Some quick responses to your points (which I did cut down to make reading
easier):
----- Original Message -----
From: "Daniel Brashler" <dannob@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: <eco@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 6:42 PM
Subject: [Eco] Recycling and P&T's Bullshit
1. I think people's love of recycling does grow out of environmental
movement of the 70's and 80's...I think that that mindset is precious all
by itself.
The mindset may be precious to you, but is it worth the cost of recycling?
Local, state, and federal governments, as well as private business, spend a
lot of money, labor, time, and energy to recycle when the benefits of it are
debatable at best and nonexistant or even detrimental at worst. This is
what P&T described as recycling "feeling good" to people. And while good
feelings are nice, they shouldn't be taxpayer funded.
2. While we may not be running out of landfill space, land itself is still
a fundamentally limited resource.
But even here, you're exaggerating the size of the landfills that we need.
Yes, that land that's used by landfills is devalued. Earth is in absolutely
no danger of being covered by landfills, and landfills themselves are very
safe and well managed. You can build on top of them once they reach
capacity, and once they are packed in, there is no decomposition. But none
of that really matters, because it takes a suprisingly small amount of land
to put trash in.
3. The oil too is going away -- it's a finite resource as well.
Again, we are in absolutely no danger of running out of oil for thousands of
years. Even if that weren't the case, there *will* be a better fuel source
developed well before we'd run out. (Solar, anyone?) There is no oil
crisis due to the earth's supply.
4. Ultimately, all our efforts at recycling are tiny in comparison to the
one on-going juggernaut event that is the growth of human civilization.
The population problems aren't in the developed world. In these countries,
the population rate has leveled and in many cases gone down. Now, in the
developing world, you've got another issue. But unless you want to start
regulating the number of babies people have, your best bet with them is to
work to get them more modern. That means bringing them out of the hands of
dictators, theocrats, and warlords, allowing them to develop a real economy,
and getting the population educated. But with advances in technology (even
with current technology), the earth can support a much larger population
than we currently have, so I'm not willing to classify this as any sort of
crisis.
J/