Going Green is Bad for the Environment
Many of the wild claims made by Green lifestyle advocates are actually worse than doing nothing at all. They increase your carbon footprint, increase trash, and are generally bad for the planet, as well as harmful to people.
You may think you’re helping save the planet, or at least being a responsible member of society, if you recycle, avoid styrofoam, drive a hybrid, use electricity instead of fossil fuel, et cetera…
But, unfortunately, taking the advice of the “green living” trendies may actually do more harm than good.
“Green” environmentalism is chock-full of urban legends, inductive reasoning, and pseudoscience that end up harming the environment, as well as being directly bad for the people pushed to conform.
Here are some facts on the subject, gleaned from the Facebook group of the same name. JOIN Going Green is Bad for the Environment, if you want more info on the topic.
_______________________________
Government-mandated Recycling Pollutes
… (not the for-profit kind) is usually so inefficient that it produces more pollution than making new paper, glass, and plastic! 13 of the top Superfund hazardous waste sites were once recycling centers!
[1] New York Times: Recycling is Garbage
[2] http://Pen & Teller on Recycling
Biofuels Have Huge Carbon Footprint
…actually have a bigger carbon footprint than simply using fossil fuel, because they require the clearing of land for agriculture, AND the farmers use fossil fuels to run their farm equipment.
[5] New Scientist Magazone: Forget Biofuels, Burn Fossil Fuels and Plant Forests
[6] How Big is the Biofuel Carbon Footprint
[7] Carbon Footprint of Biofuels: Can We Shrink it Down to Size in Time?
[8] London Times: Biofuels Produce More Greenhouse Gas than Fossil Fuels
Hybrid Cars are Worse than Normal Cars
…have batteries are so bad for the environment that you probably can’t drive one long enough to make up for the damage, before the battery goes bad and you need a new one, causing the problem all over again
[9] Prius Outdoes Humvee in Environmental Damage
Environmentalism Causes Forest Fires
Laws preventing the clearing of wood from “wild” areas, combined with efforts to prevent small forest fires, set up “tinderbox” situations, and are the reason the gigantic wildfires end up engulfing large areas
Styrofoam is Better than Recycled Paper
It requires more energy to make food wrappers out of recycled paper than it does to make them out of styrofoam…so people who have pushed companies into doing so are creating a LARGER carbon footprint, and wasting more energy
What’s more, it requires more paper than styrofoam, to do the same job, so that recycled paper/cups/whatever produce more trash. They also do not biodegrade, even though made of paper.
[11]Eco Joe: Styrofoam is Better than Paper
Electric Cars Pollute
* The laws in California that attempted to force people to build and buy electric cars, a few years back, ignored that most of California’s electricity comes from COAL power plants, that have a bigger carbon footprint than a gasoline automobile.
[12] IEA.GOV U.S. Electric Power Industry Net Generation
Nuclear Power Reduces Uranium Pollution
* Indeed, coal fire power plants put more uranium into the atmosphere (it’s a trace element in coal) than nuclear power plants (which crazy Greens oppose) produce nuclear waste
CFC Replacements are Greenhouse Gases
The CFC replacements that were forced on people when the holders of their patents funded the anti-CFC movement happen to be powerful greenhouse gasses
Wetlands Produce Greenhouse Gases, too
Laws imposing “WETLANDS” on private property owners ignore that wetlands are a huge source of methane, a greenhouse gas thirty times more powerful than carbon dioxide
[12] Science: Beaver Ponds Fuel Global Warming
[13] NASA: Scientists Hunt for Acid Rain and Methane in Wetlands
AND…Reforestation Produces Greenhouse Gases
The laws forcing REFORESTATION in Europe have been creating millions of the very type of deciduous trees that produce more Nitrous Oxide, a greenhouse gas THREE HUNDRED times more powerful than CO2.
[14] New Scientist: Nitrous oxide – no laughing matter for forests
[15] Canadian Government: Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Agroforestry
Recycling E-Waste Pollutes
“Recycling E-Waste” (including government-mandated refurbished electronics) causes even more harm and pollution than conventional recycling.
[16] Why Environmental Groups Are Wrong about E-waste
Compact Fluorescent Bulbs Contain a Neurotoxin
How many light bulbs have you broken, or witnessed broken, or were broken and then cleaned up in a place where you later happened to be? CFLs are even easier to break, and if you do, they contain mercury powder, a more potent version of the stuff that used to make people insane, or dead. If broken, the mercury in the bulb does not go away, either, because it’s a heavy metal.
[17] CFL Bulbs Have One Hitch: Toxic Mercury
[18] Compact Fluorescent Bulbs and Mercury
GREEN ACTIVISTS ‘are keeping Africa poor’
Going Green is expensive and unproductive, leaving third world Africans literally starving to death.
[19] Green activists ‘are keeping Africa poor’
Anti-Pollution Laws Cause Global Warming:
The Big Brotherment response to the fear of “global dimming” causing an ice age in the 1970s resulted in massive anti-pollution laws that not only helped cause the economic weakness of that decade, but also appear to be causing at least half of the current “Global Warming” trend.
[20] New Scientist: Cleaner Skies Explain Surprise Global Warming
Using Paper Saves Trees
Fully 87% of our paper stock, comes from trees which are grown as a crop specifically for the purpose of paper production. Acting to ‘conserve trees’ through paper recycling is like acting to ‘conserve corn’ by cutting back on corn consumption.
A National Wildlife Federation study shows that recycling 100 tons of newspaper produces 40 tons of toxic sludge.
Thirteen of the 50 worst Superfund hazardous waste dumps were once recycling facilities.
________________________________________
More “Green” activities you should avoid doing, if you’re simply trying to help the environment:
* DO NOT TURN OFF YOUR AIR CONDITIONING!
It only improves your gas mileage by about one percent, but unrolling your windows COSTS you gas mileage.
* DO NOT BUY LOCAL FOOD
That’s right, you may actually be INCREASING your “carbon footprint” by buying local food, because small-scale growers are less efficient, and food shipping is SO efficient, so that your local food may have required MORE pollution, not less.
* DO NOT BUY ORGANIC FOOD
Aside from being more likely to contain life-threatening pathogens (the famous salmanella spinach was organic), organic food requires more land, and even energy, to grow, land that could otherwise be allowed to grow trees, or otherwise used in ways better for the environment.
These, and other myths, are debunked even by the environmentalist To Be Green website:
[21] To Be Green Website – note the “5 Things Not To Sweat”, halfway down the page.
Join this group for more info, and updates, on going green
23 Comments »
Leave a Reply
About
This site has its origins before the word “Blog” existed. Back then its owner, Kaz, was simply thought of as having a website that published socio-political articles with regularity…But the only real difference was that the RSS/XML protocals were not yet used this way.
The website was known as Site of the Sentient, a reference to the famous Words of the Sentient, that Kaz had been editing for years previously.
When some random portal site hijacked the domain siteofthesentient.com, it was a dark time for the human knowledge quest. Fortunately, But Now You Know is striving to take up the slack, and even has some revamped versions of the original articles, for example Conscription, is it Slavery, and How to Get Out of Jury Duty, and be a hero instead of a bad citizen.
Kaz is a writer, graphic artist, and supplements his income by being a hardcore senior web developer.
Along with this blog, you can track his efforts with the dedicated facebook page here.
Speaking of tracking:
You can follow But Now You Know here, on Twitter
And you can follow But Now You Know, via our Facebook Page, here.
Share This Article
Words of the Sentient- Tolkien, on Government
- Criminals Are Never Disarmed — Robert Heinlein
- Power Attracts the Corrupt — Frank Herbert
- Under Democracy — H.L. Mencken
- Guard Your Enemies from Oppression —> Thomas Paine
- Your Right to Not Support Evil
- Global Warming Shamanism
- The Squeaky Wheel…May Be Foolish
- Disarming the Victims
- The Inconvenience of Too Much Liberty
Recent Comments
kazvorpal on Monkeys Don’t Kill Peopl… Jenny Brewer on Monkeys Don’t Kill Peopl… Pater Rolf Hermann L… on It’s Not Even an Effing… Upholding Integrity… on Why the End Does Not Justify t… Alf from Albany on Why Workers Dislike Union… - Pithy Pontifications
- An error has occurred; the feed is probably down. Try again later.
But Now You Know 
Very good blog! Do you have any tips for aspiring writers?
I’m planning to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything.
Would you propose starting with a free platform like
Wordpress or go for a paid option? There are so many options
out there that I’m totally confused .. Any tips? Cheers!
[…] Other reasons why we should not go green […]
Pingback by Not Being Green = Mean? | To be or not to be... Green | April 17, 2013 |
[…] and am quite against some of these, but on the flipside, I don’t agree with many “go green” concepts either. I’d like to think my approach is somewhat […]
Pingback by Greenside Café: Attack of the Vegans | findingjozi | April 4, 2012 |
WOW! This has a lot of real life usability! This deserves another 100 comments it is so good
organic foods are the best for our health since they are free from dangerous chemicals and toxins “~,
That is patently untrue. There are more organic toxins than inorganic ones.
You guys really need to calm down… this is just a website, and i found the links very helpful for my persuasive paper in which i have have to document proof of pro/ con of going green. If you staunch environmentalists actually looked at this website with an open mind, you may actually learn something…
(In response to all the vulgar language/ accusations)
wtf this is so stupid and wrong
wtf are kids being taught these days?
GO TO FUCKING HELL YOU WANNA DIE EARLIER??
GO DIE IN A HOLE
Wow, the Cult of Green lives on…but in diminished form.
Soon, this will be the only kind of thing left defending it.
Wow, that was a powerful and engaging argument. Way to make the other side see your point.
[…] Green policies do worse for the environment than the mainstream parties. And here going green is bad for the environment. […]
Pingback by The far side « TWAWKI | February 2, 2010 |
I do my share of work for the environment, I have made a park out of an empty lot full of trash and invasive plants with some neighbors, I have participated in local clean ups and I research a lot about the environment, from what I have learned this is just to make people like me angry. Most of your “Facts” are just fiction, If you have any common sense or common good in you, you should remove this article.
Rebut the facts, then.
You SAY they are fiction, but that’s just knee-jerk denial.
Your credentials, as someone who cleans up empty lots, is meaningless.
Of course it makes you angry, because you’re one of the sheep who get their self-esteem from grand, empty gestures. Who recycle because it makes them feel good, conform because it’s proper, et cetera.
Otherwise, itemize the flaws in the list.
Freedom of speech applies in the virtual world, too, TWAWKI.
We all have the right to our opinion, and the right to say it, too. You have the right to disagree. You also have the right to change the channel, close the page, or turn it off.
You do not have the right to tell anyone else what to do, any more than we have the right to tell you what to do.
Sorry if you don’t like it.
Surf to another page.
This is all false.
Go Vegan and Go Green. Save the planet.
OK, now you’re just making fun of environmentalists…
How could you stuff, it is completely untrue and stupid. I am an avid environmentalist and NONE of whats on this page is true!!!!!
You say this like you could have an erg of credibility left, after declaring you’re an avid environmentalist. That is a blindly emotional position, not a rational one. You demonstrate almost exactly the kind of run-on-feelings faith-based approach one would expect from an avid environmentalist.
You present no counter-arguments at all, much less factual ones. You appear to simply have blind faith in the inherent goodness of your superstition, which is why it produces such grotesque evil against your own planet, species, and society.
Well, I was writing a retort:
> Oh, come on, this is trivially easy. A kilogram of beef (~2600 calories) takes
> as much energy to produce as your *average* European *CAR* uses in
> *250 kilometers*.
Your goofy metric system aside, this is irrelevant.
As are most of the statistics used to frighten gullible little Greens.
The amount of energy required to grow 2.2 pounds of beef does not matter, except insofar as it helps regulate the price of beef.
Why would you bother to compare it to how far a car travels? A train can move that meat something like three thousand miles on the energy it takes to get your car to the grocery store and back. Perhaps you should walk.
> Now beef is one of the worst, but food in general takes a
> huge amount of energy to produce, process, and transport.
Sure, compared to growing daisies. But it does not matter. Why would it?
People who worry about these things haven’t the slightest idea how the world works.
> And then, on top of that, the human body is at best 20% efficient
> at turning food energy into kinetic energy, and only in optimal
> conditions (legs, at a specific torque in a specific direction and
> at a specific burn rate). And depending on how you harness that
> kinetic energy, a large chunk of even that can be wasted.
An athlete on a bike can probably get 250 miles on 2.2 pounds of beef.
What you are implying, really, is that you feel the problem with the Holocaust is that it didn’t target ALL of those inefficient humans, right?
What a goofy source for self-hate…poor energy coefficient.
> We’ve destroyed most of the world’s wildlife habitat
No, we have not. We’ve simply altered it.
Do you hate blue-green algae? It altered 100% of the biosphere of the earth, wiping out almost all life completely. It took hundreds of millions of years to recover from that, the greatest mass-extinction ever.
> because of agriculture and livestock raising taking up something
> like 4/5ths of the planet’s non-ice-covered surface.
Holy crap, no wonder the whales are dying out…we’ve covered the oceans with farms.
Even if I cut you slack on your laughably sloppy wording, far from 80% of the world’s LAND surface is used for agriculture. In fact, a majority of the world’s land surface is useless for agriculture. It has mountains, deserts, tundra, et cetera, far in excess of 20%.
Great example of how the statistics greens spout not only are irrelevant, but often completely made up.
Like the common claim that the Amazon jungle produces most of the world’s oxygen.
Did you know that 90% of our breathable O2 comes from the oceans?
In fact, the Amazon jungle CONSUMES more oxygen than it produces. More is consumed in the soil under a given tree, than the tree produces, thanks to bacteria and chemical reactions.
> Oh, but it gets worse. Farming requires utterly ridiculous amounts of
> freshwater to produce food — often thousands of gallons per pound of food.
Perhaps, but water is not magically “used up”, the water evaporates and remains in the very same system as before.
You could as reasonably complain that the Amazon jungle uses up water.
> Agriculture is responsible for the Colorado literally not
> reaching the Gulf of California anymore, for example.
That sucks for people who buy real estate in Mexico.
But it’s no worse for the environment than when any other river evaporates. Perhaps you should object to the existence of the Great Salt Lake, too.
> The decline of the glaciers of Kilimanjaro is generally credited by
> the scientific community not to be due to global warming, but due
> to the expansion of livestock raising in the area altering weather patterns.
It is due to whatever some bureaucrat thinks will (literally) scare up more money.
The people saying that are not scientists. Not in the real sense.
What’s more, none of your…
Then I noticed that it was posted by you. I had initially thought your comment ended with the link.
Apparently I can’t cut and paste properly. I got that from the comments section of that article I cited. The commenter goes by the nickname “meme.” His comment is at 3:45 pm on the 18th.
Sorry for the confusion.
Don’t forget – Don’t exercise!
btw – do you know this guy?
from http://www.autobloggreen.com/2009/04/17/legway-diy-human-powered-segway/
3:49PM (4/18/2009)
Oh, come on, this is trivially easy. A kilogram of beef (~2600 calories) takes as much energy to produce as your *average* European *CAR* uses in *250 kilometers*. Now beef is one of the worst, but food in general takes a huge amount of energy to produce, process, and transport. And then, on top of that, the human body is at best 20% efficient at turning food energy into kinetic energy, and only in optimal conditions (legs, at a specific torque in a specific direction and at a specific burn rate). And depending on how you harness that kinetic energy, a large chunk of even that can be wasted.
By comparison, thermal power plants are ~30-40% efficient (and rising), transmission is 92.8% efficient, charging is ~92% efficient, li-ion batteries 96-99.9% efficient, and electric drivetrains 85-90% efficient under typical operating conditions (they can peak at over 95%).
But hey, that’s just energy (and, correspondingly, GHGs). It gets far worse when you look at things other than GHGs. Food crops rarely put more than a couple percent of the sun’s energy into their edible components. Sugarcane is a rare exception at around 10%, but most foods are in the 0.1 to 3% range. If you assume that it *merely* takes as much energy on average to produce your food as it contains, which generally isn’t even close to true for the American diet, your average person is at under 1% solar efficiency. Factor in the huge losses in the human body, and you’re lucky if your average solar efficiency is over 0.1%. On the other hand, solar thermal plants are about 30% efficient, and then you have the (minor) additional losses of an EV drivetrain. It’s well over two orders magnitude difference in terms of land area being taken up. Ever looked at a satellite image of our planet? We’ve destroyed most of the world’s wildlife habitat because of agriculture and livestock raising taking up something like 4/5ths of the planet’s non-ice-covered surface.
Oh, but it gets worse. Farming requires utterly ridiculous amounts of freshwater to produce food — often thousands of gallons per pound of food. Agriculture is responsible for the Colorado literally not reaching the Gulf of California anymore, for example. And where the wastewater does make it to the sea, look out. Agriculture is responsible, for example, for the massive Gulf of Mexico dead zone, and similar dead zones around the world. It even affects climate on its own. The decline of the glaciers of Kilimanjaro is generally credited by the scientific community not to be due to global warming, but due to the expansion of livestock raising in the area altering weather patterns.
Ummm…Daniel, are you quoting someone?
I wrote a categorical retort, then noticed that you’re credited with the green babble…how could this be?
[…] But Now You Know Posted by admin Filed in Environmentalism No Comments » […]
Pingback by Recycling and “Being Green” are Bullshit. « Learn. Act. | April 10, 2009 |