Environmental Hypocrites, and Energy Efficient Mansions

I was researching some stuff because I wanted to do a blog post on how I thought Al Gore was a hypocrite because of his global warming message and yet he lives in a 10,000 square foot mansion, but what to my wondering eyes did appear but the monstrous house of John Edwards. Great goblet of fire Harry Potter, this thing is 29,000 square feet. I once worked manufacturing metal roofing in a warehouse that was 27,000 square feet, and we could drive trucks all up in that thing.

John Edwards has been running for president for a while, and he ran for vice last time if you remember. He has run on a campaign of help for the poor. Since I read the New York Times article last year about how he set up a non-profit organization to cure poverty and then used the millions of dollars to jet around the world, I have not trusted him. He appeared with Hillary and Barack in the Sojourners/Call to Renewal non-debate thingy about poverty, and by the sound of what he had to say and the way he said it, I thought he might have had a conversation with his aides back stage before the thing that went something like “What is their big issue? Poverty? For or against? Against? I can do against.” And now I find out he has a six million dollar house that could house the poor populations of some cities. He is not just a hypocrite, he’s a freaking jerk. What a load. There is not much that disgusts me more than people who preach help for the poor, but neglect to actually do anything for them. Jesus was different, he preached for the poor all the live long day, but he was poor himself, and he healed them, and he fed them, and I am pretty sure he actually touched and spoke to them face to face.

So back to Al Gore. Forget “An Inconvenient Truth.” He travels the world as an environmental evangelist and yet his home is massive, and has equally massive utility bills. He is shuttled around in SUV’s and other equally massive vehicles which would be unacceptable to any honest environmentalist. Oh, I see.

The thing is, any house can be green. Any home can be low energy or zero energy building or ZEB. How? Easy. First thing to do is insulate it well, plug all the holes, and install quality low embodied energy insulation (not fiberglass.) Secondly, orient it so as to take best advantage of warming sun in winter. Thirdly, install energy efficient appliances like solar water heaters and low water use plumbing stuff like low flow showerheads and the like. Fourth, generate energy to offset what you use. Any house anywhere can have solar panels in place of standard roof, or solar shingles in place of standard shingles. Rich people like slow Al and slick Eddie can do this stuff. Bill Gate’s mansion, while it dwarfs both Al’s and Eddie’s in size and cost, is quite efficient. It is an earth sheltered home built into a slope at the edge of a lake.

But, some say, Al Gore buys carbon offsets so that all the carbon he creates with his obscenely wasteful mansion gets absorbed somewhere else. This is true. But let me get through this carbon neutral bogusness and expose it for what it really is. It is a way for people with too much disposable income to buy their conscience clean. That’s right, BUY their conscience clean. Like the indulgences Martin Luther so despised, carbon credits do nothing but make rich wasteful (or sinful in Luther’s case) people feel better about stomping all over the rest of the world and hogging energy that could be used to refrigerate vaccines or heat the homes of the less fortunate. Let me ask this question: What else comes out of a power plant besides carbon dioxide? Mercury, sulfur, lead, cadmium, and a whole bunch of other toxic nastiness.

Where are the mercury offsets, where are the acid rain offsets, where are the testicular cancer offsets? I don’t see any of these rich people paying to offset the really important pollutants they create. I can breath carbon dioxide every day of my life, in fact, I produce it as a byproduct of simply being alive. If I breathe heavy metals, I’ll be retarded pretty quick, and dead not long after that.

Gore also pays extra to get green power from the Tennessee Valley Authority. What does this really mean? It means he subsidizes green power, it doesn’t mean he actually uses green power. Power comes from the nearest plant or two, no matter what kind of plant those two are. It’s like having a giant water tank to supply a town, and one supply to the tank comes from the lake, and the other comes from a natural mineral water spring, but here is only one outlet pipe. How long do you think it would work if we said “Pay us more and you can have the mineral water.” It doesn’t make any logical sense, the truth works like this: “Pay us more and we’ll think about putting more spring water in the tank.”

I want to make it clear that I have no problems with rich people as such. I have problems all day with people who are liars and hypocrites. However, I know of very few wealthy people who do not drive giant SUV’s and live in very large houses or large multiple houses. In fact, the only celebrity I know of who lives what they preach is Ed Begley Jr. He lives in a completely solar powered house, is a vegan and rides bicycles and stuff. But the biggest problem I have with the situation is that the world’s global warming evangelist has done very little to actually help the problem, other than just talking about it that is.

Everything I talk about I do, or try to do, or plan to do when I get more money. Al has all the money he needs and all he can do is buy carbon credits from his own company. The key to minimizing the future energy crisis is efficiency and conservation, two things Al Gore’s house lacks.

Now the oil companies say that prices will have to stay high because demand has dropped, go figure.

WiredForStereo

Global Warming is Racist. Review of "The Great Global Warming Swindle"

I have a great little docudrama (documentary) for you to watch, it is the answer to global warming, and you can find it here. It's called The Great Global Warming Swindle. If you want to see my review of it as far as environmentalism is concerned, check out my Sustainable Living Blog.

This review is about the section toward the end of the movie that speaks of how global warming politics is holding back the developing world. Developed countries (those who consume and pollute the most) are trying to disallow the use of fossil fuels for power generation in developing countries because of the global warming potential. However, without abundant sources of energy, they will not be able to industrialize in order to have the money to afford other sources of energy like the United States is now starting to invest in.

I am all for renewable energy as you can find out in my other blog, but my rule is that people come first. People are more important, and people make the world. Meanwhile people are dying, and living in squalor in Africa because they can't afford electrical heating or cooking.

So, what do we need to do? We need to focus on providing aid of the correct kind to third world countries. They need education, food, medicine, and technology. And while we bring them those, we can bring them Jesus. They don't need rules and regulations about what they can and can't build. They need stability and help. They need education and thus about a great many things.

WiredForStereo

The Global Warming Debate Continues

We've heard of Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth, but now there is another global warming docudrama. This one is called The Great Global Warming Swindle. You can view the whole thing on Google Video here. I would recommend that you do.

First, I need to make a single point. Many global warming activists like to say that the debate is over, that we need to stop arguing and do something about the problem. Arguments like this are pure falsehood, and as a person who is dedicated to science (just got two Associate of Science Degrees last Friday,) the debate is NEVER OVER. In science, nothing is ever immutable fact, nothing. Immutable fact comes from religion, not science. Science is study, continual study, always subject to revision on discovery of new information, or falsification of old information. But the debate is never over. It's just not in the nature of science for the debate to be over. That is not the way it works. Ignoring the facts and issues at hand, the debate in science is never over. I'll say it again, there is no end of debate in science, ever. And there is no such thing as a scientific consensus. Science is not up to a vote.

Ok, back to the docudrama. I would like to say that the reason I am calling it a docudrama, and the same reason I call AIT a docudrama is this: both use people, and people are not prone to objectivity. Both are edited, and both are meant to convey a point, not an unbiased reporting of information. Both contain elements of truth, as well as elements of untruth. I have weighed the truth in AIT before, so I'll weigh TGGWS here and now. I have done a little research, and this is my review of the film.

The film makes the point that carbon dioxide levels trail temperature changes by a significant amount to time. I have made this point before, but I my reasons were not as scientifically based as the ones presented in the film. TGGWS states that the reason for this is that the oceans hold tremendous amounts of CO2, and when they warm, they are able to hold less of it and it is released, but this effect is quite a bit delayed because the oceans are enormously large, and warming of them takes hundreds of years. Here's an important point regarding the truth of the film. The expert presented to do most of the backing up for this point has since complained that his view was mischaracterized. He still believes in human caused global warming, and says that as the oceans warm it will only get worse exponentially. This point is well taken, but the science of what he says holds true, and the point that CO2 levels trail temperatures still stands. So the point here is this: The essential tenet of the global warming theory, that CO2 causes global warming, is false. Global warming causes CO2.

I won't go through the entire movie point by point, but I'll explore one more, and that encompasses the nature of carbon dioxide as a greenhouse gas and pollutant. Every oxygen breathing creature on the planet exhales CO2. Every photosynthesizing plant on the planet absorbs CO2. Every living thing on the planet is made of carbon and if allowed to decompose would turn into CO2 among other things. CO2 is a small time greenhouse gas, but CO2 is NOT A POLLUTANT! Pollutants do damage, sulfur, nitrogen, and phosphorus oxides are pollutants that cause acid rain that kills plants, trees, and aquatic life. CO2 on the other hand comes from living things and is absorbed by plants who release oxygen which is breathed by living things which exhale carbon dioxide and the process continues.

Here's an assignment for you. Look up the most potent greenhouse gases. You'll find that water vapor accounts for 36 to 90 percent of the greenhouse effect. Try to outlaw that. You will also find that methane is 17 times as powerful a greenhouse gas as CO2 is, so stop farting.

I believe in living sustainably. I believe in renewable power. I believe in breathing clean air. But the air I breathe only contains 0.05% carbon dioxide, that is until after I breathe it. Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant, it is virtually inert, and the lesser of several greenhouse gases. But here's a thing that environmentalists forget. The rest of the world cannot afford to live carbon neutral. Most of them don't have electricity or running water or access to medical care. And without the industry to create these things, they cannot afford to invest in clean energy. It's a luxury only we in the industrialized world have, and one we should do our best to utilize.

I think there are one of two solutions to this problem. Number one, we allow third world countries to industrialize using their own non renewable reserves and then help them develop renewable energy as quickly as possible ushering in a world technological age where health and comfort abide. Or number two, we build infrastructure for them, relying on their renewable resources alone. And then there's number three, we prevent them from becoming industrialized and continue to force them to live in squalor and poverty, dying of lung cancer from cooking fire smoke, living to the ripe old age of 40. I hate the use of fossil fuels, but what is the option here? People are more important, plus with our support, they can build power plants that have minimal pollution.

Oh, and today when everyone is trying to encourage a one day boycott of gasoline, here's a better idea: buy a Tesla Roadster or a Prius. Those are the ones I recommend.

WiredForStereo

I like Global Warming!!!!

Ok, that title was just to get your attention.

There exists a great debate about global warming. Who caused it, what will happen, and what's Al Gore been eating anyway?

I rented "An Inconvenient Truth" with an open mind. As a sustainable living minded person, I thought it would be a good subject to ad to my repertoire. I didn't immediately buy the thing hook line and sinker, but I thought his points were good and I believed the science. I was at the time very interested in the concept of electric cars (still am) and eliminating gunk in the air is the main benefit of that (as well as electricity being much cheaper than gasoline.)

So, I began my research into global warming. I looked at catastrophic weather changes, I looked at glacial melts all over the world, I looked at CO2 and temperature graphs.... wait, there's something interesting. It appeared to me at that time that CO2 levels seemed to follow global warming cycles, not precede them. This made sense to me. When you compost, the hotter the pile is, the faster it rots, creating more carbon dioxide in the process. When the temperature in the world gets hotter, things rot faster, on land and in the water.

Plants like carbon dioxide, it makes them grow faster, it's the fundamental building block of plants and sugars and food. In fact, many commercial greenhouses boost their CO2 levels to about 1000 ppm, four times the atmospheric level to achieve a substantial increase in production.

An additional point is that CH4 methane (found in cow farts and *gasp* natural gas) is a far greater threat as a global warming gas than is carbon dioxide. But plants don't eat methane.

I have said in the past that I don't buy the world ending alarmism that seems to pervade some circles, but I support global warming because it furthers my goals of a sustainable culture powered by locally generated renewable energy. I stand by that today in true political style, I support something I don't believe in because it helps something I do. It's not hypocritical because I openly espouse the truth and the facts in what I am doing.

Aside from global warming, pollution is a huge problem, NOx, POx, SOx, VOC's, heavy metals from mining and coal power plants and ozone depleting chemicals are all still a huge problem. These are the problems our culture needs to focus on. Carbon dioxide is barely a nuisance (and may be considered fertilizer) whilst entire forests are perishing due to acid rain (see Sweden.)

Yes the planet is warming, yes humans are partially to blame, but the planet will go on, it's we humans who need to rearrange ourselves around it, not it around us. It's a perfectly built system, it's a garden of Eden. We can live on this planet without wrecking it, but even in wrecking it, it can still recover and outlive us.

If you really want to help global warming, STOP EATING MEAT, because that's where most of it comes from.

I hope this is a well reasoned explanation, I would love some comments.
WiredForStereo