Pacific Ocean Garbage Patch Worries Researchers 296
NeverVotedBush writes with an update to a story we discussed early this month about an enormous accumulation of garbage and plastic debris in the Pacific Ocean, a thousand miles off the coast of California. The team of scientists has now returned from their expedition to examine the area and say they "found much more debris than they expected." The team will start running tests on the samples they retrieved, and they are preparing to visit another section of ocean they suspect will be full of trash.
"The Scripps team hopes the samples they gathered during the trip nail down answers to questions of the trash's environmental impact. Does eating plastic poison plankton? Is the ecosystem in trouble when new sea creatures hitchhike on the side of a water bottle? Plastics have entangled birds and turned up in the bellies of fish, and one paper cited by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration estimates 100,000 marine mammals die trash-related deaths each year. The scientists hope their data gives clues as to the density and extent of marine debris, especially since the Great Pacific Garbage Patch may have company in the Southern Hemisphere, where scientists say the gyre is four times bigger. 'We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution."
Is it full of (Score:3, Funny)
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Some people probably don't realize but Garbage Pail Kids actually exist. It's an old 80s phenomenon that we used to trade:
LINK - http://www.lmgtfy.com/?q=Garbage+Pail+kids [lmgtfy.com]
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Is it really neccessary to patronize people with a "google it noob" link in response to a joking question with no link request?
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<a href="http://your-super-long-link.com">short description of link</a>
short description of link [your-super-long-link.com]
Earth Plus Plastic. (Score:5, Funny)
This story remind me of the George Carlin bit on the environment:
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Your post just makes me laugh. Ever considered being a straight man?
Maybe you just haven't heard the right comedians before. It's not all dick jokes and "you just might be a redneck" jokes. George Carlin was of course one of the true geniuses of our time. Pointing out the absurdities of life and still being able to sleep at night takes a truly great comedian.
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My wife and daughter would tell you you're ignorant about me, but that argument would matter about as much in reality as your argument that being straight has any importance of the value of person I am.
He didn't call you gay. A straight man [wikipedia.org] is a comedy term.
Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn (Score:5, Funny)
We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there,' said Tony Haymet, director of the Scripps Institution.
Famous last words before being eaten by Cthulhu.
This is not complicated. (Score:5, Insightful)
Problem: Garbage in the water
Solution: Pay fisherman to catch garbage
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Plastics have value. Net it and recycle it or turn it into fuel.
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Solution: Pay fisherman to catch garbage
Better solution:
1. Create plastic eating microbes. [therecord.com]
2. Deposit in plastic-rich oceanic environment.
3. Let nature do the rest. -_-
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Re:This is not complicated. (Score:5, Interesting)
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I still don't see how we get to 6. Profit! from here
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What competes with the microbes for consuming plastic?
They're not consuming plastic anymore...
Plastic eating microbes find something else they like that taste's better
They're eating tasty fish/people
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Great Idea! (Score:3, Interesting)
Where do you put it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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The Atlantic.
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A lot of it went into the ocean because it was swept overboard during storms while it was being shipped.
I'd expect lots of it could be recycled.
interesting (Score:2)
Hmmm... I wonder how many bales of abandoned cocaine are in that heap?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2007/oct/09/international.mainsection2 [guardian.co.uk]
http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2007/07/13/1183833752038.html [theage.com.au]
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Problem: Freshly caught non-recyclable garbage piling up on shore. Solution: Put it on display and charge admission? (You'll need tickets, concessions, and useless trinkets to sell of course. And when these all reach the ocean two months later, pay them to catch it again, add it to the existing ball-o-crap and raise ticket prices.)
I am assuming this stuff is all not reusable, which is why it's out there in the first place. Of course if all else fails, launch it into Jupiter. (assuming t
Re:This is not complicated. (Score:4, Insightful)
eh?
It's out there because we're a filthy bunch. We throw away plastic willy-nilly wherever we want; and whether that's in a forest or into the street (into gutter into drain out into the sea onward to the ocean) or, heck, off a cruise ship, we're not throwing it away because it's "not reusable".
Most plastic -is- reusable, even if all you do with it is create plastic pellets or plastic film. The rest you can compact, dump somewhere, put soil on top, and voila... a hill. One giant problematic hill, but rather less problematic there than it is out in the oceans where wildlife can actually get to it.
Wrong. It's difficult because there is no "patch" (Score:5, Informative)
There are two things that make this difficult. The amount of garbage is the size of Texas and a lot of the plastics have dissolved.
A crew went to the gyre and recorded a documentary (a free documentary by VBS.TV Garbage Island [www.vbs.tv]), hoping to see giant island of garbage. While they did not see the island, what they saw was far worse. The plastics have dissolved and estimated that the amount of dissolved plastics is higher than the microscopic sea life and natural oceanic nutrients in the water. The gyre is now very, very gross. The garbage is either so scattered or very well dissolved that there is no way that it can be cleansed that easily.
Re:Wrong. It's difficult because there is no "patc (Score:4, Informative)
Plastic, due to being petroleum based, does not "dissolve". It can a) bio-degrade or b) become a suspended solid, provide the particles are small enough (as well as obvious combinations of the two).
And it is, apparently, doing both.
The size of this garbage dump itself is not a problem, the problem is that it's likely still increasing. If it remained static, or was left alone, it would continue to degrade back into other compounds (some harmful, others not).
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Better not pay them by the haul, or that's a good strategy for inducing fishermen to dump massive amounts of garbage in the water on their days off. And if you just pay them for time spent at sea, you're paying them to cruise and do nothing.
Here's a thought... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Here's a thought... (Score:4, Informative)
My impression is that the vast majority of the garbage is actually quite small particles and fragments, not whole plastic bottles and the like that could be scooped up with nets. Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system.
Yes it would (Score:2, Interesting)
"Would need some sort of high-volume filtration system."
Yes it would, and wouldn't that be an extremely intertesting bit of technology to develop? Right off the bat if they first developed a way to get the plastic to reclump together, then the filter, then be able to further refine it, it could be a very lucrative oceanic mine for decades, like has been mentioned, get some fishermen and sailors back to useful work. And similar high volume filtration tech might be used for another example say
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Like, say, whales.
Re:Here's a thought... (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not pay some of those Japanese whaling factory ships with their big front loading dock doors
Okay, two things -- first, assuming you come up with an efficient method of collecting the plastic (which is broken down to the molecular level and is essentially a fine film) -- because just opening the doors and scooping it up is a bad plan. But let's say you solve that. Here's your several hundred cubic feet of plastic. Now what? You gotta turn around, drag it all the way back home, and bury it somewhere. A whaling vessel is only designed to carry a few tonnes, or perhaps a few dozen tonnes -- not a few hundred thousand tonnes.
This is a problem of scale. We need supertankers, not whaling boats.
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Bind it with another agent that will make it heaver than water and kick it over board and let it sink to the bottom.
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Pay them? With who's money?
Gigantic Building Projects (Score:3, Insightful)
Researchers (and sci-fi writers) always talk about things like gigantic space elevators and star-encompassing spheres; works that would take an entire world's focus (and several generations of dedicated work) to accomplish. I always figured that those were unaccomplishable dreams...
But then I read this story and got to thinking... Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?
Re:Gigantic Building Projects (Score:4, Insightful)
Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?
Well, because it's been broken down to the molecular level. It'd float right through a net. What's needed is a troller that can suck up the first several inches of water, remove the plastic particles, and then discard the water. Unfortunately, even something with the capacity of a supertanker would take decades of 24/7 operation to make much progress -- Because once you collect it, you gotta transport it somewhere else.
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Like to a recycling center to turn it in to more plastic instead of drilling for even more oil?
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Oh just fucking burn it (Score:4, Interesting)
If you burn the plastic and debris at a high temperature the emissions are relatively small. Burn it and put the exhaust through another filter to catch whats left. Hell you could probably power the ship from the incinerators.
Too bad plastic is cheaper to make than it is to reclaim. Otherwise someone would have scooped it all up and made it into milk jugs by now.
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I'm in favour of some large nuclear explosions. Those would probably break up the plastic.
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Not quite the way to go. You build your siphon feeder, and you design it to run on solar, nuclear, or, if you can figure out how, plastic. It accumulates the gunk until it's got several cubic yards of the stuff, presses it together, and then heat it until it fuses. In the process you shape it so it has a convenient tow ring. Then you attach a rope (possibly also fused from plastic) to it and toss it overboard. A tug pulls up, picks the rope from your deck, and lugs the stuff to a recycling center on la
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And put it where? Texas?
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"Why not make a gigantic net and scoop up all that garbage?"
Simple. There is no money to be made in garbage fishing.
Gyre (Score:2)
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Actually, I hear that not only did it gyre, but it also did gimble. At least it did while in the wabe.
Any good pictures for scale? (Score:2)
I've seen a handful of pictures from this Pacific Gyre, but they tend to be closely cropped pictures of nets full of garbage. Are there any pictures that give you a sense of scale for the Gyre? Maybe an aerial photo or something?
Re:Any good pictures for scale? (Score:5, Informative)
I can't give you pictures of the entire gyre, but there are several taken during the March 2008 DXpedition [clipperton2008.org] to Clipperton Island [wikipedia.org], a small (9 square kilometers, 3.5 square miles), uninhabited (and rarely visited) island in the North Pacific about 1100 km (700 mi) off the coast of Mexico [wikipedia.org].
Visitors to Clipperton were shocked to see the amount of detritus at the high-tide level on the beach, so far into the Pacific, and took a lot of photographs of it (e.g., here [clipperton2008.org], here [washington.edu], and here [clipperton2008.org]). Ann Santos, one of the operators, noted in her blog [clipperton2008.org],
Most [clipperton2008.org] of their outdoor photos [clipperton2008.org] have plastic trash in them.
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If it is broken down to the molecular level, then it is not so much garbage anymore, but just 'pollution'. Your assumption that there are no larger chunks is absurd too: The plastic has to come from somewhere, it's just that the chances of finding bigger chunks are lower. Personally I have the impression this 'disaster' is being oversold. They are still researching if there is any damage done. How especially does a fishing float pollute the ocean?
This is not regular trash floating in the ocean (Score:4, Informative)
Imagine trying to filter the dirt out of a muddy lake. Extrapolate that to an area of the ocean a few times larger than the state of Texas, and you can begin to envision the magnitude of the solution required.
Anecdotal evidence (Score:3, Informative)
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those looked like fishing nets to me.
If you were to come across that in the deep ocean there would be loads of fish following it around feasting the mini-eco system that you describe.
If a fisherman comes across a 'floater' like that it is great luck!
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I'll bet dollars to donuts that sharkbeer will never really take off.......
Here ya go [landsharklager.com]. So you paying in dollars or donuts?
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Resource Storage (Score:4, Interesting)
The 'plastic' waste modern man produced could be seen as a resource storage.
We're burning up a lot of the petroleum resources. Which means it goes away. Gone, not available in the future.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is being preserved in that form. A century from now people might be saying 'thank goodness they saved SOME of the petroleum in the form of all that plastic in the landfills and floating in that big mass on the ocean.' And then they may go on to curse the 'environmentalists' who forced industry to stop using plastic bags and containers. All the 'biodegradable' packaging just crumbled away.
Not saying this is a completely thought out notion, but it makes some sense.
Tear into it if it conflicts with your religion.
Re:Resource Storage (Score:5, Insightful)
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is no more "available" or "preserved" as petroleum than is the portion we are turning into carbon dioxide and water by burning it; conversely, the latter is no more "gone" than the former.
Insofar as that "petroleum" remains usable at all (e.g., as potentially recyclable plastic), it would be much better preserved simply by recycling it as plastic, rather than mixing it with garbage and putting it in landfills or dumping it into the ocean.
Good.
You know, it kinds of sends mixed messages when you first admit that you haven't thought through the issue very much, and then go on and preemptively characterize any criticism as being based on your critics' "religion".
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All the 'biodegradable' packaging just crumbled away.
Scare quotes or no, that's exactly what it's supposed to do.
Are you really suggesting that future generations will suffer from a shortage of plastic bottles and packaging?!
Civilization (Score:4, Insightful)
Plastic Mine (Score:3, Insightful)
It seems to me that Pacific island nations with very low labor costs, high unemployment and a long tradition of seafaring should be able to find an economical way to round up that trash and recycle it for money.
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But a lot of it's dissolved, or in bits and pieces the size of fingernails, and kind of spread out. How do you round up that stuff?
Would be kind of cool, though, if it could be done.
Do your part for the mother earth (Score:5, Funny)
Sponge Bob and Mr. Krab (Score:3, Funny)
Are you going to believe your eyes, or our story? (Score:3, Informative)
So garbage is not randomly distributed throughout the oceans, but not surprisingly, it collects in areas of significantly increased density due to prevailing currents. How dense? Not dense enough to be visible to the casual onlooker. Only dense enough to be identified through careful study. So is that the story here?
No. The truth isn't good enough for a story. The truth isn't good enough to drive political action. So "scientists" lend their names to "authoritative" agencies like NOAA to come up with the story of a 1,700 mile "patch" of garbage. Alternatively (and dramatically), it has been called a "flotilla".
Yes, there's "a lot" of garbage in the ocean. And, it's a "big" ocean. Look carefully and you'll see that these stories don't do much to help you gauge what this "patch" really is.
"It's pretty shocking," said Miriam Goldstein.
"We're afraid at what we're going to find in the South Gyre, but we've got to go there," said Tony Haymet.
Thank you, researchers Goldstein and Hayment, for your contributions.
Look carefully through the photographs surrounding this story. Look for the 1,700 mile flotilla of garbage. By my understanding, this thing is a whole lot less dense than the stories would have you believe.
Here's a good one that I tried to track down:
This little "factoid" apparently comes from a non-peer-reviewed paper (page 270 here [noaa.gov]) published in 1985 that cites another un-reviewed paper in 1984 (can't find this one...Fowler) that estimated that 50,000 seals had died that year due to "entanglement" primarily in nets, as best I can tell. There's no more on methodology for determining that number, nor how it should be related to overall mammal population and more general "ocean debris."
Judge the quality of the "science" here for yourself. If you're a critical thinker, it should be apparent that this isn't science at all...it's just another story of human waste.
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You know, putting scare quotes around the word "scientists" and mocking the NOAA does not actually undermine their expertise. There is no evidence the figure cited in the story comes from the pdf you link, none at all - what did you do, google the noaa website for the number 100000? Apparently not, since the page youre referring to (269) mentions 50,000-90,000 seals killed - not other mammals, and there's no number 100k there at all. But even if you're right and the number is pulled out of an ass, blame
Re:Are you going to believe your eyes, or our stor (Score:5, Informative)
I did put some effort into understanding NOAA's role in this campaign, and apparently, a good deal more than you did. See NOAA here [noaa.gov] where the agency explains how it got from the "50,000 to 90,000" quote to their "100,000" propaganda number. Interestingly, if you had indeed taken the time to do exactly as you suggested, i.e. to google "NOAAA 100000", you would have seen this reference as the third link down. I took a much lengthier route, not looking to prove or disprove anything, but simply to understand the basis of the 100,000 estimate.
As NOAA's explanation indicates, they took the only loosely related range of "50,000 to 90,000", and from there, the 100,000 number emerges without further explanation. Your metaphorical characterization exactly matches my thinking when I saw it: they pulled it out of their asses.
I have high regard for the scientists of NOAA and their work products. I say this with great sincerity, and not to patronize your point. But in stark contrast with the genuinely authoritative works of NOAA, there are the political ways in which Presidential administrations and non-scientifically motivated high-level administrators of NOAA use its good name to advance political positions. In doing so, they besmirch NOAA's well-deserved reputation for good science, and cause people like me to use quotes around the word "authoritative" when describing the agency's "work" such as this. The politicians are simply taking NOAA's well-earned trust for a lowly political joy ride.
It occurs to me that I prefer the Bush administration's strategy of suppressing publication of NOAA work products that they found objectionable. If this ocean debris campaign is any indication of the Obama administration's approach, it looks like they will be using the NOAA moniker to publish political opinions as if they are the science of NOAA. This latter approach will be much more damaging to NOAA's scientists; it blatantly misrepresents their voices instead of just making it more difficult for them to be heard.
Re:Overreaction (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yeah and they really stood the test of time.
Re:Overreaction (Score:5, Interesting)
You mean worse than oh say, FISHING?
Seriously, filtering the top 6 inches of water, even going so far as to remove anything bigger than .5 micron shouldn't be such an impossible task, I'm envisioning a boat with a wide modified bow that collects the bow wave for filtering.. perhaps a group of them in an arrow formation filtering thier way back and forth across the gyre. Heck done right they could burn the plastic as fuel, capture the co2 in the sea water to help the phytoplankton recover.
As to to the depletion of the microorganisms in that layer, if the plastic is THAT deleterious we are likely doing the species(s) a favor by removing the badly damaged members, freeing up the space for healthier members to reproduce.
Re:Overreaction (Score:4, Interesting)
Sure, should be no problem building something that can filter out a mass of pollution LARGER THAN TEXAS.
How long do you think that would take exactly? How much energy would that take? How are you going to transport the debris that is collected? Where are you going to put it? Is the solution more "green" than the problem?
This is a repeat thread with the same recommended, knee jerk solutions.
Re:Overreaction (Score:5, Insightful)
Considering that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer" (and much of the top of the food chain feeds there) the potential impact is magnified well beyond its volumetric measure.
Re:Overreaction (Score:4, Interesting)
Considering that the bottom of the food chain resides in said "thin layer" (and much of the top of the food chain feeds there) the potential impact is magnified well beyond its volumetric measure.
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
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That's 0.3% for those of us who are like Rodney McKay, and understand numbers better than words.
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The gyres (e.g., the Sargasso Sea) are where most of the nutrient transition from plankton to the rest of the food chain happens. It is a big deal, and you obviously don't know the first thing about oceanic life.
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Well, there's also the south one, and the one near China, and....
Care for some tea? (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you mind if it's 0.333% ricin?
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Mod parent up. GP comment is just stupid. Yes the ocean is big. That doesn't mean we should poison it. Should we wait until the garbage fills 30% of the ocean before we let it bother us?
Re:Overreaction (Score:5, Insightful)
The ocean might seem "all one kind of place" to you, but it isn't to the creatures who live there. If this were happening in a "desert" location, it would probably be insignificant. Unfortunately it's not. It's happening where currents naturally draw things together. Things like food. And that means its where important sea life congregates.
N.B.: I'm no oceanographer, so some of this is reasoned out from first principles, and there's some extrapolation. But this is more comparable to building a polluting factory in the middle of a rich food producing area (like, say, the Santa Clara Valley) than to building the same factory in the middle of the Sahara desert. And, yes, we were that stupid. We've been that stupid repeatedly. Many of our cities are built on the sites that were previously the most productive farm land. This is doing the same stupid thing again, with even less intentionality behind it than is usual.
For some reason we seem determined to systematically destroy all places that are sources of food. Intention doesn't usually seem to have anything to do with it, it seems to be a consequence of system design principles that we ignore (consciously...they aren't invisible, just unnoticed).
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They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers. So twice the size of Texas is 1.4 million square kilometers. The world's oceans cover approximately 361 million square kilometers. So an area TWICE THE SIZE OF TEXAS (oh noes! Panic!) is 1/3rd of a percentage point of the surface area of all the world's oceans.
The world population is approximately 6.71 billion. A third of a percentage point of that is 25.68 million. The population of Texas is only 24.33 million. Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
Protip: by most standards, an event of that magnitude would be considered cataclysmic.
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The world population is approximately 6.71 billion. A third of a percentage point of that is 25.68 million. The population of Texas is only 24.33 million. Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
Protip: by most standards, an event of that magnitude would be considered cataclysmic.
25 million people dying would definitely be a Bad Thing (TM), and as funny as the jokes could be, I'm not going to recommend or even hope that everyone in Texas dies, but if you look at it dispassionately, the human species would survive 25 million deaths without much trouble. Over 10 million people died as a result of the events of World War 2, which was about the same percentage of the world population, and we're still here. Using terms like "cataclysmic" when they aren't appropriate results in the term b
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Ergo by your reasoning, if everyone in Texas dies, there's no need to worry.
And your problem with his reasoning is what now?
What the hell? (Score:2)
They say it's approximately twice the size of Texas. Texas is 691,030 square kilometers.
Dude, you're talking about TEXAS. Nobody measures things in kilometers.
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Don't mess with plastic Texas!
Re:Watch conservatives spin it... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Yeah, I'm extremely skeptical that global warming trends we've seen are the result of our fossil fuel usage. If you follow the money, there are a lot of people in the environmental movement pushing "carbon credits", and are poised to make a boatload of money by exploiting others' guilt, while doing nothing to actually solve real problems. But no one wants dirty air or water. There are plenty of good reasons why we should be reducing our oil and gas dependency (just inhale deeply on a bad smog day if you live in LA). And one would be an idiot to argue that a bunch of plastic in the ocean (or other obviously man-made debris or pollutants) are anything but a problem caused by humans, and needs to be solved by humans.
Believe it or not, I consider myself an environmentalist. When I was a bit younger, I did a lot of hiking in the mountain ranges near my home. I think nature is something that needs to be carefully protected, because it's far to easy to trample it under the foot of progress and industry. I support our national park system, and conversation efforts everywhere. I'm switching my light bulbs to more efficient halogens as they need replacing (not by force of law, though!). I'll be replacing my gas-burning car with an electric when they come out with a practical, affordable model, and I'm looking forward to doing so.
However, I also believe that we can strike a balance between responsible stewardship, individual liberty, and capitalist enterprise. I just happen to believe that you need to be extremely judicious in applying the force of law to every problem you need to solve. Growing the power of government nearly always comes at the expense of individual liberty, so I prefer that not be our first solution, but the last.
Re:Watch conservatives spin it... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Yep, a very good point. That's why I don't outright reject the notion of government coercion when other measures fail. Pollution is certainly an infringement on our ability to enjoy a clean, pollution-free environment. Like I stated, I think there can be an appropriate balance struck in these issues. But when abuse occurs, the only one with the authority to ultimately correct that abuse is the government, and it's foolish to think that *everyone* can be reasoned with.
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I think the place you get your 'information' from that you seem to trust (though I doubt it is sufficiently backed by facts) probably stands to lose a LOT more money by being held accountable for environmental impacts...
but.. then again... who knows, right? we can pretend that 2+2 = 5 all day when you inject doubt and amplify small probabilities to seem significant.
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Ok, I guess I'll speak up for conservatives here...
Whether or not global warming exists isn't a liberal or conservative issue, it is a scientific issue, and one that has not been conclusively resolved.
The opening statement of your comment illustrates the entire problem in the US. The liberals have latched onto global warming as being humanity's Deathstar. The conservatives don't buy it. Your opinion is governed by your political orientation. Neither side is considering the issue from an impartial (much less a scientific) perspective and every corporation is trying to profit from it.
It's turned into one of those hot button topics like gay marriage and abortion... every uninformed retard is now going to have an opinion based solely on their political stance, science be damned. It's sad that most Americans don't possess the intellect or follow through to attempt to understand the science for themselves, nor do they possess the BS filters to understand when their politicians are manipulating them for political or financial gain, but they will spend hours of effort researching the best TV set and car to buy.
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Because you insult those that disagree with you by implying that they are incapable of thinking for themselves.
Also, if he had just posted that I probably wouldn't have respected his comment. Granted, there probably are scammers among the carbon credit sellers. However, if you buy up some land and plant an orchard, that's a legitimate carbon sink (the trees themselves) which will also turn a profit.
I trust that sort of thing a lot more than the average venture capitalist. But that's why, if I were to buy a
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Recycling is a joke. 90% of what consumers pretend they are "recycling" today is dumped as garbage in a landfill - mostly because of cross-contamination and other process problems.
Sure, we could be recycling plastic containers into ... ??? ... well, you see that is the problem. Nobody really has a need for garbage-grade plastic today. And when you combine 17 sorts of plastic formulations into a big hopper that is what you get. There are few, if any, practical uses for the material and nobody is interest