Is recycling just a load of BS?

[Cort Haus]

Originally posted by General Ludd
No, you should scrap your honda and walk or ride a bike.

Sheesh, what an obnoxious reactionary.

I love walking, and am happy to take public transport when there it is available. However, I can't carry my musical equipment to gigs and rehearsals. Easy, I hear you say - BAN live music.

I doubt LOTM can take his family on his bike, come to that.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by Cort Haus


Sheesh, what an obnoxious reactionary.

I love walking, and am happy to take public transport when there it is available. However, I can't carry my musical equipment to gigs and rehearsals. Easy, I hear you say - BAN live music.

No, get a wagon. You can build it out of the scrap metal from the honda you just scrapped. Now that is recycling.

Even better - We can build communities that don't revolve around cars. Where you can walk anywhere you need to be, and aren't isolated in suburbia where everyone lives but no one knows one another.

And, incidentally, I was on the metro the other night and on there with me where two musicians carrying a cello, a guitar, and amps strapped on to a buggy.

[Geronimo]

It *is* true however, that the ecological foot print needs to be minimized. I don't think reduction of consumption of goods and services is the answer because goods and services are nice things and I generally oppose reductions in nice things. The answer is reduction of waste production and ever more efficient use of primary resources to produce the goods and services.

Much easier said than done certainly, but doubtless recycling of some kind will play a role in that kind of progress.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by General Ludd



No, you should scrap your honda and walk or ride a bike.

Why are you equating consuming less with using more polluting alternatives? That is completely nonsensical.

You said the ONLY thing that reduces pollution is consuming less. It follows from that that you believe all technologies that DONT consume less are equal in their pollution output, so it does not matter (wrt pollution) whether I choose a more or less polluting alternative. IE a 50s smoke spewer, or the worst possible power plant. If you accept that one of those is "more polluting" than you accept that there are other ways to reduce pollution, in addition to consuming less.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by General Ludd


No, get a wagon. You can build it out of the scrap metal from the honda you just scrapped. Now that is recycling.

Even better - We can build communities that don't revolve around cars. Where you can walk anywhere you need to be, and aren't isolated in suburbia where everyone lives but no one knows one another.

And, incidentally, I was on the metro the other night and on there with me where two musicians carrying a cello, a guitar, and amps strapped on to a buggy.

You rode the metro? Dont you know that uses electricity to run, and is made with steel, plastic, etc? Its just another technical fix, that enables consumer society.

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


You said the ONLY thing that reduces pollution is consuming less. It follows from that that you believe all technologies that DONT consume less are equal in their pollution output, so it does not matter (wrt pollution) whether I choose a more or less polluting alternative. IE a 50s smoke spewer, or the worst possible power plant. If you accept that one of those is "more polluting" than you accept that there are other ways to reduce pollution, in addition to consuming less.

I was speaking mainy in terms of the consumer needing to consume less (to the point of no longer being a consumer). But, to your point, I would argue that coal plants today do not pollute less than they did 50 years ago, they simply pollute in different ways. The scrubbers that prevent certain amounts of pollutants from being released into the smoke don't make them disapear, they simply prevent them from becoming air borne.

Either way, aslong as industry is consuming resources it will be stripping the land and creating toxic and radioactive products (and by-products) that pollute. If there is technology to lessen the amount of total pollution created through the process - which I am skeptical of - it will not be able to compensate for the exponential growth of consumption, and it will not do a thing for the resources being consumed.

[General Ludd]

And on that note, I try not to buy into consumer culture - I try to live with simple needs, and I try to pollute as little as possible, but I don't believe I'm changing the world by doing this. Our society needs to be gutted completely, from the ground up, before any real change is possible.

[Geronimo]

Originally posted by General Ludd
And on that note, I try not to buy into consumer culture - I try to live with simple needs, and I try to pollute as little as possible, but I don't believe I'm changing the world by doing this. Our society needs to be gutted completely, from the ground up, before any real change is possible.

well if it's that bad why not just learn to stop worrying and love the rape of the environment?

[General Ludd]

Hm. I seem to of lost a post there. Maybe I edited instead of making a reply.

Anyways....

You rode the metro? Dont you know that uses electricity to run, and is made with steel, plastic, etc? Its just another technical fix, that enables consumer society.

You can't change the world by living in a barrel, and nor can I make the metro disapear by deciding to walk. The metro was here before I was. It was here before I was even born. It will be gone some day, but that will be the result of a larger collapse or changing of society, not because I chose to walk.

If everyone decided to walk, would it disapear? Maybe. But that's not going to happen so long as our society, our culture, our cities, and everything else, is built around the internal combustion engine and this bizzare fetish we have for needlessly transporting everything as far as we can. We'll eagerly import and export food to and from china, while never once eating anything that's grown by the farmer who lives within the same county.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by General Ludd



I was speaking mainy in terms of the consumer needing to consume less (to the point of no longer being a consumer). But, to your point, I would argue that coal plants today do not pollute less than they did 50 years ago, they simply pollute in different ways. The scrubbers that prevent certain amounts of pollutants from being released into the smoke don't make them disapear, they simply prevent them from becoming air borne.

Either way, aslong as industry is consuming resources it will be stripping the land and creating toxic and radioactive products (and by-products) that pollute. If there is technology to lessen the amount of total pollution created through the process - which I am skeptical of - it will not be able to compensate for the exponential growth of consumption, and it will not do a thing for the resources being consumed.

1. Yeah, I thought you might go after scrubbers. But if the slag from those is buried, where the coal came from, how are we worse off? In any case, there are a range of other technologies that reduce net pollution, I was just giving you what I thought of off the top of my head.

2. Reducing the amount of pollution via technology doesnt solve the resource problem. Yeah, but wasnt it you, just a few posts back, who said that the problem with recycling was that by extending resources, it failed to solve the pollution problem? Which is the constraint, resources or pollution? If we simultaneusly reduce pollution with technical fixes, and resource use via recycling, why couldnt that be sustainable? It might not achieve the best kind of society (anonymity and all that stuff) but it could well be sustainable.

3. Exponential growth of consumption. Sure. Weve reduced enery usage per $ GDP for the last couple of decades, but energy usage grows cause GDP grows faster. But you dont have to have GDP decline or even stop to fix that, all youd need to do would be to slow it down sufficiently.

[Asher]

Do Jewish people recycle?

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by General Ludd
Hm. I seem to of lost a post there. Maybe I edited instead of making a reply.

Anyways....



You can't change the world by living in a barrel, and nor can I make the metro disapear by deciding to walk. The metro was here before I was. It was here before I was even born. It will be gone some day, but that will be the result of a larger collapse or changing of society, not because I chose to walk.

If everyone decided to walk, would it disapear? Maybe. But that's not going to happen so long as our society, our culture, our cities, and everything else, is built around the internal combustion engine and this bizzare fetish we have for needlessly transporting everything as far as we can. We'll eagerly import and export food to and from china, while never once eating anything that's grown by the farmer who lives within the same county.

People by local produce all the time where I live. Not only at farmers markets, but in supermarkets - when its season. You want to buy out of season fruit, you gotta pay a premium - i like to rib QOTM when she buys "airplane fruit" from Chile. But buying undershirts from China, and selling them soybeans, works out pretty well for both parties. When energy runs out, transport prices will rise, and the economics will change. On the other hand oil prices will kill imports of chilean strawberries by air a lot sooner than shipments of soy via ship. And of course both airplanes and ships are more fuel efficient than they used to be.

[lord of the mark]

Originally posted by Asher
Do Jewish people recycle?

G-d, yes.

http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/Judaism/recycling.html

http://www.jewz.com/Artandent/aande.php?text=eco_kashrut.txt

http://www.shalomctr.org/node/1186

[Asher]

[General Ludd]

Originally posted by lord of the mark


2. Reducing the amount of pollution via technology doesnt solve the resource problem. Yeah, but wasnt it you, just a few posts back, who said that the problem with recycling was that by extending resources, it failed to solve the pollution problem? Which is the constraint, resources or pollution? If we simultaneusly reduce pollution with technical fixes, and resource use via recycling, why couldnt that be sustainable? It might not achieve the best kind of society (anonymity and all that stuff) but it could well be sustainable.

My critisism of recycling was that it does not prevent the use of natural resources. If we where to stop taking resources from nature completely, and only recycle what we had already taken out of the earth, it may be possible to sustain a technological society, although I would remain highly skeptical. It would also require a vast reduction of the human population, unless we expect the world to be stable with 9 billion people living in it while only millions of people can live in excess and luxury.

Similarily, it would mean that corporations would no longer be expected to make larger profits than the year before. Growth of the economy, for all intents and purposes, is out of the question so long as you can't fuel it with natural resources. There is, after all, no such thing as a perpetual motion engine - the energy has to come from somewhere, and even assuming that we could recycle with 100% efficiency (which is a fantasy) that would mean that we could not grow any more than we already have.

This is perhaps describing the technological society founded in an equilibrium of a reduced population coming after an economic collapse that you mentioned previously, but I find it much more idealistic and naive than even my hopes.