Japanese scientist: ‘Recycling is rubbish’
The Japan Times has an article featuring some of the views of Professor Kunihiko Takeda, vice-chancellor of the Institute of Science and Technology Research at Chubu University and author of the new best-seller “Hypocritical Ecology.” Here is an excerpt:
Recycling is rubbish: It eats more energy and creates more waste than burning our garbage in high-tech incinerators. The most efficient way of getting rid of garbage is burning it all together. Why? Because in raw garbage, plastics turn into their own fuel so you don’t need to add anything else. Aluminum and steel should be recycled, though, as we need less energy for that than to produce them from scratch.
Fear is a very efficient weapon: It produces the desired effect without much waste. Global warming has nothing to do with how much CO2 is produced or what we do here on Earth. For millions of years, solar activity has been controlling temperatures on Earth and even now, the sun controls how high the mercury goes. CO2 emissions make absolutely no difference one way or another. Soon it will cool down anyhow, once again, regardless of what we do. Every scientist knows this, but it doesn’t pay to say so. What makes a whole lot of economic and political sense is to blame global warming on humans and create laws that keep the status quo and prevent up-and-coming nations from developing. Global warming, as a political vehicle, keeps Europeans in the driver’s seat and developing nations walking barefoot.
Criticizing previous ideals is natural. In the 1930s, militarism was considered best; in the 1960s, mass production and mass consumerism. Then in the 1990s the main topic was the environment. Every 30 years we switch what we believe in. This paradigm will pass, too.
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What he said actually makes sense
good article
Intelligent people already know this
Knowledgeable people know this. Intelligence has nothing to do with knowledge.
Lots of people are knowledgeable. Just the wrong kind of knowledge. It takes intelligence to filter out the bs.
It takes research to filter out the BS, which has nothing to do with intelligence. You can’t refute someone if you don’t know what credentials they have and where they are mining their facts from, unless of course you have the base of knowledge required of working in some particular field.
Medical doctors can be intelligent people, but they may not know a whole lot about CO2 emissions, solar activity, and similar topics. At least not enough to discredit a theory without having done research themselves.
This isn’t new information, but Im just happy to see that its a “Best Seller”. Proof that people are at least seeing that there isn’t just one truth, whether or not they believe in the media and propaganda.
This has already been proven true many times. Just go watch Penn & Teller’s Bullshit. They already did a whole episode on debunking the myth of recycling. Same with many other science shows.
These points he makes are stupid and according to a consensus of scientists around the globe – wrong.
Of course recycling takes more energy. The purpose of recycling is not to ‘get rid’ of trash, though. It’s to reuse garbage in other ways – i.e. reduce the amount of resources being consumed. Not to mention that burning garbage releases dioxins into the air.
And just take a look at the global warming page on wiki:
There are so many holes in everything he says, it’s hard to know where to begin. The only thing of value in this interview is his ‘observation’ of how using biofuels causes food shortages. Anybody and their brother can see this just by looking at the price of corn.
He says the energy crisis is nothing to worry about because in 40 years nuclear energy will be safer and more efficient. He fails to mention that developing nations probably won’t have access to nuclear energy (lack of building funds and nuclear fuel) and also that cars and factories don’t run on nuclear energy – they run on fossil fuels. Unless you come up with an alternative to these fuels, nuclear energy doesn’t do squat.
Seriously, his idea of progress is to sit around and do nothing while hoping that human ingenuity will pull us through these issues. It takes planning and government subsidies to get research moving, and it takes careful planning to market new alternatives to the public. Sounds to me like he’s just going against common sense to sell books.
Kevin, the whole scientific community is riddled with holes in their theories.
Saying that the scientific community agrees on something means very little. In the 1970s the National Science Board warned of man-made global cooling, and that we were headed into a new ice age.
“During the last 20-30 years, world temperature has fallen, irregularly at first but more sharply over the last decade.” – 1974.
You can apply that quote almost directly to what we see in the media today! Just change “fallen” to “risen”.
That developing nations will not have access to nuclear energy is partially the fault of developed nations having money diverted by environmental groups for earth studies, instead of investing it in TRUE aid. (Not food, but a means to independence.) What the developed world is doing is giving fish to the poor instead of teaching them how to go fishing themselves.
I’d say that scientific consensus means a lot in this case considering that for the past 8 years it has been big business and PR people dictating environmental policy. I would agree with you that the community as a whole is not perfect, but moving forward on the side of caution seems much more sensible than doing nothing, which is what this Takeda is suggesting.
Based on current data, it’s clear that glacial shelves around the world are deteriorating.
Retreat of Glaciers
We can argue until we’re blue in the face whether this is natural or man-made destruction. We can also look at increased CO2 since the turn of the last century and we can also look at increased temperatures.
Even if you don’t want to put two and two together, the first and most logical step would be to look at the current situation and take steps at reducing the increase of CO2 emissions (unless you think increasing CO2 is completely fine – at which point the debate here is over). This takes time and money, and CO2 isn’t going to decrease on its own.
I understand that some people don’t want to believe that man has an effect on the global environment, but what I don’t understand is why advanced nations would rather wait to see if it’s true. Let’s say that 20 years from now we finally determine that it was our fault all along. Any changes to CO2 production will most likely take 10 years to implement and an additional 10 – 50 years to have any effect. It’s an extremely large gamble to continue to wait for concrete evidence.
And there are lots of reasons that developing nations won’t have access to nuclear power, but I doubt that it is the fault of diverting money to environmental groups. Take the US for example. The EPA has a yearly budget of $7.1 billion dollars. At the same time, the war in Iraq is costing us $12 billion dollars per month.
Second, I would argue that most developing nations won’t have access to nuclear technology because of the fear of terrorism. Nuclear power has a huge stigma attached to it, and that won’t go away any time soon.
He may be right on some points, but I still don’t see the harm in reducing one’s ecological footprint. We are damaging the Earth. We are pushing millions of species of animals to extinction. It seems like this guy is giving those who read his articles or listen to him a free pass to do whatever it is they want to. I don’t respect that.
Kevin is right on: this guy is bullocks and spouting unsupported BS.
Kevin said it all: this guy is amusing for two seconds, but you see cracks in his (numerous!) theories just by the naked eye.
The actual ecology vibe should be carefully monitored, especially with new energy-of-the-future published in newspaper everyday, but he is completely out of his subject. In every country you can find a guy tenured-professor-master-in-his-castle type that will brag on and on on him possessing the truth that nobody ever understood. Usually, it ends up with big ego and zero facts.
but if in the end they somehow turn out to be right your all going to look like jackasses won’t you.
I tend to take most of what scientists and experts say with a pinch of salt, it all sounds like handbags at dawn to me
And if you are wrong, then you will look even more of a jack-ass, won’t you? At least we are taking precautions.
This is the best part. If they’re right, technology still has improved, we lower our ecological footprint, have cleaner air and water and we’ll have lower cost energy alternatives. Plus, even better we don’t have to deal with global warming problems.
If people like this are wrong and we’re not doing anything to help the environment: we’re screwed.
I do not agree with you. Look at what people are doing to reduce CO2. Europeans are Building lots of nuclare power plants, which could be more damaging to the environment than CO2. Corns are used for fuel not for food, killing millions of poor people.
There is risk in believing CO2 global warming.
The biofuel fiasco is the result of massive amounts of corn being produced in the US and the current administration wanting to look eco-friendly. In order to compete with American production of corn, the EU has been taking advantage of African nations to produce corn. Biofuel is actually one of the side effects of not looking at things globally, and not making a concerted effort to actually produce alternative fuels.
And people are overly afraid of nuclear energy. It takes a near catastrophic disaster combined with extreme negligence to create a nuclear meltdown, and in reality coal power plants produce more nuclear byproducts than nuclear plants:
From Scientific American
The biggest problem with nuclear energy is the waste produced by the power plants, but over the lifespan of the plant there is actually less waste than most power plants that simply dump CO2 into the atmosphere.
I’m sorry Ashley, I have no idea what you’re saying.
Recycling is only worthless until the Japanese are forced into tough decisions. Without recycling, it would be only a matter of time before all of their forests would have to be chopped down to create paper for the manga industry.
Burning plastic always releases extremely toxic chemicals into the air no matter how high-tech the incinerator. Tokyo has one of the worst air quality ratings in the world. Air pollution is only the beginning. The price of crude oil drives up the price of anything not made of recycled plastic.
I agree with the global warming thing, thats absolute bollocks.His other theories are pretty cracked though
There is no consensus of scientist on this. There are more and more scientist saying man has nothing to do with climate change on earth or the various other planets that are showing a slight elevation in temperature due to solar activity. When people say we have to do something now and we must move forward, progess etc. etc., it reminds me of Wesley Mouch and the others from Atlas Shrugged.
Science doesn’t rely on ‘consensus’…it relies on facts. It’s testable and repeatable. Man-made global warming doesn’t stand up to that standard. In fact, the numbers since 2001 don’t indicate a warming trend…temperatures have gone down. The models didn’t predict that.
There was ‘consensus’ on eugenics in the early part of the last century. Just because a lot of scientists think an idea is sound doesn’t make it so.
There is a consensus on gravity too and we haven’t proven that yet too. lets throw that out too!
Yes, science does rely on facts, and the facts show that temperatures have risen steadily in the last 100 years. There are occasional dips in the surface temperature but the mean over the past 100 years is going up.
Graph of surface temperatures
Also, global warming can cause lowered temperatures. You have to take into account the entire climate and how the pieces fit together. For example, Greenland consists mainly of glaciers. Because of global warming the glaciers are melting at an increasing rate and pouring a tremendous amount of fresh water into the surrounding ocean which in turn lowers the salt content of the currents and depresses the Gulf Stream – this would change all of the weather patterns in Europe. Also heat transfer slows down because there is less difference between the cold and hot regions.
Why ice at Greenland is important
What we do not know is what caused the rise in temperature.
Since when are Europeans in the driving seat? Last time I checked the US was the sole superpower – and they are not very keen on tackling global warming. Or did it say 欧米人 = “Westerners” in the original article?
I agree with him and had a similar opinion before reading the article. Of course, as a regular citizen i don’t have nearly as much information and knowledge about the issue, so my opinion might be biased.
interesting…so when the oil runs out what are we going to make plastic out of?as far as im aware you cant make it from biofuels
I’m with Kevin on this too. And I’m seriously hoping my husband won’t find Dr Takeda’s article; I have a hard enough time getting him to put his glass and aluminum into separate bins as it is.
Supporters and naysayers alike, read the following Wired article:
http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/magazine/16-07/pb_theory
The new age of Science will not be ruled by theories or facts (be they generally accepted or ridden with holes). Given our increasing computational ability to hoard data and process it, conflict-resolution (environmental or otherwise) will simply be determined by looking at data trends. That means Takeda’s data may indeed show a current (and perhaps time-limited) trend that certain types of recycling have no significant benefits; but differing factors in the future could change those trends.
Theories are called “theories” for a reason: they are not perfect, and do not describe some law that can be applied on a global scale indefinitely. “Data Science” simply aims to dispel the illusion that “theory” is the goal. Why bother trying to develop a theory or pursue a consensus? All we really care about is the raw data, and it’s right there in front of us.
Myth of Consensus Explodes: APS Opens Global Warming Debate
http://www.dailytech.com/Myth+of+Consensus+Explodes+APS+Opens+Global+Warming+Debate/article12403.htm