RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://issuesinsights.com/2019/06/05/recycling-americas-false-religion/

Before climate change became a belief system in which humans are expected to perform penance for their sins against Gaia, recycling was the religion of many in the modern world. Those who didn’t reduce, reuse, and recycle were, and still are, considered heretics.

Nearly a quarter century ago, John Tierney wrote in the New York Times Magazine that “Recycling Is Garbage.” In an article that produced the greatest volume of hate mail in the magazine’s history, Tierney said that rather than recycling, “the simplest and cheapest option is usually to bury garbage in an environmentally safe landfill.” With the exception of a few items — aluminum cans, cardboard, office paper — the cost of the recycling equipment plus the process itself exceeded the value of the products created by recycling.

Though recycling rarely makes economic sense and often burns up more fresh resources than would have been used in making new items, Americans recycled. And recycled. And recycle still.

Are we better off for it? It can easily be argued we are worse off. Our recycling obsessions have instigated a war on plastic that’s inconvenienced consumers and cost them billions. Recycling has also helped create an environmental mess. Roughly 90 percent of all plastic found in the oceans, says the Hemholtz Centre for Environmental Research in Germany, is carried there by “the top 10 rivers with the highest loads” of plastic debris. Eight of those rivers are in Asia, two are in Africa. None are in the U.S.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/doomed-planet

Shakespeare’s monster, Caliban, dreamed of clouds opening to  show riches ready to drop upon him. Climate scientists don’t have to dream about it – honors, awards and cash prizes rain down in torrents. Other scientists try to help humanity, but while climate scientists may kid themselves and others that they share that goal, their practical intent is to raise energy costs and harm nations’ energy efficiency via renewables. While they posture as planet-savers in white coats, some of them pocket awards of half-million dollars, even a million, and notch up more career-enhancing medals than a North Korean general.

A couple of local prizes are the Prime Minister’s Prize for Science ($A250,000) for ex-President of the Australian Academy of Science Kurt Lambeck last October, and in January UNSW Professor John Church pocketed a $A320,000 half-share of the 400,000 Euro BBVA Prize.

Both have done science work of international repute and their reputations in their specialist fields are deservedly high. However, Lambeck is a long-standing smiter of “deniers” and Church propagates via the ABC such lurid scenarios as  this: “… if the world’s carbon emissions continue unmitigated, a threshold will be crossed which will lead to the complete melting of the Greenland ice sheet. This, with melts from glaciers and ice in Antarctica will lead to a sea level rise in the order of seven metres.”