But don't you realize that if we all turn off our lights that day will save billions of units of energy!! Thats a lot!! Turn them off and you'll be important like me

Just build some nuke plants and call it a day. I still say they are by far the cleanest source we have right now with the least environmental impact. Hell, even hydro and wind power can have serious consequences.

I don't think you're entirely fair in your story, Tobias. Because a tree is still (momentarily) a retainer for CO₂. That said, I also think CO₂ neutral is bullocks.

No, it's a very good way to make some other people feel good about themselves.
Sometimes I get the feeling, the calculation has already been made, that says: "we're fucked anyways". Either the world's governments suck at environmental preservation or they just don't care. I suspect the latter.
What annoys me the most is that I know that even if I do everything I can personally including ending my life prematurely, there are people/industries more than negating all that effort. And the ones who know what people that are, are averting the attention. And in the end someone is pointing at us and says: "you should spend less energy".
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I wasn't going to contribute to this thread, but today at the grocery store I was faced with an interesting conundrum related to the whole "green" hype.

Basically, once my total passed the $60 mark, the cashier said that any purchase over $60 earned a free green bin... yeah... a big, green, plastic bin to hold about 1/3 of my groceries in.

The very first thing that came to mind was, "THAT'S your company's solution?? Offer plastic bins which leave a much larger carbon footprint to produce than simply sticking with plastic bags?" Each one of these bins probably has at least 50 times as much plastic in it as a bag, and in order to provide them for free to customers you'd have to produce a ton of them.

And of course, they started charging 5 cents for each plastic bag... which means now the bags themselves are bigger, thicker, and the cashiers try to stuff more into each one. (Which probably just makes them that much more likely to tear through, regardless of the fraction of a mm thicker they are.)

Though I suppose what bothers me the most is that, these bags are nothing more than #4 plastic, yet the city I'm in won't recycle plastic bags for some curious reason. (They recycle anything ELSE made of #4 plastic.)

Oh yeah, earlier someone mentioned how recycling isn't much of a solution, to which I would remind anyone who says that: Recycling isn't meant to reduce the amount of energy it takes to make something, it's meant to reduce the amount of new material which needs to be unearthed in order to make new things and to reduce the amount of stuff which needs to go to landfills and such.

So... yeah, that's all I have to add.

I think we need to upgrade to C++02.

The problem is the way recycling is done today: Everyone sorts their trash, then a second separate set of diesel-powered trucks come around and pick up the recyclables, which are then sent to a separate location for processing.

Division of labor would solve those problems:
- Have specialized people sort through trash for you. At first, it will be done by hand, but eventual capital investments will result in machines processing trash.
- Trash goes to a single location, eliminating the waste and redundancy.
- Recycling will naturally only occur on products that are worth recycling; where the marginal cost of recycling is lower than the marginal cost of extraction.

Besides, it's really hard to "use up" non-combustible materials. When they end up in landfills, they're still easier to extract back than the mining operation that originally generated them.

Ultimately, price will determine if it's better to throw away something or to reuse it.

probably noting worse than a treeline or set of buildings

No. We are in no danger of problematically slowing down the wind. AFAIK, the bigger problems with wind turbines is that they act as giant bird guillotines.

How do you know the effects of wind turbines on the wind isn't problematic?

That doesn't mean there is no effect.

I even participated IIRC. And it is quite a problem; not now, but the only thing we have come up with so far is "bury it somewhere deep down and pray nothing leaks".

To my knowledge, no serious research done about this so far has been able to show any significant effect. Sure, we don't know for sure yet, but considering that the effect of a nuclear power plant heating up water has been shown to negatively influence local ecosystems, I'd say wind farms form a lesser evil.

I vaguely remember having read that recent research has shown that bird populations around wind farms adapt quite quickly, and avoid the turbines. The mortality rate is far below the critical mark even for endangered bird species.

A bigger problem is that there is hardly enough suitable space to place them, at least here in the Netherlands - to put up a wind farm, you need to make sure that:
- no residential areas are nearby where residents could be offended by the sight, or the noise
- the area is not used by the military (which, apparently, is a huge problem especially with off-shore wind farms)
- the wind farm will not obstruct air or sea traffic
- the landscape is not protected in any way (which, again, is a huge problem off-shore)
- and quite a few more
Which leaves very little options; as it is now, pretty much every single suitable spot is already occupied.

In the end, it all seems to come down to one thing - we need to actually reduce our resource usage. Using 'different' energy won't cut it - we'll have to do with significantly less.

On a side note: If 20% of the Earth's population use 80% of its resources, then that means if we get rid of those 20% (which unfortunately includes me and everyone I personally know), the planet could take four times the number of people it holds now at the same level of resource usage, or twice as many at half the usage.

It's true that microlevel events can trigger macrolevel events. But it's useless to focus on the microlevel things if one wants to prevent hurricanes. Global warming is a macrolevel thing that might have to do with hurricanes. A wind turbine is nothing but a huge microlevel thing. And, according to someone, it's more likely that a bird will explode or implode in the near presence of the wings, than actually get cut in two. Due to drastic pressure change.