6/30/2012

The farce of going green



Save Gaia, save the environment, protect the earth, go green. All these beautiful slogans are good only as slogans. Many people are crazy enough to use less water, save on a piece of plastic bag, a few empty cans, and think they could save the earth while on the other hand the big boys, the industries, the govts, are wasting precious resources without battling an eyelid in the name of growth and progress.

How many cars are scrapped in good working conditions daily? And think, how many plastic bags or tin cans needed to be saved to replace a good working car that is being scrapped?

How many handphones are being dumped or thrown away daily? Again, how many plastic bags and paper bags and tin cans are needed to produce one of these handphones that are thrown away? How much water and electricity needed to be saved to manufacture one handphone?

Look at the number of high capacity engine cars running around and burning fuel when a smaller engine car would do the same trick. How much resources and petrol are consumed unnecessarily to produce such high power cars? Are they necessary except to be toys of the rich?

Think, how many good condition blocks of flats that could last another 100 years are being pulled down only to be rebuilt? How much resources and energy are needed to build, destroyed and rebuild when it was unnecessary?

Think, how much food and resources would be needed for consumption if another 1m people are brought into the island for growth? Want to save some more plastic bags, paper bags and tin cans?
In order to really save the world, one main thing to do is to control population growth. Each person brought into this world is going to consume lots of energy and raw material, much more than to produce millions of plastic bags. The main destroyer of mother earth is population growth. And a corollary to this is economic growth and wasteful production for economic growth. A lot of economic activities are wasteful and unnecessary, even the new botanic garden.

Who is kidding who about saving the world? If this island stops importing more people, it will save many thousand or million times more than what it needs to do to cut on savings of plastic bags or tin cans or other equivalents.

25 comments:

virgo49 said...

Every year, burn the forests and pollute the environment.

How many plastic bags & etc not to use to save the environment??

All these are slogans are just hpocrisy

Anonymous said...

Oh, the pretenders capn say anything: the non pretenders need not follow, just do as You like.
The World Will not doom becos the environment is been damaged. Mankind is the Destroywe.

Anonymous said...

Right, and look at our Ministers going for holidays or studies trips or even worse, our military driving our hardwares during National Day.

What a joke. What do you think, Mr Minister.

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

Planet earth ~ 4 billion years old

Human species (homo sapiens) ~ 100,000 - 200,000

Time Humanbeings have been in existence 0.0025-0.005 % of the TOTAL time of planet earth. And we are dominant and arrogant to the point of thinking ourselves "separate" from Nature and The Universe. (religious people especially)

The wonderful George Carlin delivers a compelling "science lesson", to remind those who know, and to educate those who don't, but as always hilariously entertaining.

Anonymous said...

Save the Wild Boar first. 95 % of the people wants to kill them. Saving the world is a lost cause. The plastic bag you save is nothing compared to the plastic bottle used to house water or soft drink. If you want to save bring your own container to buy soap detergent and shampoo ...... Don't buy that the way, but again it is a lost cause. Because nothing will change this.

Anonymous said...

Yes, I totally agree that the slogans of saving the earth and the environment are all a load of shit, all shit and nothing but shit.

Governments care less about pollution than about increasing domestic product. They are more concern with helping companies sell more handphones, cars, computers and other consumer products.

You and me can use less plastic, metal or paper, but what the big MNCs and SMEs are doing will negate all those efforts to save the earth.

It is all about us saving for them to exploit with sweet talk and wonderful slogans.

Anonymous said...

This is the Pretend Action Party.

We reduce use of plastic bags.
So the Pro Alien Millionaires will look good when they rub shoulders with politicians from the big countries.

Eisen How Ah said...

Have a read of Sacred Economics by Charles Eisenstein (free download at http://sacred-economics.com). It explains why destroying the planet is an economic necessity under our current system, and what we can do to stop it (summary: fundamental and not cosmetic changes needed, but the opportunity may come sooner than later with the collapse of today's broken system).

Extremely interesting and thought-provoking arguments in there. Check it out (no, I'm not being paid to drive traffic there).

Ⓜatilah $ingapura⚠️ said...

Your plastic bag came from a dinosaur lah, which was made of carbon, which came from stars.

Here is the causal chain:

Helium burning in stars --> Carbon nucleosynthesis --> star goes supernova --> solar system and planets formed from debris --> carbon combines with other atoms to form organic compounds --> dinosaurs and other life --> die and change chemically --> oil --> petrochemical industry ---> PLASTIC BAGS.

Plastic bags are good for storing things and suffocating people.

Paper bags are more effective in hiding ugly faces because plastic tends to be translucent. Paper is more opaque.

Everything you use on this planet, comes fro the planet by converting something from nature, into something we use.

No species is immune from extinction. Every year, about 1000's of KNOWN species goes extinct. "Known" because science has only discovered a small amount of the estimated TOTAL AMOUNT of species (i.e.most is UNknown)

All claims have to be analyzed in the context of objective reality.

When governments get into the game, you can rest assured that it is because of the actions of "special interest groups" who want to tke away your liberty so they can control what you do, what you eat, what you buy, how you use energy.

3 words:

FUCK
THAT
SHIT

No one species -- especially the arrogant humans who over estimate themselves all the time -- is capable of "destroying the planet". Even ice ages, massive volcanic eruptions which are several orders of magnitude BIGGER and MOR DESTRUCTIVE than the puny nuclear bombs humans invented, could not "destroy the planet".

Get fucking real. Look at the science.

Anonymous said...

yah, look at the number of schools less than 20 yrs old, in good condition which have been pulled down to build new schools.They say it cost more to renovate than to pull down & rebuild.All bullshit.How come they didn't pull down all the old universities like Oxford, Cambridge etc.Look at the number of good solid condos which have been pulled down in enbloc sales.All for the papies money god.Saving the environment my foot !

Eisen How Ah said...

Well @Matilah, we like George Carlin too but the point is not that the planet will, like, asplode OMGWTFBBQ!!!!!1!! More that it will cease to be able to support the current number of humans in the style to which we have become accustomed.

We're living on the uphill part of the spike of an unprecedented draw-down of fossil fuel storage built up over millions of years. It is the only reason why there can be 7 billion humans here. Agriculture, transport, manufacturing, cities, all cannot exist in their current forms without those fossil fuels. What we think of as "normal" is a blip of around 200 years in the, what did Carlin say, 100,000 or 200,000 year history of our species.

So yeah, the planet will survive. It's just the humans and numerous other species that are about to find it tough going as the fossil fuels run out. Chew on that beaver for a minute, eh?

allthatjazz said...

both anon5.35 and Eisen How Ah make very valid points.

the constant pulling down and rebuilding of buildings here is one of the most wasteful actions. the fact that one can en bloc an estate immediately after it has its TOL is astonishing.

that one can en bloc or raze any building that is less than 50 years old for no reason except to get a fast return on one's buck is highly irresponsible. now more than ever as sand is getting scarcer and scarcer. the wastage is stunning.

then there's the building of humongous houses. out goes the garden. and because houses are allowed to be built so close to each other, air flow is cut and more air-conditioning is needed. more energy is used.

(if there is a shortage of electricity, who will get it? those air-con gardens or homes? ditto for water.)

we wont even go into the sheer wastefulness of scrapping cars that still run well, or junking mobile phones each time a new model goes on the market.

50 years ago, sci-fi writers were warning of how the rapidly increasing population would create shortages of resources and affect pple's lives adversely. now Scientists are sounding a warning - and they have data to prove their point.

as for spore's attitude to the wild boars, it's disgusting. we've invaded their homes, now we want to not just chuck them out, we want to kill them. meanwhile, we whine about foreigners invading our home land and displacing us,
squeezing our space.

those staying in the vicinity of the boars should be charged extra for the privilege of having these wild creatures at their doorstep. boars are not something you can add to the allures of a condo/housing estate, like a pool or tennis courts or saunas.

if we focused instead on doing more with less, if we werent trying to increase the population, the boars could have their home and we could keep ours too!

Anonymous said...

The 6 billion primates will make quite a pool of fossil fuel one day.

Anonymous said...

In any case extinction of the species cannot be prevented, only poatponed.

So, in my personal opinion, just enjoy the days you have here and do what the Romans do.

After all, we have more than enough worries plaguing our life than devoting the time we have here on earth trying to stop a natural cycle.

If they are serious, Governments can and should just ban the production or import of things that pollute the environment, but in reality they cannot and won't do that. It is not in their interest to do so.

So, what the hell!

Anonymous said...

I note that all the speakers in recent CNA forum avoided mentioning one of the biggest factors in Asian enviroment,that is China with such massive land mass and population,probably they just tried to be political correct as always.

Anonymous said...

Religion vs. Science's Answers to the Big Questions
www.robertlanzabiocentrism.com/religion-vs-sciences-answers-to-the...

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

China is a big consumption of raw material and resources. They have just started to do so in the last 10 or 20 years. With 1.3b population living at a standard far from the westerners and a country underdeveloped, they will need to do so for its people.

But China has taken serious measures to curb consumption in the stop at 1 policy. They are not crazy like Sinkies that want to populate the world at all cost with no regards to the dire consequences. And as a new country they are developing new green technologies to go forward.

The Europeans, esp the Americans, have been wasting raw material and resources for a few centuries. America is the worst culprits, over consuming and wasting in all things for centuries and still doing so.

And they wanted to clamp down on Asian countries and keep them at poverty level so that they can continue to live in abundance and waste in abundance.

The consumption and pollution by the Americans is still way far ahead of all the Asian countries combined.

Chua Chin Leng aka redbean said...

And welcome to the blog for the new bloggers like virgo49, Eisen How Ah and allthatjazz.

Eisen How Ah said...

Hi Redbean, your statement ("the consumption and pollution by the Americans is still way far ahead of all the Asian countries combined") might possibly be correct on a cumulative basis but not on an annual consumption basis. Since we Asians want the funner (Steve Jobs word) things in life and are prepared to work like hell to get 'em. And those things are made with fossil fuels.

I find that if you have no data, the conversation on important topics like these degenerates into "yeah it is" / "nah it isn't". So, here's another book recommendation: Sustainable energy- without the hot air" by David Mackay, of the UK Royal Society (science dudes). You can get it free from http://www.withouthotair.com/download.html.

It shows the calcs for the cumulative amount of fossil fuels used by each country, since we started digging up the ground for them, as well as the amount each country uses annually.

Note the chart on page 13 ( http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/withouthotair/c1/page_13.shtml ) showing that Singapore has the second highest greenhouse gas emissions per person of all Asian countries, after Turkmenistan. Not good for a country with no national oil company, and more importantly, far worse than the place our lovely government likes to put down and compete against - Hong Kong.

The message of the book is that all the non-fossil fuel energy sources won't be enough to meet our current consumption needs. So as the easy-to-extract fossil fuels run out, we are going to be looking at reductions in consumption for everyone in the developed world even if we maximise renewable energy production.

It's that simple. And we haven't even mentioned global warming that will turn the 99 year Sentosa Cove gin palaces / whore traps into maybe 40 year rentals.

So start today. Eat less meat, fly less planes, turn your air con temperatures up, turn off your lights and devices when not in use, scrap and recycle any useless hulking SUVs you have lying around, repair not replace your stuff, walk to the shops more ( there's no parking spaces there anyway).

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