![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
boredom causes strange behavior
Boredom and digital cable at Momie's house has led to me overwatching Penn & Teller: Bullshit! recently. It's a really interesting show, and for the most part I agree with all that they say, but I still try to take it all with a grain of salt. It is, after all, very opinionated, and things like that are never entirely balanced in their presentation.
Nonetheless, it's kind of served as a catalyst for me to evaluate my opinions on things. I've come to some firm stances on issues that were semi-wishy-washy in my mind before, and I feel pretty good about it.
For example - PETA. I didn't know much about them before. Now, though, I can whole-heartedly say that I do not approve of them or their methods. I'm all for animal rights, and I think that all living beings should be treated with as much respect and as humanely as is possible, but PETA takes it all too far. I like eating meat - biologically, humans are designed as omnivores, and I see nothing wrong with fulfilling the role that nature set out for me. Besides, sashimi is really really tasty, and I like not worrying about getting sufficient proteins. Just meat consumption ensures that I do. I also enjoy having pets. My ferrets seem very happy in the room we've set up for them, and I can't imagine them having a steady supply of high quality kibble, soothing ferret-lax, and jingly plush toys out in the wilderness. Somehow, I think they're better off in our care, and they'll live longer with the regular vet visits, vitamin supplements, and grooming my family and I make sure they receive. I agree with PETA that abuse in animal slaughter for consumption is appalling - that doesn't mean all slaughter should stop, however. Regulations should be made for it to be as humane and painless to the animals as possible, and I don't think anyone would really disagree with that. Breeding animals purely for fur coats is unnecessary and cruel, as is trophy hunting - but fur obtained from hunting for an animal which is afterwards consumed *should* be used. To throw it out would be wasteful! If hunters use as much of their kills as they viably can, I have no problem with it. So long as the animal is not wasted, it seems very natural to me.
Wow, that was a very long paragraph. Coming into this, I had no intention of dedicating that much space to just the PETA discussion. Ah well.
Moving on, I also stand against recycling, sans that of aluminum cans. Too much energy is consumed by recycling to make it worthwhile and beneficial to the environment, and growing new trees to use for paper does just that - grows new trees. Isn't this a good thing? Even if they get chopped down, more will be grown. And overall, there will be a farm of trees where there were none before. This is what we want! More trees, w00t!
Anyway. I don't know why I'm so inspired to rant about this stuff right now. I really should start packing up my stuff for tech again, or checking on the boys, but eh. I guess I may come back and write more later, if I am still so inspired.
Nonetheless, it's kind of served as a catalyst for me to evaluate my opinions on things. I've come to some firm stances on issues that were semi-wishy-washy in my mind before, and I feel pretty good about it.
For example - PETA. I didn't know much about them before. Now, though, I can whole-heartedly say that I do not approve of them or their methods. I'm all for animal rights, and I think that all living beings should be treated with as much respect and as humanely as is possible, but PETA takes it all too far. I like eating meat - biologically, humans are designed as omnivores, and I see nothing wrong with fulfilling the role that nature set out for me. Besides, sashimi is really really tasty, and I like not worrying about getting sufficient proteins. Just meat consumption ensures that I do. I also enjoy having pets. My ferrets seem very happy in the room we've set up for them, and I can't imagine them having a steady supply of high quality kibble, soothing ferret-lax, and jingly plush toys out in the wilderness. Somehow, I think they're better off in our care, and they'll live longer with the regular vet visits, vitamin supplements, and grooming my family and I make sure they receive. I agree with PETA that abuse in animal slaughter for consumption is appalling - that doesn't mean all slaughter should stop, however. Regulations should be made for it to be as humane and painless to the animals as possible, and I don't think anyone would really disagree with that. Breeding animals purely for fur coats is unnecessary and cruel, as is trophy hunting - but fur obtained from hunting for an animal which is afterwards consumed *should* be used. To throw it out would be wasteful! If hunters use as much of their kills as they viably can, I have no problem with it. So long as the animal is not wasted, it seems very natural to me.
Wow, that was a very long paragraph. Coming into this, I had no intention of dedicating that much space to just the PETA discussion. Ah well.
Moving on, I also stand against recycling, sans that of aluminum cans. Too much energy is consumed by recycling to make it worthwhile and beneficial to the environment, and growing new trees to use for paper does just that - grows new trees. Isn't this a good thing? Even if they get chopped down, more will be grown. And overall, there will be a farm of trees where there were none before. This is what we want! More trees, w00t!
Anyway. I don't know why I'm so inspired to rant about this stuff right now. I really should start packing up my stuff for tech again, or checking on the boys, but eh. I guess I may come back and write more later, if I am still so inspired.
no subject
w00t!!! i've been saying that for sooooo long now.....its kinda how i got a vegitarian buddy to eat orange chicken. that and she was hungover. and still drunk. and i think she still had some muscle relaxers in her system. yea, that was a good night.
no subject
as for mine: we are running out of space on this planet as it is. anything that can reduce the amount of waste, biodegradable or not, that goes into the landfills helps. yes, planting more trees for paper farms helps, but the trees will only be cut down again, thus negating the "more trees" comment.
interesting choice of topic...lets hear you argue it with a tree hugger. :)
no subject
for starters, we are *not* running out of space. in fact, according to one expert on the show, we could fit 2000 years worth of garbage (from all of america, i think) into a very small space, something like a cube 35 miles on each side and 200 ft deep. that's actually not that bad, all things considered.
next, recycling uses an awful lot of energy. there are special trucks that go out to pick up recyclables, releasing twice as many gases into the air as would be there if just a garbage truck came. it also takes more energy to recycle items than to produce new ones, with the exception of some metals, aluminum in particular. this again produces more waste products to damage the environment and go into the atmosphere.
paper recycling, specifically, produces many harmful things, such as ammonia, that aren't by-products of primary paper production. plus, the trees on paper farms may not last eternally, but while they're there, they help take in carbon dioxide and release oxygen. it may not be as much as from a tree that lives out its entire natural life in a forest, but it's still more than would come from plain dirt without any paper farm there.
now, while recycling is burning energy, which is not at all a renewable thing, landfills *produce* energy. the decomposition of garbage releases methane, which in modern landfills is collected and piped off to power plants to provide energy for many many homes. sounds like a much better deal, if you ask me. sure, we may be making new paper and glass simultaneously, but we're also making energy, and there is definitely more worry over energy sources than over glass sources.
there's also the money factor. recycling is far more expensive than just producing new objects, to the tune of $8 billion extra tax dollars each year. of course, being the tree hugger you are, i'm sure the financial aspect doesn't matter to you, but there are others that are concerned by it certainly.
as a footnote, penn and teller tracked the governmental recycling reforms back to one man whose name has eluded me at the moment. rest assured, though, that the report everything was based off of was full of inaccuracies and false statistics. certainly, conservation is a good idea, and the recycling of some metals is even worth it, but the rest of it is based off of falsehoods. bottom line - recycling makes people feel better because they're misinformed. sad, really.
let the debate rage! *rolls up her sleeves*
teehee
As far as paper and trees and such, I bet a shiny penny that the biggest threat to trees, especially old growth, which absorb more co2 than new, young trees, is wood for lumber, not paper, and anyone who has walked into a home depot has seen large piles of dimensional lumber... it comes from trees that are big, cause that wood isn't just bits glued together, like particle board or mdf, and you can't recycle it, either. New construction techniques, such as high strength concrete, manufactured wood products (like mdf and particleboard in innovative shapes) which can be made from newly planted small trees, and steel framing are needed to protect old growth forests, so I'm gonna keep using that ultra-bright-white printer paper that has 0 percent post-consumer recycled content because it looks a lot better than the brown recycled paper :D
Recycling will probably become a good thing for the environment eventually, but in my opinion all environmental activists should concentrate on alternate/renewable energy sources, because as we all know, if you can't breathe the air, not much else will be able to, either, and there won't be too much left to save. Fossil fuels, if we don't stop using them, will probably end up being the worst threat to the health of all living things by the time we run out of them, both fossil fuels and living things. Wind power and nuclear power, it's the future, yeah yeah! China is going to be using hundreds of meltdown-proof pebble bed reactors to power its burgeoning population in the future, and maybe we should think about that, too. And good news, the price of wind power is now below 1 cent per kilowatt hour. If the U.S. bought an assload of wind turbines today, that is the technology available right now, we could convert three percent of the farmland in the U.S. to windfarms and we'd have 95 percent of our energy needs met.
...
no emissions... at all. hm. and there are a bunch of rich white people in new england somewhere, near the kennedy compound, methinks, who are trying to block a large offshore windfarm because...
...and here it comes....
it won't look good.
It's official, we will continue pouring tons of combustion by-products into the atmosphere because of a bunch of rich white people don't want to look at a wind farm...
Also, I think global warming is a crock, but I still don't want to be breathing air thicker than cigarette smoke when I walk outside, which is a real, proven, consequence of fossil fuel burning.
so, I guess my point is, it doesn't matter if you recycle if you can't breathe :D
also, old growth forests are good, so build your house out of hemp or something, you goddamn dirty hippies.