It's Earth Day 2022

It's time for our annual bacchanalia of the made-up holiday they call Earth Day, my very favorite holiday to make fun of.   

As befitting the environmental movement, my tribute to Earth Day is over 90% recycled.  The only way it could fit the environmental movement better would be if everything I said was factually wrong.  Sorry.  No can do.  It wouldn't be me. 

Earth Day, as most of you know, is a holiday made up in the late 1960s at the start of the national environmental movement, inspired by the almost entirely discredited book Silent Spring.  Ira Einhorn is one of the main founders of Earth Day, if not the guy who started it.  Ira practiced what he preached: he murdered his girlfriend (less stress on the planet) and composted her body in his closet.  (Reduce, re-use, recycle!)

You won't find Ira Einhorn's name listed in any of the Earth Day promotional literature, as the organizers have taken great pains to distance themselves from this man, at least since he became better known for composting his girlfriend in a trunk in his closet for a couple of years in the late 1970s.

Ira Einhorn died in prison April 3, 2020 as commemorated in the New York Times.

I was a science geek in high school in 1970, the first Earth Day, and indoctrinated into the liberal crap of the day.  Who can forget the commercial with the crying Indian ("Iron Eyes Cody", who - BTW - was Italian, not Native American) looking at the spoiled earth?  Caught up in the spirit of the day, we went looking for pollution, and tested a local canal for coliform bacteria.  

The movement led to the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency, probably the best example of an agency that has outlived its usefulness (unlike the Federal Department of Education which was never useful).  Unlike government agencies, manufacturing companies are seriously interested in solving problems.  Quality Engineers, Manufacturing Engineers and many others have settled on the Pareto Principle.

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian engineer who turned his mathematical skills to economic problems.  What he is best known for is the "80-20 Rule", the observation that 20% of the efforts produces 80% of the results.  Although 80% and 20% is an approximation, the rule is more or less right far more often than it is wrong.  Often called Pareto efficiency or Pareto Optimality, it has appeared in quality control, industrial engineering, and popular books.   

How does this relate to the environment?  Pareto (and most of today's Quality Engineers) would say to first measure your problems.  Find the 20% of problems that cause 80% of the trouble and work to get rid of those few problems while you let the others sit.  Then you "Lather. Rinse. Repeat."  What tends to happen is that you eliminate, or (at least) reduce the biggest problems and then have different set.  You eventually end up with much fewer problems and production running much smoother.  

If you're a government agency, the last thing you want is to solve problems, though.  Not only will you have nothing to do, you won't get offered "incentives" to rule in certain ways.  This is how you get things like the EPA ruling that Ozone concentrations found naturally in unspoiled national parks are higher than should be allowed.  Which makes it impossible to measure if emissions are below the new limits because the natural background is higher than what they're trying to measure.  Or how they regulate puddles on farms miles from a river under the Clean Water Act, meant to apply only to "navigable waters of the US."

As you know, the Green New Deal acolytes directing President Xo have a goal of cutting CO2 emissions by 50% by 2030 - a mere eight years.  Even more laughable was the talk by Climate Czar John Kerry in which he said even when we get there, "We still have to suck carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere."  One would hope he doesn't mean suck all the carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere.  Yeah, it's a trace gas but even third graders know that it feeds all the plants Earth that feed all the animals on Earth.  That's assuming they haven't been talking about made up gender nonsense instead of real science.  On top of that, sucking all the CO2 out of the atmosphere is impossible.  Every living creature on the planet will add back CO2 one breath later.  Plants inhale CO2 and exhale O2 all day.  At night they inhale O2 and exhale CO2 just like us. 

The 50% goal, though, doesn't mean compared to today, it means compared to 2005.  In my world, when a politician picks a date like that, I automatically think "they're cherry picking that date; I'll bet it's the worst possible date," and sure enough this plot from Statista shows that 2005 was about the peak year of CO2 production in the US, pretty much 6000 mmt (million metric tons) of CO2. 

The last point on the plot is 2020, and at 4,571 mmt, it was already down to 76% of the 2005 levels.  

I honestly don't think it's possible to reduce it to 50% of that peak at any reasonable cost.  The EPA says the transportation sector of the economy generates 29% of the so-called greenhouse gasses, so shutting down all transportation wouldn't be enough.  That includes not just cars and planes, the typical examples of pollution, but includes shipping goods around the country.  Replacing gasoline or diesel cars with electric just moves the CO2 production to the "electricity" sector - not counting the massive CO2 production in the "commercial" pie slice to manufacture the electric cars.  It would take reductions in all the sectors on this pie chart, and I just don't think it's there to save without invoking "and then something magical happens" - as Kerry pretty much did.

 

Chart from the US EPA.

In celebration of Earth Day, just remember "nature wants you dead" (a close to home reminder).  Turn on the air conditioner (if you're in my part of the world, it has been on) or the heater.  Burn some charcoal and a hunk of cow or pig.  Turn on all the lights in your house.  Start a big bonfire in your back yard.

“Remember, it doesn't count unless the lights can be seen from Proxima Centauri.” 

This column was written entirely from recycled electrons.  No electrons were wasted, disposed of or inconvenienced.