[Eco] Recycling and P&T's Bullshit

[Jonathan Grabert]

Some quick responses to your points (which I did cut down to make reading 
easier):

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Daniel Brashler" <dannob at brashler.net>
To: <eco at lists.looneylabs.com>
Sent: Tuesday, January 30, 2007 6:42 PM
Subject: [Eco] Recycling and P&T's Bullshit

> 1. I think people's love of recycling does grow out of environmental 
> movement of the 70's and 80's...I think that that mindset is precious all 
> by itself.
The mindset may be precious to you, but is it worth the cost of recycling? 
Local, state, and federal governments, as well as private business, spend a 
lot of money, labor, time, and energy to recycle when the benefits of it are 
debatable at best and nonexistant or even detrimental at worst.  This is 
what P&T described as recycling "feeling good" to people.  And while good 
feelings are nice, they shouldn't be taxpayer funded.

> 2. While we may not be running out of landfill space, land itself is still 
> a fundamentally limited resource.
But even here, you're exaggerating the size of the landfills that we need. 
Yes, that land that's used by landfills is devalued.  Earth is in absolutely 
no danger of being covered by landfills, and landfills themselves are very 
safe and well managed.  You can build on top of them once they reach 
capacity, and once they are packed in, there is no decomposition.  But none 
of that really matters, because it takes a suprisingly small amount of land 
to put trash in.

> 3. The oil too is going away -- it's a finite resource as well.
Again, we are in absolutely no danger of running out of oil for thousands of 
years.  Even if that weren't the case, there *will* be a better fuel source 
developed well before we'd run out.  (Solar, anyone?)  There is no oil 
crisis due to the earth's supply.

> 4. Ultimately, all our efforts at recycling are tiny in comparison to the 
> one on-going juggernaut event that is the growth of human civilization.
The population problems aren't in the developed world.  In these countries, 
the population rate has leveled and in many cases gone down.  Now, in the 
developing world, you've got another issue.  But unless you want to start 
regulating the number of babies people have, your best bet with them is to 
work to get them more modern.  That means bringing them out of the hands of 
dictators, theocrats, and warlords, allowing them to develop a real economy, 
and getting the population educated.  But with advances in technology (even 
with current technology), the earth can support a much larger population 
than we currently have, so I'm not willing to classify this as any sort of 
crisis.

J/