There are certain inconsistencies in the thought process on the Left that drive me crazy (and its a short drive). Nowadays they are worried about the minuscule “carbon footprint” of the United States, while ignoring the Bigfoot print of manufacturing behemoths China, India and Brazil. Air is air and water is water. No matter how clean we keep our air and water won’t matter as long as those 3 industrial heavyweights are muddying them up.
Then there are two big ticket ecological disasters in America that greenie worrywarts (Sierra Club, Izaak Walton League, Audubon Society and such) just flat out ignore. The first is automobiles. Not the amount of pollution they put out, but the wasted resources of their designed obsolescence. They’re made to be replaced after 10 years! 2,500 pounds of plastic, rubber and steel thrown in the dump after maybe a decade!
Plumbers found out some time ago that plastic outlasts metal pipes by a longshot. You might get 60 years out of copper and galvanized, but plastic lasts forever. And while PVC doesn’t work in automotive applications, polymers do. Along with stainless and aluminum. Between those 3 materials, cars could easily triple their lifetime. Thereby reducing their ecological impact by 300 percent. But as it stands now, Detroit designs them with just enough untreated steel to make you throw them away way too early.
The other area of completely unneeded harm to the environment is asphalt shingles. You’re very lucky if you get 25 years out of them. Whereas with rubber/plastic shingles, clay tiles and galvanized metal roofs, you’re talking 100 years if not longer! That’s 400%! Goodnight, do you know how many thousands of pounds are thrown into a landfill every 25 years? A small house roof with asphalt shingles weighs 2,805 pounds, the typical house two to three times that!
Damn right the people who put on those shingles want that to continue! Its like plumbers and conventional water heaters! No way do they want you to go tankless. They want to keep selling you those 40 gallon tank models. You know why? Because without proper maintenance, you won’t get more than 10 years out of them! All you have to do is run a gallon out the bottom once a month, and replace the anode rod every 24 months, and they’ll last forever! Instead we have another big ticket item we throw away after 1 decade instead of 3.
So we worry about the ecological splinters, while ignoring the beam in our eye.
Politics and Religion 