Fewer people to offend on lj than facebook. My typing will suck. Going around sleeping kids is hard.
I read various “Go Green!” things and uhm… I’m actually kind of appalled that they exist because the recommended things are all so fucking basic. Recycling. Give me a fucking break. There is NO reason to not recycle. It’s fucking braindead. Come on people. Try not to use paper towels/plates/etc. Uhm yeah. What the fuck is wrong with people that they think convenience justifies using one use items constantly? HAVE YOU NOTICED OUR PROBLEMS WITH LANDFILLS YOU DUMB FUCKS?!
I might be offending a few people here but I kind of can’t find it in my heart to care. My neighbor says that their dishwasher broke so they’ve been using all disposable stuff because they can’t deal with doing dishes. I want to tell her that she is a lazy piece of shit, but I don’t. (And it’s not just her. That household has two less-than-full-time adults, one late teen-early20’s daughter from the husband’s former marriage, and a boy Shanna’s age.) They could get freakin dishes done. It’s not like they cook much anyway. How hard is it to just eat out of the take out containers you are wasting anyway. 😛
I will confess that some ‘Go Green!’ advice bugs me. Recommending that even if you only have a couple of cloth diapers it’s an improvement over using disposables full time is… maybe true. The problem is that most people will still wash the cloth diapers separately out of fear of feces contamination (not a completely out of left field worry) so they are doing daily half or less full loads of diaper laundry. That’s not actually a great choice in terms of overall ‘eco-friendliness’, ya know? Think about how many gallons of water you are using. I am a big fan of cloth diapers, don’t get me wrong… but only having 10 cloth diapers means you shouldn’t be doing it at all. Seriously. You are wasting so much water. I suppose if you can get past the normal squeamishness and wash them in with regular clothes it’s a good thing. But I doubt people are doing that. Really.
(Sarah is stuck in her house thanks to a blizzard and wants stuff to read. So uhm maybe I’ll be ranting more. 😛 )
And that, pretty much, is what’s going to dig us into our cozy little hole: Can’t deal.
Which translates into “don’t care”. Until we actually care, things won’t change. And for a large number of us, until it actually impacts us in a way that we notice, we’re not going to care.
My “Go Green” annoyance? Grocery stores are saying “Bring your own bags for a reward (5c charity donation, raffle drawing, etc)”, but when I choose not to use a bag in the first place, because I don’t need one, I get no respect.
Un-cycling. If you don’t need it, don’t use it in the first place. Simple.
And what kind of respect do you think you should be getting? I mean, awesome that you aren’t using bags when you don’t need to buy why do you think you deserve something special? In giving out incentives for bringing bags stores are encouraging something that has noticeable impact. People who don’t need a bag at all are in the minority. Although I am thanked when I point out I don’t need my milk bagged.
I think not using a bag should be treated as bringing your own. Like I’m using some kind of “invisible” bag, that also doesn’t waste resources.
You are entitled to any opinion you want to have. There is no value for a store in trying to encourage people to only come in for one or two things so uhm… no.
I find it worrying when I see college age people obliviously mixing recycling and compost into black garbage. I mean: c’mon! How hard is that!? 🙂
I think every school should be required to bring kids to a landfill by age 7 or so. Get’em while their young.
I had to stop and think and delete my original response. I did actually go to a landfill before I was 7! My family brought in cans to the recycling center before the county offered it and the recycling center was at the same location. 🙂
We wanted the money though, not vague ideals about saving the planet.
that was me, btw…
I figured it was Debbie, so thanks for letting me know. 😀
One of my favorites: Turn down the thermostat to 68 to save energy.
This year I decided to splurge. I turned the thermostat up to 64 for a while. When I get cold, I put on another layer.
Totally! When I was asking around for ways to bundle Calli up more at night people were horrified that I put her in so many layers. She’s going to overheat, you know. But then I horrified them by saying I bundle her because we don’t heat our house at night and it drops down to the 40’s. The main response was, “I would never have a house with a baby in it get below 70 degrees.” Uhm yeah. How did people survive for centuries before central heat.
Yeah, ummm, tell the 70 thing to the Eskimos.
I would commend just turning down the thermostat at night. I think mine goes down to 50. Uses much less energy but if it gets really cold (and it does for a day or two here or there) the pipes don’t freeze. (Yes, I’ve dealt with frozen pipes in the Bay Area.)
*cough*PCPolice*cough* Uhm… there is noticeable controversy around the word “Eskimo”. I 150% get what you are saying though. 😀
How about
“Those Damned People Living in Frozen Wastes Sitting on My Oil?”
as babies, my kids made so much heat that we used them like ‘lectic blankets.
cold? go grab a kid and stick ’em under the blanket with you.
they can’t turn *all* that food
into meat, bones, fat, and poop.
some of it has to turn into heat!
we figured since we were feedin’ ’em we should get some reward!
My pet peeve is appliances. True, my fridge isn’t the newest. But I keep the coils clean, have thermometers in both freezer and fridge and alter temp when needed. My electric bill is low, so I have some idea that I’m not wasting that much energy.
So why don’t I replace it with a brand new EnergyStar fridge? Cause I can’t see how throwing away/giving away a usable item is less harmful.
Now if the thing were like 20 years old and burned through wattage like a mo-fo, I’d be there.
I know! Totally with you. And car upgrades! Oh man.
> My neighbor says that their dishwasher broke so they’ve been using all disposable stuff because they can’t deal with doing dishes.
And there’s an illustration of a bigger reason why green advice for individuals is at best only a small piece of the solution. No matter how obvious it is. Things like that won’t change through individual action, they’ll change if plastic is more expensive. Or some other systemic change along the same lines. Public policy and economics will always have many orders of magnitude more effect than individual practice, so the only really effective “go green” advice IMO is to put some time towards ways to influence systemic changes: science, economics research, politics, public policy, advocacy, etc.
If everyone who doesn’t use disposable kitchenware at home switched their practice for one day this year and used all disposable dishes and plasticware and threw them all about, but in exchange for that, made one more call to each of their US Senators and Rep this year than they otherwise would’ve, the net effect would likely be positive. Though of course if they made those extra calls and *didn’t* use the disposable dishware that’d be better 🙂 And if 1 out of every 100 of them also spent one afternoon this year volunteering for a candidate of organization that promotes better policy, that’d be so so much better.
from Debs
this! THIS is why I’m studying environmental POLICY instead of simply green sustainability or environment or whatever.
dc
Ironically, if we actually used significantly less fossil fuel, plastics would get *even cheaper*.
One of the science fiction books of my past brought that up quite a while ago. Part of the premise was that the world had pretty much fucked itself out of the benefits of the industrial age by burning all the raw material that could have been made into useful stuff.
Lots of “green” items and practices just aren’t.
Here in northern Alameda County, we get to mix food scraps in with yard waste. So now, instead of the yard waste going to a facility near Pleasanton, it goes to Modesto, because it’s no longer suitable for processing into garden mulch, but has to be handled differently (in a much more energy-intensive way).
CFLs are a fraud. They don’t last any longer than incandescent bulbs, despite costing a lot more, and they get thrown in the trash, adding toxic materials to the waste stream.
Hand-washing dishes may be less environmentally friendly than using disposable dishes. Hand-washing uses *lots* of water, and if you can compost the disposables, that’s actually a pretty environmentally friendly solution. Dishwashers are much more efficient than hand-washing both for power and water.
i spent years helping design recycling facilities of all kinds.
after we reduce/reuse/recycle everything we can. we should:
go back and “mine” old landfills for metals. it’s easy to get to and there are billions (trillions?) of tons of great useable stuff in there.
fuckin’ screen and burn the stuff we can’t recycle (because there’s a lot of it) and make steam for industry and ‘lectricity for everyone else. after natural gas, municipal waste is the cleanest burning fuel there is. especially if you screen the fines (and either recycle them, because their rich in metals, or treat them like the hazardous waste they are).
trash is abundant, readily available, and we already have the collection/transport system in place. burning reduces the volume of what you need to dump by many-fold. trash ash can be processed for metals and, even if it’s not, is still far less toxic that the coal and lignite ash we already “dispose” of.
we spend so much money trying to get coal to burn cleaner when we already have an easily obtainable fuel that’s much, much cleaner from the start.
please no “burning is evil crap.” it’s a good solution with wonderful technology to support it.
Amen. Very few people make this connection, and as an Environmental Professional in the Energy from Waste Industry it is a hard message to get people to realize. Combusting waste for energy eliminates the need for fossil fuels to generate electricity, REDUCES CO2 in the atmosphere, increases the recycling of metals, and doesn’t consume irreplaceable amounts of land. And as you said, it is actually one of the cleanest ways of generating electricity with today’s technology.
-K
other green
If your neighbor with the broken dishwasher has some money to spare I’d be happy to come down and do the dishes.