The Anti-Environmentalist Movement

My wife sent me an email about the hazards of CFL (compact fluorescent lightbulbs) to me this week.

Unbelievable. The warning said that the lightbulbs contained mercury and that if you broke them, you needed a hazmat team to clean up the area and that the bulbs could not be thrown away. I immediately looked it up in Snopes and discovered that the bulbs have the mercury content equal to the ink in a period at the end of a sentence. There was a procedure for cleaning it up yourself, which is to sweep it up, not vacuum it up (vacuuming disperses the material in the air where you can inhale it. You can dump the shards in the trash after you carefully sweep it up. No hazmat team, no special disposal, nothing to be afraid of.

The site my wife found was a for profit conservative website that tries to pass itself off as news. When you scroll down the site, you see it is mostly an anti-environmental site.

I just don't understand much of the anti-environmental movement. Conservatives have been angered at, belittled, and made fun of environmentalists for years. For years they declared that it is ridiculous to assert that humans could effect the climate. They use terms like "tree-hugger" like that's a bad thing. Their fear is that if big companies aren't allowed to pollute indiscriminately, they won't be competitive. So the position is basically if some small amount of fat cats aren't allowed to trash the planet at will.... what is supposed to happen that's so bad? Who benefits from crushing the Green Movement? If you're not the 1/4 of 1 % that is a CEO of the owner of a megamulticorp, what are you protecting?

Anti-Greens always say that a volcano pukes out more CO2 or mercury than worldwide industrial output does. There is some truth to this, volcanoes do put out CO2 and mercury, but not near as much as power plants. Actually, big volcanic eruptions are rare and their affects are usually dissipated in less than a year. This argument confuses me. Are they saying that a volcano has the ability to pollute more than us, so we shouldn't even try to stop our own pollution? By that logic, your city generates more trash than your household does, so why not just toss all your trash out on your front yard, because it's not as bad as the city landfill. Are we saying that Exxon Valdez was bad, so why not empty your engine oil out in the local creek?

Getting back to the CFL issue, what is this person's point? On one hand, they try to tell us not to worry about mercury coming out of industry or power plants, but heaven forbid if there's an insignificant amount in those energy saving light bulbs! My understanding is that incandescent bulbs also have a small amount of mercury. So are we supposed to not be afraid of friendly mercury contamination by industry but terrified of mercury if it comes from an evil tree hugger? If these planet trashing apologists were true to form, they would be rejoicing over the mercury content of CFLs and having bulb smashing parties where they tell the horrid EPA to stay away and let them pollute all they want.

People thought that the "Vast Right Wing Conspiracy" was a paranoid fantasy, but you have to admit that purveyors of Right Wing Media don't even question the basic premises or check the facts of people that are saying what they want to hear. These people are truly brainwashed, incapable of having an independent thought, analyzing both sides of an issue, or open to considering much less believing something they don't already agree with. If they wanted to persuade me, they're going to have to get some groups of scientists to study the issue and prove that there are threats or problems with some issue. The problem is, a good scientist would require proof, and the only acceptable proof for these people is what already supports their view. I keep waiting for reality to catch up to these people, and I think it's starting to happen. We may have to wait for a couple of generations to die off and take their erroneous and dangerously short sighted ideas to the grave with them.

DISCLAIMER: 2 "facts" in my posting have not been thoroughly researched or checked (whoops, I'm guilty too!). I would like to look up and confirm that the total output of CO2 from volcanoes is small compared to power plants. I heard this on a science podcast about 6 weeks ago, but I need to go back and check my source and see to what degree it's true, and what the Mercury comparison is. I don't know about mercury content of incandescent bulbs, I heard it and didn't check it. I am also painting conservatives with a broad brush, which is not fair, and does not help persuade anyone over to a different viewpoint. It is one of the aspects of right wing media, fundamentalist rhetoric, or political smear that I feel is demeaning and degrading, and hurts the public discourse. If you are conservative because you like littler government, because you believe that business is good for the health and prosperity of the country, or because you believe in a strong defense, you may be open to listening to the science and knowing the truth of the matter. If you've fallen prey to the rhetoric of either side and no longer question their basic assumptions, then you are a lost cause and there is no point in trying to open a dialog.