If I turned you off back there

[j4]

"On televisions, for example, we would like to see labels saying 'if you watch it, it will cost x pence per hour, if you leave it on standby, it will cost y pence'. Then you can present the environmental cost in monetary terms"

But that's not actually presenting the environmental cost at all, really, is it? Unless you add "WHICH MEANS that when you sink into drooling oblivion in front of the flickering forms of minor celebrities bonking in a bath of baked beans you are not only wasting the product of several thousand years of human evolution but also SYSTEMATICALLY RAPING THE PLANET and leaving it an UNINHABITABLE WASTE LAND, you selfish cretin." Really. Is it. I mean.

That's before we get to the question of how in the name of -- well, frankly, anything you care to name -- an electric toothbrush can be regarded as "essential".

I think I'm just in a bad mood today.

Comments

[arron-shutt.livejournal.com]

Yeah, it's great to live in an unbridled consumer society that until now, we've not had to consider the fruits of our actions.

There's also the "carbon cost" of moving components around the world to make essential electric toothbrushes, making components for essential electric toothbrushes and digging resources out of the ground to make and fuel all these processes. I remember seeing a "resource assessment" in the late seventies on Tomorrow's World for the environmental impact of making a single Coca Cola can. The report was nearly half a metre of paper stacked on top of each other. Just for making a single cola can.

The problem with people today, is that they do not see cause and effect as being linked. And even now that disaster seems to be staring us in the face without some kind of radical rethink to how we live..people still ignore it, as it seems easier just to ignore reality than actually do something about it..

Just wait until the oil runs out. No food on supermarket shelves, no plastics, no transport, no medicine, no agrochemicals, no computers, no electrical power..then we'll be royally screwed as a advanced species..

no electrical power

[ewx.livejournal.com]

You don't need oil to generate electricity.

Re: no electrical power

[arron-shutt.livejournal.com]

You need it to lubricate vehicles, move coal from place to place by diesel train (given that most of the UK train network is unelectrified) as well as make the plastics that act as insulators around wires and for electronic components.

Sure you can avoid fossil oil for generation, but it's in everything else..and converting one form of oil to another is not economic, and in some cases not fit for the purpose you intend. You can make aviation fuel from biodiesel, but you can't power jet engines from it AFAIK.

Not saying it's impossible, but I guess we'll wait until it's too late before we start to deal with the problem.

not economic

[ewx.livejournal.com]

The missing word in that remark is "yet". Scarcer fossil oil makes alternatives of all kinds more economically viable and makes it more worthwhile figuring out how to substitute for oil in processes that currently cannot do without. The world is not static.

[pjc50.livejournal.com]

Well, we've got 100 years of coal and Fisher-Troph, so we're not going to run out of oil soon. Even then it's never going to get to a "no ..." situation, just a "more expensive" one, as we can cook all that stuff up from oilseed or oilpalm feedstocks.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

*nod* the Alberta Shales are going to go over the line into "worth extracting oil from" any day now. I wish that part of this country were not wingnut-conservative heartland, but it still won't hurt our economy.

[hairyears.livejournal.com]

Is it time to reconsider that, now that he strength of the Loonie means it's uneconomical to run the production lines at Ford in Ontario?