It's surprising that so-called environmentalists have such little understanding of how things work.
They are surprised that the gyres of plastic and stuff turn out to be giant foundations for a whole new way of life. Anyone who has owned a boat will know that leaving it sitting in the sea results in life crowding onto it in such profusion that the thing can barely sail.
Scraping the hull of boats is a constant hassle. Coating the hull with horribly poisonous mercury used to be a way of slowing the growth. But not for long. Most poisoning was done to the people cleaning and sanding the hulls every now and then.
Wading around in the shallows as a child should have shown the budding environmentalists that plastic bottles and bags and everything else sitting in the mud accumulates slime and then more and more and more. Life tries to get a grip on anything it can cling to. Crabs will hide in the plastic bottles. An octopus would love a plastic bottle with a hole that they can just squeeze through, while keeping an eye on what's going on around them. They'd probably pull it under a rock for better shelter.
What the environmentalists should also know is that subhuman life lacks intelligence - and mostly humans should be included in that as we have only 1 kg of intelligence each and it's borderline functional mostly.
Therefore, stuff attached to floating gyres hasn't heard of The Tragedy of the Commons. It's every man for himself. So they keep on crowding onto the bits of lifeboat plastic until it gets too heavy and sinks, never to be seen again, taking a load of siliceous and carbon life to the bottom of the ocean where it piles up with the radiolarian ooze and everything else that falls to the bottom of the ocean in kilometres thick sedimentary layers.
A similar process happens with CO2 increasing in the air. The Sargasso sea and seaweed everywhere and a quadrillion tons of life in the ocean is feasting. Hence the seaweed and algal growth, provided there are enough other nutrients. Megatons of seaweed turns into ocean habitat and everything ends up at the bottom of the ocean after various life cycles have finished. Hagfish gobble the remains of whales leaving the residue to add another layer to the kilometres already there.
Despite burning stupendously vast megatons of carbon, we have managed to increase CO2 to only 420 ppm over a hundred and fifty years of enormous effort. As coal and hydrocarbons get more expensive and nuclear, photovoltaics and electric cars and alternatives to heating and travel become more attractive, CO2 production will go down. People avoid paying for fuel if they can.
Fortunately for farmers and life in general, CO2 levels are up from starvation, tragedy of the commons levels of 280ppm that prevailed before the oil industry came to the rescue. Plants are breathing easier. Irrigation requirements are down.
Since the carboniferous times, CO2 has been reduced from 6000 ppm all the way to death and deserts at 280ppm. 500 ppm or 600 ppm would be better. than 400 ppm.
After 40 years of watching CO2 as a possible problem, it still looks like a good thing rather than bad at the levels we're getting towards. As I said to my boss Nelson Cull [in BP Oil] back then, if it becomes a problem, it's easy to fix = just cut taxes on computers, insulation, income, what have you, by say $10 billion and charge $9 billion in carbon taxes, and stop wasting another $1 billion. He didn't like my suggestion. But it would work, unlike the stupid emissions trading scam and loading on more and more and more taxes.
The latest super stupid move by the commie government in NZ was to tax workmen buying petrol/diesel Utes [utility vehicles] and new cars generally $8,000 and give rich Remuera ladies wanting to show off their green credentials and status $8000 towards a nice new Tesla.
Petrol and diesel are also highly taxed by way of per litre tax or per kilometre road use [for diesels]. Of NZ$3 retail per litre for petrol, about $2 is tax [all taxes from wellhead to exhaust pipe]. But the Remuera ladies pay NO road tax or fuel tax. The roads are their's for no charge to roam at will.
But wait, there's more. To promote electricity, the commies fund free electricity at some charging places [though not at home]. Virtue signalling is very popular in electricity suppliers and other esg/dei idiots.
Mqurice |
