I
IBRRHOBO
Guest
This thread may piss some folks off; I am pretty good at doing that and brush up all the time on it!
Yeah, so I get this pimple faced fuckstick kid from some tree hugging organization today on the phone trying to hawk his wares for 50 quid in the middle of dinner. I tried, politely, to tell him I really don't give a fuck about light bulbs as Dollar General has 'em 4 for a dollar and I had no need for his 7 dollar compact florescent lights (CFL). So this petulant motherf*cker starts in on how the South really needs to get with the program as we are a disaster area in terms of the environment. Had I been able to reach through the phone I would have shoved my hand down his throat and pulled his testicles out!
It's not so much that I am defending the South. First, when I am dead it's not going to matter a whole hell of a lot anyway. I DO have a problem with some fuckhead telling me what I MUST put into my home I OWN!
I *69'd his number, spoke with his manager and after a threat to call the FCC, as I am on the no call/fax list, they apologized and are now sending out a case of the fucking CFL's! See, I didn't want the fuckers anyway and now, thanks to the Save the Earth Foundation (forgot their name) I have yet more trash to deal with.
Well, I thought I better look into what this little fucking Al Gore was sending me and lo and behold here's an article dealing with it:
This got me really thinking about all the environmental shit. Now, I don't agree with creating toxic waste dumps wherever or sending ships to India for dismantling so we don't deal with it here. I do believe that there have to be some pretty fine lines drawn though. For example, Congress' new initiative to get everyone into the hybrid cars. Well, I dredged this up:
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer because it is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery.
So, I'm putting this in red as I'm pissed about things. See, where does it end? I mean at what point does my land and my life arbitrarily pass into other's hands? A light bulb here, a prius there, where does it end?
:club::club::club::club:this...' and '...start doing that... .'
Yeah, so I get this pimple faced fuckstick kid from some tree hugging organization today on the phone trying to hawk his wares for 50 quid in the middle of dinner. I tried, politely, to tell him I really don't give a fuck about light bulbs as Dollar General has 'em 4 for a dollar and I had no need for his 7 dollar compact florescent lights (CFL). So this petulant motherf*cker starts in on how the South really needs to get with the program as we are a disaster area in terms of the environment. Had I been able to reach through the phone I would have shoved my hand down his throat and pulled his testicles out!
It's not so much that I am defending the South. First, when I am dead it's not going to matter a whole hell of a lot anyway. I DO have a problem with some fuckhead telling me what I MUST put into my home I OWN!
I *69'd his number, spoke with his manager and after a threat to call the FCC, as I am on the no call/fax list, they apologized and are now sending out a case of the fucking CFL's! See, I didn't want the fuckers anyway and now, thanks to the Save the Earth Foundation (forgot their name) I have yet more trash to deal with.
Well, I thought I better look into what this little fucking Al Gore was sending me and lo and behold here's an article dealing with it:
How much money does it take to screw in a compact fluorescent light bulb? About US$4.28 for the bulb and labour -- unless you break the bulb. Then you, like Brandy Bridges of Ellsworth, Maine, could be looking at a cost of about US$2,004.28, which doesn't include the costs of frayed nerves and risks to health.
Sound crazy? Perhaps no more than the stampede to ban the incandescent light bulb in favour of compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFLs).
According to an April 12 article in The Ellsworth American, Bridges had the misfortune of breaking a CFL during installation in her daughter's bedroom: It dropped and shattered on the carpeted floor.
Aware that CFLs contain potentially hazardous substances, Bridges called her local Home Depot for advice. The store told her that the CFL contained mercury and that she should call the Poison Control hotline, which in turn directed her to the Maine Department of Environmental Protection.
The DEP sent a specialist to Bridges' house to test for mercury contamination. The specialist found mercury levels in the bedroom in excess of six times the state's "safe" level for mercury contamination of 300 billionths of a gram per cubic meter. The DEP specialist recommended that Bridges call an environmental cleanup firm, which reportedly gave her a "low-ball" estimate of US$2,000 to clean up the room. The room then was sealed off with plastic and Bridges began "gathering finances" to pay for the US$2,000 cleaning. Reportedly, her insurance company wouldn't cover the cleanup costs because mercury is a pollutant.
Given that the replacement of incandescent bulbs with CFLs in the average U.S. household is touted as saving as much as US$180 annually in energy costs -- and assuming that Bridges doesn't break any more CFLs -- it will take her more than 11 years to recoup the cleanup costs in the form of energy savings.
The potentially hazardous CFL is being pushed by companies such as Wal-Mart, which wants to sell 100 million CFLs at five times the cost of incandescent bulbs during 2007, and, surprisingly, environmentalists.
It's quite odd that environmentalists have embraced the CFL, which cannot now and will not in the foreseeable future be made without mercury. Given that there are about five billion light bulb sockets in North American households, we're looking at the possibility of creating billions of hazardous waste sites such as the Bridges' bedroom.
Usually, environmentalists want hazardous materials out of, not in, our homes. These are the same people who go berserk at the thought of mercury being emitted from power plants and the presence of mercury in seafood. Environmentalists have whipped up so much fear of mercury among the public that many local governments have even launched mercury thermometer exchange programs.
As the activist group Environmental Defense urges us to buy CFLs, it defines mercury on a separate part of its Web site as a "highly toxic heavy metal that can cause brain damage and learning disabilities in fetuses and children" and as "one of the most poisonous forms of pollution."
Greenpeace also recommends CFLs while simultaneously bemoaning contamination caused by a mercury-thermometer factory in India. But where are mercury-containing CFLs made? Not in the United States, under strict environmental regulation. CFLs are made in India and China, where environmental standards are virtually non-existent.
And let's not forget about the regulatory nightmare in the U.S. known as the Superfund law, the EPA regulatory program best known for requiring expensive but often needless cleanup of toxic waste sites, along with endless litigation over such cleanups.
We'll eventually be disposing billions and billions of CFL mercury bombs. Much of the mercury from discarded and/or broken CFLs is bound to make its way into the environment and give rise to Superfund liability, which in the past has needlessly disrupted many lives, cost tens of billions of dollars and sent many businesses into bankruptcy.
As each CFL contains five milligrams of mercury, at the Maine "safety" standard of 300 nanograms per cubic meter, it would take 16,667 cubic meters of soil to "safely" contain all the mercury in a single CFL. While CFL vendors and environmentalists tout the energy cost savings of CFLs, they conveniently omit the personal and societal costs of CFL disposal.
Not only are CFLs much more expensive than incandescent bulbs and emit light that many regard as inferior to incandescent bulbs, they pose a nightmare if they break and require special disposal procedures. Yet governments (egged on by environmentalists and the Wal-Marts of the world) are imposing on us such higher costs, denial of lighting choice, disposal hassles and breakage risks in the name of saving a few dollars every year on the electric bill? - Steven Milloy publishes JunkScience.com and CSRWatch.com. He is a junk-science expert and advocate of free enterprise, and an adjunct scholar at the Competitive Enterprise Institute..
This got me really thinking about all the environmental shit. Now, I don't agree with creating toxic waste dumps wherever or sending ships to India for dismantling so we don't deal with it here. I do believe that there have to be some pretty fine lines drawn though. For example, Congress' new initiative to get everyone into the hybrid cars. Well, I dredged this up:
Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer because it is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles.
The nickel produced by this disastrous plant is shipped via massive container ship to the largest nickel refinery in Europe. From there, the nickel hops over to China to produce ‘nickel foam.’ From there, it goes to Japan. Finally, the completed batteries are shipped to the United States, finalizing the around-the-world trip required to produce a single Prius battery.
So, I'm putting this in red as I'm pissed about things. See, where does it end? I mean at what point does my land and my life arbitrarily pass into other's hands? A light bulb here, a prius there, where does it end?
:club::club::club::club:this...' and '...start doing that... .'