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Nov. 17, 2012 - Davis Aurini
22:17
Environmentalism

www.staresattheworld.com

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Let's start this video off with a quick trivia question.
What percentage of the atmosphere is composed of carbon dioxide?
The answer is 0.039%.
Environmentalism.
The funny thing about environmentalism is under the modern mythos, you have this idea that for all of human history, we were just abusing and destroying and tearing apart the earth.
You know, maybe not those Romans, because they only had bronze technology, and bronze isn't evil the way that plastic is evil.
But that somehow around the 60s or 70s, conveniently, that's when we figured out that, oh, we should, you know, take care of the planet, spaceship Earth, etc., etc.
See these pictures from the 1950s of these giant smokestacks just belching, oh, look at all that evil smoke going into the atmosphere.
They're killing the planet.
And yet those stories have very little bearing on reality.
First of all, if you've actually seen, if you've actually seen those pictures of the smokestacks and you know anything about anything, you realize that that's water vapor that you're seeing.
When you see exhaust coming out of a car, yeah, you used to see this a lot, but when you see it, it's primarily water vapor.
That's one of those funny little science facts that these idiots don't get, is that one of the primary products of combustion is actually water.
You know, the thing that puts out fires.
So let's go back.
Let's go way back to about 1100 AD or so.
Now there's this method of fishing that most coastal peoples figured out.
When you're on the coast, tide comes in, tide goes out, regular basis.
So what you do is you set up nets that are just above the low tide line.
So imagine you've got your slope going down into the water here.
The water moves up the slope, down the slope.
You put a net right about here.
And when that tide's going up, going out, a whole bunch of stupid fish get caught in your net.
And that's how you fish.
Very simple, very easy, and most people figured this out.
But let's go to 1100 AD, thereabouts.
Britannia.
When the first state was beginning to form throughout the entire island since the fall of Rome.
Now at this time, people were using this techniques on the rivers.
And you don't need to know that much about fish to understand why this would be a problem.
Salmon swim upstream to spawn.
It's a vital part of the ecosystem.
If you are taking a chokehold in the ecosystem, particularly one related to breeding, and eating all the fish, or 99% of the fish that come through that, things are going to get a little bit fucky.
And these ancient Britons noticed this.
There are actually agreements reached to not do this anymore.
Without a complete super state, there's a lot of negotiation, but everybody agreed that this is not a good thing.
I swear, these ecology kids, they read about the tragedy of the commons and they think they're the first people to ever hear of that.
It's been something humanity's been dealing with since before recorded history.
We know how to deal with the tragedy of the commons.
Environmentalism is very important.
It is something that we should be concerned about, and it has always been around.
So, that's the first example where you're destroying the natural resources in your environment.
The overfishing in Britain.
A second major type of environmentalism that you should be concerned about is the subtler aspects of what our created environment is doing upon ourselves.
And the perfect example of this: look at the Roman aqueducts, a brilliant engineering feat that were lined with lead.
So, the entire Roman populace was suffering lead poisoning.
And none of them realized it.
None of them knew what was going on.
If you want to take a modern-day corollary, think of plastics.
Think of Ziploc containers in the microwave.
Are they bad for you?
Possibly.
Is there any solid evidence?
No.
There's a few hypotheses out there that they mimic female hormones.
But it's probably a decent precaution not to put Ziploc or plastic in the microwave.
Maybe it doesn't do anything, or maybe it does.
And then you have other things.
You have catalytic converters.
Catalytic converters have been proven to make a huge difference.
You know, our environment is something we should be very, very worried about.
And I'll give you one more modern example because this is one of those interesting things that you pick up working in the evil, evil of Alberta oil sands.
Aquifiers.
Now, what an aquifer is, it's a store of water under the earth.
And most of our water comes from aquifers throughout most of history.
The way an aquifier works is you have the bedrock of a planet that's basically impenetrable.
It shifts around a bit.
There's certainly magma flows that go through it, but the bedrock is pretty bloody hard.
Not much goes through it.
But above the bedrock, you have regolith.
And what regolith is, it's bedrock that's been chafed against.
It's been torn apart into little tiny bits.
And the higher you get, the more manipulatable the smaller the bits are.
And then, of course, on planets like this, you get soil above them, and soil is just regolith with active biological processes going on inside of it.
And so, what an aquifer is, is you have the whole rain cycle, rains down, it settles into a place in the regolith that's particularly good for storing water.
You'll have alternating layers of really hard stuff and really loose stuff with little tiny gaps that you can get in it.
And that's where the water stores itself.
It's also where the evil, evil Alberta tar sand oil stores itself, and where that evil, evil, fracking natural gas stores itself.
And so, when you drill a well into this, you're not going to get all the water at once.
It's not some sort of giant underground lake.
Okay, it is water built up like around in these tiny little crevices all over the place.
And it has a very, very slow flow rate.
Flow rate varies, of course, based upon what sort of geology you're dealing with there.
In Australia, well, I don't want to get this wrong, but I believe they actually have water stored since the Paleolithic in Western Australia.
There's a very, very slow drift from east to west across the continent in this gigantic, the largest aquifer on Earth, I do believe.
So, now that you know what an aquifer is, you don't want to overwell it.
You don't want to dig too many wells and take out too much water.
Because this aquifer not only feeds your well, it feeds rivers and streams in your area.
It can act as a support underneath the city that you live in.
In fact, several American cities have sunk significant amounts over the decades and centuries because they've pulled this water out from underground.
And also, you don't want to deprive the land of this water.
Some of this aquifer water is what trees use, especially in arid regions.
And if you get a plume of pollutants in this aquifer, you won't notice anything at first.
You'll have this plume shoot down.
Imagine dropping a bit of dye into a glass of water.
It'll shoot down, and the glass of water very slowly expands.
With aquifiers, we're talking about hundreds, hundreds and thousands of years before the pollutants start coming up in our drinking water.
That is an environmental concern.
And there's some very loud critics that are saying that the approach in the United States and probably Canada, Britain, Europe, is more focused on the election cycle.
Is this going to cause a problem during my election cycle?
No.
Well, it's not really a problem then.
That is the sort of environmentalism we should care about.
But what do we hear in the mass media?
What do we have shoved down our throats constantly?
global warming.
Folks, global warming is asinine.
It is absolutely and utterly asinine.
First of all, let's take this supposed threat of the globe warming.
Well, there's a very real cause for concern that we might be entering an ice age within the next five centuries.
Anytime between now and 2500 AD, we're due for an ice age.
They just don't really tell you exactly when they're coming.
That scares me, not global warming.
Second of all, what has happened in the past during recorded history when the temperature has gone up?
Well, the Renaissance.
And the Renaissance wasn't just a European phenomenon.
You can find corollaries in India, China, Japan.
When the climate warms up, there's a longer growing season.
There's more free energy.
We're not trying to survive during this terrible winter.
We can devote more of our productive energy to science and the arts and technology and civilization.
I would be happy if the planet were five degrees.
Ten degrees might be a little bit interesting, but it certainly wouldn't kill us off.
It certainly wouldn't be an existential threat against our species.
Whereas in Ice Age, our species will survive it, but how much of our society will?
Last ice age, we got knocked down to 10,000 individuals.
And we had much bigger brains back then.
Next, this whole CO2 is a pollutant thing.
It's just another one of these asinine environmentalist calling cards.
CO2 is a natural product of the environment.
It's a critical part of the biological process.
If you increase CO2 substantially in the atmosphere, do you know what would happen?
Plants would grow faster.
And there's scientific evidence to back that up, too.
You'd have regions that formerly you could not grow commercially viable crops.
All of a sudden, with the higher CO2 levels, they'd be commercially viable.
And finally, the last linchpin in this idiotic CO2 argument.
I'm sure you've all seen the graph.
This is actually what turned me off of the whole environmental movement in the first place, was Al Gore and his ridiculous little movie, where he had to get that little electronic accordion to lift him up on his giant graph to point at it.
Yeah, you're a good showman.
You're not a good scientist, Al Gore.
You did not invent the fucking internet.
This graph of temperature levels versus CO2 levels, guess what?
There's a gap they don't want you to know about between the CO2 and the temperature.
The warm temperature happens first, then about 50 or 100 years later, the CO2 level follows it.
Because, you know, that thing that covers 70% of our planet?
The ocean?
CO2 is water-soluble.
When the planet warms up, the oceans slowly release CO2 into the atmosphere.
Thus, the connection between temperature and CO2.
These people know this.
These people have the data.
They study this in school.
But they don't tell that to us in the media.
So what drives climate change?
Well, there's two interesting theories right now.
The one, the most self-evident one, is you know that giant ball of fusion that we're locked into orbit around?
It's roughly in that direction for me right now.
Yeah, maybe that thing causes climate change.
It goes through periods where it gets hotter and colder.
And there's some worrying signs that it's getting colder right now.
It might be what causes ice ages.
It's certainly what causes winter in the north and south hemispheres.
And there's one more interesting theory that is so bloody weird that I think it might actually be true.
It is that high-energy particles from supernovas trigger cloud formation.
And when you have more clouds, you have less light, more light reflecting back into outer space, so you get less temperature.
And it is so bloody weird that I think it just has to be true.
But either way, these are two workable and interesting theories that are plausible.
This CO2 myth that somehow driving your car is bad for the planet is absolutely asinine.
There's a saying, and nobody knows quite who invented it.
There's a few different people in the ring contending for being the inventor, but the watermelon.
Green on the outside, red on the inside.
And that's what you see with all of these environmentalists, is they don't actually want a solution.
They want to create problems.
They want sustainable energy.
And as you all know, I'm actually quite worried about peak oil, about energy consumption, about how we're going to keep surviving, because oil is ultimately a non-renewable resource.
Though one of my viewers, a geologist, did send me some very interesting information that what I said about peak oil might be a very biased and incorrect assertion.
I'm certainly going to do a hell of a lot more reading before I write anything significant about this.
But regardless, energy is a concern.
We need energy.
We need energy to survive.
So why not nuclear?
The environmentalists are up in arms about nuclear.
There hasn't been a nuclear plant built in the United States in 40 years.
The United States is using technology from the 60s and 70s in their nuclear plants.
And you think we haven't learned a few things since then?
You think we haven't designed better nuclear plants, more advanced nuclear plants?
Thank God here in Canada, we actually have them.
This good old red Toryism that sometimes the government doesn't give a fuck what the idiot voters think about things.
And so we do have nuclear plants.
They're trying to build one north of Calgary right now, and there's just this huge brouhaha over it.
Why?
It doesn't pollute.
It creates energy.
It's renewable, unlike oil.
We're not in danger of running out of nuclear materials, fissionable materials, for at least the next 10 million years, okay?
Like this is not a pressing concern right now.
And what did the environmentalists do?
They want subsidies for solar panel companies and wind farms and banning oil, banning natural gas, banning coal.
These people do not care about the environment They do not care about aquafires.
They don't care about mining either.
Funny thing about mining versus oil.
Mining is actually far more destructive of the local environment.
But it's such a cutthroat industry that there's very little money to be made in it.
So they go after the guys with money.
The guys getting oil out of the ground.
It's terrible.
It's absolutely terrible because environmentalism, true environmentalism, is such an important thing.
And we have a bunch of these sick Marxists running the show.
So don't go overboard and be all anti-environment because you're right wing and lol, I threw a plastic cup out the window.
But don't fall for this bullshit being peddled by the quote-unquote environmental scientists.
I dated an environmental scientist.
She did not believe in IQ, even though she believed that her burrowing owls were the stupidest type of owl out there.
But IQ's a myth.
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