There was a news article a long time ago about the economy, and how garbage had an implication on how the economy was doing. It wasn't really a revelation in any way, the implications were pretty straight forward: More garbage, better economy, less garbage, worse economy. Pretty straightforward why this was true as well: more people producing garbage means more people buying things with which to produce said garbage. But this seems like a pretty bad thing altogether: we buy new things to replace our old things, but we waste our old things. We don't donate as much as we should, and/or we waste what we have by throwing it away. It was just something that makes me wonder...
As a people, Americans are the most wasteful, and basing economic analysis on the amount of garbage we produce is a horrible thing. We use a huge percentage of the world's energy and produce a huge amount of the world's garbage, and yet we continue to import 7 million barrels (or more) of oil each day to meet energy requirements. For those of you who need a rough statistic, that's approximately 60% of the oil we consume each day is imported from other countries. I couldn't find any good exacting statistics on America's garbage production, but last time I checked (around 1997), we produced something around the tune of 70% of the world's trash. And sadly enough, many of our recycling efforts go to waste. Much of our trash nowadays are recyclables, and biodegradables produce things that, while not necessarily harmful to the environment, contribute to Environmental decay. Things like methane gas and other pollutants. So special chemicals and methods are used to prevent all decay in landfills, so being biodegradable is often an unecessary and wasteful practice.
So what's to be done about our garbage disaster? Well that's a question for the ages. The most important thing to do right now is to cut huge gobs of cash from our military budget (allocate more to our troops at least and less to military development), and promote alternative energies. There's already a proven end to our ability to use fossil fuels (we're consuming them 100,000 times faster then they're being produced. As stupid as that may sound to some of you, the truth is that it is much more of a crisis then anyone has really made it out to be yet. Watch yourselves, and support politicians who are for alternative energy sources.
Anyway, now that I've managed to get a good new rant for the day onto Anime! I watched a bunch more Tokyo Underground, and here's my thoughts so far:
While the plot is rather clever and the power system is quite awesome, the love story is really crappy in the respect that it moves waaaaaay too fast. Mainly it's the fact that apparently way more then what your see happens in the seven episodes I've watched so far, to make it seem at least a little more legitimate that they're so in love. When the main female character does the self-sacrifice scene she says: "I've seen so many things up here..." then flashes back onto a whole bunch of stuff you never saw. I feel like all writers need to take a one week course on how to write love stories...
Hippocritical. This blog requires ebergy. The internet access you have requires money. You talk of less trash, but you produce as much as anyone else. You can preach, but can you listen? Either buy a hybrid, cut your internet access and use a library, and turn off your computer. And for someone who watches anime, you buy trash, so I fail to see how you are better than anyone else. Your television requires energy. Give up your computer and television for a month, then talk. You are right, but, your tone is way off for someone like you
Posted by: at February 19, 2005 09:46 PM Ummmmm... I'm not condemning electrical use, I'm condemning oil use. While certainly you could point out the obvious flaw here (many/most power plants still use fossil fuels, so to condemn fossil fuel use and still advocate electricy is rather contradictory), power plants are much more highly regulated than other fossil fuel using appliances. So while still being harmful to the environment, it's not nearly as bad.
Besides this, I plan to aim for a hydrogen car as soon as I can afford one. The first car I buy (not the one that I currently drive), I plan to make it a hybrid.
Anime? Trash? Thanks for cutting down what millions of people watch on a daily basis to one word which is expressly YOUR opinion. As well as that, the Anime I buy I keep. It's not like I buy anime and chuck it right into the trash once I've finished watching it.
And besides all of that, you make the general assumption that I'm condemning the production of trash in general, which, while in part is true, is a stupid assumption (mainly because simply by existing as a human being I produce waste like packages for many things). What the main point of this argument is for people who throw away recyclables. Recyclables make up about 10 - 13% of what is actually trash.
I myself am an avid recycler and in fact, we actually have oversized recycling bins that we specially ordered. And please note that we use these extra recycling bins while still only producing 1 trash can of trash. We also maintain a compost pile in our backyard and reuse all of our plastic bags from grocery shopping. On top of all that we normally cook all our food from scratch, and therefore avoid producing extranious waste in the form of packages and unknown resturant wastes. We donate most of our old clothes to collection agencies along with some of our old furniture. So allow me to ask ou this: How many of the things that I listed above do you do? Please don't be a dick and assume I'm spraying all of this out of my ass. I hope you realize I effectively destroyed any argument you had, and yours did nothing to reduce mine.
I apologize, thats not what I meant about Anime. I meant that if you dont like it its not biodegradeable. It costs energy to produce, it was part of your post, so I just used that, while I dont like it, its none of my buisness, sorry about that. And I misunderstood about your article, I thought thats what you meant. In that case you can talk about recycling. I am just used to lectures about trash from people who use more than me. Hybrids are tought to find though. I do some of those things, but I also dont pretend I do them. Good to see that someone cares about the enviroment. I wasnt trying to insult you, or destroy your argument, in fact I was trying to make you realize that you should do that stuff. I apologize for any misunderstanding
Posted by: at February 20, 2005 08:39 AM