Regulatory Logic

My son in law sadly reported to me that he kissed his eighteen year old Honda van good bye. The van was still in good running condition and he wanted to keep it as a working truck. Since he is in the business of fixing air conditioners and furnaces he has opportunity to make a few bucks on the side. The company he works for provides him with a work truck, but they don’t allow him to use it for jobs not company assigned. Thus a handy vehicle with his tools loaded would be a great assistance.

The Honda began to alert him to problems with dashboard icons that warned of impending doom from air pollution devices. The Honda doctor wanted nearly two thousand dollars to fix the problem, but the van is worth much less than that. He was not in the mindset to spend that much money to repair a truck that might last another year before the next large expense occurs. The truck has over 210,000 miles on it’s odometer which is credible for a car these days.

The son-in-law called a junk dealer who gave him $500 bucks for it. The man hoisted the van onto his flatbed hauler and told him that he will remove and recycle the catalytic converter and then the van goes into the crusher. In the good old days backyard mechanics would disable these non-essential devices and sensors and continue running the van. Today, we have laws they stipulate with holding a license plate if the vehicle does not pass the yearly emission control test, no plate, no car.

Now here is my dilemma. My own Toyota is seventeen years old, has 182,000 miles on it, has a rustless body, the interior looks like it did when new, it has no dents, the paint still shines, and I still like it’s style and looks. Then why would I trade it for a car that is newer and doesn’t appeal to me? Because Uncle Sam has this thing about keeping air pure. I remember when driving in California years ago that the air seemed to be foggy, and the residents dismissed my complaint with “oh that’s only smog.” We see similar pictures of smoggy days in China, and hear stories about the government forbid driving cars on days when the Olympics were being held. Yet, the same government that withholds personal freedom and liberty of it’s citizens does not have regulations that require smog control devices on their cars. We, on the other hand, have some personal liberty and freedom, but are hampered by laws and regulations that really contradict everything our constitution stipulates. Since we claim to be a Nation of Laws and we try to mean that by enforcement our liberty and freedom are often limited. Why we even have two sets of justice, although that is not stipulated it is very clear that some people play by a different set of rules and regulations.

If I were a rich man, I would have new car every year, and a paid driver to haul my ass to the library, and the pharmacy once a month. I am not rich, but I am not poor, so I must provide my own transportation, and that means driving myself around in a car. When my dash board lights up I’ll have to move to a State that doesn’t require emission control testing.

When I was a teen my home town of Chicago had a public transportation system that allowed me to get around town for a nickel a ride. It was cheap, and easily accessible. No one had to walk more than eight city blocks to catch a streetcar, and the cars came by every fifteen minutes. Today, when I could use a system like that, the tracks are buried under asphalt and the streetcars are replaced by buses that come every hour. It is worse in the suburbs where transit systems are a dirty word, and the infinitely wise city planners don’t even provide sidewalks to link one neighborhood with another. The younger planners argue that we don’t need public transport any more because self-driving cars will replace the need for a personal transportation device, and the next day we read about someone getting killed in a self driving car accident.

About twenty years ago, I thought it would be cool to come back a hundred years from now t see how the world had changed. Currently, I am only fifteen years away from being able to remember what it was like a hundred years ago, and it ain’t pretty. I don’t imagine the world will look like it did in Star Wars or Star Trek. The flying car will still be grounded, people will still have to work, and they will still have to commute to a job on out dated and scarce transportation. I think a hundred years from now people will still be blogging about how much better it was in the “good old days.”

The Green New Scam

Last week I got the urge to research the effect of carbon dioxide on global warming. I must have looked at charts on a dozen different websites. What I found was not what I hoped to find. Chart after chart showed CO2 levels rising yearly. My inner brain began to trickle information to the front of my mind. Most notable was a vacation camping trip I took with my kids. We went to Arizona and one of the stops was between Phoenix and Tucson at a place called Biosphere 2. It was intended to be a giant experiment to determine if man could survive in space in a man made atmosphere replicating that of Earth.

Inside Biosphere 2 was a much smaller experiment. In fact, I would call it a tiny experiment showing the result of CO2 on plant growth. Biosphere 2 is a three acre glass topped structure that is hermetically sealed off from Earth’s atmosphere. The tiny experiment was three twenty gallon aquarium tanks set up side by side. Tank 1 had a normal CO2 level, Tank 2 had a generous percentage more CO2, and Tank 3 had a ridiculously high percentage above normal CO2, they all had the same amount of light. The test was to see the effect of CO2 levels on corn growth. In Tank 1 the corn was normal, kind of what we see in the fields near the 4th of July. The CO2 level was increased in Tank 2, and surprisingly the growth was hearty and healthier looking than normal, but in Tank 3 the corn was a shriveled dried up mess. The CO2 level in Tank 3 was increased to double digits above normal. That experiment stuck with me. Rising CO2 levels gives us a an agricultural advantage, and too much CO2 dries up the earth and burns the crops. That is when I put the brakes on writing about the CO2 hoax and global warming.

Then yesterday, the idea light turned on and I got a new insight. In all the charts and articles about global warming there was not a single one that showed a temperature rise on the earth’s surface or atmosphere. If there is such a report the green new dealers are hiding the facts. In order for the Arctic ice caps to melt the air temperature at the pole has to rise. Another thing that is missing is any data that indicates a rise in water levels other than that caused by the tides and the position of the moon relative to Earth. I also remember seeing another shocking video on rising water levels in Venice, Italy. They showed knee high water covering St. Mark’s Square. My God, I thought, is it really happening? A few weeks later I saw another article that explained that the high water in Venice is cyclical, and is attributed to seasonal tides. The news station made a scare piece that would make one believe that the ice caps are melting. The Venetian locals have learned to live with rising water as we will if ever our coastlines begin to go under water. No where have I found one article that takes the opposite approach and identifies a phenomenon that cancels the effect of rising CO2 like what if the hole in the Ozone layer acts as a vent that draws excess CO2 out into the stratosphere? Is no one interested in playing devil’s advocate?

Notice how the hole in the ozone layer hovers over Antarctica, the same spot that will melt away because of rising CO2. Also notice that the hole keeps getting bigger even though earthlings paid the price of changing out freon from air conditioners world-wide.

Another part of my research was to compile a list of cars, trucks, busses, locomotives, ships, and airplanes that contribute to CO2. The worldwide transportation component accounts for 40% of the CO2 load, but I have yet to see a single article about how walking and bicycle riding can reduce CO2. If you want to make a personal contribution break out your trusty Schwinn, air up the tires, oil the chain, and start pedaling. Not only will you reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere, you will lose weight, sleep better, and generally be healthier.

Fossil fueled Electricity is the number two contributor to the CO2 load just behind light vehicles. What I don’t see is a projection of how converting cars from fossil fuel to electricity will affect electricity generation. I guess we will worry about that when it actually happens. That conversion is not just a USA problem it is also a world-wide problem. China is of course the world’s largest polluter and is far ahead of where the USA was in the nineteen forties. If the United States worked overtime and created a pollution free atmosphere the air flow around the planet would change out our pure air and mix it with stinky Chinese air. We pay to clean the air, and they continue to pollute. In my mind we are the slaves of the Chinese.

As a kid, I remember very well how polluted the air was on the Southside of Chicago. We had a concentration of steel mills and oil refineries that spewed tons of caustic gasses and ash into the sky, the stink was amazing. We made great strides in eliminating the problem by losing the steel mills to Korea, and the refineries to the gulf coast. We cleaned our atmosphere by worsening someone else’s. As the world becomes more intelligent and uses more computers it also becomes an electrical energy hog. By concentrating on reducing car emissions by converting to electricity we have pushed the electrical generation problem off toward the fantasy of wind and solar, neither of which will suffice. If the politicians were smart they would send China a monthly bill as payment for the U.S.A. filtering their crummy air.

During the nineteen eighties I had to determine why our products were failing in the pristine eastern region of Canada. After microscopic examination of the failed products I determined that the plastic was being attacked chemically. Why and how does that happen in the deepest forests of the continent? Finally, after much study I blamed it on acid rain. How did the rain get loaded with acid so far in the wilderness? The answer was that the air became polluted by smoke pouring out of smoke stacks eight hundred miles away that were modified and made taller to move the pollution away from a population center. The smoke reached a layer of air moving eastward and fell out over the forest where our product was used. The pollutant mixed with the rain and caused the rainfall to be very acidic. An example of one area solving its pollution problem by transferring it to another area. We came to our conclusion after learning that the fish in that area were dying from lake water that was highly acidic.

The air pollution problem is huge and complex. I would like to see a viable solution to it in my life time, but I fear that will not happen. One suggestion that I have is to go backwards in civilization. We must go back to the days when there were no industries, or gasoline gulping cars, and we didn’t need so much electricity. Trash your computers, TV’s, phones, lights, and air conditioners, then, we might be able to make a dent in rising CO2 levels, but will we affect a change on global warming?

In closing, picture this, a world that exists one hundred years from now, and civilization has made the ultimate sacrifice to reduce CO2 levels to normal. Yet, with all that sacrifice the planet has continued to get hotter as it normally does in a cyclical way, and the ice caps have melted anyway. How will we answer to that? We will have wasted a hundred years of human effort causing untold misery on several generations of people on solving the wrong problem. What will the politicians say to that? What will their spin be? WiIl we believe it, or will we buy into what ever bull crap Uncle feeds us, and we drink the cool aid. I for one, would like to be here a hundred years from now to fend off the leaders who will lie their way out of the problem, and blame it all on Trump.