Troublesome Creek has blue-skinned people. Kentucky has Blue Grass. There are Blue mountains in Oregon, but no one is turning blue faster than Vermont. In a few short years, the political Left has taken the state on a ride to hell.

They drank the blue Kool Aid®.

Vermont is not there yet, but as I observed on Right Side Up radio a few weeks back, and on occasion on these pages or over at VermontGrok, we can watch the descent in real-time. Vermont is falling like leaves from trees in autumn, a chorus of told-you-so’s on the wind in their wake.

Vermont Dems are making all the same mistakes Democrats do. They opened the progressive playbook and chanted scripture and verse, and you can see the decline with your own eyes.

Murder!

In 2021, the state had nine homicides. In 2022, that number jumped to 25. As 2023 winds its way through autumn, the State Police have a number that could be as high as sixteen—the result of seven suspicious deaths in October alone.

 

Hunters on Friday afternoon discovered a body in a remote area in Plainfield, and Vermont State Police say the death “occurred under suspicious circumstances.” It marked the second time this week that hunters found a body in central Vermont.

Since Oct. 5, Vermont State Police have reported seven deaths considered to be suspicious. By comparison, there were only nine reported homicides in the state for all of 2021, although that number spiked to 25 reported homicides in 2022.

No arrests have been made in any of the seven recent cases.

 

With two months left to 2023, there’s plenty of time for hunters to find more bodies, and you can’t discount the way the Left has set the table in the rest of the state. The road to utopia is always paved with the dead.

They could still come under the 2022 number, but another seven suspicious deaths in either November or December will put them close to a new trend; I’d bet that’s more likely the case. Vermont has been set up to fail, and fail it will.

The solution – at least to the rising number of murders –  is not as complex as they might imagine, but progressives are probably working on the wrong solution as you read this.

If they ban hunting, people will be less likely to find the bodies.

 

The Night Cap might become a daily piece—a quick snapshot of an issue or some opinion at the end of the day.

The post Night Cap: Is Vermont Becoming The Land of Suspicious Deaths? appeared first on Granite Grok.

In gauging the promises of climate rescue by corporations and non-governmental organizations, citizens must reflect upon the track record of past technological projects peddled as the cure to all that ails us. EVs, wind turbines, and solar panels are touted as absolutely necessary to save the planet.

Yet the boondoggle of the ethanol “industry,” the “cash-to-clunkers” program, and other much-ballyhooed technological solutions reveal a history of big promises concealing negative returns. So when The Lego Group abandoned its efforts to make its best-selling toys from recycled bottles recently, we wondered if perhaps the vaunted recycling industry is over-promising and under-delivering as well.

Americans widely assume the plastics, glass, metal, and other waste products they discard are recycled and reused. Unfortunately, this is often not the case: Major problems continue to prevent most of these substances from being efficiently recirculated. Since “green” construction, EVs, windmills, and solar panels all contain these same materials, the issue of reuse via recycling relates to their sustainability.

The United States has failed to achieve the high rates of recycling of some products attained in Europe. Europeans pay more for landfill disposal and have widely adopted bottle deposit and multiple-stream collection practices that improve consumer compliance and sorting at the source. The United States has lagged in these areas, but also faces problems moving recyclables long distances, a lack of industry consolidation, and weakening market demand for recyclables. These industry challenges are not diminishing but increasing.

Glass, plastics, and metals are chief categories of recycling opportunities. Each presents unique problems, yet all encounter shared hurdles of economic efficiency that have stalled American recycling programs to the point of near irrelevance.

Glass

Glass is arguably the easiest substance to reuse, as it can be processed into “cullet,” a crushed-glass product mixed with virgin glass to manufacture new bottles. Yet glass also poses unique challenges. It gets shattered during collection and transport, which contaminates other renewables such as cardboard, as well as the glass itself. Glass is quite heavy, making trucking costs (economically and environmentally) high. Glass is hard on equipment, increasing plant and machinery costs. Only about 40% of glass in single-stream recycling collections is recycled. A mere third of all US glass is recycled, with some ten million metric tons of it being dumped into landfills annually. Glass is also less environmentally destructive on disposal because it is inert and does not produce leachate (chemicals that leach from landfills) or methane. So it’s often cheaper to just landfill glass rather than recycle it.

Metal

Metal recycling focuses mostly on aluminum, steel, and copper, and presents its own challenges. Appliances and other products must be dismantled to meaningfully extract recyclable materials, especially the burgeoning volume of electronics such as discarded cellphones and laptops. Virtue-signaling corporations publicly proclaim recycling commitments, but there is insufficient capacity to meet those goals. Only about 19% by volume of durable goods were recycled in 2018. Only 30% of aluminum cans were recycled. Many cities do not implement expensive Materials Processing Facilities (MPFs) and find it cheaper to simply landfill cans collected from consumers.

Plastic Rates of plastic reclamation are so low globally that the phrase “plastic recycling” is essentially oxymoronic. The problems with recycling plastic have long been known – many companies have been accused of “greenwashing”: misleading the public into believing their products are recyclable when they are not. There are thousands of different kinds of plastic in use, and they can’t be mixed when remelted. Plastics degrade after one or two uses, and new plastic is cheap and easy to manufacture. The plastics industry proposes to triple production by 2050, but less than 5% of plastics are remanufactured into new products. Greenpeace presented a study that found that the more plastic is reused, the more toxic it becomes – to marine and human life, in food and water as well as landfills. Renewable Energy, Isn’t Into this chasm of failures now leaps the hasty, climate-urgency-fueled push to manufacture whole new waste streams of unrecyclable manufactured junk, falsely labeled “renewable energy products.” Wind turbines, EVs, biodigesters, solar panels, and other techno-gadgets touted as climate-saving all end up in the dumpster. Manufacturing inputs for these goods include coal energy, mined metals, and numerous pollutants, all of which are simply ignored by proponents. Similarly, the externalized costs of disposal are simply dumped on future generations to sort out.

This is more than just a recycling issue: It is extremely costly to shift inefficient technologies and infrastructures once they are implemented, as is demonstrated by single-stream collection methods and the shortage of large processors of glass, metal, or plastics. What are the pollution costs of installing electric charging stations for EV cars, changing the grid to accommodate surges of energy demand when solar panels or wind turbines are offline, or shifting an entire industry to ethanol production? What are the economic and environmental costs of transforming those failed systems after they are hastily implemented?

Recycling Boondoggles These different recycling industries share common economic hurdles: a lack of market, limited processing facilities, high transportation costs, a need for capital-intensive technological investments, and insufficient large-scale processors. They also share in the illusion that waste products are being reused. Promises made politically, unachieved, are then left for the next generation to figure out. The hucksters for climate technology are off and running, seeking bigger and better technological promises to break. John Klar is an Attorney, farmer, and author. Mostly farmer… And Regular Contributor to GraniteGrok and VermontGrok.

The post Greenwashing: The Lies We Tell of Recycling and the Climate appeared first on Granite Grok.

Americans have always prided themselves on living in the land of the Free and the Brave. It has a great sound, but does it ring hollow in the 21st century? We are not far from a two-year period where the government locked us down, forced us to vaccinate with untested pharmaceuticals, wear masks unless sleeping, and not to question a single facet of the COVID plan.

Our children were locked out of schools, forbidden from interacting with each other, and not allowed to participate in indoor or outdoor sports. We were not allowed to go to Church or a gym but could go to Walmart or Target. We were not allowed to visit the sick in hospitals or the elderly in nursing homes. We were restricted in how and when we buried our dead. Does this sound like a free country? Does this sound like a brave populace? I don’t think so.

Fast forward to 2024. The restrictions may not be as obvious, but those subtle restrictions still infringe on our Constitutional rights. Today’s edicts do not impact both sides of the aisle similarly. Joe Biden has weaponized his Justice and Intelligence Departments against political foes and their followers. The FBI has been found to infiltrate Catholic Churches seeking “Radical Catholics” who may be threats to Democracy. By the way, what is a Radical Catholic? I was born when masses were celebrated in Latin, and I still believe in the old ways of the Church. Does that make me a Radical? You will have to ask Joe and his FBI for the answer. The Justice Department is still protecting school boards and departments from “terrorist parents” who are concerned with graphic pornographic books available for elementary school children.

The White House and Social Media are continuing to work together to censor the information available to the public, and the CDC is pushing a new round of “magic” vaccines. The President is doing all in his power to thwart efforts by Robert Kennedy Jr. and Marianne Williamson from challenging him in a Democrat Primary. These efforts are how Democrats envision Democracy. People who trespassed into the Capital on January 6 are serving 18-year prison sentences while murderers and rapists are released early or serving time for reduced charges.

One of the greatest shows of Government abuse of power is what is being done to Donald Trump. The former President has been charged with nearly 100 indictments in multiple jurisdictions in a blatant attempt to keep him off the 2024 ballot. Trump’s poll numbers rise with every new charge, showing the Democrat tactics are backfiring. Their effort to break Trump and destroy his business empire should terrify every American. If Biden and his administration can do this to a former President, their most powerful opponent, and a Presidential candidate, they destroy any one of us. Is this what happens in the country of the Free and the Brave? It is in today’s America, under the power of Democrats. The Party of the People wants the people under its thumb.

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