‘Carbon footprints’ are measures of ‘change’ that people make to the environment and are assumed to be a bad thing by definition in the modern environmental movement. Any benefits of emitting carbon are ignored and any potential negatives are exaggerated. There is no attempt to actually quantify the positives or negatives, but not because such a measurement is scientifically uncertain and difficult. The science is irrelevant. This is a social/political/religous movement now. If science was important, environmentalists would stop trying to ‘save’ the planet (hold it in stasis) and start promoting it.

Best regards,
ClimateSanity

I’ll elaborate. Lower mainland land is a bit of premium when one is surrounded by moutains and an ocean. However, in the north there are many abandoned open pit mines. Most have rail spurs to them or at least right of ways. One of BC Rail’s, (now CN) main problems is they only haul product 1 way, north to south. Predominantly it is natural goods such as coal and wood pulp in various forms going to the more populous areas in the south and around the world. Hence, CN’s productivity can immediately be no greater than 50% (measured on a $ basis). CN would love to find something to haul back north. Put the garbage on those trains, dump in an closed open pit mine and a couple of thouand years from now, you might come close to filling one up. A couple of thousand years beyond that you’d be left with a nice big hole filled with dirt. (yes, I realize I’m simplifying). There are some problems such as the rail cars have to be spotless to carry pulp. I’m sure they have cleaning facilites up north and can build that into the price. I GUARANTEE you the cost of doing that is less than burying it in the lower mainland and/or recycling. I’ll bet a lot of money the only reason recycling makes sense is because it is less expensive than burying it in a LOWER mainland landfill. It is only by environmental lobbying we don’t do what is best for the environment. The other way, the tax payer spends less and a company makes money. . . Makes more money. Hmmmm, maybe that’s the root of the evil?!?!?!

Side note; I find it interesting the BC Gov’t has bought into the AGW, has labelled it the biggest crisis facing human beings and won’t allow more coal power plants to be built. Yet, they continue to allow the export of coal around the world. I guess jobs in the politically sensitive interior are far more important than the survival of the human race. Hypocrites.

As for paper, well every time somebody recycles paper they create a mess of dirty sludge, burn up extra energy and make it less profitable for another person to plant a tree which will take CO2 out of the atmosphere until when fully grown the tree is converted into paper. The most environmentally friendly thing to do with waste paper is to bury it in properly managed landfill site. I know that landfill sites look horrible when they are being filled, but on completion they usually become wonderful protected nature reserves.

Other than aluminum (which we know has a net benefit for recycling it) what kind of net benefit is there to recycling the other “common” items, such as glass, plastic, paper, etc? By net benefit, I mean as far as amount of materials recovered, cost, and any kind of substantial energy savings.

I dug up some data for New Zeland, but to be quite honest I’m skeptical. Here’s the link:

Recycling Benefits

This is something that I am merely curious about, as I’ve often wondered if the plastic I throw in my recycling bin is useful, or being shipped to a landfill in China somewhere (as some ewaste-cyclers have done)

i presume that is a true-false type of statement. i think that 80 percent answering the same way on T/F statements shows that at least they took the test seriously. from the examples given, it seems like the intended answer was obvious – sacrifice reduces global warming. maybe they had some tricky ones on the test, like, ‘not hitting the crosswalk button when crossing the street leads to global warming’. i could see that one tripping me up. or ‘beavers increase global warming when they cut down trees to make their dam’. that’s a toughie. or ‘glacial advancement/recession is only acceptable when controlled by anthropogenic climate management’. enough of those and maybe i couldn’t figure out what they wanted.

“In the EF student group, this improved to a 53% correct response.”

was the correct response to chain themselves to the front gate of the bottling plant and throw feces at the workers?

considering the disparity between the control group and the ef subset group, i’d say the test easily proves that brainwashing is effective on roughly 53 to 80 percent of the college population.