Probably because any "skepticism" about climate change (no matter how reasonable) is basically taboo (cancelable offense) which triggers knee-jerk opposition in reactionary/contrarian types.
Happens with other topics, like transgender treatment for kids.
It's also amplified by the humiliation many kids experience when struggling in school systems. Causes a general distaste for reason and science because, in a very real way, it hurt them as a child. Not actually science and reason itself, but people pushing it and claiming to represent it.
You are wrong on the facts about all of these, which is impressive in its own way, but just to focus in on one:
Burning plastic isn’t better for the environment than recycling. It is better than landfill, assuming you're using the heat to displace fossil fuels though.
You can check out the waste hierarchy on wikipedia if you care about being well informed about stuff:
No, I am not wrong. That's what's sad about this. People actually believe in all these things, not realizing they don't help the environment. And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
Go read a study on the energy and water costs of recycling plastic. But I'll give you a quick summary:
Plastic has two energy components. The energy embodied in it because it's flammable, and the energy to manufacture it.
It takes more energy to recycle plastic, than it does to manufacture it. So why do people want to recycle it? Because they want to recover the energy embodied in it!
But if you burn it, you get that energy back, AND you got to use the plastic for some productive purpose. And since recycling it takes more energy than manufacturing it new, burning plastic is always better than recycling it.
Here's a meta review of Life Cycle Analysis that says otherwise.
Different countries, different methodologies, different assumptions but recycling being better than burning which is in turn better than landfill across a range of environmental impacts is fairly consistent.
> Overall, this review found that for all the studies which aiming to compare waste treatment
technologies, mechanical recycling comes out as the environmentally preferable option in
most cases
Hopefully this:
> And once people do find out how badly they have been mislead they tend to have a backlash and turn completely against anything an environmentalists suggests.
also applies to you finding out that you've been lied to by people who have a vested interest in generating exactly that backlash against environmentalist.
That study is making the exact same error I already mentioned: They are counting the embodied energy of the flammable plastic as GWP, while not discounting the energy saved by burning the plastic instead of some other fuel.
They literally cite that as the benefit it provides over landfill. All of the studies, that this is a meta review of, do that. It's just a fact that it releases CO2.
> Similar discretion is needed while comparing the results obtained for the WTE [waste to energy] option
by the four studies. It is known that the incineration process emits greenhouse gases,
but it also generates thermal energy and electricity which can be used as an alternative
to fossil fuel consumption. However, the results indicate that overall, the WTE option
contributes adversely towards the global warming problem, with all high positive impact
values between 50% and 100%. However, all four studies indicated a negative impact value
for AP, indicating that the incineration process is advantageous in reducing the impact of
acidification, making it the second most environmentally friendly method of disposal, and
suitable for disposal of the residues discarded by the MRF process.
The key point being, if you can get your heat or electricity from a non-fossil source, then it's preferable to do so. Because releasing CO2 into the atmosphere is bad for climate change.
But luckily for WTE, the are other aspects that make landfill even worse. Still not as good as recycling, just like all those environmentalists have been saying, correctly, for years. How boringly non-contrarian of them.
That paragraph you quoted is logically inconsistent. I mean think about it - if you are substituting other oil for this plastic, how in the world can your plastic have "100%" GWP?
That would imply they somehow manage to emit double the CO2 that the plastic actually contains. Or they burn it and don't capture any energy at all, so there is no substitution taking place.
And the negative GWP for recycling? That's impossible. Recycling something does not remove CO2 from the air - rather it costs CO2 to do the recycling. I suspect they are subtracting the embodied energy of the plastic to get that figure, which is dishonest.
Sorry, but this "study" is worthless. But it's an excellent example of the sorry state of environmentalism.
29 published Life Cycle Analysis papers from different authors in different reputable journals in different countries all got confused about this, then the meta review that talks in detail about the different assumptions they all made also missed this?
That seems unlikely.
I've never even seen this specific meta review before, I just knew that's what they all said and grabbed the first link I found to a recent one. Feel free to check others, they will all broadly agree because this is fairly boring stuff.
Welcome to the club. Yah, that is the current state of environmental research. It's just junk.
This is why I started this thread with "Because environmentalists have a truly terrible track record.". And this is also why so many people are so distrustful of what "experts" say about this topic.
Environmental research is so dependent on assumptions it's basically impossible to do it honestly. Usually an author will have a goal in mind, then write a paper to reach that goal, and he'll have no trouble doing so - just change an assumption here or there, and you'll be successful.
If you want a way to cut through the nonsense just follow the money: Resources cost money, the method that is cheapest, to a rough approximation, is the one that uses the fewest resources.
Plastic straws take FAR FAR FAR less energy than metal ones - don't forget the hot water to wash the metal one. Paper straws are usually coated with stuff, the paper takes more energy that plastic, and the coating doesn't break down - so you don't even get the compost.
So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Plastic bags are good for litter, but you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better. Not to mention people reuse around half of them for garbage bags, so if you ban them, people still need to buy them.
> So long as we are burning natural gas for energy, it's better to use it directly in your home, vs have someone else burn it, make electricity, then use that.
Only if you're using resistive heating. Heat pumps run on natural-gas-produced electricity can be at least as efficient as direct natural gas combustion for heating, and they automatically transition to cleaner sources of energy as the grid does.
> you would have to use reusable ones hundreds of times, and never wash them - ever, for them to be better
I understand that this is the case for cotton bags, IIRC due to high water use in cotton production, but for other types of reusable bags the threshold is lower.
> people reuse around half of them for garbage bags
This estimate seems like it's significantly too high. I do most of my grocery shopping at places that don't provide free plastic bags, and yet I still end up with far more single-use plastic bags than I could ever use for garbage. I would guess that no more than 10% of single-use bags actually get reused for trash.
Heat pumps work fine for home heat, but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer. Heat pump do not work well for those applications - I considered buying them and checked into it.
Your oven also uses resistive heat. Induction can work well, but is underpowered if you are cooking more than 3 or 4 things at once (especially if you also use the oven). You need around double the electric service most homes run to the range (there is no standardized plug for it).
Induction is only a replacement for causal cooks, people who make full course large meals will not be happy with it.
It sounds like(yet again) another US only problem. My induction hob here in UK is wired to run at 7.2kW and the last thing I would describe it as is "underpowered" - even with all rings turned on at max power, things will burn instantly. It's a vast vast improvement over a gas range, wouldn't be without it.
>>but I specifically mentioned hot water and dryer.
I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
>> Heat pump do not work well for those applications
What's wrong with heat pump dryers? They are awesome, as long as you aren't putting them in an unheated space like a garage. They use much less energy than condenser dryers and considerably less than vented ones, while being pretty quick.
Ranges in the US can be wired for 50A * 240v * 80% = 9.6kW, and no, that's not enough. Cheaper homes have 30A for the range which is I guess what you have.
> like(yet again) another US only problem
I don't think Europeans realize how they sound when they say stuff like that. Especially when your stove would be considered low end in the US.
A good stove is around 5 kW, and each burner is 2.5kW = 15kW to run everything at once - basically double the service you have. Unless you want to wire the range and stove separately (which might be an option).
> I've never in my life have seen a dryer that runs on gas. Is this a thing?
Obviously it's a thing, otherwise why would I say it? Is this a European thing not to have them?
Gas dryers cost a bit more to buy (15% more maybe), but much much less to operate (half to be exact). If you have gas service in your home and you buy your own appliances you'll almost always pick that.
> What's wrong with heat pump dryers?
They are very expensive, and save about half the electricity - but gas dryers also save about half the energy, so there's no point in going for the heat pump.
Even if you have no gas service, they cost around double a non heat pump, and it would take 10 years to recoup the money. It's not worth it - all you are doing is generating emissions in the dryer factory instead of your house.
Environmentally the gas dryer is better, at least as long as we still burn gas to generate electricity.
And don't forget the heat pump dryer takes much longer to dry clothing - at least for my house the dryer is always the bottleneck for laundry, I would never buy one that takes longer!
Yes, natural gas dryers are semi-common in homes that have natural gas service where I live (Minnesota) due to the fact that it costs about half as much to operate a gas-fired dryer vs an electric one.
Nearly everyone has gas furnaces here in MN since it’s significantly cheaper to heat with natural gas in the US, and it gets very cold here.
As a frustrated environmentalist myself. I would just like to say, burning or not burning natural gas for heating is dependent on a lot of factors. But the GP is generally right in most of the US because the energy is already coming from coal or natural gas. Both of which are back of the envelope about 50% efficient at converting heat from the burnt coal/gas to electricity. Add in the transmission and distribution loss (aka step up/down transformers, increasing distances to the electric plant as they are moved farther outside of cities/etc) and its another ~5-10% loss, and then the final conversion assuming a heat pump has a 50% gain. So its roughly a wash, and the actual gain/loss is dependent on electric mix (nuke+hydro), how cold it is outside (heat pumps for heating get really inefficient as the temps drop until they are basically restive heating, which many switch to after a certain point to avoid just burning up the compressor).
There are similar problems around wind/solar, which tend to just be green washing natural gas peaker plants, many of which aren't even combined cycle. So the easy back of the envelope here is, that if your not getting ~50% of your power from a nuke its likely that burning the gas in your house is more CO2 friendly (the places with lots of hydro also have nukes, so 1rst order approximation).
And the plastic bag thing, is again feel good because those bags both have a very short time to degrade (despite all the environmentalist misleading people into thinking they last decades, which is true when they are buried in a landfill, but that isn't the case they then talk about which is finding them in the open environment where UV destroys them in a few months to a couple years).
The plastic drink bottles though? Those are much more robust, but just about no one banned them in favor of recreating the commercial bottle washing systems we had before and that exist in mexico/etc. But again, one had to be very careful about total system costs, which is how we get back to nukes. We have to shift the energy curve away from CO2 sources, and the only way to really do that is to find a significantly more energy dense mechanism. And we have one, which is somewhere in the ballpark of 7 million times as dense per Kg and instead of arguing about the CO2 being emitted to move or manufacture things, we could basically zero it out with 40 year old technology and likely gain another order of magnitude of efficiency if we built energy systems with modern technology that actually burnt the entire fuel load rather than calling it "waste".
Most environmentalist are just as uninformed as the climate deniers, which is why we are stuck.
PS: once you start to understand much of the above you can also see how premium electric cars can frequently be worse for the climate than econobox gas. The numerical systemwide advantage isn't so overwhelming to wipe out the disadvantages in places that get a lot of power from coal.
Arguing for natural gas heating is dumb. The only way to hit net-zero is electrification AND renewable electricity generation. Both will take decades. The only question is whether to do them sequentially or in parallel, and it is pretty obvious which will get us to net zero faster.
Emitting a bit more carbon now is worth it if we can significantly reduce emissions long term
