bkeypurr’s Recent Comments

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  On babies and selfishness

  Several people have made comments about having more than two children as being selfish.  I have to wonder, are any of these people who made these comments parents?   Having children is a great responsibility and being a good parent is very difficult work.  

  To me, the really selfish people are the ones who are well educated, making good money, could afford to raise 2 or more children and choose not to have any.  Don't leave the baby making to the poor, uneducated and those who don't care about the environment then blame them for the problems that they and their children are causing.

  As the saying goes, "The children are our future."  Once you are gone from this world, you will no longer be able to add or subtract to your carbon foot print.  If you have children who are taught how to live in a sustainable way, your contribution to the environment could go on for generations after you are gone.  In that case, if you had 4 children instead of just 2, your impact would be two times greater.  So, no, the argument that having more than 2 children is irresponsible and adding to the problem is just plain wrong.  

  Educating our children and our parents who to live more in harmony with the environment is the key.  And as a person who choses not to have children, this could be your lasting contribution to make.  Be a good example and help educate children and parents instead of judging and condemning them.

  Parents of large families by default have to be more efficient and recycle by necessity (hand-me down clothes, toys, cars, etc).  These families per person carbon foot prints can be much smaller than a single person or married couple living in a home.  I am not advocating that we should all go out and start large families, I am just pointing out that having a large family does not necessarily make the parents selfish and a larger burden on the planet.On Umbra on small steps with big impacts posted 1 year, 1 month ago 18 Responses

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  Another coefficient solution

  "Clean coal" is another coefficient solution offered by industry, just like catalytic converters for automobiles in the 70's.  A coefficient solution looks at the rate of pollution caused by the current rate of consumption.  A new technology comes along which reduces the pollution rate.  Sounds great, right?

  Catalytic converters made an amazing and measurable reduction in the amount of pollution cars created, something like 1/4 to 1/5 the amount of emissions that they were targeting.  Now, people drive 4 or 5 times as much as they did in the 70's so we are back at the same levels of pollution.  So, the coefficient solution helped reduce emissions and made a difference, but, our behavior changed, and we used more and more.

  "Clean Coal" may reduce a targeted emission, but if consumption increases, the helpful effects of the coefficient solution will diminish, just like they did with the catalytic converter.  It's great that the industry is even looking at something like this and I think it should be pursued.  However, we need to be in the process of moving to cleaner energy sources at the same time so that we can reduce our need for coal while making it a cleaner fuel to use.On Umbra on clean coal posted 1 year, 3 months ago 17 Responses