Tag Archive for: EnvironmentalistMovement

What Litter Says about America

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Estimated Reading Time: 3 minutes

Especially telling is a water bottle that is marketed as eco-friendly.

Like an archeological dig, the litter that my wife and I pick up on our daily five-mile walk says a lot about American society.

The daily debris comes from all socioeconomic classes. Receipts found among some of the items show that they were bought miles away in impoverished parts of town. Other litter comes from a nearby resort, where guests pay a few hundred dollars a night and then throw stuff out of the window of their luxury car upon departure. 

We’ve walked in every region of the United States, in both urban and rural areas. Judging by the amount of litter and trash along roadsides, public places, and even hiking trails and national parks across the country, civic-mindedness, civic pride, and manners are in short supply in America.

On our daily walks, we’ve picked up fast-food debris, beer cans, and bottles, liquor bottles, water bottles, shards of glass, Styrofoam cups, face masks, latex gloves, cigarette packs, vaping devices, nitrous oxide cartridges, drug paraphernalia, plastic bags, Swiffer cleaning cloths, cardboard boxes, Styrofoam peanuts and other packing material, car parts from accidents, construction materials blown out of the beds of pickup trucks, and even a leather briefcase full of vomit.

On two occasions, we found a wallet that contained a driver’s license, credit cards, and cash. Each time, we promptly mailed the wallet to the owner, who never thanked us.

The volume of litter is greatest the day after Memorial Day and Independence Day. It’s as if Americans show their patriotism by trashing America.

The most telling and ironic piece of litter that we’ve ever picked up was a white and blue designer water bottle, or carton, with the brand name of “Just Water.” The particular bottle was found next to plastic carry-out food containers, which indicated that the items had been discarded together.

Marketed as eco-friendly, Just Water bottles are plastered with feel-good homilies about sustainability and greenness. Let’s look at the wording on the bottles before returning to the commentary.

One side of the square bottles says:

100% Spring Water

+ naturally alkaline

+ plant-based carton

+ sustainably sourced

Another side says:

YOU JUST DID A GOOD THING.

This carton is made almost entirely from plants, which pull CO₂ from the air (instead of adding more). And because the premium we pay for our water goes directly into improving local water infrastructure, we’re actually helping the small American city we source from.

One carton might not save the world, but it’s a start.

SO THANKS,

AND NICE MOVE.

A third side says:

A system that’s out to change everything.

We partner with a small city [Glens Falls] in upstate NY

to buy their excess spring water at 6X the municipal water rate.

which puts more $$$ into their local economy.

Then we package it up in a carton made from 54% paper

and 34% plant-based plastic, totaling 88% renewable content,

which means up to 74% less carbon emissions vs. similarly sized plastic bottles.

So if you’re going to buy packaged water, this one’s better for everyone.

A fourth side gives the following packaging facts, among other information:

Paper 53.9%

Plant-Based Plastic 34.6%

PE [polyethylene] Plastic 8.1%

Foil 3.4%

None of the information says how much energy was used to pump the water, to fill the bottles, to warehouse the bottles, and to ship the bottles across the country from Glens Falls, New York, to Tucson, Arizona, where I found the bottle in question. Nor does it mention that paper production is one of the most energy-intensive and environmentally harmful industries.

Also unsaid is how Just Water compares to municipal water in price, purity, and environmental impact. No doubt, the city water that I drink out of reusable, non-BPA glasses and hiking bottles—after running the water through filters that remove chlorine and other substances—comes out way ahead in these measures.

In any event, Glens Falls can better afford bottled water than Tucson. The New York town has a poverty rate of 14.7%, which is seven percentage points lower than the poverty rate in the City of Tucson. One reason for the disparity is that Glens Falls is 89.6% non-Hispanic white, versus only 43.3% for the City of Tucson. When Tucsonans buy Just Water, they are sending money to New York.

It also should be noted that spring water isn’t necessarily good water. As a case in point, my father-in-law lived in a bucolic hamlet in the Allegheny National Forest in northwestern Penn., not far from the New York border. The hamlet’s unofficial water system was connected to a spring. Sounds good, unless one happened to know that the spring is in the middle of old oil fields and near a former charcoal/chemical plant. Because the water had a strange-looking sheen to it, I didn’t drink it and reluctantly showered with it.

Moreover, if left untreated, spring water can contain lead and arsenic, since these elements occur naturally in the ground.

The discarded bottle of Just Water is a perfect illustration of how Americans fall for green marketing but are oblivious to the trashing of America.   

 

Federal Appeals Court Upholds Stop to Rosemont Mine in Arizona

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

Editors’ Note: As the reader will note, the court held the mining claims were invalid because no valuable minerals were found.  It is certainly not common for mining companies to dig large holes costing millions just for the fun of it. Let’s suppose rich mineral deposits were found? Would environmental groups still oppose the mine? How does that square with the Green agenda that posits a complete change over in our energy grid and transportation system, which requires extensive exploitation of minerals like copper, nickel, lithium, and cobalt? You can’t get the quantities of minerals out of the ground for the Green revolution without disturbing ocelots. It is either that or let the dirty mining be done in China, leaving us as dependent on them for minerals as we are on Middle East dictatorships for oil. All economic decisions have trade-offs and you can’t back the “Green Agenda” on the one hand, and block the mining of necessary minerals on the other. Not unless your intention is to destroy the economy, that is.

 

A federal appeals court upheld a ruling to invalidate the U.S. Forest Service’s approval of an open-pit copper mine in southern Arizona.

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against Toronto-based Hudbay Minerals’ plans for the $1.9 billion Rosemont Mine in the Coronado National Forest.

The court said Thursday that Hudbay’s mining claims were baseless. “Because no valuable minerals have been found, the claims are necessarily invalid,” the court’s decision read. “The district court was therefore correct in holding that the Service improperly assumed their validity.”

The Center for Biological Diversity was pleased to see the court uphold a previous ruling in this one.

“This momentous decision makes it clear that Hudbay’s plan to destroy the beautiful Rosemont Valley is not only a terrible idea, it’s illegal,” Allison Melton, an attorney at the Center for Biological Diversity, said in a press release. “The Santa Rita Mountains are critically important for Tucson’s water supply, jaguars, ocelots, and many other species of rare plants and animals. We won’t let them be sacrificed for mining company profits.”

Hudbay wants to blast a mile-wide, half-mile deep pit in the Santa Rita Mountains. The environmentalist organizations say that this would have harmed more than 5,000 acres of land.

Hudbay issued a statement on Thursday reiterating that it isn’t giving up on the project yet, and will seek other avenues to get it done.

“In the Decision, the Court of Appeals agreed with the District Court’s ruling that the U.S. Forest Service relied on incorrect assumptions regarding its legal authority and the validity of Rosemont’s unpatented mining claims in the issuance of Rosemont’s Final Environmental Impact Statement,” the company said in a statement. “While Hudbay reviews the Decision, in any event, the company will continue to pursue its alternative plan to advance its Copper World project.”

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This article was published by The Center Square and is reproduced with permission.

This Invasion Is Brought to You by … Western Environmentalists

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Estimated Reading Time: 2 minutes

For more than 40 years, the environmentalist movement has been warning that global warming is the result of mankind’s burning of fossil fuels and poses an “existential threat” to human and other biological life.

This is one of the many grandiose lies the Left uses to reshape, if not destroy, Western civilization. Other grandiose lies used to achieve that result include America being systemically racist; that violent crime is the result of racism and poverty; men give birth; sex and gender are “nonbinary”; and that former President Donald Trump was a Russian asset.

It should now be obvious that the “Greens,” the environmentalist movement — not global warming — poses an existential threat to humanity. For the first time since the Cuban missile crisis of 1962, the world faces the possibility of a nuclear war. Russia is explicitly threatening the use of nuclear weapons should the West come to the defense of Ukraine and has put its military on nuclear alert. Given the possibility that Russian President Vladimir Putin is deranged, the threat is far more real than it was in 1962 when Nikita Khrushchev was the leader of the Soviet Union. Putin believes he embodies Russia (just as Hitler believed he embodied Germany). Khrushchev did not believe he embodied Russia.

Were it not for the green movement, Putin would not have been confident that he could get away with invading Ukraine. During Trump’s presidency, and due to his policies, the United States became independent of foreign oil for the first time. Within months of assuming power, the Democratic Party, an extension of the environmentalist movement, forced America to revert to dependence on foreign oil, including Russian oil. Beholden to the environmentalists, candidate Joe Biden made promise after promise to curtail oil and gas production: no new fracking on government land, no drilling in the Alaskan Arctic, and shutting down the Keystone pipeline.

Putin got the message.

So, thanks to environmentalists, not only is America once again dependent on foreign oil, Germany is dependent on Russian oil. Angela Merkel, another in a long line of foolish Germans, even shut down Germany’s nuclear reactors — which the greens in Germany applauded. They applauded it — despite the fact that nuclear energy is the only viable non-carbon energy that can sustain a country — because the environmentalist movement is not nearly as interested in the environment as it is in restructuring society. The environmentalist movement is as interested in protecting the environment as the communist movement was in protecting workers or the defund-the-police movement is in protecting blacks.

The Democrats came into power in 2021. The average closing price of oil in 2020 was $39.68 a barrel; the closing price of oil in 2019 was $56.99 a barrel. As of this writing it is $138.00 a barrel. The extremely high price of energy — a direct result of the environmentalist policies of the Democratic Party and the liberal and Left parties in Europe — is one of the two primary reasons for the ever-increasing rate of inflation. (The other reason is the result of another Democrat policy: the printing of trillions of dollars.)

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Continue reading this article at at PJ Media.