Brian,

I was glad to see that you "draw the line at extracting the tin oxide from MOF resistors or the arsenic from GaAs semicons." That establishes the notion that some things are not worth recycling. Now the issue becomes the basis to be used to draw the line. How much extra should people pay for recycling, and should that be from altruism or coercion? (Coercion, apart from other disadvantages, is expensive.) I noticed when I was in an office services store recently , they had three versions of printer paper available: ordinary, 40% post-consumer content, and 100% post-consumer content. The price increased as the post-consumer content increased. So now you can have degrees of altruism. But what I have not seen publicized is how much benefit the earth experiences from such altruism, particularly for a renewable resource like trees. Where's the life cycle analysis, the cost-benefit analysis? One would think that with all the environmental activist organizations, these would have been widely disseminated long before now.

Even for fossil fuels, how much privation is appropriate for people to endure to ensure an adequate supply for future generations (and for how far into the future)? Apart from possible future privation, consider the real present privation for people in the third world who must spend a significant amount of time daily collecting wood for their energy needs, and the associated health issues involved in breathing all that smoke. Why is so much more attention given to the needs of people as yet unborn than the present suffering of live humans? If the environmental activists are really so concerned about privation, why don't they promote policy changes that would benefit these people? 

The logic would seem clear to me that use of nuclear energy (fission, or some day, fusion) will prolong the availability of fossil fuels, and does of course not entail CO2 emissions either, so one would think that environmentalists would promote, rather than oppose, this idea. Again, a cost-risk-benefit analysis, with numbers, is needed so decisions are made on the basis of fact and not slogan, truth, not dogma. (Incidentally, as I've commented before, you have an impressive range of topics about which you have facts to present - I'd just like to see more such facts presented to ensure that decisions are rational rather than emotional.)

Some day, fossil fuels may not be anywhere as important as they are today. After all, there was a time when whale oil was important commodity. Then people figured out how to meet their needs in other ways. Ordinary biomass may, at some price, become the feedstock of choice for both fuel and and material needs. Do you have an estimate of what that price might be today? And lest we take the recent runup in oil prices too seriously, I can remember the oil crisis of the 1970s. It was claimed then that we were running out of petroleum. Somehow, supply increased and prices dropped, and the crisis was over, at least for a long time. I've watched the price for silver, copper, palladium, and other industrial metals rise dramatically, and then fall. The price for many minerals is lower today than it was decades ago, which must frustrate the sustainability crowd, who must resort to generalizations and appeals to altruism to make their claims.

Gordon Davy
Baltimore, MD
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410-993-7399