Earth Day

[will]

   I hope everyone gets their cars out tomorrow for Earth Day. Nothing like tire smoke and unburned hydrocarbons for the masses.   

[Kern Dog]

The Earth is far more durable and self healing than it gets credit for being.

[b5blue]

Yea yet humans are NOT! 

[John_Kunkel]

The Earth is far more durable and self healing than it gets credit for being.

[Kern Dog]

I'm not wrong.

[lloyd3]

Dang it, forgot it was Earth Day yesterday somehow (& w/me being a former "government scientist" [& even serving as an USEPA employee]...absolutely sacrilegious!). 

Do we have an effect here, absolutely. Is it permanent, well...likely not. In the short term (which is properly measured in human lifetimes) if you're living downstream of a polluting industry (think Bhopal, India) then it is a real problem.  The emissions from the tailpipes of my old Dodge do not amount to a hill of beans (to quote Bogart) when compared to any volcanic activity on this planet, but if you lived in the Los Angeles basin in the 1970s and 80s, you could see (and then taste) the effect of burned hydrocarbons (and the products of their incomplete combustion) in the air there on a daily basis. Here in Denver we had a similar problem in the 1980s and early 90s (the now infamous "Brown Cloud"). 

Newer cars are clearly cleaner (& safer) and for very good reasons(!). However, we generational Americans (in many cases, multiple) are becoming an overly-surly crowd (at even our best) as we don't take very-well to some geeky and largely-phony government-types telling us what we can or cannot do (or even possess) as we view many of these things as to being our "birthrights" here in the "good 'ole US of A". However, because the bedamnedable "Nanny State" has become such an overly-dominant force in all our lives anymore, to the point where it has become noticeably oppressive, I would have driven my car yesterday as a symbolically fully-extended "middle finger" to all of that nonsense.

I might even drive it today, now that I think of it (I might even have a big boozy Margareta to celebrate that fact with lunch).

Live dangerously before you no longer can.

[John_Kunkel]

I'm not wrong.

In the eyes of those who spout the party line, they're never wrong.

[b5blue]

Tell that to the dead and dying from Love Canal.