Tag: environment

The other Chinese bug plaguing the country

The spotted lanternfly is native to China and has been spotted in the American east coast as early as 2014 but is recently more rapidly spreading (theoretically by people moving due to Covid and unknowingly transporting lanternfly egg masses with them). Local governments are asking citizens to kill and report it to wildlife if they see it as it is a danger to ecosystems outside of Chyyna, India and Vietnam.

Technically, this is a depiction of Mothra, the Godzilla movie monster, but it also serves as a warning of how bug problems can get out of hand

I know you’ve never heard of this, because I haven’t, and that means you probably haven’t – so if you’re wondering what this thing is:
Although its called a “fly” and looks like a moth, the spotted lanternfly is a hopping tree bug. It’s considered invasive and dangerous because it deposits “sticky honeydew secretions” that then grow mold that prevents plants from photosynthesizing and causing the plants to die according to USA Today. This makes it dangerous to trees and cash crops, marking it as a threat to orchard, grape, and logging industries.

This “stomp to kill” order is no joke. Watch how local government twitter accounts request you to assassinate these things as it creeps from the far east coast into the midwest:

Then it appeared in a Kansas students entomology entry at a state fair display (the student correctly identified the insect, by the way). One of the fair’s judges was familiar with the insect — and the requirement of reporting it to the USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service.

Story developing. Godzilla on standby.

Electric vehicles are cool but they’re not the environment savers people think

Just a friendly reminder (and I do mean friendly. no one should be angry or jerky about this) that “clean energy” uses dirty energy. Specifically: electric cars use fossil fuels…

In case you are wondering: yes, coal is a fossil fuel…

Some just try to fool the public about this but others acknowledge the dirty fuel use in clean energy but claim that vehicles reduce carbon dioxide emissions cuz they use less fossil fuel than burning gas in a vehicle engine to make it go, but… the data isn’t conclusive that that is true:

The Greenpeace / Transport & Environment report’s research states that while PHEV manufacturers cite official test results showing CO2 emissions averaging 44g per km, they actually emit more like 117g per km in real use, which is much closer to the value for petrol and diesel cars of 164-7g per km. This is because the true emissions of a PHEV depend on how you drive it. If you don’t plug it in, a PHEV behaves like a conventional hybrid, except with about 200kg more batteries, which are being lugged around for no reason. Also, if you drive a PHEV fast, the fossil-fuel engine will fire up anyway, negating the emissions benefits of battery power.

Based on these findings, Greenpeace is arguing that car manufacturers are simply using PHEVs as an excuse not to stop manufacturing polluting internal combustion engines, and that this vehicle type should be banned alongside pure petrol and diesel in a decade or so as a result. Their arguments are not completely lacking in merit. Lots of people will have purchased a PHEV for the reduced tax due to their low official CO2 emissions, and once they’ve bought the car don’t care about driving it in a way that actually produces this ecological outcome. Both the manufacturers and owners can pretend to adopt green behaviour without actually bothering to do so.

Obama Reverses on Costly Enviro-Regulation

President Obama has changed his policy on a piece of legislation that held back business in favor of protecting Mother Earth. When President Bush did things like this it was cuz he wanted babies and old people to choke on oil exhaust so he would have something to masturbate to. What’s the spin when Obama does it?

In a dramatic reversal, President Barack Obama on Friday scrubbed a clean-air regulation that aimed to reduce health-threatening smog, yielding to bitterly protesting businesses and congressional Republicans who complained the rule would kill jobs in America’s ailing economy.

Withdrawal of the proposed regulation marked the latest in a string of retreats by the president in the face of GOP opposition, and it drew quick criticism from liberals. Environmentalists, a key Obama constituency, accused him of caving to corporate polluters, and the American Lung Association threatened to restart the legal action it had begun against rules proposed by President George W. Bush.

The White House has been under heavy pressure from GOP lawmakers and major industries, which have slammed the stricter standard as an unnecessary jobs killer. The Environmental Protection Agency, whose scientific advisers favored the tighter limits, had predicted the proposed change would cost up to $90 billion a year, making it one of the most expensive environmental regulations ever imposed in the U.S.

Wtf is going on here? Certainly there is a conspiracy, since we all know that government forcing businesses to do things that hippies want done is the only way they will ever stop polluting the planet into an irreversible death spiral. So what say you, then, hippies? Does Obama want everyone to choke on corporate America’s gaspipe schlong just like those evil Republicans? Or were you lying about the evilness of those Republicans and now that a Leftist administration is making the concession that goes against that talking point, you’re ready to admit that you were just using that ad hominem smear to demonize people who stand in your way of your unrealistic utopian ideals?

If an actual hotel lobby of hippie-convention attending survey takers were to be polled, I would bet on the choice being to throw Obama under the bus because the lie about evil corporate greed being at the heart of mamma-earth protecting cultist ideals is too much a staple in hippie doctrine to give up. The quote above, displays as much already. The only viable option someone who has bought that line of thinking has is to claim that Obama has been co-opted by the evil corporate machine or something and is now going to coldly kill us all.

Why High fructose corn syrup is icky

This article on Yahoo!

1. The process of making high fructose corn syrup is pretty weird

Weird? Who the hell cares what’s “weird”. Giving birth is weird. doesn’t mean no one should do it (just most people). What they mean is that it’s “weird” in the classic sense, meaning “not natural”:

The process starts off with corn kernels, yes, but then that corn is spun at a high velocity and combined with three other enzymes: alpha-amylase, glucoamylase, and xylose isomerase, so that it forms a thick syrup that’s way sweeter than sugar and super cheap to produce.

2. High fructose corn syrup does weird stuff to your body

This one is a better play, but unfortunately kindov means “dont eat anything ever” since it’s in everything.

The syrup interferes with the body’s metabolism so that a person can’t stop eating. It’s truly hard to control cravings because high fructose corn syrup slows down the secretion of leptin in the body. Leptin is a crucial hormone in the body that tells you that you’re full and to stop eating.

That’s why it’s so closely associated with obesity in this country. It’s like an addictive drug.

3. There might be mercury in your corn syrup

Yikes dude….

“We went and looked at supermarket samples where high fructose corn syrup was the first or second ingredient on the label,” Dr. David Wallinga, a food safety researcher and activist at the nonprofit Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy said. These 55 different foods included barbecue sauce, jam, yogurt, and chocolate syrup. “We found about one out of three had mercury above the detection limit,” Wallinga said.

4. The environmental impact of high fructose corn syrup is huge

Yawn. don’t care. not true in the real sense, only in the “limited scope of hippie humans” sense. Weakest one in the list.

Whatever Happened to the Hole in the Ozone Layer?

As Lewis Black says: “We’ve got men, we’ve got rockets, we’ve got Saran Wrap… FIX IT”.

All I heard about via the environment in the 90s was “the hole in the ozone layer”, the hole, the HOLE! Well, its not actually a hole, its an area that is thinner than the rest, and its not actually a big deal apparently since no one says a damn word about it anymore. LiveScience says the size of the hole has stabilized.

Yes, the ozone has thinned over the North Pole and is expected to keep doing so for 15 years due to “due to weather-related phenomena that scientists still cannot fully explain” (thats helpful). But theres good news:

Since the 1989 Montreal Protocol banned the use of ozone-depleting chemicals worldwide, the ozone hole has stopped growing. Additionally, the ozone layer is blocking more cancer-causing radiation than any time in a decade because its average thickness has increased, according to a 2006 United Nations report. Atmospheric levels of ozone-depleting chemicals have reached their lowest levels since peaking in the 1990s, and the hole has begun to shrink.

The most hilarious part for the hippies freaking out over Global Warming is that the article says recent studies show that the size of the ozone hole affects the global temperature…but not in the way you probably think…

“Closing the ozone hole actually speeds up the melting of the polar ice caps, according to a 2009 study from Scientific Committee on Antarctic Research”.

bahaha. awesome.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ytCEuuW2_A

Why blacks don’t go to National Parks

Why don’t blacks visit National Parks? DUH. Because the dirt and soil remind them of slavery. Obviously. This was revealed when ABC News ran a story last month profiling Yosemite National Park Ranger Shelton Johnson.

According to Mr “first and only black ranger at Yosemite” (cuz that’s significant for some reason), blacks are also so tribal and easily led that if Oprah or Snoop Dog would just recreate at a park now and then, that would let the dark-skins across the nation know that these areas are safe for their kind too. After first asking why stats on the race of park attendee’s are taken anyway (which I giggled at even though I took the mention of visitor-race to be Johnsons eyeballing and not official stat-counting, but who the hell knows), John Stossel (who works for ABC but was not involved with this piece) asked on a blog “Why must racism be the first thing to which some people assign blame for every problem, real or imagined?”

Debbie Schlussel has a theory:

Hmmm . . . maybe the reason they don’t like national parks is that Yosemite’s only Black ranger wears two earrings, if ya know what I mean. Maybe Blacks don’t go to national parks because they don’t want to. Maybe they prefer something else for their free time. Why is this a problem? It’s their business what they choose to do with their free time and their free choice, not a national crisis that needs to be socially engineered otherwise.