Blah blah blah

COP26 ends (?) And everyone is accusing themselves of having just done “blah, blah, blah”. In a sense, both sides are right. Greta has entered the loop of "what you do will never be enough", while on the other hand the complete absence of clear proposals and requests (even realistic) is pointed out to the young lady.

But this is not the problem: the problem is that mass media exist, that is, things that stand between the masses and reality, and they prevent the masses from perceiving reality simply by adding things, things that are taken from the repertoire. lobbies that advertise in the newspapers themselves.

If from the denier front we have an absurd bombardment of nonsense things that we call "gree washing" (and here Greta is right), on the other hand we have a whole series of other lobbies (from Real Estate to mass tourism to agricultural food) that they pollute the “green” message of meaningless notions.

If on the green washing of the malvagye corporations everything is said about everything and everything that can be denounced (and often even the false) is denounced, the magagnette of the Gretine are often hidden.

The green world today is divided into different superstitions, each of which is funded by a case lobby.

1. Panoramism. The belief that the environment must look like a postcard to be healthy and the "green" must be everywhere. It is sponsored by real estate, that is, by those who build and manage real estate properties, and have noticed that if in front of a building we put 4 trees at 15m ^ 2 of grass, the value of the building grows by 25% because it is 'a "green" area. Panoramists are those who say no to wind turbines because they "ruin the view" (and their country villas lose value), or say no to biomass power plants because they "stink" (and their villas in the countryside lose value) ).
2. Gardening. They are those who believe in the history of forests (but also simple public parks) as "green lungs", which make "the oxygen we breathe" and "purify the air". The oxygen that we breathe comes from the oceans, while the forests (all) have a slightly negative balance (they consume more than they produce, except in the initial moment of the forest) and if you want pure air you have to go rather to the deserts like the sahara. (There are measures, it's a fact). Behind this are the mass tourism industries that sell you "unspoiled places" to spend your holidays, and once again, the real estate that sells you a shitty building at double the price if it has a view of the city park.
3. Dietism. There is a slice of industry that fights to process only vegetable materials enriched, at worst, with pig fat. And so we believe that cows produce methane. Let me be clear: they produce it. What we don't ask ourselves is what would have happened to the grass they eat had it not been eaten. It would die, the same bacteria would break it down and produce the same methane. Second: a 600 kg cow at most contains about 70% of water, that is about 420 liters. The idea that to have an adult cow we destroy tons of water is not true. Simple stoichiometry. . On the contrary, methane is produced very well by decomposing dead plants in water: rice fields, rainforests, swamps and freshwater lakes are inevitably the first sources, no discussion, from the end of the Carboniferous geological period onwards: due to volumes at stake. But the lobby of the agricultural food industry doesn't like it to cool the rice fields because they produce methane. It's the cows' fault. Let alone if anyone will ever go to measure how much methane a rainforest produces. Much. And you have never seen how much water a rice paddy consumes : other than cows.
4. Technologism. Technology products and solutions, such as the home office, are going crazy, which are made to avoid taking the car to go to work. They are a godsend, mind you. But on the other hand, you have to see how far you are. The energy cost of transmission increases with distance: if it is true that it is ecologically convenient to stay at home within 50-100 km from home, the story of having a job in Milan and living in Puglia, honestly, leaves me perplexed. It's convenient for the worker, I wouldn't swear on the energy cost. We should know how ecological it is to live in Puglia, for example: if in your Apulian town the waste is recycled worse than in Milan, it was more ecological that you lived in Milan. Ditto for electric cars / bicycles / scooters, which will never have the same low friction and the same per capita efficiency as a tram or railroad. However, there is a whole IT world pushing in this direction.
5. Gadgetism. Remember Greta's water bottle? Well, it doesn't need a shit and you produced CO2 to do it. But the most economical and ecological way of transporting drinking water are and remain the aqueducts. Instead of walking around with a water bottle as if you were in the desert, you can turn on a tap in any western kitchen, ask for tap water in a bar, or go to the coffee room if you are at work. Instead, a whole series of useless ecological gadgets are invading the market, for the sole purpose of giving a "green" status symbol. As if melting glass to make a useless bottle had no ecological impact. Behind this, of course, there is a whole “green” gadget industry.
6. Fake news. There are also (and there are many) “green” urban legends. For one thing: it is true that permafrost releases methane, which is a greenhouse gas. But the percentage of methane in the atmosphere today is 1.8ppm, while that of CO2 ranges from 250-400ppm depending on the place and time of day. So it is true that the melting of the ice releases clathrates and releases methane into the atmosphere, but the effects will only be visible in times from 1000 to 100,000 years: http://geosci.uchicago.edu/~archer/reprints/archer. 2005.clathrates.pdf . Furthermore, we are only talking about Arctic permafrost, not all permafrost which, on the other hand, cannot hold methane. If you see a lot of methane in the Russian air, more often it is a faulty gas pipeline or a Soviet-era regasifier. It doesn't mean we can rest easy, but it's not the most pressing issue. Ditto for “extintion rebellion”: the only scenarios that predict the extinction of homo sapiens within 100 years are the truly extreme ones, which are considered highly unlikely even by the IPCC scientists themselves.
7. Green finance. Green finance is the mechanism whereby if my country has a coal plant and the neighboring country has a hydroelectric plant, the neighboring country sells me green derivatives and from tomorrow my coal plant produces "green" energy. It is a great incentive to build the hydroelectric plant, of course, but it is also a great incentive to keep the coal plant. And so you may be using only green energy, just because your coal plant has bought green derivatives.
8. Political parties. Greta continues to reject the idea of ​​using the same methods and tools used to create it to tackle the problem. His words. Interesting. Interesting because the politics he is carrying out, with demonstrations, protests, young people in the streets and rallies, perfectly responds to the identikit of "the same methods and tools that created the problem". It is not absolutely clear how one can object to the usual politics during the usual demonstration , as if it were something absolutely new, and not feel ridiculous.
9. VIP activism. As I said earlier, forests do not absorb CO2 in the long run. It means that only by growing does the tree have a net production of oxygen, while to build its mass it must necessarily store carbon. But then the tree dies, and since we are not in the carboniferous, the fungi, the bacteria and all those who degrade the lignin and make us CO2 arrive, and at full speed a forest does not produce oxygen, at best it breaks even, while the forests very old (oxygen) consume a little due to the ecosystem they host. The VIPs who want to plant a trillion trees could also sequester in the carbon as the tree grows, but at full capacity they would not have changed practically anything. And no, the Amazon rainforest does NOT produce 20% of the oxygen we breathe: https://www.factcheck.org/2019/09/amazon-doesnt-produce-20-of-earths-oxygen/ . Of course it does not mean that burning it is good because it would produce CO2 in burning (and the problem is CO2, there is no lack of oxygen anywhere), but the oxygen balance in the air is produced by the oceans. .
10. The "Detox". If you take 80kg of meat and ask a chemist to remove the plastics and metal nanoparticles, he will succeed. But what it will give you back is a muddy mush that has little to do with meat. Likewise, the idea that by eating something you remove microscopic amounts of plastics and metals from your body is just pureed shit. This can't happen, period. Removing those substances from the human body in a peaceful way (in the sense that you will have to survive and still look human) is chemically impossible. Get over it. There is no fucking detox. I speak of detox as the culmination of bullshit, of those who are buying "natural" clothes, "organic cotton" and other bullshit. They have no scientific basis.
11. The "Biodegradable". I kept it for last because it's the most catastrophic scam history has ever seen. For one simple reason. Let's take polymeric plastics, such as PET or PVC: there are no scientific standards to describe "degradation" or "biodegradation". What the companies of "biodegradable" things do is just to assume, somehow, that their products deteriorate in the environment, and "disappear". We have been producing "biodegradable" products for 30 years and apparently we no longer find them in the environment, but … we find their "metabolites". The detergents we use disappear from the environment in about ten years: then we find the chemical remains in the sea, inside the fish. But if we take polymer plastics, like PET, and an ultraviolet ray hits the plastic, it can break off a piece of the molecule, being ionizing. Is the result of the process “organic”? No, it's just a more opaque plastic. When is PET biodegraded, exactly? How much do we have to break up the molecules? There is no scientifically accepted standard that applies to every material: and so many plastics have "disappeared" from the environment disintegrating into nanoparticles, which we no longer saw, until we found them inside mammals, at the top of the food chain. . To this end, the EU has pulled out of the "criteria":

It is clear how wide the meshes of these criteria are: "should be limited" does not say how much the limits are, "minerals" does not say that minerals are allowed, so if something decomposes into mercury and uranium it is fine, or products that they disintegrate must pass through a 2 × 2 mm sieve: very useful against nanoplastics. The fourth criterion says that there can be no substances that limit the degradation to the first two points.

You understand that with such criteria, taking a product and making it "biodegradable" is not complicated. Even burning something is part of "converting 90% of the mass into CO2, water and minerals", indeed it seems a criterion for incineration.

All this to say, that even modern ecologism is a nice pile of BlaBlaBla.

There are scientific bases, which sound the alarm and tell us that we must try to keep the fundamentals of planetary chemistry stable. But when parties, lobbies, and protest movements come into play, everything gets lost in BlaBlaBla.

So yes, COP26 was actually a BlaBlaBla.

But, essentially, this is what happens when politics arrives, whether it is made up of leaders, or whether it is made up of protests.

IPCC after many years of work has managed to create a credible science behind global warming. On this science, however, two layers of bullshit have been deposited, those of the ecologists and those of the deniers.

It's all a BlaBlabLA. With the only difference is that it is ALL a blablabla.