warren d

I know how the world works. Everyone buys and sells to each other and everyone is supposed to be better off financially. My point is if the politicians really are serious about this issue then they need to encourage people to buy less of everything because it is industry that is causing a lot of the pollution but they don't want us to cut down buying and selling to each other. I know and I certainly wouldn't deny them the protection they need. You can bet your life that most of them live in houses that use far more power than me though. Lead by example.

But I do look at my own life. If politicians set an example then people start thinking "OMG this really is serious" I'm trying to do my bit. Like I said earlier, I try to use as little power as possible to keep my bills down. I also try to buy quality items when I can afford to that will hopefully last longer than the cheap stuff that has to be replaced all the time. I buy very few products anyway apart from what I need in my work. I don't over eat. I buy the minimum amount of food that comes in packets. I hate waste, etc.

Not for me. My argument is if I'm already cutting down as much as I can then why don't they? We know they are not making big cut backs because if they were their own publicity machine would be telling us all about it.


I don't mind leaders flying around the world to meetings about pollution but a hell of a lot of the flying around the world is to promote trade. Trade causes pollution. If people don't buy products that they don't really need then that makes a huge impact on pollution. Far more than just telling people to switch the TV off at the wall.

BTW most electrical items on standby use very little electric. I'm not saying everything in my house is on standby. It's not. An item on standby in winter actually contributes to heating the house so turning it off at the wall makes just about no difference at all. Not buying ridiculous amounts of Christmas presents for example will make a difference though.

carter71

According to BERR the average uk household uses 13kWh per day, so 8% would be just over 1kWh. Suggesting an *average* of 50 TVs on standby on every home - obviously some homes could have 3 or 4 times that amount!

Econ

I did say that we could produce * but not be as cheap *, you are trying to make a point on this to me that I already stated... anyway, I think they could be produced cheaper in Europe than you and others think. Bringing manufacturing taxes in the EU down, no transport to and from Asia, no duty (if any where applied), lowering the minimum hourly rate (many already work for less than the minimum EU rate) all this would make a product that would cost more from a manufacturer in Asia but probably not be that much more in many cases and probably no more in some other cases.

I think I have read and understood, but I wonder if you have as what I have been saying is that our governments preach green but chuck their waste in someone elses back garden and over the fence, 'We have a really clean house but go into the garden and next doors garden is full of litter'. Manufacturing has been strangled in the UK, it is in other EU countries also, so we are cleaner than we used to be, but we get someone else to do the manufacturing and they can create the pollution (probably at twice the amount of pollution we would create manufacturing it). As you mentioned cheap labour rates (which is fine if that is the rate of the country) but probably in very poor conditions that we would not except here.

ewaste in China: ewaste in China

ewaste in China: (US Based) ewaste China CBS

I think you miss that I am making the point of the hypocrisy and not so much the issue used to explain it, although it is in it'self is a problem, you can believe it or not but we should be doing something about it and not just... oh look we are being good and recycling metal but then also chuck the rest of the bin in a cesspit of waste in china, again a hypocrisy.

Charge people tax in driving a couple of miles less to be greener and tax fuel for not being clean when we:
Let ships burn bunker fuel with the waste and damage it caused to peoples health.

Preach that the government in the UK (and now other EU countries doing the same) is a green country and have cleaned things up when: We ship our rubbish and other waste to China, ship the goods here and waste back using up a load of fuel doing so and so creating that pollution in Asia and the shipping lanes and the sea.

Yes, there is a lot of ewaste but that is mainly produced by the US and Asia it'self, what we have in ewaste is small compared to them although that is relevant as is all other waste.

The Weee directive is just another example of how a government cannot seem to set something out in an informative and clear manner 'maybe this has improved in the last year or maybe people in the electronics industry understand it better than I did' but if the people who put this together maybe had a brain storm and realised they could cut down on packaging waste by changing the packaging it would save a lot of waste from the start. Recycling in electronics is the way to go and we should be pushed if not forced to go in that direction yes but all this stuff 'ewaste included' sent to asia for recycling is creating health problems there as much of your 'ewaste' is causing contamination and can be dangerous, is this sort of waste not better recycled under controlled conditions than let it be recycled the way it is in Asia!

chulo

I got the clip from a forum in the industry I work in and WEEE is a big issue.

There is something about to happen, nobody is releasing anything, but it concerns appliances and there management.

An example is the Whirlpool company, they produce appliances who its been noticed arn`t lasting very long.

One issue is on there refrigeration system, they produce a PCB that controls all functions, this has a high failure rate over 12 months, the replacement cost of the PCB is £246.89 plus vat trade price from Whirlpool.

There has been an extremely high level of appliances less than 4 yrs old being scrapped as the clients purchase this appliance for £289.99 retail.

WEEE has allowed this to be monitored, the various watchdogs are up in arms that landfill sites and waste disposal are full of products that could have been repaired for very little money.

The PCB Whirlpool buys in from a Chinese component manufacturer for around £3.00. There finding it difficult to justify there green credentials and this is world wide, the appliance ships all over.

Whirlpool is not the only brand and its not just white goods that is being affected.

Cape Blue

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standby_power

Cape Blue

Europe produces more ewaste than the US (has more people), the key difference is that we have EU Directives that control it - the ROHS Directive requires manufactures to minimize hazardous substances, the WEEE Directive requires manufacturers to pay for its recycling and the Basle Convention (& EU TFS Regs) prevent waste management companies from exporting it.

The examples of ewaste being exported from EU countries is either illegal activity or companies trying to push the loophole of tested reusable equipment. The US does not have (m)any export restrictions, so a far larger amount is exported from the US as its domestic recyclers have tight wage, safety and environmental controls and cannot compete to it being dumped in Asia, moved on very low cost freight as the containers are needed back there for the next cycle of goods.

The shipping of ewaste to Asia or Africa, whether for recycling or under the pretense of "reuse" should be banned - it already is within the EU and it just requires better enforcement and a tightening of the definitions around 2nd hand goods/reusable. In the US anything apart from CRT TVs/monitors can be shipped, and even these can be as all the "recycler" needs to do is tell the USEPA - who do not appear to care that much. In theory Asia would be the perfect place to recycle ewaste as it is manually intensive and most of the recovered metals and plastics will be sold to Asia anyway, unfortunately the Asia countries clearly do not have sufficient regulation to manage the safety and environmental impacts.

The vast Majority of the "rubbish" that the EU ships to Asia is, as I have said before, bulk volumes of clean recyclables (or secondary raw materials) that are mostly cleaner than their comparable primary raw materials and are often very valuable - baled aluminium drinks cans are worth over $1,000/t, copper $5,000/t, steel $400/t and so on - same with the grades of paper/card, plastics etc. This material is not realistically "waste" and at some point the EU will move to re-classify it so it will not appear in waste export stats.

Regarding packaging - its not for some Government Dept to look at each and every use of packaging to decide whether its appropriate, what the EU Packaging Directive has done is to make the companies that manufacture products and the retailers that sell them directly responsible for packaging recycling - basically they provide price support through, in the UK, the PRN system. This incentivises the reduction in packaging as the less packaging that Tesco or Heinz sells, the less they have to pay to be recycled. The money flows from Tesco to its compliance scheme and from the scheme to the recycler and from the recycler to the collector (CA site).

Europe most definitely has de-industrialized and has shipped a lot of its polluting manufacturing to Asia where is is undertaken in an even more polluting fashion. EU country claims that they have reduced their carbon footprint should be seen in the light that "their" footprint is now half sitting in Asia.

You seem to think that there is a big Gov hypocrisy of shipping waste to Asia/Africa - what I am saying is that very little real waste is shipped and it is mostly illegal activity, the vast bulk is not really waste for all intents and purposes - the shredded steel has been traded internationally for over 40 years, well before any waste laws came into place and it is multi-billion-dollar steel conglomerates that are vying to buy it.

Even if Gov policy has its faults and some areas of high-energy usage are not properly addressed, that does not mean that we should just say "sod it" and ignore the parts they are trying to address - the fact you feel there is too much shipping and that manufacturing is still being done in Asia, does not negate the importance of reducing your electricity use by turning off standby switches.

When it comes to CO2 (heading back to the original part of the thread), I don't believe it is realistic to stop international trade and that the theory of trade making everyone wealthier is robust. I do believe that planned obsolescence, a lack of design for recycling and a throw-away society are going to be inherently more wasteful and carbon intensive.

The key to me seems to be a carbon tax - both domestically and imputed on imports from countries that don't have one. This will internalize the true costs of CO2 (amongst other greenhouse gases) into the product/process involved and will help to incentivise a whole range of behaviours from turning off standby's to manufacturers designing ultra-low-power standby's, (and through renewable power, more fuel efficient vehicles public transport, better home insulation, recycling of energy-intensive materials and on and on).

No country wants to be the only one and with the US and China still dragging their heels it will be many years before we have anything substantial - we'll probably end up with some sort of "cap and trade" which is the wimps way out as they avoid the "tax" label even if it is effectively a tax, albeit a poor one.

jackytoo

http://entertainment.timesonline.co....cle6936404.ece

interesting read.

chrisfromusa

Plain and simple, global warming is a myth. I'm with the Czech President on that one. CO2 hardly causes a dent in global climate. The sky is not gonna fall with more CO2 in the air. We breathe the stuff out everyday and it hasn't killed the earth. The Medieval Warm Period was much warmer than it is today, and read up on the Maunder Minimum and Dalton Minimum. We as humans can't change the climate with all the tech in the world, we're too small. I remember all the scary fire-and-brimstone theories that Al Gore was saying since he came out with his science fiction movie, that the oceans are gonna get warmer and warmer and warmer as the years go on and hurricanes will be stronger and more frequent. Well hardly any hurricanes have struck the southeast U.S. since 2005, which was the year Katrina came onto my shores and devastated New Orléans. Hardly any after that, and 2008 was soooo cold here last winter you have no idea. I thought I was living in Maine! Of course it's not global warming anymore, now conveniently it's "climate change". Well, technically speaking, isn't the climate a dynamic cycle? That it's always changing? I seem to remember that everything in nature follows the pattern of sin x....this whole carbon tax, cap-and-tax systems are just ways to rob our money and devastate our economies.

Cape Blue

Ignoring your unscientific certainty and lack of knowledge of the issues in general, why would governments, of all different flavours around the world, want to devastate our economies - what would that do for them, would it help them get re-elected? Would it be better for their electorate if they were poorer?

Why would Governments want to be anti-free market and put taxes on their own countries that will slow down growth? Why would they collude together to do that, is this the work of the sinister UN?

Why have the NGOs been colluding with them over a 30 year period in this heist? Have the US paid off Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, The Sierra Club?

How did the NGOs and Governments get all the scientists in their peer-reviewed research process to fudge all the data all around the world to pretend that MMCC was happening?

For the few scientists that are not part of this conspiracy, why do you think it is that they have not considered the Sun's power variations in their thoughts, seems amazing that they would have missed that over the past 30 years of research - perhaps you should write to NASA and point it out to them - here's their website where they have got it all wrong: http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/loo...arth_warm.html

chrisfromusa

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zOXmJ4jd-8

There all your answers can be answered in that video. Yes NASA is wrong, and my government is known to lie time and time again, which is why I don't trust what my government says. Al Gore is just there to make millions, he doesn't care about the environment, not when he sold off parts of our national parks to logging companies. Have you not considered the sun is what drives our climate? Watch that video, it's on the long side, but I feel that it's "required reading" for all you AGW believers

Cape Blue

What benefit is there for any Government to reduce the wealth of their citizens and alienate their voter base at the same time? You forgot to answer that.

So you believe that NASA missed out on the issue of sun spots? What a bunch of fools to spend 30 years with all those scientists and not consider the power of the sun - make sure you contact them to save them wasting any more time.

Gore was writing about environmental issues back in 1992 with his first book.

Monckton is a nut-case - bedwettters, Obama birth Cert? He has no science qualifications (he read classics at uni), seems to like quoting a bit of latin amongst the snide remarks about real scientists. He is not credible, he does not write articles that are peer reviewed.

He thinks that a new World Government is being created by left-wing communists (around 1hr32) and that global warming is being used to do this. Obama is signing the US citizens freedom away.
He is an enormous whack-job!

What else does he believe?
You note that he discusses his "peer reviewed" article and the editors being sacked.

chrisfromusa

Oh my mistake, what benefit was there for Clinton to sign NAFTA and have our manufacturing base largely outsourced to Mexico and to a lesser extent Canada? Isn't this reducing the wealth of a nation since, as many people know, manufacturing is what brings wealth and prosperity. Hasn;t your UK government really reduced manufacturing in northern England? Outsourced to eastern Europe, China, or wherever? This counts as reducing the citizens' wealth because they get laid off and only have minimum wage service sector jobs to look forward to. Plus this has the effect of people going to university en masse to get degrees, with so many people having degrees these days, it's practically an extension of a high school diploma nowadays since a bachelor's degree is the minimum recommended degree to get any decent paying job. As you know, there's only so many commercial sector jobs available, and unemployment increases as manufacturing jobs get outsourced. So in the pursuit of seeking lower labor costs, and having complacent governments, companies shutter their factories and move out, effectively reducing their citizens' wealth.

Alright if you think that Lord Monckton is off his rocker, then watch this video:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ft8LfE7AI2w

I guess the founder of the US Weather Channel is wrong too?

chrisfromusa

http://icecap.us/index.php/go/about-us

Might want to have a read on this site as well

And this video is a documentary made by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. (Canadian BBC equivalent) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fr5O1...video_response

cricketman

Oh dear, you are confirming all my fears about the US education system

I find it unbelievable, there is something called wikipedia nowadays, if not read a science book. Although many of these are banned or censured in the US.

Climate change/global warming did not start with Al Gore. I have a Chemistry Masters and I learnt all about the processes at school and university 5-10 years before Al Gore decided to release a video.

You said "we all breath in CO2 every day so it cant be bad for you", that has to be one of the most ignorant comments I have ever read. Yes of course we do! It is the balance between CO2 and O2 which is the critical mix for life.

And anyway global warming happens because the heat of the earth cannot escape from the atmosphere because the heat bounces off the CO2 molecules and come back down to earth again. The CO2 acts like the glass in the greenhouse, hence why it is called the "greenhouse effect".

The atmosphere is an equilibrium of gases in a very delicate balance. What we need to do to maintain the correct mix for life is open to question as there is so much we dont understand in Science. However, you dont have to be a genius to realise that spewing chemicals into the atmosphere that can/may/will have harmful effects just so we can have a new fridge/car/doll every few years is a stupid way to look after ourselves and the planet.

Us humans are not as clever as some people believe, we only have simple understanding of how the earth manages to support life. My guess is we'd have wiped ourself out within the next 5,000 years

carter71

Karma sent, Cricketman!