Thursday Thirteen #77
13 Things About Dane Bramage
13 Fun Facts About Earth Day Tuesday was Earth Day. I conserved energy by sleeping in. They shut the lights off at work for an hour. I'm sure the energy saved cool the climate or caused a tree to sprout somewhere or something. I believe in not polluting the environment but I don't subscribe to the predictions of doom by the eco-prophets. And a lot of the so called science behind the claims of environmentalists leaves me leery. But in the spirit of the day I have put together this list of Fun Facts!
- Recycling one aluminum can saves enough energy to watch a TV for three hours. T.V. is so crappy these days that I'd rather skip three hours and produce a new aluminum can.
- Recycling one aluminum can saves energy equivalent to half a gallon of gasoline. Which gets consumed hauling cans to the recycling center.
- if every newspaper was recycled, we could save about 250,000,000 trees each year. At the rate rags like WaPo and NYT are hemorrhaging readers, this goal is doable.
- Only 11% of the earth's surface is used to grow food. 75% of the earth's surface is used to grow fish.
- The patron Saint of ecologists is St. Francis He believed in conserving water by not bathing or washing his clothes. He was also the patron saint of body odor.
- More than 20,000,000 Hershey's Kisses are wrapped each day, using 133 square miles of tinfoil. All that foil is recyclable, but not many people realize it. It's hard for me to find those teeny tiny recycle bins. But just think of all the protective headgear moonbats could craft from all that tinfoil.
- The world's first national park was started in 1872 at Yellowstone National Park in the US. The first can of beer went on sale in Richmond, VA, January 24th, 1935. The first six pack of empties was found in Yellowstone on January 25th.
- April 22 is the first official day of Spring in the Northern hemisphere and of Fall in the Southern hemisphere and was chosen to be Earth Day for this reason. Which is confusing to all of us who still view the vernal equinox in March as the first day of spring.
- Every ton of recycled steel saves 2,500 pounds of iron ore, 1,000 of coal, and 40 pounds of limestone So recycle instead of burying old steel in the ground where the ore, coal and limestone are.
- A modern glass bottle would take 4000 years or more to decompose -- and even longer if it's in the landfill. This has sparked the ecology friendly practice of breaking glass bottles in the streets where they decompose faster.
- One-third of the water used in most homes is flushed down the toilet. The earth friendly practice of not flushing not only saves water but reduces the build up of household guests with its odor.
- The Washington, DC-based Institute For Local Self-Reliance calculates that recycling creates 36 jobs per 10,000 tons of material recycled compared to 6 jobs for every 10,000 of tons brought to traditional disposal facilities Which is great because 10,000 tons of recycled materials put 50 lumberjacks, miners and factory laborers out of work.
- The average American uses seven trees a year in paper, wood, and other products made from trees. This amounts to about 2,000,000,000 trees per year! Rain forests are being cut down at the rate of 100 acres per minute!Every week about 20 species of plants and animals become extinct! At this rate there will be no trees by next Tuesday at 11:33AM. But that's okay because all species of life will be extinct by then.
I am sure I will get it from the eco-purists out there, but I was just having fun. But when you think about it, can the earth's eco system be so delicate that it will careen out of kilter over a few tons of man-made trash, when for centuries, mother earth herself has belched contaminants into her atmosphere in quantities that makes man's contribution look like a soda spill? Wildfires and volcanoes chuck more "green house gases" into the air than all the cars combined. So why are we sweating?
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