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NOW AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC IS OVER: 

 

The smart way for cash-strapped cities to save money and protect workers: Stop recycling. 

 

Howard Husock calculates that New York City could save nearly $200 million annually by scrapping its recycling program and sending stuff straight to the landfill.

 

And it would spare trash collectors and other workers from the risk of handling recyclables with Covid-19 and other pathogens.

 

If Bill di Blasio and other mayors want their pleas for federal aid to be taken seriously, they need to show they’re serious about eliminating waste.

 
 
 
 
Save your (obligatory) Conservatives hate the earth response...........read up on what REALLY helps.
 
 
 
Posted

Hey! If over a year ago AOC reported we only had eleven years left, does anyone know if we bought ourselves a couple of weeks by shutting down a good chunk of the world? 

Posted
7 minutes ago, SoCal Deek said:

Hey! If over a year ago AOC reported we only had eleven years left, does anyone know if we bought ourselves a couple of weeks by shutting down a good chunk of the world? 


No. Based on the number of years the planet has been heating and cooling and the effect we’ve had on it I’d say we bought ourselves  .000000000002 of a second give or take 30 zeros. It’s a very inexact science. 

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Posted
3 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:


No. Based on the number of years the planet has been heating and cooling and the effect we’ve had on it I’d say we bought ourselves  .000000000002 of a second give or take 30 zeros. It’s a very inexact science. 

 

Not bad about a Trillion dollars per.

 

Money well spent

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Posted
On 5/17/2020 at 7:09 PM, B-Man said:

 

 

 

NOW AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC IS OVER: 

 

The smart way for cash-strapped cities to save money and protect workers: Stop recycling. 

 

Howard Husock calculates that New York City could save nearly $200 million annually by scrapping its recycling program and sending stuff straight to the landfill.

 

And it would spare trash collectors and other workers from the risk of handling recyclables with Covid-19 and other pathogens.

 

If Bill di Blasio and other mayors want their pleas for federal aid to be taken seriously, they need to show they’re serious about eliminating waste.

 
 
 
 
Save your (obligatory) Conservatives hate the earth response...........read up on what REALLY helps.
 
 
 

Time for the $0.05 and $0.10 bottle deposits to go away. The various states have raked in millions on that scam. I can’t see where any recyclers of these items are going to want their employees to sort through them at least in the foreseeable future. 

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Posted
2 hours ago, Gary M said:

 

Not bad about a Trillion dollars per.

 

Money well spent


But it’s amazing they actually had the audacity (not even sure if that’s the right word here) to throw the 12 year time frame out there. ?

Posted
25 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:


But it’s amazing they actually had the audacity (not even sure if that’s the right word here) to throw the 12 year time frame out there. ?

 

 

The lie sounds better with a deadline, if they leave it open end no one listens. Plus it means we have to move fast, so no time to discuss and/or review the data.

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Posted
On 5/16/2020 at 3:57 PM, Buffalo Timmy said:

CNN admits she is not the expert on the panel- but she is there to help reach young people. How about using facts for that?

 

Did you just use "CNN" and "Facts" in the same breath? 

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Posted
36 minutes ago, Chef Jim said:


But it’s amazing they actually had the audacity (not even sure if that’s the right word here) to throw the 12 year time frame out there. ?

I would go with pomposity, maybe utter pomposity, but that's only because you grabbed audacity first. 

 

On 5/16/2020 at 3:57 PM, Buffalo Timmy said:

CNN admits she is not the expert on the panel- but she is there to help reach young people. How about using facts for that?

If they want to reach the young people, they should just shortcut it and put Biden on the panel.  He'll grab 'em but good. 

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Posted
3 hours ago, Nanker said:

Time for the $0.05 and $0.10 bottle deposits to go away. The various states have raked in millions on that scam. I can’t see where any recyclers of these items are going to want their employees to sort through them at least in the foreseeable future. 

Don't let Newman and Kramer here that!  They spend an entire episode trying to figure out how to beat the system.  If I remember correctly it was the use of a free US Mail truck that tilted the numbers in their favor!  :lol:

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Posted
On 5/16/2020 at 12:57 PM, Buffalo Timmy said:

CNN admits she is not the expert on the panel- but she is there to help reach young people. How about using facts for that?

 

So based on that logic we should have all our teachers be teenagers because you know young people only listen to their peers vs adults.  

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Posted
2 hours ago, leh-nerd skin-erd said:

I would go with pomposity, maybe utter pomposity, but that's only because you grabbed audacity first. 

 

If they want to reach the young people, they should just shortcut it and put Biden on the panel.  He'll grab 'em but good. 

Naw, we don't want Joe poking around this.

Posted
On 5/16/2020 at 3:04 AM, Azalin said:

 

I would love to see a little honesty, or at least clarification, with regard to the widespread use of the nebulous benchmark known as "normal". Too many of those trying to shape energy policy present Earth's climate as something static; that without humanity the four seasons would pass normally with only the occasional heat wave or cold snap. We know for a fact that the Earth was much warmer during past eras, and we know that there's been multiple ice ages. Some scientists suggest that we're still emerging from the most recent one. We know that the oceans used to be lower due to there being much more glacial ice - the lowered oceans allowed for the Aleutian Island land bridge that brought the first Americans here from Asia. Proof of a dynamic climate is all around us, but too often climate-debate talking points come back to referencing "normal" as a fixed level of routine weather and temperature that mankind (especially capitalist mankind) threatens to destroy. 

 

Qualitatively, many people refer to a “normal” climate as that which existed right before the start of the Industrial Revolution, with slight adjustments for any non-anthropogenic changes that have occurred since then.

 

But for the purposes of science and energy policy, in most cases “normal” is a quantitative reference to averages of atmosphere and ocean climate data taken over the past 125 years or so and compiled by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Any scientific paper referencing “normal” climates will provide a more detailed description of how these numbers were calculated. When research gets interpreted and summarized by the mass media for the public, little details and annotations like these tend to get omitted. But I don’t think there is any deliberate dishonesty in play here.

 

Note that the “normal” climate reference that is commonly in use does account for some man-made global warming. The concept of normality is about what’s acceptable and what’s not. The vast majority of the world’s modern farming system and civil infrastructure was put together with these twentieth-century climate averages in mind.

 

There is no denial that climate is a dynamic entity, independent of man. The issue is how to explain the unprecedentedly sudden and stark changes (by geologic time scale standards) that have occurred curiously since the late 1800’s, but without the benefit of explanation from factors like large-scale volcanic activity or meteorite strikes. Anyone with a better explanation than man-induced greenhouse gas emissions will become a scientific legend.

 

 

On 5/17/2020 at 7:09 PM, B-Man said:

NOW AND AFTER THE PANDEMIC IS OVER: 

 

The smart way for cash-strapped cities to save money and protect workers: Stop recycling. 

 

Howard Husock calculates that New York City could save nearly $200 million annually by scrapping its recycling program and sending stuff straight to the landfill.

 

And it would spare trash collectors and other workers from the risk of handling recyclables with Covid-19 and other pathogens.

 

If Bill di Blasio and other mayors want their pleas for federal aid to be taken seriously, they need to show they’re serious about eliminating waste.

 
 
 
 
Save your (obligatory) Conservatives hate the earth response...........read up on what REALLY helps.

 

Assuming the $185 million in annual savings is accurate, that’s only 22 cents annually per NYC resident. Why not find other ways to balance the budget? And why not implement basic coronavirus protections for recycling facility workers instead of scrapping the whole enterprise altogether? Can’t the private US market find ways to pick up the slack of what China used to do for our recyclables? Won’t sending recyclables to landfills only speed up the need for additional landfills to be created? Doesn’t the use of recyclable materials instead of making new ones lower the overall manufacturing costs for companies? These are just some of the questions I have from this article. I appreciate creative ideas and outside-the-box thinking, but sometimes I’m amused by all the mental gymnastics that conservatives and neoliberals perform to avoid raising taxes ever so slightly on the uber-rich (especially on the financial elite here in Manhattan that continually receive government bailouts and clever tax evasion options).

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Posted
3 hours ago, RealKayAdams said:

 

<snip>

Can’t the private US market find ways to pick up the slack of what China used to do for our recyclables? 
<snip>

I recycle and was not happy that recycling plastic bags went away when China stopped accepting them. I would think the USA could find a way do do this.
However, I really wonder if China was really "recycling"  or just trashing items for a fee.

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Posted
7 hours ago, RealKayAdams said:

 

Qualitatively, many people refer to a “normal” climate as that which existed right before the start of the Industrial Revolution, with slight adjustments for any non-anthropogenic changes that have occurred since then.

 

But for the purposes of science and energy policy, in most cases “normal” is a quantitative reference to averages of atmosphere and ocean climate data taken over the past 125 years or so and compiled by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). Any scientific paper referencing “normal” climates will provide a more detailed description of how these numbers were calculated. When research gets interpreted and summarized by the mass media for the public, little details and annotations like these tend to get omitted. But I don’t think there is any deliberate dishonesty in play here.

 

Note that the “normal” climate reference that is commonly in use does account for some man-made global warming. The concept of normality is about what’s acceptable and what’s not. The vast majority of the world’s modern farming system and civil infrastructure was put together with these twentieth-century climate averages in mind.

 

There is no denial that climate is a dynamic entity, independent of man. The issue is how to explain the unprecedentedly sudden and stark changes (by geologic time scale standards) that have occurred curiously since the late 1800’s, but without the benefit of explanation from factors like large-scale volcanic activity or meteorite strikes. Anyone with a better explanation than man-induced greenhouse gas emissions will become a scientific legend.

 

 

There's not a lot that I disagree with here, but I'm not completely in agreement with you when you say:  ""normal” is a quantitative reference to averages of atmosphere and ocean climate data taken over the past 125 years or so and compiled by NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)". I have faith in the research and calculations of both organizations, but only to a point. I sure feel old admitting this, but I'm slightly older than NASA, and almost a decade older than NOAA. That gives them a good 50-60 years of hard data to work with, but to go back 125 years takes a lot more theorizing than working with empirical, contemporary evidence. That's my biggest beef with the entire issue - how can an honest, legitimate trajectory be calculated when "point A" on the chart has such potential to be incorrect? Maybe it can be, maybe not. I personally don't believe it's solid enough to base policy that may potentially have a negative economic impact on us. 

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