We have to change ow everything is done and consider the wider ramifications of things.
Exporting pollution…
A thread I posted in a while back showed smelter complex in a picture and showed a lump of coal I picked up on the tracks that used to fuel it.
It was a dirty process that killed all the trees and gave men lung cancer.
It ended in 1972 no longer able to meet emissions and no longer cost effective to do.
Fast forward to today and there are plants that are only a few years old in China using the same basic idea as that 75 year old ( when it closed ) plant from 1972.
My employer tells me we have to reduce all costs to compete with those plants.
Why would we ever want to compete with that?
Its killing men and trees and rivers, the carbon footprint is HUGE.
We should never compete with that, we should never even trade with people that will do that to themselves for a quick buck, and we should punish companies that pack up and move to China so they can pollute like its its 1972,
Total agreement. Why do we think it’s acceptable to export pollution, or to allow direct, "level playing field " competition with industries and countries that don’t respect their own people, or the planet? I don’t assent to the dictates of "the economy ", or "the market ". Never met either one. They are constructs of conventions, and very obviously beneficial for a certain class.
As a general rule, i found that pollution starts when profits needs to be made or governments need to save costs…
ad the fact that people prefer easy above right and the coctail gets complete…
my joke of the day:
If you give the poor farmer a fish, he will have a meal
If you teach him how to fish, his family will never starve
If you teach a politician how to fisch…
He will catch all fisch and sell them expensive to the starving farmers…
Yesterday , droving around shopping, some people approached and the question came…
"if everybody drives like this, all bamboo would disappear ? "
My reply: "if you want to eat tomato’s, you have to grow them first… "
The past proves…
We, we are harvesting bamboo planted 4 years ago… already having more then our own need, but we grow more and cultivate more, because it cleans the air at a high rate…
We already got the title “bamboo city” of Thailand…
Same time we teach the farmers as we keep the politicians far away
Koen I have thought right along how good it is that you can use bamboo. That stuff grows so fast and is next to impossible to kill off. Two great qualities in a fuel source.
BBC ran article saying burning wood is dirtier then burning coal .
They burn wood from USA with coal and say they are reducing emissions .
The USA was sending money down a hole literally saying we were going to have clean coal .
I don’t know what BBC article you are referring to. Normally the BBC is pretty good reporting. But if they said wood is dirtier then coal they are just wrong. Carbon issues aside coal is responsible for most of the increased radiation in our atmosphere over the last 150 years or so. I got into a debate last fall with some people about the coal issues and if you do some digging you find that all coal has trace amounts of radioactive material in it. The process of burning coal condenses this in the ash and also releases it into the atmosphere. Coal will never be a clean safe fuel. I believe it has alot to do with the increase in cancer rates world wide.
The bbc article in question was talking about local air polution in London going up due to people burning wood in older heating stoves. Local air polution is not the same as higher global emissions. Any wood burned would be carbon neutral despite localized air polution due to inefficient stoves. I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m no longer following this post . It’s turned into an endless loop of voicing greevances and bad conspiracy memes.
Best regards, David Baillie
There logic is flawed because they are looking at it as a single time harvest of the tree. The fact is all the carbon to make the tree comes from the atmosphere and when the tree dies all that carbon will go back into the atmosphere. So burning it or letting it rot doesn’t matter. Yes you release the carbon when you burn the tree but if you have a steady supply loop and harvest in a sustainable manner then next year’s trees are absorbing the carbon burned this year. It has to be looked at as a managed sustainable resource. Now the argument that we should not ship them goes for everything same hit if they ship any fuel source so unless they have a local source they have to pay that hit.
I agree with your response to the article I posted from BBC . Taking opportunity to say "Bio energy with carbon capture and storage " It has been done but you have to pump oil out . Ethanol producer pumped CO2 into oil field . I do not think charcoal is seen as a form of carbon storage . Or those who control what is seen as carbon storage . do not want charcoal seen as a form of carbon storage . A person who did said you need to make a profit from every part of the process .
Geese have reappeared in southern Manitoba, about a month sooner than would be normal. A bit of a question if they won’t fly back south a ways in the face of cold weather, but remarkably early, earliest ever. Significant temperature anomalies have continued all winter over the Arctic ocean. Seem like causes for concern.
There are large areas near me in the Colorado Rockies where trees are so close to each other that there growth has almost stopped. If they are thinned the trees left will start growing again. I have seen them double in size after 10 years. To do this they must be recapturing large amounts of CO2. The larger spacing between them also helps keep fires from jumping from one to another and allows grass and other plants to grow under them rather than a carpet of dead needles. Elk deer and other wildlife can do much better. In most cases these stunted trees are to small to use for lumber and there isn’t enough uncommitted water to operate a paper mill. About the only use that will help pay the cost of thinning is using them as fuel. If the price of electricity continues to rise, it may be possible to gassify for a generator and sell power to the grid. Pellets could use some but I doubt that market is large enough for the miles of forest that need thinning and not nearly enough people DOW.
Garry the winter here has been odd. It has been warmer but then windy and freezing cold again that cycle has repeated all winter. I have had a very hard winter with my cows as a result of that hard cold wind. We are also about a month early on the spring it has pretty much devastated the maple syrup industry here this year. I am hoping this is more of a fluke year but I think the trend to come is more weird unstable weather like this. That is part of why I am trying to build a herd of Gallaway cows. They do well on just grass and they are probably about the hardest of the beef cows. Highlander are maybe better at extrema weather and poor feed but they also grow slower and have horns. I can dehorn them that isn’t really a big deal but I like the Gallaway cows a little better as they are a little bigger.
The Highland cattle interest me, but I suspect growing all that hair requires a lot of calories, and any squeeze gate work would require dehorning after a certain age, and burdock would wreak havoc with their hair. I suspect at auction an animal like that would probably suffer a price penalty, and it would be harder to assess body fat and fill. They would do very well in cold weather, and the hide would make an amazing rug, although even here short haired breeds do well with an open shelter and dry straw bedding.
I know a fellow who had Dexters, there are a number of those smaller bodied European breeds that would be easier to fence, handle and pasture, I will be looking into that seriously in coming years, but availability will be a deciding factor. With AI you can get all kinds of genetics, I will be tapping into that I think.
Look up the belted galloway if you want smaller or regular galloway if you want them bigger. Both Gallaway and highlander have hair instead of body fat it is just leaner meat. You have to market direct which is harder but if you want a small herd you can’t compete with auction prices anyway they will be angus feed grain raised faster. You can force an angus steer to market weight in 10 months. But grass fed will take closer to 2 years to reach the same weight.
That said there are alot of reasons I like grass fed.
As to horns. Burn them off when the calf is about 2 weeks old. You want the nub to be about the size of you thumb from the tip to the bottom of your nail. If it isn’t that big you won’t get all the cells at the base when you do it bigger and you have more of a mess to deal with. I grew up with dairy cows and we had to dehorn them all. I have seen every system they have and could tell you what is wrong with them all. Don’t dehorn a full grown animal yourself. It takes a vet who knows how and they will pump them full of antibiotics. The horn links to their sinuses if you do it wrong they can bleed out or get a deadly infection. When I was a kid we would sometimes buy something with horns and my uncle and I did dehorn some adults it isn’t pretty.
I had to dehorn one of my calves because the mother is part highlander. With an iron it is only about a minute and it is over.
I won’t have horns here again. I had one adult with horns with the first beef I bought. She killed a couple of cows in their normal bumping heads to determine rank. Once I figured out what had happened she went to market but it was too late and cost me a couple of nice cows. Lucky for me she never got mean and turned on me. But loading her to ship her out was a little tricky.
A highlander bull about 5 years old killed the guy who raised it from birth not too far from here last fall because it got him with the horns.
)
