The climate change consensus extends beyond climate scientists

[freebeard]

Advanced technologies vs advancing technologies AKA coal vs magic photovoltaic rocks.

*History may record that the free market was one of the most stupid ideas man could have come up with,at least after 1776.Adam Smith never lived to see a time when man's technology and the 'invisible hand' could quite literally destroy the very resource base on which it derives it's sustenance.
*Our climate challenge is largely due in part to ignorance on the part of consumers.Which rewarded ignorant industries.Which is in part due to lack of education.Which is due in part to the investment portfolio of the educator's pension fund,which is financed by profits from pistons and internal combustion,etc.. There may come a time when we can no longer afford some of the 'natural' consumer freedoms we've enjoyed in the past up until now.Policy will have a lot to do with that.So far,hedonic adaptation is King.

Politics follows culture. The 'invisible hand' is not a bad concept, it just needs to be updated for the age of Artificial Intelligence. Bucky Fuller predicted that we would willingly fall in line. The only thing holding us back is nihilism.

[Xist]

I know that notifications are not comprehensive, but I have been checking on fewer and fewer threads while I try to focus on projects, and I have received fewer and fewer notifications. I happened to read something in the newspaper I thought I would share here and the last e-mail I received about this thread was a week ago. Little did I know there have been twenty-five posts since then.

I am still replacing my timing belt!

I skimmed...

Anyway, China is the largest purchaser of recyclables, but Arizonans have been mixing more and more garbage with their recycling. Fewer places are purchasing recyclables and cities need to hire more people to sort out garbage, so it is becoming unprofitable--if they can even find a purchaser.

Phoenix is the sixth largest city in the U.S. and can work with large companies that find consumers, but the other cities cannot. They keep talking about poor Flagstaff, which is apparently not filled with hippies, despite every appearance to the contrary.

Phoenix has sent over 200,000 tons of contaminated recycling to the dump. Smaller cities sometimes do the same with clean recycling when they cannot find a buyer. China now demands that recyclables be 99.5% pure and nobody can meet that standard.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...mpe/752442002/

In an opinion piece I found when I was looking up that above article states:

[A] city ordinance prohibits municipal recycling at apartment complexes[...]. A 2015 Arizona law actually outright bans any requirement for Valley cities to offer service at multifamily residences.

https://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...bly/761822002/

Was that sponsored by dump magnates or something? Landfill barons exist, right?

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Xist

Anyway, China is the largest purchaser of recyclables, but Arizonans have been mixing more and more garbage with their recycling. Fewer places are purchasing recyclables and cities need to hire more people to sort out garbage, so it is becoming unprofitable--if they can even find a purchaser.

Phoenix has sent over 200,000 tons of contaminated recycling to the dump. Smaller cities sometimes do the same with clean recycling when they cannot find a buyer. China now demands that recyclables be 99.5% pure and nobody can meet that standard.
https://www.azcentral.com/story/news...mpe/752442002/

In an opinion piece I found when I was looking up that above article states:


https://www.azcentral.com/story/opin...bly/761822002/

Was that sponsored by dump magnates or something? Landfill barons exist, right?

Have you ever lived in an apt complex before? People use the recycle bin as a garbage dump. At my complex, the recycle has a slot to push recyclables through, while the garbage bin requires a key and has no access except by opening the door. Lazy people are just going to dump everything in the recycle.

So, recycled goods require sorting since people are lazy/ignorant/uninterested. If it requires sorting, why not just have all garbage sorted and not separate out the recyclables? Instead of asking every consumer to spend time sorting these things, leave it up to machines and experts.

Finally, most recyclable goods are not worth recycling. The only reason to recycle glass is to prevent broken bottles from littering the ground. We're in no danger of running out of the raw materials for glass, and from an energy perspective it is more costly to recycle it than to just make a new container.

Likewise, I doubt most paper goods are worth recycling. How much energy goes into sorting, transporting, shredding, cleaning, and remanufacturing paper into new paper goods compared to growing new pulp trees and turning them into paper products?

Some things are worth recycling, and those tend to be metals. You don't even have to force people to recycle most of them because they have intrinsic value. People will steal the wiring from homes just to cash in on the recycle value of the copper. If recyclables have value, there would be no need for laws compelling recycling, and people would either be stealing the resources, or be willing to pay for them.

[Xist]

When I lived in an apartment I kept my recyclables in bins and drove them to a recycling center. The complexes never had recycling.

I would complain to management if dumpsters were under lock and key. Do they want to walk out to the dumpster with the key dozens of times a day?

When I was in Germany they fined you for contaminating the recycling and for throwing away recyclables, which was great, because I saw German employees throw recyclables from the recycling into the garbage.

The problem described in the article I shared is that recyclables in Arizona are already contaminated and it is not cost-effective to pay people to sort it.

If you throw everything together the paper and cardboard are ruined and it would take too much time and money to clean the rest.

I guess that metal recyclers could just pay you nothing for your scrap, melt everything, and deal with 50% slag.

Win-win?

[sendler]

Originally Posted by aerohead

Saturday,I finally got to watch Nate Hagen's,April,2017 Earth Day lecture at Rochester,N.Y. on YouTube.
I appreciate the link! Thanks!
Some comments:
*My opinion is that some of the presented data are contextual.
*As with many economic presentations,critical externalities are omitted,which skew the significance of some of the data.

There is only so much time to elaborate on each of 200 slides in an hour. He explains things much better in the 100+ hours of his honors course. The 1,000 pages in his upcoming books will be a great help in understanding and disseminating of all of this whenever he finally gets them done.
.
https://youtu.be/YUSpsT6Oqrg
.

[oil pan 4]

I take all my junk that I think can be resold to the local agricultural auction and take the worthless junk recyclables to the scrap yard for hard currency.
Last week at the local agricultural auction a pile of fairly worthless looking 6ft long ibeams sold for $650. Why, I have no idea.

So now I'm buying junk like what I see being sold at auction from the scrap yard for 7 cents a pound and dragging to the auction yard and dropping it off.
I guess you could say I'm a professional recycler now.

[redpoint5]

Originally Posted by Xist

I would complain to management if dumpsters were under lock and key. Do they want to walk out to the dumpster with the key dozens of times a day?

The problem described in the article I shared is that recyclables in Arizona are already contaminated and it is not cost-effective to pay people to sort it.

The dumpster at my complex uses the apt key to open the dumpster door. The recycle bin is always overflowing, despite being empties every couple days, and probably contains 50% garbage. However the dumpster is never overflowing because it compacts, and because people prefer to throw their garbage into the recycle bin.

Recyclable materials not worth recycling certainly is a problem. I'm sure there is a better future solution, but the way we manage recycling in many municipalities is not good. I don't really blame a municipality that has come to the conclusion that recycling certain things doesn't make financial sense.

Originally Posted by oil pan 4

So now I'm buying junk like what I see being sold at auction from the scrap yard for 7 cents a pound and dragging to the auction yard and dropping it off.
I guess you could say I'm a professional recycler now.

That would be a professional reuser. Recycling is when you take it to the scrap yard and they melt it down to make other products. Auctioning it off to be repurposed is an example of reuse.

In order of efficiency; reduce, reuse, recycle.

[oil pan 4]

I just call it money.
And now I do most of the trailer towing with my leaf so as long as I only do 1 load a day fuel costs are almost $0.

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by redpoint5

Sure, these are "silent" ways that renewables are being expanded through Federal policy, but they appear to have an effect. Perhaps not as much of an effect as some would like, but quadrupling renewable energy in a decade seems pretty effective to me.



I'll point out that the end of every story is that everyone dies.

Perhaps we could all live as cavepeople with very limited numbers and enjoy 500 million years of adequate resources. Or, we could get smashed by an asteroid within that time-frame.

Bacteria don't multiply as sparingly as possible and slowly consume a food supply, saving it so that their colony can persist as far into the future as possible. Nature has chosen resource consumption as the best strategy for survival, and the bacteria's best bet is to eat while the food is there.

Consumption is not an invention of capitalism, it's encoded into DNA, and is neither virtuous or evil.

I'm all for wise and efficient use of resources, and I'll admit that in many ways we fail to wisely utilize these resources. That said, innovation and technological progress involves consuming more than subsistence levels of resources, and inevitably involves waste.

I do believe there are non-catastrophic solutions to seemingly runaway resource consumption, as the declining rate of population growth suggests. There are limits to resources, but there is no limit to resourcefulness.

*Wow! thanks for the homework on the federal initiatives,tax credits,etc..
It explains how there might be a silent consensus as to what we ought to be doing,and move in that direction without rattling investors (economy).With the equivalent of an oil depletion allowance for alternate/renewable energy,the market is incentivized to go where the new money will be found,incrementally,over time,allowing capitalists to modify their investment portfolios over an acceptable time frame.
*Yes,absolutely,the days on Earth are numbered.The time scale is unknowable,but no one will get out alive.(AeroStealth attempts to address this in his new sci-fi novel).
*I've never settled on a number for a natural carrying capacity,sustainable population for Earth.The World Bank,at one time,thought we'd settle out at around 10-billion,if those in the developing world had confidence that their children would make it to adulthood and outlive them.I don't know what parameters they used,nor assumptions.They may have made projections for a planet that no longer exists.
*If the population continues to grow exponentially,we will be like bacteria in a petri dish,consuming all available resources and extincting ourselves.Historically,when communities were stressed,conflict between the haves and the have-nots ensued.In the animal world,numbers increase to the natural carrying capacity.We have technology that complicates the calculus.
*After 1890,and the 'frontier' was 'closed' in the USA,there was no longer a physical place where people under population stress could escape to.Mass-marketing was born then and there,to create an 'internal' world of hedonic adaptation for Americans to go to,where consumerism could purchase short term endorphins and dopamines to distract us from our lives which sucked.Vance Packard wrote largely on this theme in the 1950s.Today,you see this same psychological juggernaut at work on TV,cable,satellite,radio,print media advertising,along with television and motion picture product placement advertising.We can purchase any number of approved lifestyles (killing styles).And we go from fix to fix,in an endless cycle.And Shylock will lend at interest if you don't happen to have the income to support it.
*Innovation will be something to watch as things unfold.'Necessity is the mother of invention' has now become,'The necessity of invention is a mutha.'
*We are a technological society,and as my dad would say,'It's a lot easier going forward,'I suspect that we'll see new technology in the pipeline to at least cushion our transition to who knows where.
Thanks again for all the data.We can use all we can get!

[aerohead]

Originally Posted by freebeard

Advanced technologies vs advancing technologies AKA coal vs magic photovoltaic rocks.



Politics follows culture. The 'invisible hand' is not a bad concept, it just needs to be updated for the age of Artificial Intelligence. Bucky Fuller predicted that we would willingly fall in line. The only thing holding us back is nihilism.

*We don't know anything before Sumer,except for maybe China.For the Chinese,the military industrial complex was the beginning of statecraft.The capacity for defense or conquest undergirded the entire structure of power.
Sun Tsu's Art of War is still a staple for military academies and corporate boardrooms today.
*Much has been written on the Roman Empire.In addition to headcount conscription and warfare,they had a system of client/patron relationship,benefiting senators and business,which today is reflected in modern government and rule of law.Non-persons which have wealth and more of a vote than real people can hire lobbyists to do there bidding in Congress.
*Elections and re-elections are made on this money stream.
*Capitalism dates to at least,the joint-stock corporate slave-owning gladiator industry in Rome,and has worked for some.It's probably the most expensive way to get anything done.Adam Smith didn't trust it.As he wrote the Wealth of Nations,our forefathers were fighting a revolutionary war,in part,to throw off the burden of taxation to subsidize business losses of the British East India Company.(The Revolutionary War against Armed Capitalists)
*If all data were inputted into,to,say the cloud,it would be interesting to see what kind of decisions came out if we got to ask the questions.
*If we actually had education it would be very interesting to see what human behavior looked like.Here in Texas,critical thinking is legally banned from public school curriculum,which defeats the premise of democracy,which depends upon an informed populace.
*Nihilism is alive and well.I know plenty who are addicted to it.It's an easy path once begun.