Monday, July 22, 2013

Food for thought

Why capitalism will never be able to be green -- "When an American replaces the battery in a car, likely as not the old battery will be shipped to Mexico rather than to a modern US recycling plant. The reason? Its lead emissions standards are one tenth as stringent as US standards." (Toronto star, June 1, 2013). By the numbers – the number of tractor trailers that the dead batteries would have filled in 2011 = 17, 952; estimated increase in dead batteries to Mexico, 2004-2011 = 525%; lead smelting and refining plants in the US forty years ago = 154, today = 14; tons of lead emitted into the air by a single Mexican plant = 6 or 33 times expected for a cleaner plant in US. Capital beats all, don't it?
And here's another piece of environmental information that beggars belief -- The world's economy is being powered by China, and China is being powered by coal, a nineteenth century technology despite ads from Big Coal that tout the cleanliness of coal! (ever seen a miner?). In China, coal accounts for 70% of its energy production, January -- more than forty times the level deemed safe by The World Health Organization; 1.3 million square kilometers are regularly blanketed in China enveloping 600 million people: 750,000 people die from air pollution each year. Yet the capitalist system cries 'we must expand there'! about as much coal as is used by all other countries combined. As a result, ten billion tons of carbon dioxide are emitted annually; Beijing recorded one thousand micrograms of fine particle pollution
in January -- more than forty times the level deemed safe by The World Health Organization; 1.3 million square kilometers are regularly blanketed in China enveloping 600 million people: 750,000 people die from air pollution each year. Yet the capitalist system cries 'we must expand there'! John Ayers

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