Mark _australia said...pweedas said...
From what I can see, there are a few things that are certain.
We can’t just go on blowing our waste up chimneys and hoping the planet will cope.
Why not? People contibute less than 1% of the total greenhouse gas emissions each year.
Is a 50% increase in the last few decades going to cause catastophe?
I'm not referring to greenhouse gasses so much when I say "waste" because i don't count CO2 as being pollution.
The problem is that anything we dig up out of the ground has millions of years of stored impurities which have diffused into it from the ground above.
When we heat it or burn it we release millions of years of stored impurities into the atmosphere and spread it far and wide.
Most stuff we dig up is either processed or refined or consumed by heating it and thus releasing the toxic materials. Some of them are extremely toxic even at very small concentrations.
A lot of it is impossible to scavenge out so it is just blown up the chimney.
This definitely is a problem and is generally recognised as such.
Unfortunately, a common solution to this problem is to just build a taller chimmney to spread it even further at a reduced concentration.
It has sort of worked in the past because of the relatively small scale, but with the huge increase in worldwide production over the last 10 years, with even greater production proposed, it is no longer an acceptable option.
It's not so noticeable in Australia because of our big area and high environmental standards. But when you see pictures of the air in China and some parts of Europe, it clearly has reached a critical level.
Thus to my thinking, although i disagree with all the hoo-haa about CO2 and global warming, if it makes us more concious about what we blow into the atmosphere then it is not entirely useless.
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