Good governance utilizing democratic processes, capitalist economies, meritocracy and healthy work ethic, and the Rules of Law and Private Property (among other things) have raised billions out of abject poverty. From a world where poverty was the normal state of being for thousands of years of human existence. Yet, one of Lloyd Alter’s Carbon Upfront! commenters is offended by a Waste to Energy facility in Denmark that, while mitigating several noxious air pollutants, still spews….wait for it…a gas that plants and humans NEED to sustain Life.
Lloyd has almost pitched me out yet again as he has joined with other Canadians in having mental midget fits that Trump DARED to suggest that Canada join the US as our 51st State. Fury, from some, doesn’t come close to describing their fervor (or is that fever?). Adding the tariffs into the mix merely threw jet fuel onto their ire. Frankly, it was rather amusing watching him and his commenters lose their ever lovin’ minds – and of course, I was joining in from the sidelines with “comment grenades”.
I’ll recount more of this tempest in a blog-cup later on, but he took my advice and decided to move from his recent political-style posts (which he’s really out of his domain and knowledgebase) back to what he knows better:
Looking back at Bjarke Ingels’ Amager Bakke
The incinerator with a ski hill that “under a decade since opening, has gone from green icon to bête noire.”Almost everybody loves Bjark Ingel’s Amager Bakke, (also known as ARC) the world’s most photographed incinerator — sorry, I mean waste-to-energy (WTE) plant — in Copenhagen. I toured it in 2017, and shortly before it was complete, it was burning garbage, but the ski slope and the climbing wall had not yet been installed. The numbers were impressive:
It’s a lot of garbage; in 2015 ARC converted 395,000 tonnes of waste into 901,000 MWh of energy, of which 766,000 MWh was heat, equivalent to the consumption of 150,000 homes, and 135,000 MWh of electricity. It uses a “wet” smoke cleaning system that will remove 85% of nitrous oxide, 99.9% of hydrochloric acid, 99.5% of sulfur…What it doesn’t remove is Carbon Dioxide. Burning waste puts out more CO2 per tonne of garbage burned than coal…
Yep, CO2. Without it, we all die—end of story. But CO2 is the whipping boy, among other things, of the environmentalists. But as their religion requires, they will flog anything and anyone that violates their Enviro-Sacraments. At least Christianity has a sense of Grace and Forgiveness; these people are more like militant Islamists where only death seems to be the proper response for any infraction.
So off they went – and one p.j melton (yes, a bit of self-pretension there with all lowercase) went there with them (emphasis mine):
Pro tip on any kind of burning that claims to be a climate solution: if it looks like garbage, smells like garbage, and seeps into your hair and clothes like garbage … it’s garbage. This was always too good to be true—delusional, in fact. I’m really glad, as Adrian mentioned, that Denmark is accounting for these emissions and attempting to eliminate them.
Getting to zero waste and zero emissions at this point may require a compete collapse of so-called civilization. I’m not sure humans are smart enough to get there before all our toys are taken away.
And we are right back to that Viet Nam War famous phrase of “We had to destroy the village in order to save it”. Er, if something gets destroyed, what’s to save”. But that’s where she went. Sorry, on this one, absitively clueless. It’s one thing to speak of that on a tiny village abstraction but of global civilization?
Of course:
“… may require a compete collapse of so-called civilization….”
I’m assuming “complete” is the actual word.
Trust me, worrying about CO2 (or any other emissions) will be the least of all the problems that will then rise to the fore if your desired “collapse” comes about. It will lead, once again, to that Hobbesian phrase “short, nasty, and brutish” becoming the new Standard of Living of almost everyone. Anyone that survives will be wishing for these current “good old days” and going “what were they THINKING?????” [or she, as the case is].
Unless, of course, you are either the Strong Man (e.g. warlord) or his acolytes (yes, the Patriarchy will assume its position in a hurry and with great Evil. And they will laugh about it. Feminists will be on the menu for dinner (perhaps more than just rhetorically speaking). The weak, the ill, and the aged will be cast aside with no afterthoughts.
And many people will become their “toys” for the short amount of time they have life left.
First world citizens have no idea how good we really have it. Go to Haiti and live in one of their cities’ ghettos for a couple of years to see what I mean. That is, if you last that long. Ditto many other nations around the world.
You have NO IDEA what you revealed in that short phrase.
Eco-Socialism – that’s what they really want.
I guess I stopped the conversation once again. At the time of this writing, no one has replied to either of us to extol, support, mitigate, or harrumph. I did expect someone to help her out – me not so much (after all, just like the TEA Party of old, anyone not of the Left today is a “Trumper”; I had kinda hoped for SOMETHING!)—however, nada, nein, nothing.
I guess I got something right this time – maybe?
