NYC, USA take backward stance on waste-to-energy technology

Today's NY Times reports that while Europe has built 400 energy plants that convert garbage into energy in Denmark, Germany, and The Netherlands, the U.S. shows no interest in integrating this technology as a means of curbing carbon emissions that is cheaper than landfill disposal. While Europe plans on building more waste-to-energy incinerators, the U.S. has no plans to change its current methods of waste disposal. In other words, while the U.S. spends more money on military technology, prisons, and Barack Palin's drill-baby-drill project, Europe spends money on technology that improves environmental conditions and lowers energy costs for everyone.

The American reaction to the incinerators is typically shallow, short-sighted, and selfish. State officials worry the incinerators would hurt recycling programs--even though the European incinerators only use garbage that is non-recyclable (note the relentless American aversion to basic facts and the zero-sum game mentality that concludes lowering energy costs and improving environmental conditions is bad because it will cut into recycling programs). Environmental groups in America claim, "incinerators are really the devil" (note how even American environmentalists are driven by an obsessive, fundamentalist, judgmental mentality).

The best take on New Yorker attitudes toward the European incinerators comes from Nickolas J. Themelis, professor of engineering at Columbia University and a waste-to-energy advocate, who calls New York City's vigorous opposition to the creation of these incinerators environmentally and economically "irresponsible." Quote: "It's so irrational. I've almost given up on New York. It's like you're living in a village of Hottentots who look up and see an airplane--when everybody else is using airplanes--and they say, 'No, we won't do it; it's too scary.' " This perspective is consistent with the comments I made during our last Podcast that NYC has become a has-been--totally non-progressive, senile, set in its ways, assuming that just because it is NYC that it is hip and the coolest place ever. Part of the hang up in NYC over waste-to-energy incinerators is the relentlessly selfish attitude of New Yorkers who would bitch endlessly about where the incinerators would be located even though they cause no noise or odor. The snobby NYC attitude toward garbage disposal is to use trucks that contribute to carbon emissions pollution to dump the garbage in Ohio or South Carolina landfills, reinforcing their provincal attitude that in this global age the world begins and ends at the Hudson River.

New Yorkers' off-the-charts ultra-conservative attitudes are a sharp contrast to the ever-increasingly conservative Danes, even those in Horsholm, a conservative region with the highest-per-capita income where the mayor wants to expand the incinerator program because the incinertors decrease heating costs and increase home values. If we were talking about wiping out a once-thriving neighborhood in Brooklyn to build a basketball arena, then everything would go smoothly. But a scientific or intellectual approach to a daunting, 21st century problem that has nothing to do with entertainment? Forget it. That's not hip for the people of NYC and their too-cool-for-school mentality. Maybe if Steve Jobs could show that waste-to-energy incinerators make his iPad more efficient to use, then Big Applers would come around.

To find out more, the article is titled "Europe finds clean fuel in trash; U.S. sits back" page A1, NY Times, 13 April 2010.