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Not As Environmentally Friendly As Promised

One thing leads to another ... Problems arising from past attempts to protect the environment undermine current prospects for protecting the current environment.

This North Carolina seaside city's beaches are eroding away. They can no longer replenish their beaches' sand using federal funds because they can no longer take sand from a protected area. The Army Corps of Engineers stepped in to locate a source of sand offshore. The source area they found is riddled with hundreds of thousands of tires that drifted away from artificial reefs constructed decades ago. It will be ever more costly to harvest the seabed sand because of the tires, and the tires themselves represent a chemically toxic threat to the marine ecosystems they were sunk to help protect.

FULL STORY: https://www.wral.com/wrightsville-b...-of-thousands-of-tires-in-the-ocean/20400638/
And not just when tyres are dumped into the sea. . . I looked this up a while ago, and something like 300,000 tons of air pollution are generated from vehicle tyre's. Hardly ever gets mentioned!
 
Can't we just inflate our tyres with pure CO2? That should help store some of it.
 
The report, which was, in addition to Chancel, authored by Thomas Piketty, Emmanuel Saez, and Gabriel Zucman, also found that wealth inequality had a strong correlation to carbon emissions and climate change goals. The poorest half of the population in rich countries is already at (or near) the 2030 climate targets in terms of emission rates, but that’s not the case for the top 50%.

Rationing by price, the bottom half cant afford to pollute, the top half carries on as normal
wile telling everyone else they have to do more.
:omr:
In the North West of the UK where we live there is serious concern amongst charities and other professionals about what will happen over next winter, when energy costs are due to sky rocket. I can well imagine there will be excess deaths amongst the bottom half due to their inability to keep warm and healthy. Will be the same in other regions I'm sure.
 
Can't we just inflate our tyres with pure CO2? That should help store some of it.
CO2 is basically plant food though. We learnt that in the most basic early lessons in science in school.
Plants breathe in CO2 and absorb light during photosynthesis and convert it (along with water and other minerals) into chemical energy, producing oxygen and energy-rich organic compounds.
And warmer periods in history have occurred to coincide with increased plant growth.
And very few people die of it being too warm - mostly being too cold is the killer.

We shouldn't store CO2 - if anything we need more of it. And more trees.

(Of course waiting for the howls of derision from the green fanatics who will no doubt attempt to bully everyone with a bunch of horse-feather climate change 'data' accusing me of wanting to kill our children or some such nonsense.
Don't bother, you're wasting your time.)
 
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Fascinating article - link to whole thing is under the pic.

“Lithium is one of the key components of building (car) batteries and I wanted to photograph the worldwide biggest examples of lithium evaporation sites in the lithium triangle of Chile, Bolivia and Argentina.”

"Why is lithium extraction bad for the environment?"
"Any type of resource extraction is harmful to the planet. This is because removing these raw materials can result in soil degradation, water shortages, biodiversity loss, damage to ecosystem functions and an increase in global warming.
But when we think of extraction, we think of fossil fuels like coal and gas. Unfortunately, lithium also falls under the same umbrella, despite paving the way for an electric future.. Lithium can be described as the non-renewable mineral that makes renewable energy possible - often touted as the next oil."
"According to a report by Friends of the Earth (FoE), lithium extraction inevitably harms the soil and causes air contamination. As demand rises, the mining impacts are “increasingly affecting communities where this harmful extraction takes place, jeopardising their access to water,” says the report."

1659885754406.png

https://www.euronews.com/green/2022...s-reveal-the-dark-side-of-our-electric-future

This is one of the production sites as shown on google maps.
this is just one of them and is not the biggest - an area of about 12 x 14 miles is used here, but it extracts from a large area of land around it.
1659886426608.png

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place...23dc!8m2!3d-23.8634189!4d-69.1328491?hl=en-GB
 
Goals get announced, not because they are achievable, but because they think it sounds good.
Things are never thought through fully, not by big businesses, corporations, or any governments of all flavours.

When the thing happened some few years ago with tumble-dryers bursting into flames, they sent blokes out to engineer a fix to existing machines.
I asked the bloke who did mine if he had a lot of them to do?
He explained that there was only him and one other guy doing the whole of Hertfordshire, they could only do (at best) 4 in a day each, and there were about 30,000 to be done in Herts alone.
A bit of simple calculation led me to find that the work to do all of the machines would only take these 2 guys about 14 years, assuming they didn't both take 4 weeks holiday each year.
 
Where are they going to find the people who will do that job?
Assuming that a heating tech installs 1 a day (at some sites, it may take longer than that), that means they need to recruit over 1600 people. Doesn't sound a lot, but recruiting trained, experienced people is a huge task. And they'd need other staff to support the operation.
Plus, you need a load of equally hard to find fitter to completely replace the existing radiator and piping systems...
 
Where are they going to find the people who will do that job?
Assuming that a heating tech installs 1 a day (at some sites, it may take longer than that), that means they need to recruit over 1600 people. Doesn't sound a lot, but recruiting trained, experienced people is a huge task. And they'd need other staff to support the operation.

Spoke to the uncle a few months ago an old school good Irish builder and he said that its impossible to hit the targets set in Ireland which is same thing but larger scale in UK. He says builders are not there most good ones are in commercial and the grants etc will attract cowboys in their droves. He advised me not to go near any ECO improvements in current times. Also without proper insulation the heat pumps are a waste of time.
 
Spoke to the uncle a few months ago an old school good Irish builder and he said that its impossible to hit the targets set in Ireland which is same thing but larger scale in UK. He says builders are not there most good ones are in commercial and the grants etc will attract cowboys in their droves. He advised me not to go near any ECO improvements in current times. Also without proper insulation the heat pumps are a waste of time.
Yes, many older properties can't be insulated up to the standard required.
 
I did actually see something like this recently. A van filling up with diesel, with EV-Support or something like that on the side.
It wasn't a Tesla branded van, but an independent support service for EV users.
Not a great advert when the support uses petrol/diesel.
 

Brad Pitt foundation agrees on $20.5m settlement to owners of faulty post-Katrina houses


It sounded like a dream come true, complete with a handsome prince riding to the rescue: the construction of 109 new, sustainable, flood-proof and affordable homes in New Orleans’s Hurricane Katrina-ravaged Lower Ninth Ward, all thanks to movie star Brad Pitt.

But the homes that were eventually built fell far short of Pitt’s 2006 promises: they were plagued by mold, electrical fires and unclean water.

On Tuesday, 13 years after Hurricane Katrina victims started moving into the homes, a settlement was reached that will pay $20.5m on behalf of Pitt to homeowners whose properties began to deteriorate almost as soon as they bought them.

Pitt announced the Make It Right project to great fanfare in 2006. The plan was to hire a cast of famous architects to build flashy, environmentally-sustainable homes at the epicenter of Hurricane Katrina’s catastrophic flooding, and sell them to flood victims below cost – starting at $150,000. The Hollywood icon boasted that the houses were “a proof-of-concept for low-income green building nationally, maybe even worldwide”.

But that dream quickly fizzled. The eye-catching architecture was ill-suited to the torrential rainfalls of New Orleans: some of the houses had flat roofs and were missing basic features like rain gutters, overhangs, covered beams, and waterproof paint – causing mold, leaks and rot soon after they were built. While Pitt’s charity initially made repairs, residents say the firm forced them to sign non-disclosure agreements...

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news...-settlement-owners-faulty-post-katrina-houses

maximus otter
 
And, I think I'm correct in saying, that the new radiators need to be larger too.
Yes, I read recently that a UK government report (I've not seen the actual report in fairness though) suggested that fitting a heat pump in an existing property that needed radiators, insulation etc upgrading could cost upwards of £27,000. A quick glance at some adverts for these suggest cost of £8 -18,000 depending on upgrades necessary and taking 2-5 days. There seem to be many pitfalls with these systems such as noise (40-60Db mentioned) time to heat up and so on as well as still needing electricity to run them and circulate water in a wet system. I stayed in a holiday cottage fitted with one and the heating really needs to be running most of the time as it takes a long time to heat from cold and also the temperature of the radiators is much lower than via a gas boiler. Also the colder outside the longer it takes to heat the water which seems a bit of a flaw to me!
It seems that if you want to install in an existing house all you need to do is pay for more efficient insulation, replace all the radiators for larger ones, install solar panels and put up with the fan droning away in the garden most of the time:)
 
Yes, I read recently that a UK government report (I've not seen the actual report in fairness though) suggested that fitting a heat pump in an existing property that needed radiators, insulation etc upgrading could cost upwards of £27,000. A quick glance at some adverts for these suggest cost of £8 -18,000 depending on upgrades necessary and taking 2-5 days. There seem to be many pitfalls with these systems such as noise (40-60Db mentioned) time to heat up and so on as well as still needing electricity to run them and circulate water in a wet system. I stayed in a holiday cottage fitted with one and the heating really needs to be running most of the time as it takes a long time to heat from cold and also the temperature of the radiators is much lower than via a gas boiler. Also the colder outside the longer it takes to heat the water which seems a bit of a flaw to me!
It seems that if you want to install in an existing house all you need to do is pay for more efficient insulation, replace all the radiators for larger ones, install solar panels and put up with the fan droning away in the garden most of the time:)
It'd be cheaper to strip the plaster from the inside walls and put thermal block insulation on and plaster back over it...
 
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Any green scheme to combat climate change must involve spending lots of public money so as someone can make lots of money. Whether it's a good idea or not doesn't matter. The new heating scheme fits the bill perfectly so it'll probably go ahead.
 
Any green scheme to combat climate change must involve spending lots of public money so as someone can make lots of money. Whether it's a good idea or not doesn't matter. The new heating scheme fits the bill perfectly so it'll probably go ahead.
I wonder who is making the money out of this? No prizes for guessing.
 
I wonder who is making the money out of this? No prizes for guessing.
In the case of the wind power station that they tried to build across the road c. 2005, the trail for the money, via the Caymans and a shell company or two, ended up at a Taiwanese Shipping Magnate. One of our number worked in the city and dug this out...
 
Google change reduces airline emissions calculations

‘The company said it made the change following consultations with its "industry partners".’

What the aviation ones saying make it look better?

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62664981
Interesting. From what evidence we have, there's also an affect from contrails, that is water vapour from commercial airliners. After 9/11 there was a temperature fall in north America.

https://edition.cnn.com/2002/TECH/science/08/07/contrails.climate/index.html
(CNN) -- The thin wisps of condensation that trail jet airliners have a significant influence on the climate, according to scientists who studied U.S. skies during a rare interruption in national air traffic after the September 11 terrorist attacks.

During the three-day commercial flight hiatus, when the artificial clouds known as contrails all but disappeared, the variations in high and low temperatures increased by 1.1 degrees Celsius (2 degrees Fahrenheit) each day, said meteorological researchers.

....but I've not seen anything regarding the big drop in flights when Covid got moving.
 
Is there any eco friendly planet saving product that is cheaper than what it is replacing?

Just taken Mrs T's car for an a/c re gas. As it is old and uses a coolant that stangles bees or something it was about £60. The newer planet saving coolant (and if you have these newer systems you can't use the old coolant) is in the order of £110

Surely something, somewhere that is "planet friendly" and is capapble of doing the job as well as whatever it replaces must cost the same or less? But I can't think of any examples.
 
Is there any eco friendly planet saving product that is cheaper than what it is replacing?

Just taken Mrs T's car for an a/c re gas. As it is old and uses a coolant that stangles bees or something it was about £60. The newer planet saving coolant (and if you have these newer systems you can't use the old coolant) is in the order of £110

Surely something, somewhere that is "planet friendly" and is capapble of doing the job as well as whatever it replaces must cost the same or less? But I can't think of any examples.
There are a lot of household items that can be used for cleaning that are probably better than the bought ones. Like vinegar, lemons and baking soda.

But probably anything else is just milking it’s green credentials.
 
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