"GREEN" & "CLEAN" IN AMERICA

    

Dear George...Is it [ever] justified to reach our destination by detouring others?  In our quest to reach our Green, Clean and Organic goals - people in developed countries are compromising the lives of people in countries struggling to develop...

I'm sure if you were President now Mr. Washington, you'd be quite perplexed by our [and the G-7 member countries] obsession with Earth's Environment. After all, very little in the original 13 Colonies was wasted: sugar sacking material made comfy nightgowns, potato sacks neatly covered cabin windows, dogs and cats ate table scraps, pigs were fed vegetable tops, weeds like dandelion made a nice local vintage wine suitable to serve with fish - and all outhouses were strategically positioned downwind and downhill. 

However, with the Industrial Revolution - life on this planet became 200 wild years of inventions and discoveries that went from steam power to the cotton gin to electricity to the telegraph, mass processing steel, oil discovery, enhanced mining with dynamite, the telephone then the light bulb, to the first maned motor powered flight--to the Model T offering travel freedom...Along with the Industrial Revolution there evolved an exploding Middle-Class from the ranks of immigrant tenant farmers, former slaves and indentured Irish servants - who became a completely new subclass--Consumers!

By 1910, intoxicated with hope and growing family businesses and regular paying jobs, as well as newfound education to at least the 6th grade - people previously held back for generations by an oppressive dual social system of either a peasant-class or a noble-class, became drunken shoppers! And shop our great grandparents did, slowed only temporarily by a 1930's depression. People bought; cars, sewing machines, furniture, art, toasters, washing machines, irons, hair dryers, can openers, radios, blenders, televisions then fax machines, computers and cell phones. 

Electricity and the internal combustion engine of the 19th Century later paired with the emergence of the personal credit card in the mid 20th Century - pried opened the entire Universe! Each generation became more nuts than the last one. If there was 'space' on the VISA the vast majority of North America was at a mall, somewhere. 

Then came the invention of the invention--that is to say created need. We didn't have to wash and reuse cloth diapers or dust rags we could throw away disposable diapers and paper towels. We weren't required to bake our own cookies or even make a simple sandwich we could buy a prepackaged peanut butter & jelly! Soon came more of the same, but in a slightly different form like bottled water!! [Somewhere along our 'path' of modern-human-evolution how did we lose the ability to hold a glass under a water tap???] 

Which brings us to the environmental disorder that is Planet Earth, 2021 with our convoluted approach to addressing all those former decades of drunken-disorderly behavior to which we gave little or no thought to the effects we were causing.

But, now 'fellow-travelers' - we're more aware or are we? 

In our rush to vilify the humble plastic straw we continued to produce 60,000 plastic water bottles a day and the same with plastic bags. Our contradictions abound. In our zeal to embrace all things Green and Organic and Clean we're in danger of swapping one misguided decision for another without truly understanding many factoring rules of science. Like the science that Earth's climate was/is/will always be changing. Geology 101 is basically "4Billion years of unsettled weather".

VOLCANOES...I'll start with CO2 - but also include SO2, because Earth has an impressive collection of constant volcanic activity. Old Faithful in Yellowstone Park is a well known active degassing caldera vent. However, the latest eruption on the Spanish island of La Palma is only one of over 500 known recent [active last 100 years] and current [active last 20 years] volcanoes - spewing not only CO2 [Carbon Dioxide], but also SO2 [Sulphur Dioxide]. The top 10 volcanoes degas both of these toxins at a rate between 13Tg and 18.5Tg [Teragram/Thero-Transistion] into Earth's atmosphere. 

Comparatively - Earth's [very] active volcano pool makes emissions from the tailpipe of a 1970s traffic jam of muscle cars as safe to breath as oxygen. 

FOREST FIRES...Fighting forest fires has become another 'industry'. We used to have a fire 'season' with major out of control fires, rare. However beginning in the 1960s in Europe and North America we stopped actively managing forests. Environmentalists protested logging, but not with an effective alternate plan they just insisted that 'all' tree harvesting stop. Since paper products and housing was still needed specific areas were leased, but clear cutting instead of targeted cutting created an imbalance with vast amounts of topsoil erosion a problem after any rain. Areas with a complete ban on all tree harvesting created an opposite imbalance with too much undergrowth.

Between 2001 and 2017 there were 70,000 wild fires a year that emitted vast amounts of carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, hydrogen cyanide and sulphur dioxide into Earth's atmosphere.  [Plant more tress.]   

Let's move on. 

ELECTRICITY: Electric cars and trucks is the latest technological development getting superstar attention because electricity is considered a form of clean-energy. We could make that natural assumption based on all the fuss environmentalists made protesting the building of hydro electric damns [also reservoirs for water storage as a hedge against drought] in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s - that was essentially halted, by environmentalists. So, with hydro only accounting for 6.5% of our needs what else can can generate sufficient electricity? Oh dear, 34% of our [clean] electricity is generated by natural gas! There's that darn petroleum industry again then another 30% is generated from coal. Hmmm, gee whiz, coal needs to be mined and so does uranium for nuclear plants which accounts for about 20% of our electricity. 

Wind and solar combined supports only 7% of our electricity needs.

Okay--so now let's leap into the future and visualize how 'adding' millions of electric cars, trucks, trains, planes and boats to our electrical grid might look like with electric charging stations replacing gas stations. At home if you're annoyed by your electrical bills now you're going to like your future utility bills even less. But aside from that - increased production of more solar panels and more wind mills and more electric vehicles means using even more of what our [trend-following] politicians claim is 'causing' climate changes - which is pollution.

**To produce one solar panel [depending on size] requires 1.5 to 2 barrels of crude oil. But that's part of    the environmental story. Solar panels have an 18 to 25 year productive 'life', composed of  photovoltaic [PV] cells to convert sunlight to electricity. When these panels enter landfills toxic materials like lead can leach out as they break down. With current plans, by 2050 the quantity of worn out solar panels - much of which is not recyclable - will double the tonnage of all today's global plastic waste. And presently the typical time to recoup the cost is 15 to 26 years.

**To produce one wind turbine blade [depending on size, but not including installing each foundation] requires 7 to 7.4 barrels of oil. Then maintaining each turbine requires regular oil lubrication. But as with solar panels, worn-out wind turbine blades will in ten to 12 years begin to add 3 million tons per year of unrecyclable plastics in expanded landfill sites.      

**To produce one midsize electric car requires 6 to 8 barrels of oil - then - the batteries required to power an electric vehicle requires not only more petroleum [100 barrels of oil to fabricate a single battery that can store the equivalent of one barrel of oil], but also compounds from mining. Mined earth is baked in a kiln to reveal the rare metals required for electric car batteries. However, only 0.2% is usable, the other 99.98% contains contaminated waste soil that is dumped back into the originally excavated land. Further, those batteries carry a varied manufacture's warranty of 3 to 7 years [some 8 to 10] which means millions of discarded batteries end up - where? A specially designated landfill?  Right! 

But the environmental fallout of surface mining for basic materials in EVs [electric vehicles] is another part of the misdirection. You thought sea life was threatened by plastic straws [& plastic bottles] was a problem -try- deep-sea mining! EVs require rare earth elements such as lithium, nickel, colbalt, manganese -and-dysprosium and neodymiun. And below the ocean's surface are polymetallic nodules, which are lumps of minerals that consist of manganese and iron that other metals like copper, titanium, nickel and cobalt have been absorbed. This makes polymetallic-nodules far more attractive to mining companies--however, the jet machines used to harvest nodules can create underwater dead zones and irreversible damage to aquatic life. 

*If we destroy ocean habitats to improve surface air quality what have people pushing 'The Paris Climate Accord' or 'The Green New Deal' fixed? Does 'that' seem even remotely environmentally sound; Biden, McConnel, Pelosi, Graham, Schumer--Environmental Czar John Kerry--anyone?

None of the heavily taxpayer subsidized Green programs [that should be university masters and doctorate research projects] are economically or environmentally viable... 

*Further - as I said in the beginning, people in developed nations are compromising the lives and futures of people in countries struggling to become developed. In our politicians' [short-term-thinking] self-serving quest for re-election those rare earth compounds from surface mining are extracted largely in the Democratic Republic of Congo by hand, and by children as young as seven, according to Amnesty International. Costly, environmentally inefficient programs aimed to address Climate Change are enacted at the expense of the very human rights, we 'profess' to cherish. So, how environmentally responsible is that...It's midnight and time to return to reality.

What is a possible redirection? Start by pulling back, way back...We're still "drunk" spenders and highly voracious consumers with mega amounts of 'stuff'. We have stuff stored in closets, spare rooms, garages and storage units for which we pay monthly rent. We're spoiled. Our duplicates have duplicates. 

We can redirect the vast amounts of money destined for more and wider freeways - instead - to nuclear powered buses and trains [it works well for submarines] reinstating our once impressive rail network of passenger/commuter connections for jobs between towns and cities like Europe never stopped. We can produce half as much plastic stuff and other disposable landfill stuff. [No more bottled water, no more grocery or retail plastic bags.] Retailers have so much quarterly inventory they must routinely mark down that inventory in order to move it from their shelves for the next shipment. Does that make sense? 

Transitioning [above and below Earth's surface] to less hydrocarbons needs better science, better thought, better planning with less investors pushing for faster returns on their money, because they environment isn't benefitting - investors are.

https://medium.com/@BraveNewFilms.org/heres-how-to-contact-all-535-members-of-united-states-congress-call-email-tweet-20b8a1c54195

 *Sherrie Todd-Beshore is an award winning mystery-suspense novelist & former journalist. 

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