Green Projects Lately, there has been a very big push for renewable energy. Some people consider electric cars a form of renewable energy because the cars are not using petroleum products. I would like to ask a question, if I had a device that put out fumes or if I had a device which did not, but in the manufacturing process put out a lot of fumes to make it, would you call the device green? What I’m really saying is this, manufacturing batteries for electric cars is not a green process. It switches the pollution factor from the car to the factory which is doing the manufacturing. In my mind, for something to be truly green, there has to be no pollution anywhere in the chain of manufacture to the finished product. In case you are wondering how much pollution is involved in manufacturing batteries for electric cars, it is said it is at least on par with manufacturing petroleum products and sometimes more. This problem does not exist with all green projects. One of my favorites is a wall which is 200 feet high created from plants. A company in the UK has received permission to use this living wall on a building. They will install modular honeycomb panels containing recycled compost. Recycled aluminum will also be used. The urban greening is supposed to make people feel a lot better about where they live. What I didn’t see mentioned was the fact this could cause more maintenance since plants may have to be trimmed every once in a while. Perhaps they’ve hit upon a type which reach a certain height and remained that way, but they didn’t say that. Many places which are pushing green energy projects claim they will be better for the world’s environment. I would hope this is true. One thing which is hardly ever mentioned however, is the fact there is a natural force in the earth which changes are environment every once in a while and hopefully this is not what is happening now with the heating of the earth. I say hopefully, because there are some scientists who believe the heating affect has been caused mostly naturally and humans only have a very small percentage of the blame. It is true humans are their own worst enemy. Some of us plant trees while others are busy cutting them down in the rainforest. Some of our factories which have no limits in some places on the amount of pollution they can discharge. I could have understood this in the beginning of the Industrial Revolution because people didn’t know any better, but now we know breathing this stuff is bad and it certainly isn’t good for the rest of the life on the planet. But when you think about it it’s really stupid to do. It’s like poisoning the water you drink. We are doing this too. It has been said carbon dioxide build up is out of control and if we don’t remove 730 billion tons of it from the atmosphere by the end of the century we are going to be in a lot of trouble. A lot of people believe the answer to our problems with carbon dioxide is the planting of trees. They want every government on the planet to plant a staggering number of trees in their country. Scientists are saying that it is quite feasible to plant one billion hectares of trees on the planet. The amount of land that size would equal the size of the United States. Scientists take this further by saying if we restore the ecosystem it will not only stop the warming of the planet, it will help the biodiversity and lower the poverty level. I’m not sure how all of that would work, but the scientists believe it. The thing which is choking our oceans, rivers and streams is plastic. It seems like everything is wrapped in plastic and every bottle and container is made from it. We didn’t have this problem before we wrapped things in plastic and use it for bottles. If we went back to glass containers and bio degradable wraps for products it would do a lot for eliminating the plastic scourge. All of us now have microscopic plastic in our bodies as do all the sea creatures and probably land creatures also. Even if it is more expensive to manufacture a bottle made from glass, I think all of us wouldn’t mind paying a penny or two more knowing the bottle wouldn’t pollute the ocean or maybe us. People used to return bottles to the store so maybe increasing the deposit to ten cents might be an incentive to return bottles and cans no matter what they are made of. I don’t know how many people know this, but any biomass waste releases carbon when it decomposes. This means you also have naturally decomposing elements in a jungle or forest setting that have nothing to do with man. So called environmentalists in California are not taking care of their forests to fight this problem. Some people are talking about burning all biomass in a certain way, which is in akin to using an airless technique which produces biochar. The biochar locks in the carbon and can be buried in the ground to help reduce the carbon footprint. I see a couple of problems with this idea. First problem I see is having to somehow ship this stuff to where the furnace is and the second problem is the solution only lasts for about 100 years before the carbon starts to leak again. Even if every farmer and factory which uses products which create biomass burns them in these kilns, the extra work and expense involved could put the business underwater. There are some scientists who believe we are on the verge of creating a nuclear power plant which uses fusion. I have been hearing at for many years, but there is a huge plant being constructed in France and hopefully it will put out more energy than needed to run it. That is the whole secret which has avoided us all these years. We have gotten test plants to run but it took more fuel than the energy it created. In case you’re wondering why everybody wants to see fusion, it is because it is very clean and doesn’t leave the nuclear waste that fission plants leave now. There waste is truly polluting and can last for hundreds of thousands of years. There is no doubt we need some new green projects; we can’t just stop everything we are doing because it isn’t green. That would drive our economy into the basement. There has to be an intelligent way to put more green projects online which use wind, water and sunlight.
|
