Global Warming Eco-Terrorists Are Coming After Your Flat Screen TV
MKFreeberg at House of Eratosthenes on Jul 08 2008 at 8:27 am | Filed under: Feature Article, Global Warming
Your flat screen TV is contributing to global warming (hat tip: Boortz).
A greenhouse gas called nitrogen trifluoride, used to make the TVs, is 17,000 times more potent than carbon dioxide, said Michael Prather, director of the environment institute at the University of California, Irvine.
But no one yet knows how much of it is being released into the atmosphere by industry, a report in Britain’s The Guardian said.
Prather’s research shows production of the gas, which remains in the atmosphere for 550 years, is “exploding”.
It’s only at the end of the article you read that this is all about the possibility of a contaminant, not about the contaminant itself. And this Prather guy clearly belongs to the “all regulation is good and doesn’t cost anything” crowd:
Air Products, which produces the gas for the electronics industry, told New Scientist that very little nitrogen trifluoride is released into the atmosphere.
But Prather raised concerns about companies being careless with the gas, given the lack of a regulatory framework.
Well, he’s right, you know — if this stuff is 17,000 times more potent than CO2, it should be taken very seriously. The first step is to find out what “very little” means in terms of what’s released into the atmosphere. A cubic foot per television set?
Unless it’s zero, I say we should use this to shed some more light on the greenhouse gas debate. We weren’t building flat screen TV sets in 1934, which has now been revealed to be the warmest year on record, so this would be some sturdy evidence that the “greenhouse effect” isn’t the be-all-end-all. Sorry, but when you make superlative claims like “17,000 times more potent,” this can have unforeseen effects on your argument if your audience is paying attention; we’re spewing this awful gas, and even with that benefit we haven’t managed to get the “mean temperature” up to the levels of 74 years ago.
And, as the propeller-beanie pocket-protector white-coat-wearing regulation-loving geek points out, the production of flatscreens has been “exploding.” Logic would therefore dictate we can stop complaining about carbon for awhile.
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