Pseudo green

[meow2222]

There seems to be a lot of promotion at the moment of socalled green techs that have little or no hope of meeting expectations. At the same time, technologies that actually do pay their way are not even mentioned in government publications.

Perhaps I'm being a bit cynical, or perhaps not cynical enough... lets spin this one and just see what happens. Lets say the govt wants to back the interests of big businesses, including power generators. To achieve this one needs to discredit green tech in the public eye. How better to do that than to promote assorted dead ducks and let the critics rip into them all over the country. This achieves 3 political objectives in one go:

1. power companies will support and vote for you
2. consumers will too, as they think youre being green and trying your best to promote green tech
3. the almost credible face of green techs today will be knocked back by several years, thus mass adoption of money saving home gen techs wil not occur. This is 'good' because if it did occur, massive tax income losses would follow, and job losses in generation and distribution. Both of these would make govt fiscal policy look a lot less succesful.

Windmills on houses are now being promoted, despite being one of the deadest ducks we've seen yet. Solar PV has long been hyped, despite never coming close to payoff, while solarthermal space heating is consistently avoided. etc.

NT

[meow2222]

There seems to be a lot of promotion at the moment of socalled green techs that have little or no hope of meeting expectations. At the same time, technologies that actually do pay their way are not even mentioned in government publications.

Perhaps I'm being a bit cynical, or perhaps not cynical enough... lets spin this one and just see what happens. Lets say the govt wants to back the interests of big businesses, including power generators. To achieve this one needs to discredit green tech in the public eye. How better to do that than to promote assorted dead ducks and let the critics rip into them all over the country. This achieves 3 political objectives in one go:

1. power companies will support and vote for you
2. consumers will too, as they think youre being green and trying your best to promote green tech
3. the almost credible face of green techs today will be knocked back by several years, thus mass adoption of money saving home gen techs wil not occur. This is 'good' because if it did occur, massive tax income losses would follow, and job losses in generation and distribution. Both of these would make govt fiscal policy look a lot less succesful.

Windmills on houses are now being promoted, despite being one of the deadest ducks we've seen yet. Solar PV has long been hyped, despite never coming close to payoff, while solarthermal space heating is consistently avoided. etc.

NT

[nightjar]

I think it is like ripping up cast iron railings in WW2: It wasn't any real use, but it made people feel involved.

Colin Bignell

[Codswallop]

Sounds like a good script for Bremner, Bird and Fortune (Channel 4, 8pm, Saturday), where Fortune plays the hapless 'green' government minister trying to defend wind turbines and other pseudo green scams, and Bird plays the bemused interviewer. I really do wonder about domestic rubbish recycling. I needed a respirator the other day when the chap in front of me at the bottle bank set off in his diesel Range Rover, pumping black smoke from the exhaust, after he put a few newspapers and bottles in the bins. In my area we used to have a once weekly collection of our domestic rubbish. Then the council introduced boxes for recycling paper, cans and bottles, but that needs a separate lorry to collect these. Then the council introduced bags for garden waste, but that needs a separate lorry to collect these. My understanding is that 3 massive diesel-engined lorries are 3 times more environmentally damaging than one. They certainly make 3 times more noise. The logic of this escapes me. Is there really any net gain with recycling?

[Andy Hall]

This is an interesting conspiracy theory but unlikely in practice. I think that the reality is much more simple. Suppliers of consumer paraphernalia for allegedly green purposes making money from the gullible.

[nightjar]

The main driving force has been the lack of landfill sites to dump things into.

Colin Bignell

[meow2222]

Something I've not yet figured out a sensible answer to: why dont 'they' dump rubble into the sea by the shore in a big u shape, and fill the area with mixed landfill rubbish. No landfill used up, and in time it will be more land for what is a high price land country.

NT

[meow2222]

It cant be a conspiracy theory, because only one person caries out the plan. No conspiracy is involved.

If what you propose is true, our government must be gullible and lacking in an expert to advise them. How likely is a national government to be in that position?

Oh, I forgot point 4: the real take up of green techs which reduce tax income will happen later during another government party's term, leaving them with less tax money to spend.

NT

[Mary Fisher]

"nightjar .uk.com>"

Perhaps Codswallop could bury his own waste in his garden, then he wouldn't feel bad about supporting a useless system.

As for the OP , not all pv is useless even in England. We keep our caravan leisure battery topped up with a small pv panel which cost £10, it's been well worth having.

And I'll bang on about our solar water heater again: we've had no obvious sun for days, it's been close to freezing at night and we've had a lot of rain. The water in the cylinder this morning, even though water has been drawn off during those days, was 30C. That's a tankful which didn't need heating for the first 30C for me to have a bath.

There's a move to make things better, it's slow but it's working.

The first i.c.e. vehicles were noisy, smelly, thirsty and uncomfortable and seen by some asa toys for the rich. Improvements happened, they will with green technology too.

Mary>

>

[tinnews]

That's the sort of thing that gives the green movement a bad name.

You're not gaining a whole 30 degrees, nor anything like that. The water that comes from your supply (whether it's from your own well or a mains supply) is almost certainly well above zero degrees. It's most likely in the 10 to 20 degrees range I would think here in the UK.

[Codswallop]

I don't know what prompted such a nasty response. I didn't write anything to offend you.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Not sure the govt. are that clever actually.

Add to the list The 'electric cars without non fossil fuel energy generation' myth. The 'boil half a kettle' myth. The 'use low energy lamps' myth. The 'tax the car, not the fuel' myth. The 'standby' myth.

etc. etc.

If the govt really wanted us to reduce fossil fuel usage the answer is simple.

- tax the fuel.

- give tax breaks to companies employing home workers.

- eliminate 90% of traffic calming, traffic lights, and pedestrianisation stuff and low cars to actually move along without being halted all the time.

- spend as much money per capita on a railway infrastructure as they do on roads. And make it as free to the railway operators as the roads are to the truckers.

- spend as much money on bringing really high speed internet to everyone, as they do on bringing roads there. (whilst laying railway tracks, lay optical fibres at bugger all opportunity cost)

- build 20 nuclear power stations

- remove all taxes from biofuels

The let peoples own cost benefit analysis sort it all out.

[The Natural Philosopher]

And Al suacepans. Useless for aircraft as quality of the alloy was wrong, but Land Rover used it to make cars afterwards.

[The Natural Philosopher]

And yet the east coast is falling into the sea because of lack of material to pile into landfill.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Exactly.

Make it a nature reserve.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If you do the calculations on hot water usage, its frankly peanuts.

When I kill our oil fired aga in the summer, our oil consumption is frankly not measurable over the whole summer, just heating the water.

The aga itself makes it measurable, but its in winter when the heating is on that we really burn the oil.

The answer to green issues is not really technology, its lifestyle.

To use less fuel the answer is simple. Use less fuel.

[Christian McArdle]

The biggest scam is hybrid cars, which don't pollute significantly less than normal ones, but do have a huge pile of polluting lead acid batteries to dispose of every 50,000 miles.

When we bought our second car, we bought a Peugeot 107. Approximately the same g/km as a Toyota Prius, but it actually achieves its fuel economy figures in real life, and there isn't huge amounts of battery waste to dispose of during the lifecycle, and costs less than half. (OK, the Prius has an extra seat and a slightly bigger boot, but it does look like a dog's dinner).

Christian.

[Phil L]

It's all a load of shit.

We wouldn't make a slightest bit of difference no matter what we do personally, when countries like USA ignore the issue completely. this coupled with China and India's new found wealth and therefore demand for cars, and remember their combined population is almost ten times the population of the USA and 40 times that of the UK, so me sticking a toy windmill on my roof isn't going to make a blind bit of difference..no, the only reason 'issues' like this are highlighted in the first place is so that they can tax them to death at a later date, they couldn't give a flying f*ck about the planet or anything else,they are interested in money, and now that tobacco tax has disappeared due to huge scale smuggling and the relaxation of customs etc, a large hole needs filling, cue the new 'tobacco' namely, fuel.

It's been suggested today that new taxes are to be introduced to stop binge drinking, again, it's another cash cow set up by the government, drinking has never been any different nor unruly behaviour any worse or better than it is today, it's just 'convenient' to tax the hell out of it now under the guise of cutting out binge drinking related shenanigans, we all know it won't make a blind bit of difference there neither, but at least the govt will make a few extra billion a year out of it....here's a tip: - next time you see an 'issue' being highlighted on the news and political parties getting excited about it, expect a huge tax to follow, it never fails.

[nightjar]

I think the word you missed out in front of material is 'suitable'. Domestic rubbish is not a particularly useful landfill material to stop erosion.

Colin Bignell

[nightjar]

I disagree. In my youth, we went out to have a drink, preferably without getting drunk, because of the after-effects. Today the aim of many is simply getting drunk. I spent five years in Glasgow as a young man and saw only one act of violence, despite frequenting the city centre most weekends. Today, there are many ordinary town centres that I would avoid at night.

Colin Bignell