Global Warming

[Ozme52]

I prefer to say realist when someone mentions defeatist.
It Tells me their ideas are only ideas or theories being bantered about and not actually in place.
Most liberal ideas don't come into fruitation because for the most part their ideas are expensive and there's no way to fund them.
Many great ideas , aye and most any thing put forth by .gov , take away from personal freedom. Trying to impose their idea of a utopian society that if enacted would be so screwed that it would be no better than what is here now.

I'll agree with a lot of that.

A side note as to the cost of some of these 'solutions' is that money (mostly) doesn't grow on trees. It's mined out of the earth and smelted into useful items. Manufactering creates wealth. Manufacturing creates greenhouse gases. So in order to fund solutions, one must realize one is adding to the problem. No one has determined the cost of some of these 'solutions' in terms of the offset to the carbon footprint. It does no good to reduce greenhouse gases on one front if it increases them on another. One needs to understand the "balance sheet" of gains and losses.

It goes to my issue with all electric cars. You offset clean(er) burning hydrocarbons with electricity produced by coal burning plants.

Another example. Aluminum is not the great 'green' metal everyone presumes it to be. Aluminum requires huge huge amounts of electricity to smelt the ore into useful metal. Yep, all that nice recyclable aluminum creates a huge carbon footprint. We don't recycle aluminum out of altruism or a love of the earth... we do it so we can have aluminum, light, strong, non-oxidizing. Without recycling the cost of making it in the first place would be prohibitive.

It happens to cost less to smelt new iron than to recycle and resmelt old iron/steel. So the carbon footprint of new iron is less than that of recycled iron. Each item has to be measured independently. An all inclusive recycling mandate could make things worse.