Thursday, April 21, 2022

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.  



13 comments:

  1. It's also the anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon blowout/explosion/sinking.

    Take that, Ira!

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  2. I love to annoy the leftist earth huggers when they shout at me (hey, I live in Gainesville, FL, also known as the Berkeley of the South) by pointing out that the high-grade marijuana they are smoking is force-grown using tons of chemicals and 'fed' high levels of CO2.

    Yeah, CO2. CO2, CO2, CO2 makes the plants grow.

    Like, well, the CO2 concentrations during the dino era were twice what they are now or something.

    Might as well call 'Earth Day' 'Watermelon Day.' You know, Green on the outside, Red on the inside.

    As to "Silent Spring," I used to have a list of articles and publications that all disproved SS, and I would hand it out to people who believed that dogsqueeze.
    Sadly, somewhere I lost it all.

    Included in the list of articles was one that noted the death rates due to not having DDT available.

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  3. I won't say that the EPA has completely outlived its usefulness. There is some need for a national set of standards for such things as clean water and clean air, with such standards being reasonable and achievable, scientifically sound. After all, I grew up with asbestos brake linings and tetra ethyl lead, remember reading once how living in LA was the equivalent of smoking so many cigarettes per day from the smog.

    The problem is that government agencies need to be given a clearly defined and limited charter to start with, significant oversight from above and an occasional pruning back to prevent the typical growth and spread.

    No one in government has any understanding of control theory. All such government agencies need to be designed using the concept of negative feedback - limiting controls that stabilize the system. Instead they (and government in general) operate with positive feedback, and all such systems eventually go out of control.

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    1. Sounds like we're in the same age group. I was an adult before unleaded gas hit the market.

      The problem with "reasonable standards" is that nobody knows what they are. Once they set standards, they tend to be there indefinitely whether they're too lax or too strict. As long as innovation continues, we either seriously slow down or stop innovating or take some risk. If someone develops a new chemical for extracting something important or whatever do they allow it on the market without 20 year survival date? 5 year?

      Just like our experiences with oncologists: you don't really know 5 year survival rates until after 5 years.

      The precautionary principle that the trial lawyers cling to says you don't put anything out in the world unless it's completely safe.

      I'm not arguing that we were better off without them, just that they've done enough Pareto optimizations that now they're going after problems that are so small relative to what they started with that you have to wonder about cost/benefit ratio.

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  4. Yes! Bonfires! Return that valuable carbon back into the atmosphere!!!

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    1. Bonfires are just stored sunlight being released back in the wild...

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  5. Thank you for reminding me about Earth Day. I didn't remember that it was today or how important the communists feel that it is. Green is the new Red.

    Would it be appropriate to eat a steak today? I was planning on doing that for lunch and this gives wings to the plan. I guess that I should also have a side salad - normally a pairing with a delicious steak that I go for. In this way I can be responsibly eating a salad with blue cheese dressing, AND a ribeye at my favorite local steak joint.

    I think that conservation is important, and reducing pollution is always a good thing where possible. Being "responsible" means being wise, and there seems to be a deficit of common sense among our betters, who spew out worthless events like Earth Day.

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  6. I think that conservation is important, and reducing pollution is always a good thing where possible. Being "responsible" means being wise, and there seems to be a deficit of common sense among our betters, who spew out worthless events like Earth Day.

    All of my ridicule of the day aside, I don't think anyone would argue our (Western) world isn't better off today than before '71. The big lesson is being responsible, as you say. There's no such place as "away" where you throw bad things. You just put them in a different place.

    90% of environmentalism is "clean up after yourself" and "don't put your crap near where anyone eats."

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  7. Here in Texas we have had our "bonfires". There have been a bunch of wildfires that burned thousands of acres. There was one just 40 or so miles from me, the Das Goat Fire, that burned about 1100 acres.

    Most of the Texas Hill Country has burn bans, so no bonfires on our property tonight to celebrate Earth Day.

    And most everybody has included my sentiments on the day. I do wish I had some of those articles that Beans was talking about because the Texas Parks & Wildlife magazine had an article praising "Silent Spring". I would send it in and refute the praise. The problem is that most of the folks in the TPW Department and other states equivalent are at the least unwitting supporters of the Environmental Left if not outright overt environmental nutcases.

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  8. A couple years ago, on one site, I referred to Earth Day as the Ira Einhorn Composting Day. Most didn't get it, and those that did got offended.

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    1. I would have laughed.

      I've been running that paragraph about Einhorn since 2011. Recycling yet again!

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  9. Earth Day is also Vladimir Lenin's birthday. Ain't that odd?

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    1. What a strange coincidence! Why, who would have thought they would pick that day to push for total control to the big governments and Non Governmental Organizations?!?

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