GoldenEye: Source Forums
Debriefing => Off-Topic Lounge => Topic started by: killermonkey on April 06, 2010, 12:19:02 pm
-
So, as you may know, I am a rather vocal person when it comes to methods to protect the environment. Vocal because I feel the need to oppose all the half-brained, half-researched methods to "protect" us from ourselves. The most notable of those is "Bio-Diesel" which will (and already is) going down as the biggest blunder in human history (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2005/dec/06/transportintheuk.comment) in terms of political, total emissions, and implementation stand point.
Anyway, so you want to "Go Green" (I HATE that term but it does sell)? Well I have been following some pretty basic guidelines since moving to Michigan for the past two years that I believe has made my footprint here as minimal as I would like it to be.
- Ride your bike for short distance travel!
- Use public transportation as much as possible
- Reuse your grocery bags until they fall apart
- Use a grocery bag for small trash bag (small trash can)
- Turn off your lights when not using them
- Replace all your bulbs with CFL's (http://www.energystar.gov/index.cfm?fuseaction=find_a_product.showProductGroup&pgw_code=LB)
- Try to limit the number of large garbage BAGS you put out every week. I only use 1 garbage bag for two people per week.
- Take recycling seriously, know what your town accepts and SORT properly. Unsorted and improper recycles can ruin machinery and taint a whole batch of recyclable material
- Lower your heating and cooling to just at your comfort level. Sweaters, blankets, and fans are cheaper and more effective at heating/cooling you.
EDIT (MORE):
- Refuse a bag at a store when you don't NEED it (single item, big item, etc.)
- Buy a couple reusable bags at Target/Walmart (only 99cents!)
This is a partial list, if I think of more things I'll put them up here. I hate to do stuff that impacts the way I live. Aside from riding my bike (which helped me lose 15 pounds in a year!) non of these common sense actions makes your change your life style.
Comments? More Suggestions?
-
I dont usually put shit in grocery bags anymore. I just grab everything and put it in the car or just put everything in the cart and throw it inside the trunk. Those plastic bags tear easily.
1.) Drive slowly and follow the speed limits, which will save you gas and other peoples lives.
2.) Don't floor the pedal, instead slowly depress it which will save you gas again, or your just wasting fuel.
3.) If your going on vacation, turn off your computer since your not going to be using UNLESS, you torrenting or going to use VNC on it.
4.) DO not throw away batteries that are no longer working. Instead, find a place that takes care of them and dispose them properly. Throwing them away makes you a ungreen person and toxic waste gets into water and makes people act retarded.
5.)Spread the word to others, and we all can help make the planet greener and cleaner.
-
Don't throw away food in the trash. Any food and organic waste is biodegradable and can be recycled/composted. You can buy biodegradable bags made from vegetable starch which you can use as a separate food bin. Find out if you have any local composting or food recycling facilities.
Don't use plastic bags at all, you should be able to get durable, reusable shopping bags from large supermarkets.
-
3. Reuse your grocery bags until they fall apart
4. Use a grocery bag for small trash bag (small trash can)
5. Turn off your lights when not using them
7. Try to limit the number of large garbage BAGS you put out every week. I only use 1 garbage bag for two people per week.
8. Take recycling seriously, know what your town accepts and SORT properly. Unsorted and improper recycles can ruin machinery and taint a whole batch of recyclable material
9. Lower your heating and cooling to just at your comfort level. Sweaters, blankets, and fans are cheaper and more effective at heating/cooling you.
Covered. (My house doesn't have AC anyway; #3 in the form of reusable bags now and then.)
We recycle paper, even though that doesn't do anything... It actually uses more energy to recycle the stuff than to just make new paper. I need to knock if off.
Cans and bottles, however, are very worth it and everyone should at least check that off their list if nothing else.
-
The energy of recycling paper is offset by the fact you save trees. Id rather have less fuel and slightly more expensie paper over time than even LESS trees over time.
Another big thing you can do is join the "clean up" days where communities collect garbage from beaches and anywhere. And do a tree planting program. Here in australia there is a single day where people plants thousands of trees.
Personal green goals are fine, but if you are serious about it cutting back isnt the same impact as GIVING back
-
Personal green goals are fine, but if you are serious about it cutting back isnt the same impact as GIVING back
You can give back all you want. At the end of the day the question is: Have you given back more than you take?
In most cases that answer is a huge NO. Therefore, individual reduction/cutbacks are a much larger effect then cleaning the beach every once a year when a lot of individuals stick to their cutbacks it adds up VERY fast and makes a HUGE difference.
For example, when gas cost > $4.50 a gallon in the US a few years ago, there was actually a MEASURABLE change in CO2 in the atmosphere because people started driving less and less to save money. That, my friends, is what its all about.
-
Can you all shut up and buy my crude..
-
Can you all shut up and buy my crude..
Can you pay for my gas?
-
Only if you support the oil sands and your car can do 500+ MPG
-
So, as you may know, I am a rather vocal person when it comes to methods to protect the environment. Vocal because I feel the need to oppose all the half-brained, half-researched methods to "protect" us from ourselves.
Touché, where I Sir support half-brained, half-researched methods. What is this talk of economic, political, total emissions, or implementation stand points.
-
You can also throw your uneaten food outside. We have deer, raccoons, and coyotes that just eat whatever we toss.
And yeah, definitely recycle. A lot of my buddies just toss everything in the trash, which pisses me off.
-
http://www.cbc.ca/canada/calgary/story/2010/04/06/calgary-un-report-carbon-dioxide-greenhouse-emissions.html
eat it suckers. also most Mexicans don't have cars.. so invalid argument.
-
The energy of recycling paper is offset by the fact you save trees. Id rather have less fuel and slightly more expensie paper over time than even LESS trees over time.
This is why tree farms exist. We use trees so we replace trees, just like any other form of produce.
(I don't know which source is used more, but I wish the farm method was more common than it is...)
-The fuck was I trying to say...
~Edit for typo. We use trees, not tress...
~2nd for strike.
-
Enzo, that article is a joke and a half. Anti-Idle laws? Really? I mean if you are idling for 10 minutes or more then it's bad, but summarily turning off and on your engine is worse then just letting it idle in terms of wear and tear on your starter and initial ignition emissions which are generally very sooty because of incomplete combustion.
Not to mention the UN is a fucking crack pot when it comes to global surveys (take the infant death rate poll they like to taught around but fail to mention that each country can define what it means to be an infant death....). And this is the understatement of the century:
The electrical grids in those cities run on hydro or nuclear power, whereas Calgary relies on coal-fired electrical plants that create more emissions.
-
XBOX users = Infants = 17yo and younger...
+15 Gamer Score!
-
Cavity insulation for your house makes a huge difference in heating efficiency. Was a good 3C warmer after i had it done.
Get a combi boiler, one that only heats up water you will be using rather than one that heats a huge tank.
-
Good tips Keefy, but this assumes you own a home and have enough equity to afford these modifications. My guide is meant to be of little to no cost personal behavior kind of things to consistently help save the environment.
-
100% of Iceland's electricity comes from renewable sources, however I think you'll find they have the highest carbon footprint:population ratio this year.
Population 400,000 and one big ass volcanic erruption.
-
FYI not everyone can capitalize on geothermal as easily as they can.
-
this topic can still be active by showing you something not only its a green idea, but a fucking cool idea.
http://www.yankodesign.com/2010/10/22/bottle-so-beautiful-and-full-of-light/
1.)Choose your favorite drink and finish that all until the last drop appears.
2.)STOP dont recycle it in the bin.
3.)Get some bottle cover led's
4.)Crush the bottle however shape you want it to be
5.)Screw a led cover onto the bottle and its now a kick ass looking thing.
6.)Hang it in your room and you are a certified geek.
-
Ride your bike for short distance travel!
Rather situational. If bitches will keep their spandex shit on the sidewalk and off of the big boys road, fine, but whenever I see a tenspeed-bump on my highways' shoulders, I rage, because if he does something stupid, like be on my highways' shoulders, I'm the one getting dragged in for vehicular homocide.
Use public transportation as much as possible
Get felt-up by strange new people you didn't know you didn't want to meet!
Use a grocery bag for small trash bag (small trash can)
Works good for bagless vacuum dumping as well, as long as you don't fluff the bag when tying it up.
Replace all your bulbs with CFL's
Ahhhh, mercury. Sweetest of the transition metals.
Did the greenfags completely forget about that part of fluorescent chemistry? Oh wait, they would have to be practical smart instead of liberal/hippie smart for that. Yes, using a heating coil as a light source is pretty caveman, but shit, one broken CFL and you're getting almost as much mercury as eating a half-can of tuna.
Take recycling seriously, know what your town accepts and SORT properly.
So your refuse will be nicely stratified when they dump everything into the same pile after pulling out the aluminum since that's the only thing that is profitable to recycle.
Now it's time for GOOD IDEA BAD IDEA
GOOD IDEA
Refuse a bag at a store when you don't NEED it (single item, big item, etc.)
BAD IDEA
Buy a couple reusable bags at Target/Walmart (only 99cents!)
My region sucks so I've been part-timing as a checkout chimp in recent months so I can afford to pay hazmat teams to clean up after broken CFLs.
Resuable bags, are, in a word: assholes.
1) They don't stretch and they're often too small in at least one critical dimension. Plastic-bags are self-snugging, fabric means either the box is 1cm too wide to go in right, or 1cm too narrow and things bounce around.
2) You're slowing me down. I've already got shit in a plastic bag by the time you come down from your hippie cloud and interject as though I were defecating on your VW Bug, "oh NO, I have this, save the bag." I swear, every time someone comes up with a fabric bag they tell me to save the plastic bag, as though that's how they keep score. It is my personal policy to strip the bag that I already started to use from the dispenser rungs, wad it up, and put it, empty, into the garbage beneath my terminal. Why? Fuck you, hippie.
3) Hippies don't wash. This includes their bags. You know that filthy bum texture that cloth gets when it is soiled slowly over time by atmospheric pollutants, sweat, dope fumes, and casual filth? It's a little stiff, a little sticky, and you don't really want to touch it.
No cloth bags. GTFO of my line.
Drive slowly and follow the speed limits, which will save you gas and other peoples lives.
Drive the speed that everyone else drives. Fuel is cheap, no matter what spoiled Americunts say when our prices flirt with pairity with UK prices. No one crashes their car into another car when they got the same speed as the other cars around them. It's shitheads going one-under on a road where citizens go four-over and cops go nine-over that cause jams, clogs, and collisions, and if you want to reduce vehicular deaths, make public serving of alcohol illegal.
If your going on vacation, turn off your computer since your not going to be using UNLESS, you torrenting or going to use VNC on it.
Just turn it off. We are entering the era of cheap portable computing, a couple hundred bucks gets you a little laptop, USB flash chips carry all the data you need, and if you seriously need a 24/7 line, just rent a server from a farm.
Throwing them away makes you a ungreen person and toxic waste gets into water and makes people act retarded.
This is an epic sentence, though for reasons beyond your intention.
The energy of recycling paper is offset by the fact you save trees.
Dammit, why do people say stupid things like this?
Man invented something a few years ago called a farm, where you breed things like chickens and cows and trees so you can eat/eat/wipe-your-ass with them later on. A quick google reports that 15% of virgin (from tree) pulp production is from old-growth. The regions that do still use old-growth are places like Canada and Russia, which is pretty much lousy with trees anyway.
When you chop down trees, you have barren land. What's the #1 best thing you can do with that land? Plant more trees. Farming works.
Meanwhile, the "energy offset" is bullshit because a growing tree is a energy-collection and oxygen production device. Farming trees collects energy from the sun and produces oxygen. Recycling paper collects no energy from the sun and shits out a lot of industrial waste in the form of bleaches and chemicals used to treat the waste paper into something that the consumer is willing to buy.
-
Man invented something a few years ago called a farm, where you breed things like chickens and cows and trees so you can eat/eat/wipe-your-ass with them later on. A quick google reports that 15% of virgin (from tree) pulp production is from old-growth. The regions that do still use old-growth are places like Canada and Russia, which is pretty much lousy with trees anyway.
When you chop down trees, you have barren land. What's the #1 best thing you can do with that land? Plant more trees. Farming works.
Meanwhile, the "energy offset" is bullshit because a growing tree is a energy-collection and oxygen production device. Farming trees collects energy from the sun and produces oxygen. Recycling paper collects no energy from the sun and shits out a lot of industrial waste in the form of bleaches and chemicals used to treat the waste paper into something that the consumer is willing to buy.
Q-F-T
-
where you breed things like chickens and cows and trees so you can eat/eat/wipe-your-ass with them later on.
That is halrious!
I cant say anything but VC is totally fucking right on the money!!!
Recycling USES energy which releases shit into our assmosphere then we inhale that shit that turns our childrens into dumb little fuckheads who cant pay attention in school, who cant listen to their parents, and the list can go on.. well not all shit is from that... but im just showing a point like a lot of the chemicals that come from products which are not good for your health have an effect on human beings.
VC must have read a lot of books in his past. I am just thinking VC has a house with those big and wide ass book shelves stored with enviromental books lol.
-
It's not the number of books you read, but which ones you select.
-
It's a little stiff, a little sticky, and you don't really want to touch it.
Like the socks under my bed.
-
Yes, like the socks you masturbate into to the voice of Bashe when he is doing his Bizarro-VC impression.
-
Yes, like the socks you masturbate into to the voice of Bashe when he is doing his Bizarro-VC impression.
Bashe? u mean this?
"Irresistible male marine suit that can make any chick horny and gives good luck"
Source= http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=bashe
lol
-
No. He is referring to me.
Anyway, let's not derail this any further. There is a decent discussion going on otherwise.
-
No. He is referring to me.
Anyway, let's not derail this any further. There is a decent discussion going on otherwise.
Oh shit, i am sorry.
-
Instead of simply driving the speed limit and pissing all the other drivers off or curing lead foot, simply buy a more fuel efficient car. Like, a Toyota Prius or a BMW Z4 or something. They get 30-50mpg even when being gunned by a madman.
Sadly this is a more "do as I say, not as I do" deal as I get an amazing 15mpg when joyriding my massive SUV around.