Happens with other topics, like transgender treatment for kids.
Some people just hate change and being told how they should live.
They keep advocating for things that won't really help the environment - or actively hurt it. As long as those things pass some kind of "purity test".
For example:
Being against nuclear power.
Plastic straw ban (the replacements are way worse for the environment).
Banning natural gas in homes (using electricity for your stove, water heater and dryer has greater emissions).
Plastic bags vs others types - study after study has shown this helps litter, but is worse in every other possible way.
Recycling plastic rather than burning it. Burning it is better for the environment, but "sounds bad".
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:
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.
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.
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/13/10/5340/pdf
> 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.
> 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 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.
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.
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.
Nuclear power should be obvious.
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.
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.
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.
>>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.
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.
> 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!
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.
Emitting a bit more carbon now is worth it if we can significantly reduce emissions long term