Rank The Environmental Atrocity: Is Fraud Visible from Outer Space?

Multiple Choice:  If you could correct one thing, to protect the planet, sustainability, endangered species, and the planet, what would you choose?

• Hard rock metal mining?

• Mining Indonesian coral islands for tin (to replace recycled lead batteries in electric solder)?

• Diverting Interpol enforcement from Ivory poaching, to arrest African internet cafe investors?

• A pile of inert silicate leaded flux (slag), sitting by a smelter for 80 years?

• A pile of CRT tubes, diverted from reuse, sitting in a warehouse in Yuma?

To the degree the last one belongs on the list, it's because of fraud.   The first fraud was BAN and SVTC telling California that the CRT monitors being shipped in 2002 were destined for dumps. They were being purchased by SKD factories.

The second fraud was, again, BAN and SVTC telling California that diverting those CRTs to "recycling" companies represented international law or environmental progress.

The third fraud was allegedly committed by the cathode ray tube recycling company ("Dow Management" in Yuma) which evidently took money for the tubes, stuck them in a warehouse, and ran.


Our war should be on fraud.

First do no harm.  Be true to thine own self.  Truth is not conservative or liberal, blue or red or green, truth is transparent, and only environmental and recycling systems based on truth will be sustainable.

(By the way, I had access to other 'close up' photos with children in them, but believe it contributes to poster child exhaustion, we all need to de-escalate the emotional button-pushing)


It's a lie that recycling is a bigger risk than mining or disposal (the only alternatives), it's a fraud to say 80% of the international recycling is actually dumping, it's untrue and unfair to call technicians in Africa environmental criminals.   It's false that the Basel Ban Amendment is law - it has not passed.  It's a lie that the CRT monitors circled by Michael Rey, Nichole Young, Solly Granatstein, and Scott Pelley's Hong Kong helicopter were scrapped in Guiyu.  People are claiming to "follow the trail", which is a line on a map, and they didn't, the trail didn't go there.  Most of the lines being crossed are on the boundary between fact and exaggeration.  Ghost tonnage (fake numbers on recycling stewardship states) is the only way to create money without any effort or environmental risk, and should be even higher on the list than CRT glass fallout from copper, plastic, and aluminum recycling.

"We followed the trail?"

I'm experimenting with computer programs which allow me to zoom out, via Google Earth, from "crisis points" for environmentalists, to try to put our #sustainability concerns and environmental progress in a proper perspective.  Of course, you can't see species extinction very well that way, except for the shrinking habitats.  But these "city dumps" emergencies are the moral equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theater.   The stack of CRT computer monitors in Hong Kong will suddenly look tiny, the Thai and Chinese lead mines, the mining and reuse alternative, look huge.

There are millions of young environmentalists, willing to line up and make a difference with their lives in the green movement.  Sicking them on the geeks of color goes way, way beyond "collateral damage".

Visible from space?

We have elevated junk electronics recycling high above virgin material extraction, when it doesn't even rank high among dry cleaners, beauty salons, laundromats, and auto garages.   Authority without borders, accusation without accountability, arrest without evidence, bans from trade without trial.

I was just telling a friend, by email this morning, about CAER's attempt to make shredding equipment look more "patriotic" than export for reuse and repair, or even hand-disassembly.  I'm not less patriotic than the anti-export advocates.  I think what I'm doing, seeing people of other races for what they can do instead of for what they cannot do, seeing a free market melting pot as a wonderful thing, is uniquely American.

I followed the trail too, sorry to miss you Scott.

This blog is a celebration of using intellectual and philosophical free press to correct wrongs, to assess power imbalances, and to stubbornly re-state the truth in USA's public square.

"For me the whole point is that America is a unique place to publicly call out the BS.  I can't imagine trying to correct a wholesale public misperception of this scale in any other country in the world, certainly not in a country whose government is as powerful as ours."