A new Green Bin program in Ottawa is in its third week of operations and many are already concerned that the program will struggle to meet its targets:

Orgaworld Canada has a 20-year contract with the city to compost 80,000 tonnes of green bin waste a year. At $93.50 a tonne, the city will be forced to pay the company at least $7.4 million, regardless of how much organic waste it collects.

To meet its minimum target, the city has to deliver roughly 1,500 tonnes of organic materials to the compost facility every week. But the city has only collected 500 tonnes since the program was launched in early January.

The city rolled out the program on Jan. 4, but theres already been some confusion about what can go into the bin. Last week, the city had to tell residents that they shouldnt put dog feces into their green bins.

Ottawa resident Earl Jones said hes still trying to sort out what can be composted.

These are common mistakes, but mistakes that are easily rectified. As a socially conscious, consciously social, environmentally aware friend of the earth, I will post Mitchieville’s Garbage & Recycling Awareness Rules & Regulation 2010 Handbook for A Sustainable & Green Environment (MGaRARaR2010HfaSaGE) pamphlet that is sent to every Mitchievillian household at the beginning of every year.

In short, it outlines the proper proceedure for garbage and recycling disposal.

• Garbage collection will be every second week. Please check your City of Mitchieville’s MGaRARaR2010HfaSaGE.
• You will receive 52 blue garbage bag tags once a year. Each tag represents one bag of garbage. After all 52 tags have been used, additional purple tags will have to be purchased directly from City Hall at $7.00 per tag.
• All garbage bag(s) must be placed no closer than 14″ from the curb and must not be stacked one on top of the other, but rather side by side, but not more than 7″ shall separate each  -  do NOT place garbage bags on the sidewalk, traveled roadway or on top of snow banks.
• All garbage containers must be CSA approved, and also approved by the Garbage Bag Standing Committee. See next rule:
• Trash must be contained in regulation trash can(s) with authorizing sticker(s) attached, or in a trash totter, or in blue PAYT trash bags.  
• All garbage shall be put to curb-side no earlier than 9 pm the previous evening of pick-up, and no later than 5:30 am on the day of pick-up.
• No garbage bag shall weigh more than 23 lbs, nor be higher than 36″.
• All garbage bags must have a twist-tie locking system, and/or and a triple Hanford semi-closed knot.
• Only green garbage bags shall be used, any other coloured bag(s) will not be picked up.
• All garbage bags should be no thicker than 22mm but no thinner than 20mm

Recycling

• All discarded food waste is to be placed in your provided green recycling box
• All cardboard, paper products, glass bottles, steel cans and plastic bottles are to be placed in your provided blue recycling box
• Throw away lids and caps and rinse well. Labels are OK.
• Plastic cylinders, ceramics, lightbulbs, waxed and coated paper, loose shredded paper and ovenware is to be placed in your provided red recycling box
• Broken glass, aluminum foil and margarine tubs are to placed in your provided salmon coloured recycling box
• All clothing is to be placed in corrugate boxes that are made of old corrugate boxes, no larger than 1′ x 1′ x 1′ high. The exception to this rule are shoes, which are to be placed in a special yellow recyclable box
• Hazardous waste such as paint cans, propane cylinders, and aerosol cans, are to be placed in an olive-drab recycling box, with an attached large 12 x 12 “Hazardous Material” warning label, which can be purchased from City Hall at $12.99 per label
• Garden waste, such as lawn trimmings, weeds,  small wigs, are to be placed in brown recycling bags
• Bags are not to exceed 24.85 lbs
• All branches and/or sticks are to be cut to lengths of no more than 17.5″ long and tied together, wrapped 3.7 times with a Stanford knot, and bundled in piles no higher than 41.7″ high
• Sod and heavier garden waste material is to be placed in the special mauve bag, provided directly from City Hall at $6.95 per bag
• Paper products should never be placed directly alongside glass bottles, but a barrier of steel cans should separate the two
• The blue box should sit to the right of the green box (from street-view), with the red box to the right of the green box. NEVER position the red box beside the blue box, or on the other side of the green box. If improper alignment of boxes occur, a fine of $300.00 will be levied
• If more than three recycling boxes are out at curbside, the colour from left to right should be coordinated based on lighter shade colour to darker shaded colour. EG - blue, salmon, olive -drab, green, brown, red, mauve
• Styrofoam and plastics higher than 7″ will not be collected
• All boxes are to be cleaned weekly by the homeowner, from a solution consisting of 1/2 cup warm water, and 1/2 cup mild dish detergent, which can be purchased at any one of Mitchieville’s 127 conveniently localed Recycling Centres throughout Mitchieville, for $7.99 per 250 ml bottle.
• All collections are to commence every Wednesday for even numbered houses, and every Thursday for odd numbered houses. If there is a holiday on any given Monday, collection will be take place the day after the originally scheduled collection date. Except in the summer, in which case the collection will resume 48 hours after original collection date, except for odd numbered houses which will be collected 24 hours earlier than original collection date

I hope the good citizens of Ottawa will find value in this easy to follow guide. Through the use of MGaRARaR2010HfaSaGE, Mitchieville expects to reduce its greenhouse gasses by a whopping 0.00000472% over 25 years. We wish the citizens of Ottawa the same kind of success.

Even though the Polar Bear Specialist Group claims that warmer temperatures and shrinking ice floe in the Arctic has significantly reduced the polar bear population, a U.S. Senate and Public Works Committee report says otherwise:

The “alarm about the future of polar bear decline is based on speculative computer model predictions many decades in the future. Those predictions are being “challenged by scientists and forecasting experts,” said the report.

But those predictings of dwindling polar bear populations haven’t stopped the US Geological Society from proclaiming that future sea ice conditions…

“will result in the loss of approximately two-thirds of the world’s current polar bear population by the mid 21st century.”

Oh rly? Tell that to an Inuit:

Harry Flaherty, chair of the Nunavut Wildlife Management Board in the capital of Iqaluit, says the polar bear population in the region, along the Davis Strait, has doubled during the past 10 years. He questions the official figures, which are based to a large extent on helicopter surveys.

“Scientists do a quick study one to two weeks in a helicopter, and don’t see all the polar bears. We’re getting totally different stories [about the bear numbers] on a daily basis from hunters and harvesters on the ground,” he says.

Dr. Mitchell Taylor, a biologist who has been researching polar bear populations in Canada’s Nunavut Territory for 35 years, seems to agree. “The study estimates from the Iqaluit area agree with those of local hunters, although the accuracy of the counts is doubtful in some areas,” he says.

Gabriel Nirlungayuk, director of wildlife for Nunavut Tuungavik Inc., is another doubter who questions the accuracy of helicopter surveys. “Helicopters have many limitations, including fuel capacity. They can’t go far out into the open water,” he says. But hunters crisscrossing the area by dog team, snowmobile or boat “are seeing polar bears where scientists and helicopters are not traveling.”

Forty years ago, old-timers living in the area around Hudson Bay were lucky to see a polar bear, Nirlungayuk says. “Now there are bears living as far south as James Bay.”

Perhaps it’s time for a polar bear hunt. $1000 a head.

Computer models are wonderful and generally accurate, unless, it seems, they are measuring arctic ice-flow, global warming, or the polar bear population. Other than those three minor things, they tend to be dead on.

Hot, cold, warm, cool. Whatever and whenever the world is going to heat up or cool down, or even possibly stay exactly the same as it has been for the last 2000 years, one thing is for certain: NOW is the time to panic.

Ahead of the Copenhagen Climate Conference (alliteration), world leaders are lauding China’s announcement that it will cut 2005 carbon intensity levels — the amount of CO2 produced per unit of GDP growth — by 40-45 percent by 2020. This is absolutely fantastic news, until you remember that the Chicoms are nothing but filthy liars:

BEIJING (Reuters) - A top Chinese climate envoy said Friday only emissions curbs carried out under its newly announced carbon intensity targets that have international financial support will be open to outside scrutiny.

In other words, the 95% state-owned industries will not be open to outside scrutiny, but the foreign-owned enterprises will be.

Yu Qingtai, China’s climate change ambassador, added that most of the country’s emissions-curbing plans would likely not fall into the category of “measurable, reportable and verifiable.”

This is how the Chicoms say “fuck you”. Whatever they do, it’s none of our business. They will not measure, report or verify carbon emissions levels.

“You cannot apply the same kind of standards for actions that we take on our own, with our own resources, (as you do) for actions that we take with international support.”

Meaning, if a foreign business sets up in China then yes, apply your carbon emission standards to it, but as for state-run businesses, well, that’s our business, not yours.

China, however, has emphasized that the target is a voluntary, domestically binding policy goal, raising the specter of a dispute at Copenhagen over whether and how reported Chinese emissions reductions will be checked.

There is no “dispute” here at all. Emission reductions won’t be checked because the Chicoms won’t allow outside agencies to check them. Where’s the dispute in that? The Chicoms are actually being quite upfront about this. They have spelled out that their target is “voluntary”. If western leaders would stop praising the Chicoms for one second, they would realize that the commies aren’t going to do a bloody thing about reducing emissions.

Beijing insists that rich, industrialized countries should continue bearing most of the burden in reducing greenhouse gases and that developing nations like China and India must not be subject to mandatory emission reduction targets in any new deal.

China also said any new accord should include more financial and technological support for developing countries.

What Beijing is saying is that the west should continue sending them money and technology so they can continue their explosive growth, so they can build up their military, so they can keep taking our jobs, while sending us further into debt and an eventual financial collapse.

I was wrong when I said the Chicoms are liars, at least on this subject they’re being completely upfront. It’s the western governments that don’t want to hear the truth.

Der Spielgel Online is reporting today that climotologists throughout our doomed planet are stumped as to why global warming seems to be stalled. It’s a real mystery to the consensus crowd. What a dilly of a pickle:

Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.

The planet’s temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. “At present, however, the warming is taking a break,” confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany’s best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. “There can be no argument about that,” he says. “We have to face that fact.”

For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.

“It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community,” says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. “We don’t really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point.”

Keep in mind that these are the same *experts* that claimed if world governments didn’t band together and cough up hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars immediately to combat the global warming *crisis*, the world would disappear within a matter of a few years, or months, or as some claimed, weeks or days.

But the science is settled, we have consensus! What the devil is going on? Remember, the same *scientists* that claimed consensus on this issue now can’t figure out if the lack of global warming in the last ten years is due to sunspots, ocean currents, or lack of midnight basketball courts for marginalized, inner-city youth that are still suffering from the effects of colonialism in Africa by evil, white, heteronormative males.

And in other news:

In 2002 Responsible Travel became one of the first travel companies to offer customers the option of buying so-called carbon offsets to counter the planet-warming emissions generated by their airline flights.

But in October, Responsible Travel canceled the program, saying that while it might help travelers feel virtuous, it was not helping to reduce global emissions. In fact, company officials said, it might even encourage some people to travel or consume more.

“The carbon offset has become this magic pill, a kind of get-out-of-jail-free card,” Justin Francis, the managing director of Responsible Travel, said in an interview. “It’s seductive to the consumer who says, ‘It’s $4 and I’m carbon-neutral, so I can fly all I want.”‘

Offsets, he argues, are distracting people from making more significant behavioral changes, like flying less.

Oh, do tell?

You mean to say that the very same people that buy indulgences to prove their *green-ness* are the same people who are knowingly and willfully destroying the planet? Go figure.

So, it would be like an unelected leader of the world green movement telling everyone that they must cut back and conserve, change their lifestyle and pay more in taxes to fund environmental projects, meanwhile, the mouthpiece lives in a 20 room mansion, consumes $2400 a month in electricity alone, even “consumes more than 20 times the national average” in natural gas, owns three boats and a fleet of gas guzzling SUV’s and other cars, yet because he pays a stipend for offsets and other nonsensical solutions to a problems he made up, well, this is perfectly fine and responsible?

If you need to buy offests to assuage your guilt about what you’re doing to the environment, you’re a weak, delusional and all around stupid person. When the revolution comes you will be the first to go and I welcome that day. I live in a house with a blue box, a smaller blue box, a green box, high-efficiency stove, fridge, washer, dryer, cfl bulbs, a high efficiency air conditioner, programmable thermostat, etc, so the chances of me ever feeding the loser machine by buying offsets are somewhere between never and eff you gently with a chainsaw.

I’ve done enough and so have you. Now is the time to burn the planet alive.

The tens of thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, and environmental activists that are swarming Copenhagen this weekend don’t care about the environment one bit. If they did they would teleconference the whole thing. But they will fly to Copenhagen in private jets or Boing 747’s, hire Mercedes, eat endangered foods and exploit the local population for their every need. They are earth rapists and the enemy of mankind. They need to be stopped by whatever means necessary. They are stealing our money and exploiting the world’s poor. They are evil assholes who should be beaten with large sticks.

Put it this way - these thieves are flying to Copenhagen to talk about a non-existant problem, to find ways to steal billions of dollars to fix the non-existant problem, and will meet again in 3 months to again talk about the non-existant problem. On OUR dime.

I’m sick of these pigs. Liars, thieves and deviants the whole lot of them. And to think we’re subsidizing their perversions.

A report released today by the British Food Standard’s Industry, found that organic foods are no healthier for you than regular ole pesticide sprayed foods:

Their report, after a 12-month study based on 50 years of research, says the benefits of chemical-free vegetables, fruit and meat have been overstated.

The findings could be a major blow to the £2billion-a-year organic food industry which has been hit by the recession.

Consumer group Which? said shoppers may now think twice about buying more expensive organic food.

The findings are based on the first comprehensive review into the nutrient value of organic food compared with food grown through conventional farming methods.

The FSA commissioned the study from the London School of Hygiene & Tropical Medicine. More than 100 types of food were studied including rice, chicken, milk and eggs.

The review, published in the American Journal of Clinical Nutrition, found small but not “important” differences between the nutrient content of organic and conventional types of food.

Public health nutritionist Dr Alan Dangour, who led the review, said: “This is the first time all this evidence has been brought together under one single study. Organic food is no worse than conventional but there is certainly no reason for suggesting organic food has a superior nutritional content.

“A small number of differences in nutrient content were found to exist between organically and conventionally produced crops and livestock, but these are unlikely to be of any public health relevance.

“There is no good evidence that consumption of organic food is beneficial to health in relation to nutrient content.”

I thought this was common knowledge, I thought everyone knew that organic foods are a crock of organic shit?

The organic-heads won’t believe this for a second though, it’s not in their best interest. No one likes to hear they’re wrong, it’s like insulting their religion in a way.

Ever since that daft bitch Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring, the nutjobs have come out of the woodwork. The enviro-freaks claim that only organic farming is sustainable. Yet if every farm were to go organic, we’d still have to cut down all the remaining forests to make room for more organic farms, and yet there would still be billions of people that would starve to death.

Organic-heads take pride in the fact that their foods have only been sprayed by *naturally occurring products*, like sulpher and copper, pyrethrins and rotenone; BT spray and Spinosad (which are both made by bacteria) . Yet, sulphur irritates the lungs, and rotenone has been shown to cause Parkinson’s disease in rats. Yikes.

Organic-heads will drone on and on and on about how bad chemicals in food MUST be for you, how they MUST cause cancer, blah blah, blah. But is it true? Of course not. Sure, if you grab a bucket of DDT and pour it over your head, the chances are you’re going to get sick. However, time after time, it has been shown that the amount of chemicals found in food are not only below legal limits, but often times completely undetectable. If you want to ingest harmful chemicals, have some caffeine. Or solanine. Or psoralens. Yum yum.

OTOH, organic foods are a petri dish of multiple diseases. Organic production involves manure, but not chemical washes. So, moulds, like aflatoxin B1 have been found in organic peanuts (how’s that for a carcinogen?), among other numerous bacterial outbreaks.

There’s so much more to say about this, but you get the idea. Enviro-weenies like to believe they know how to take care of a farmers land better than the actual farmer. But as the saying goes, “those who can’t do, teach”. And that’s the enviro-trade in a nutshell. It’s in the farmers best interest to take care of his land, not to pollute it, and create a high yield. But just like global warming or cooling, or Silent Spring, or the hundred of other fake crisis the enviro-trade lunatics have hoisted upon us in the last 40 years, their cause is simply about money and power.

Eff you and the Smart car you rode in on, you will get neither.

A two-year study by three Australasian scientists has concluded that global warming is being caused by nature and not by human activity:

Auckland University climate scientist Chris de Freitas, Bob Carter, an academic at James Cook University, Townsville, and Melbourne scientist John McLean have concluded that little or none of the late 20th century warming trend can be attributed to humans.

Instead, they say that in the past 50 years the average global temperature has fallen and risen in close agreement with the development of El Nino or La Nina conditions.

In 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said global surface temperatures had increased about by 0.74 degrees Celsius between 1906 and 2005.

The panel concluded that rising levels of greenhouse gases from human activity, including deforestation and burning of fossil fuels, were responsible for much of that increase.

De Freitas, who has worked as an adviser to the Climate Science Coalition, which is sceptical about global warming, said his paper had been fully peer-reviewed over six months and accepted by a top academic journal.

I think it’s time that nature starts accepting responsibility for ruining our planet. For far too long, nature has gotten a free pass and was always silent when the blame for global warming was being cast on humans. Tonight that ends.

When it was decided (incorrectly) that humans were the cause of global warming, governments throughout the world were too happy to tax us in order to bring us into line. Now that it has been concluded that nature is actually the fiend, it’s only right that we tax nature.

I know many of you are reading this and thinking that it’s impossible to tax nature. How is it possible to tax a volcano, or El Nino, or a tree? Well, quite frankly it is impossible to tax them, but what we must do as responsible stewards of our lands, is tax those who harbour nature.

For instance, anyone living in the same state or province as a volcano should pay a flat tax of $1000 a year. Every family should be taxed $25 for every tree on their land. The sun is the biggest greenhouse gas emitter there is, and since the sun shines more in the south, a fair tax of $3000.00 per resident should be immediately instituted.

That’s just a start, there are many more culprits out there. Think about it, who do you know that’s harbouring nature? Who do you think isn’t paying their fair share?

This next post was stolen in its entirety from Andy’s Place. If you haven’t bookmarked Andy’s site and don’t go there every day, you have something wrong with your head. 

Andy received a computer letter from a friend which I have posted below. It’s in regard to energy consumption. I want you to enjoy the hell out of this.

House #1
A 20 room mansion (not including 8 bathrooms) heated by natural gas. Add on a pool (and a pool house) and a separate guest house, all heated by gas. In one month this residence consumes more energy than the average American household does in a year. The average bill for electricity and natural gas runs over $2400 per month.. In natural gas alone, this property consumes more than 20 times the national average for an American home. This house is not situated in a Northern or Midwestern ’snow belt’ area. It’s in the South.

House #2
Designed by an architecture professor at a leading national university. This house incorporates every ‘green’ feature current home construction can provide. The house is 4,000 square feet (4 bedrooms) and is nestled on a high prairie in the American southwest. A central closet in the house holds geothermal heat-pumps drawing ground water through pipes sunk 300 feet into the ground.

The water (usually 67 degrees F) heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer The system uses no fossil fuels such as oil or natural gas and it consumes one-quarter the electricity required for a conventional heating/cooling system. Rainwater from the roof is collected and funneled into a 25,000 gallon underground cistern. Wastewater from showers, sinks and toilets goes into underground purifying tanks and then into the cistern. The collected water then irrigates the land surrounding the house. Surrounding flowers and shrubs native to the area enable the property to blend into the surrounding rural landscape. The heating/cooling system is so efficient that initial plans to install solar panels were cancelled.

HOUSE #1 is outside of Nashville , Tennessee;
it is the abode of the Environmentalist, Al Gore.

HOUSE #2 is on a ranch near Crawford, Texas;
it is the residence of the former President of the United States, George W. Bush.

For all you Snope Doggie types, you can verify this computer letter until the cows come home.

Why do I bother reading the New York Times, you may ask? I’m pretty sure if someone like George Will were producing startling evidence he was crazy, liberals would at least be mildly interested.

(more…)

Leave it to Reuters to try and one-up ABC (Drudge headline: ABC Turns Programming Over To Obama; News To Be Anchored From Inside White House.) But wait a second…Obama lobbies? He’s a lobbyist! Get him out, quick! Oh, right, he couldn’t uphold that promise, either. (”Barack Obama has pledged to change the way Washington works and to curb the influence of lobbyists,” John Podesta, co-chairman of Obama’s transition team, told reporters.” John Podesta was a lobbyist as the head of the Center for American Progress.)

(more…)

A top UN official has called for a worldwide ban on plastic bags:

“Single-use plastic bags which choke marine life should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere,” said Achim Steiner, head of the U.N. Environment Program, according to McClatchy Newspapers. “There is simply zero justification for manufacturing them any more, anywhere.”

After Achim Steiner told the conference that plastic bags were bad for the environment, he sat down in his richly padded Italian leather chair, loosened the Salvatore Ferragamo five-fold, silk tie that adorned his Egyptian cotton Eton Diamond Shirt, and slowly poured some Japanese mineral water into his Oenophilia stemware. He then got up and walked out to his chauffer-driven Mercedes Mclaren SLR which took him to his private jet which flew him back to his 4800 sq. ft villa in Bordeaux.

From there, Steiner entered his villa, hugged his life partner, and when asked how the conference went, exclaimed, “Hopefully I got through to those bastards that plastic bags are killing  the environment!”

According to Environment Canada, just because we had frost this weekend (and 25cm of snow in Edmonton), doesn’t mean we are going to have a cold summer:

“It looks that the models are suggesting at least at this time that maybe what nature has in store.”

 

An air front moving in from the south will bring warmer temperatures this summer, at least 20 to 25 hot days with temperatures above 30 C, as of mid-June, Phillips said.

The summer will bring warmer temperatures? That sounds reasonable.

You can always trust Environment Canada to deliver the goods. This past winter they called for just a sliver of snow and unseasonably warm temperatures. Sure, they were completely wrong, but what I’m saying is that they are usually correct. Take last summer for instance when they said it was going to be dry and very hot. Oh right, we had a record rainfall and it was cold all summer. Well, the winter of 2007-2008 they hit the nail on the head when they said we would get little snow and very warm temperatures. My bad, we had a record snowfall and a record cold snap.

At least they were right when they predicted last Sunday to be warm and sunny. Oh c’mon.

I hear what you naysayers are naysaying–these same people who can’t predict what the weather is going to be like three months from now, one month from now, one week from now and one day from now, are the same people that want us to believe that if we don’t change our habits immediately, the world is going to implode in 120 years.

Yes, that is exactly what they are saying. Hope, Change, and Believe™.