Pollution – Delingpole World

UK Report Confirms: Recycling Is a Pointless Exercise in Green Virtue-Signalling

California recycling (Justin Sullivan / Getty) — Justin Sullivan / Getty

Recycling is a waste of time and money which probably does more harm to the environment than good.

This is the message of a damning report produced for the UK government by the National Audit Office.

It confirms what many have long suspected: recycling is an empty ritual, devised by green zealots, enforced by bureaucrats, but with no practical benefits whatsoever.

Obviously, being an official report, it doesn’t state the truth quite so bluntly. But it leaves the reader in no doubt that Britain’s recycling targets are just an empty, EU-driven exercise in green virtue-signalling and that the whole process positively invites fraud and corruption.

The report focuses on packaging recycling. Under a scheme introduced by the Blair Government in 1997 to comply with EU recycling directives, companies are obliged to take a certain percentage of their packaging from recycled material – or at least to do so symbolically by purchasing “recovery evidence notes” from specialist recycling companies. These are a bit like carbon credits or renewable obligation certificates: a way of maintaining the illusion that there is a free market, while simultaneously forcing companies to underwrite green tariffs imposed on them by the state.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Save the Oceans – Stop Recycling Plastic!

Green recycling policy is killing the oceans with plastic pollution, says a shock report by a Finnish public health expert.

The report, written for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Mikko Paunio, adjunct professor in general epidemiology at the University of Helsinki, is titled Save the Oceans – Stop Recycling Plastic.

Paunio writes:

The title may sound odd to ordinary people, but the sad fact is that the global “recycling” industry has significantly added to the marine plastic litter problem.

I have put recycling in quotes, because only a small fraction of plastic recovered from consumers is actually recycled: the material collected is dirty and so mixed up that it is impossible to produce the high-quality raw material required by, for example, the food-packaging industry. Most recovered plastic is simply burned or dumped: on land, in rivers, or even directly in the oceans.

Unable to recycle waste in line with the targets imposed on them, rich countries have chosen to dump it — plastic, paper and cardboard — on poor ones, especially China. Lower environmental standards in much of Asia has made it cheaper to manage waste there and low-quality recycled plastic can sometimes be profitably produced from these waste streams, albeit in highly polluted conditions.

In recent years, the stream of waste delivered to China expanded vastly. Annual imports reached 85 million tons, including 8 million of plastic. The quantity was so huge that inspection at ports became impossible, and the unscrupulous found that even mixed or hazardous waste could profitably be sent, disguised as “recycling” to avoid landfill tax or high management costs in rich countries. Unable to handle this tsunami of refuse, the Chinese were forced to either burn or dump vast quantities. An unknown amount found its way to the oceans.

The consequences for the environment and for public health of this “recycling” madness have therefore been horrendous, and have ultimately proved too high for the Chinese, who have now banned waste imports entirely. Recent figures suggest that recycling businesses in the UK have responded by simply shipping waste to Asian countries with even weaker environmental standards. So even more waste will end up in the oceans in future.

In recent months, plastic pollution has become the favoured cause of environmentalists, as it finally dawns that the public is heartily sick of being lectured about ‘climate change.’

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Plastic Bans Are Stupid, Unconservative and Won’t Save the Whales

From the U.S. to the European Union to Australia, the West is waging war on plastic.

It’s the latest moral panic. Soon, we’re told, there will be more plastic in the sea than there are fish. The floating island of plastic known as the Great Pacific Garbage Patch is nowthree times the size of France. Fish are becoming so addicted to pollution they actually prefer plastic microbeads to real food. It’s killing whales. Etc.

Of course I can see why governments are keen to be seen responding to this terrible threat. If you’re as desperately useless as Theresa May’s UK government, for example, it makes perfect sense to try to distract everyone from your incompetence by launching bold anti-plastic initiatives which get you a big thumbs up from national treasures like Sir David Attenborough and which don’t cost the public purse much money.

But I wish they wouldn’t bother. As this article from Inside Sources demonstrates – and it really ought to be required reading for all those bansturbators out there working themselves into a righteous frenzy about just how Medieval they’re going to get on plastic’s ass – these plastic bans, in the West at any rate, are a complete waste of space.

Here’s why,

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Environmentalism Is the Dirty Secret Behind Global Pollution Deaths

Most of the world’s deadliest pollution is concentrated in the Third World, largely among poor households which have little or no access to electricity produced by fossil-fuel power.
Serious pollution in the West, however, is negligible.

This is the clear message of the latest State of Global Air report produced by the Health Effects Institute and Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation.

But it is not, needless to say, how it is being reported in the liberal media.

The Guardian, for example, headlines its story: “More than 95% of world’s population breathe dangerous air, major study finds”.

This sounds bad, until you realize that the “dangerous” air being talked about here is only “dangerous” because it contains concentrations of particulate matter known as PM_2.5.

Ah yes: our old friend PM_2.5. We dealt with this pseudo-scientific fake news scare story this time last year, at the time of the previous State of Global Air report.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Killing Yourself for Gaia Is an Act of Insanity

Environmentalism has a long history of attracting cranks, loons and zealots.

There was the Unabomber, whose Manifesto was all but indistinguishable from Al Gore’s Earth in Balance.

There was James Lee, the eco-terrorist who in 2010 was shot by police at the Discovery Channel after taking hostages, leaving behind rambling messages protesting about “overpopulation” and the need to “the human race from breeding any more disgusting human babies.”

Now there is David S Buckel, a lawyer who burnt himself to death in Prospect Park, Brooklyn, apparently in the belief that this would set some kind of moral example to all those people out there bent on destroying the planet.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

‘Fish Prefer Plastic to Food’ Study Was #Fakenews, Science Misconduct Committee Finds

‘Fish prefer plastic to food,’ claimed a paper published in Sciencelast year. It was the environmental horror story du jour.

The billions of tons of plastics that we release into the environment for the most part do not biodegrade. But they do degrade, breaking into ever smaller particles that end up in the oceans. Lönnstedt et al. show that the impacts of these microplastics are multifold (see the Perspective by Rochman). Eurasian perch larvae exposed to microplastics were less active, less responsive to predator cues, more likely to be eaten, and less likely to thrive—preferring to eat plastic rather than their natural prey.

Naturally, this news was seized on by the mainstream media as further proof of the damage man’s selfishness, greed and refusal to amend his lifestyle was causing to the planet.

It was reported everywhere from the London Times and the Washington Post to the Smithsonian Magazine and the BBC.

The study, by Swedish researchers, seemed to confirm everyone’s worst suspicions about plastic pollution of the oceans. Of especial concern in this case were the plastic microbeads used by the cosmetics industry in skincare products. These microbeads have been madeillegal in the U.S. under legislation introduced during the last days of the Obama administration, with the European Union considering a similar ban.

Here is how the BBC reported the story:

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Forget Suing VW. We Should All Be Claiming Millions for Other ‘Green’ Lunacies That Literally Cost the Earth

Oh, how I wish I’d kept hold of my Skoda Yeti. If only I hadn’t just sold it, I might have stood to make a cool £3,000 in compensation from the class action being brought by motorists against Volkswagen and its sister brands (Audi, Skoda, Seat) as a result of the Dieselgate emissions scandal.

Like many duped motorists, I acquired my diesel car in the naive belief that it would not only be more efficient and cost-effective than a petrol one, but also that it was better for the environment. We now know that this green myth is a nonsense.

The particulate matter produced by diesel engines is toxic, polluting and may be responsible for tens of thousands of deaths annually across Europe.
Some manufacturers such as Volkswagen have known this for ages, but rather than lose business it rigged emissions tests to make its cars seem more eco-friendly than they actually were.

Read the rest in the Daily Mail.

Paris Climate Talks Are Doomed Because China Knows ‘Climate Change’ Is a Hoax

AP Photo/Andy Wong

“The fact of the matter is that there’s a reason why you have the largest gathering of world leaders probably in world history here in Paris. Everyone else is taking climate change seriously.” Barack Obama.

Like a lot of the president’s statements on climate change this isn’t actually true. In fact there are lots and lots of people in the world who know it’s a hoax. And among them, unfortunately, happen to be the ruling elite of the most significant carbon emitting nation of them all: China.

We know this because of a devastating report, released today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, written by one of the West’s leading experts on the Chinese environmental economy, Patricia Adams.

Adams, an economist, executive director of Toronto-based Probe International, who has been working with the Chinese environmental movement since the mid-Eighties, is under absolutely no illusions about China’s real position on “climate change.”

China sees it as a brilliant opportunity to fleece the gullible gwailo for as much money as it can, to burnish its international image by making all the right green noises, and to blackmail the West into providing it with free technology.

But it has no intention whatsoever of sacrificing economic growth by reducing its carbon dioxide emissions.

China knows this. The West either knows this or strongly suspects this. So any agreement reached next week which pretends otherwise will either be a fudge, a lie, or an outright capitulation by Western negotiators – because China knows what it wants and it isn’t budging, no sirree.

Here’s how Adams puts it:

China, the world’s largest emitter of carbon dioxide, is under intense international pressure to reduce its use of fossil fuels. Although China’s leaders aim to reduce the country’s fossil-fuel consumption to 80% of its energy mix by 2030, they will not forsake national economic growth for the supposed global good. This is because China’s Communist Party knows that to stay in power – its highest priority – it must maintain the economic growth rates that have raised the incomes of much of its population and kept opposition at bay. China’s leaders know that GDP growth is tied to fossil- fuel use.

So far so disastrous for the COP21 negotiations. But worse is to come, far worse.

Obama and other Western leaders like to pretend that China’s appalling air pollution – the “airpocalypse” afflicting major cities which kills at least half a million a year – gives it a strong incentive to reduce its CO2 levels. But in fact the opposite is true.

That’s because China understands – as the West pretends not to – that CO2 and “pollution” are very different things.

Read the rest at Breitbart.