The impending environmental disaster

Scort said:
What we are asked/expected/happy to do on an individual household basis - is akin to dropping a tiny grain of sand into a Loch and hoping it goes someway to forming new landmass within.

Honestly - if people in the UK suddenly stopped doing anything "green", it would have such a miniscule impact, that's it probably wouldn't even register. Yet we are a wealthy bunch, so easy prey to be taxed and subject to ever-increasing choke holds on things in our lives - all the while being told just how much we're killing the planet.

I'm all for giving my daughter a better world to inherit - but when there are nations around the world, churning out more and more badness for the earth, it makes our efforts seem pointless; and nothing more than a little feel good pat on the back for some.
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It has been Al Gore's pet project to milk millions if not billions out of countries for so long. It's a great money maker causing mass alarm and fear.
 
413x said:
The 'we won't make a difference' argument is a bad one. Just admit you don't care.
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Very true. I do think the "we won't make a difference" should be "we won't make a big enough difference".

I mean, just using the right coloured bin is making a difference, but the world is still getting warmer. How much of an impact I have personally made in the last decade is up for debate. I'll have to have another look at the carbon footprint calculator.
 
TheOracle said:
Very true. I do think the "we won't make a difference" should be "we won't make a big enough difference".

I mean, just using the right coloured bin is making a difference, but the world is still getting warmer. How much of an impact I have personally made in the last decade is up for debate. I'll have to have another look at the carbon footprint calculator.
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i'll say this again ..it's not .. over a 100 yrs it's even over 5k yrs it's cooling .. your seeing the last of the heat for quiet a while .. if your kids are young they might see a proper summer again .. the problem is we don't live long enough and forget most of our past .. it's a 3k 6k 12k cycle ....
 
The Running Man said:
If it gets as bad as he said, and we have millions of people trying to come here to take you're already diluted wealth I'm pretty sure you're going to vote for a leader who puts Britain first.
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Sorry I was commenting on your use of nearly every catchphrase used by politicians recently I thought you were making a joke
 
'but China' - they're only fulfilling the needs of the rest of the world. They're a manufacturing powerhouse, and they allow you and I to buy cheap stuff. We need to buy less stuff. We need to repair more. Also 27% of global co2 emissions is due to China. The rest of the world can lead by example and make a huge difference.

'it's all a lie' - people have been campaigning for 50 years trying to tell people that humans are changing the environment so much that animals are being bought to the brink of extinction. It's not a new thing. It's also not a lie, there's plenty of credible science across multiple areas to back it up.

'warmimg is cyclical' - it's widely accepted that co2 emissions are disrupting the natural rhythmn of these cycles.
 
Tefal said:
Nope seriously where do you think things are going?

It's all still here
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Specifically about your "today's garbage is tomorrow's mine" comment, which was both flippant and wrong.

Landfill sites are simply biohazards and will remain so for potentially thousands of years. Even after that, nobody is going to come along and mine for resources in landfill, due to the difficulty of extraction and the fact that you will just have many different kinds of junk down there, so if you're looking for something specific - some mineral or whatever - you aren't going to find it easily in a landfill site.

The idea that landfill is some kind of resource is terribly misguided. Landfill is waste, and will always be waste. I doubt anyone is interested in picking it over, now or in future. Except the destitute. But not corporations or industry.
 
FoxEye said:
Specifically about your "today's garbage is tomorrow's mine" comment, which was both flippant and wrong.

.
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No its not already 1 ton of mobile phones possess more gold than 1 ton of rock from a high quality gold mine.

In future the hydrocarbons and metals in landfills will be a concentrated resource source they will be dug back up. Heck we already capture the methane from some of them for fuel.

It's not hard to strip landfill contents to Ash (mineral oxides) it's just energy intensive once you have lots of energy to spare (fusion or renewables) all you need is water and pressure. No matter how much of a "biohazard" it is.
 
For more near term solutions for land fill mining do look up elfm (enhanced landfill mining) and thier operations.

It's got a lot more real than the "futurist" stuff it was over a decade ago (good lord) when I was taught it so there's lots to read up on!

Just wait till you see an air classifier for a cool peice of tech
 
Some clever person needs to invent a way to harness the full power of the sun.

We have many times more energy than we could ever need just being beamed to us constantly.

We should be putting almost every penny we have and every genius available into the development of electricity storage.
 
Jono8 said:
Some clever person needs to invent a way to harness the full power of the sun.

We have many times more energy than we could ever need just being beamed to us constantly.

We should be putting almost every penny we have and every genius available into the development of electricity storage.
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The crazy thing is that it doesn't even need to be 100% efficient. Less than a billionth of the sun's energy reaches earth. And “humankind is only using about 1/10,000 of that amount of energy from the sun, for its total energy consumption." - which is about 160,000 TWh. We could generate enough electricity for the entire planet's current consumption with solar panels covering the same land area as Israel. https://ecotality.com/how-many-solar-panels-to-power-the-world/ PS you can get 7.5 Israels inside Great Britain...

For the time being, we need crude oil to help us create the technology and equipment needed to harness the sun's light. What's scary is that once it's gone (estimates are that oil will dry up in 2070), we're properly ******.
 
Tefal said:
For more near term solutions for land fill mining do look up elfm (enhanced landfill mining) and thier operations.

It's got a lot more real than the "futurist" stuff it was over a decade ago (good lord) when I was taught it so there's lots to read up on!

Just wait till you see an air classifier for a cool peice of tech
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Ta for that. I've been wondering about the viability if mining landfill for a while, and the ELFM document I found after your post was pretty interesting reading.

I'd guess not all landfill sites are equal- domestic waste prior to the start of the recycling era would probably be more lucrative in terms of metals reclamation, for example.
 
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