact of the vivid plastisol designs silkscreened on them- you don't want to know the impact of those chemicals!

Then there's those damn Compact Flourescent bulbs. I've written about them before, here and here, but here's a simpler way to think about it: you've heard the environmentalists' slogan, "Think globally, buy locally"? Well, no CFLs are made locally- all CFLs are imported, all of them.

I know what I'm about to say can be applied to a whole lot of things, but... why can't we think things through before committing so much to them?

Pictures from the spill

A picture is worth a thousand words... in this case, unprintable words. Have a look

Three short videos

of safe, environmentally friendly windmills

Yet more inconvenient truths

Some now say that variations in atmospheric dust levels affect the temperature of the Atlantic ocean far more than global warming. They are claiming that 70 per cent of the change in Atlantic temperature over recent decades has resulted from reduced dust, rather than climate change. What kind of Holocaust-denying, flat-Earth, anti-science right wingnuts are saying this?

"The new analysis comes from scientists in the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the University of Wisconsin. They say that the Atlantic temperature trend has been warmer by approximately a quarter of a degree each decade since 1980: but that most of this is actually because more sunlight is reaching the sea due to reducing levels of dirt in the air above it.
"A lot of this upward trend in the long-term pattern can be explained just by dust storms and volcanoes," says Amato Evan of Wisconsin uni. "About 70 percent of it is just being forced by the combination of dust and volcanoes, and about a quarter of it is just from the dust storms themselves."... The researchers say that predicting what will happen to atmospheric dust levels in future is difficult, with volcanoes notoriously random and African dust storms poorly understood. Nonetheless, according to Amato, future ocean-warming models will need to make allowance for them somehow or their predictions will be well out of whack." (my emphasis)

The Register story here
The actual paper here (requires subscription)

Worst. Idea. Ever.

People sometimes ask me why, see as I'm a Pagan with a greater than average concern for the environment, I prefer the older term "conservationist" to "environmentalist". It's to separate myself from the kind of people who think up things like reusable toilet wipes