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Recently my lifestyle -- driving an old car, burning wood occasionally -- has been questioned by well-meaning folks who say that old cars and wood smoke both pollute. To defend myself, I contacted a little-known expert, Dr. Itzallah Schamm of the Ersatz-Green Institute for the Creation and Dissemination of Socially Responsible and Environmentally Acceptable Perceptions.
Regarding your woodpile, when a tree falls in the
forest, it oxidizes,
he said. If you burn the wood
in your stove, it also oxidizes, except more quickly.
You're just returning carbon dioxide to the atmosphere so
that growing trees can access it more quickly than
otherwise. Dead wood is going to oxidize, one way or
another, so you might as well get some good out of
it.
I thanked him, but wondered about my ancient car.
A new car requires more than a ton of steel,
plastics, copper. Mining damages the environment, as does
smelting and refining, not to mention to manufacture of
plastics. And there is much energy required. But by keeping
an old car running, you prevent such environmental
degradation.
Fine,
I agreed. But it gets only 17 miles to
the gallon. What can I say to that?
Gasoline is very dirty,
he pointed out. The
sooner we burn it all up, the sooner we will switch to a
benign fuel like hydrogen or ethanol, and the world will be
a better place. You're doing your best to bring that about
quickly, unlike the jerks in their new 40-mpg
Daizitzus.
I asked Dr. Schamm about his other work. The pride was
evident as he described his first triumph. It was in the
early '70s. Environmentalists were demanding that breweries
and bottling plants switch back to those heavy deposit
bottles that could be re-used hundreds of times.
The major brewers and bottlers,
he continued,
were against that. Heavy bottles are hard to ship, which
gives small local operations an edge over big national
brands. The big boys want light aluminum cans that can be
shipped easily from their centralized plants. So we created
the
Recyclable
label and put it on the cans.
That really was clever,
I agreed. It implies
that you're really concerned about the environment, but
lets you go ahead and do whatever greedy thing you wanted
to do in the first place. Even plutonium is
'recyclable.'
He nodded. Now that consumers and stockholders are
again expressing concern about these matters, we've been
quite busy devising ways to pretend that products are
'green' while continuing business as usual.
I asked for an example of his current work. I can't
talk about most of it,
he said. But I'll give you a
hint. We're doing a job for a big toxic-chemical company,
to portray one of their poisonous plant sites as a great
benefit to the environment.
How?
Simple. Look at Rocky Mountain Arsenal, once called
the most polluted site on earth. Nobody can build anything
there, so there's a greenbelt right on the edge of a big
city. There's a big environmental plus right there. They
even have tours to see the bald eagles that nest there
because nobody will disturb them. So a poison-gas factory
has become a wildlife refuge -- how can you be more
environmentally sound than that? Wait till you see the ad
campaign: Superfund Sites -- Saving American
Wildlife.
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