- Low-flush toilets cause stink in San Francisco: "San Francisco's big push for low-flow toilets has turned into a multimillion-dollar plumbing stink. Skimping on toilet water has resulted in more sludge backing up inside the sewer pipes, said Tyrone Jue, spokesman for the city Public Utilities Commission. That has created a rotten-egg stench near AT&T Park and elsewhere, especially during the dry summer months. The city has already spent $100 million over the past five years to upgrade its sewer system and sewage plants, in part to combat the odor problem.
- Consumer Reports: GM's Volt 'doesn't really make a lot of sense': ""When you are looking at purely dollars and cents, it doesn't really make a lot of sense. The Volt isn't particularly efficient as an electric vehicle and it's not particularly good as a gas vehicle either in terms of fuel economy," said David Champion, the senior director of Consumer Reports auto testing center at a meeting with reporters here. "This is going to be a tough sell to the average consumer."
Windmills!
--------------------------------------------
Follow me on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube
Visit the Legal Insurrection Shop on CafePress!
I would add CFL bulbs to your list, as they cost too much, don't last as long as advertised, and they could be the next self-inflicted environmental catastrophe for America- home, work, landfills and ground water contaminated by mercury, a toxic metal which causes irreversible organ damage and brain impairment.
ReplyDeleteThose swirly DQ glass cones break-- did anyone think about that? Well, yes, "they" did, and the Federal guidelines for trying to clean up the scattered mercury on hard floors and carpet stops just short of suggesting a hazmat suit and licensed abatement contractor with a wet vac. There's no way to get it all up.
CFLs and their increasingly mandated use are Edison's bright idea gone dim, imo, along with our collective IQ in a few years. Wait, maybe that's the idea...
Yeah, but the Volt has those cool new curlicue headlights.
ReplyDeleteYou can add to your list LA's decision last year to restrict residential water usage for watering lawns etc.. to only a particular day of the week depending on where you lived. Suddenly, water mains were bursting across the city on an almost daily basis. Turns out that this was putting undue stress put on the pipes from first reducing pressure on restricted days and then bursting on days where the usage surged.
ReplyDeleteIt's called "false economies".
BTW, since every drop of water that ever existed on earth is still here, why is there a water shortage? Here in CA, most of the rainfall that doesn't fall on the mountains ends up in the ocean. And now that the feds have ordered water that used to flow to Central Valley farmers to be redirected to the ocean to protect the salmon, you could argue very forcefully that the government has created the shortage.
After Atlanta area droughts for several years in which we were told, basically, to "go brown" by the greens and pink city workers, I could believe water rationing is part of an ingenious eco-plot.
ReplyDeleteHomeowners had to sacrifice grass and treed lawns (which are unethical, of course, unless they're plots of native grasses, rock and goats) to the bureaucratic engineers of resource diversion and infrastructure (mis)management. Stressing and killing off a significant percentage of cooling and carbon-consuming foliage leads to an even hotter urban island than before, and so you have a near perfect algore-rhythm of mercury and CO2 rising that Proves! "Man"-made Global Warming. Nevermind how the Man is often a prog telling us not to waste water...
Gray water systems for the yard make too much sense, and that's why they're difficult to get approved where I live.
i think there is great potential for windmills. i have suggested a cordon of them surrounding the capital building and the white house. we could light up NYC with the power they would provide.
ReplyDelete"honey, why are the lights flickering?"
"Dang it, congress has been adjourned."
Here's an idea. There is a perfectly good, inexpensive, widely available solvent that is used in more developed countries that can alleviate this problem for San Francisco. It is called water. Studies have shown that if you use enough of it to properly flush your fecal matter then a happy side effect is that it helps clean the sewers out so that you don't have to send in people with bleach, re-breathers and bio-hazard suits.
ReplyDeleteEven the ancient Romans used this method to good effect so it is tried and true and has been around for quite a while. I know it sounds crazy but it might just be worth a shot.
And Scotland is learning what Spain already learned: 3.7 jobs are lost for every green job created
ReplyDeletehttp://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-12597097