It’s all the rage now, making TV news and stories in newspapers. Where are we ever going to put the ever increasing amount of rubbish being discarded by Americans? We’re familiar with the photos of landfills growing like Topsy; trash trucks continually regurgitating tons and tons of newspapers, tin cans, old tires, and the offal of a civilized society. Even if there weren’t a space problem, landfills are costing us a fortune.
One of the advantages of being old, is the ability to remember when things which are now problems, weren’t, and why not. Where did we put the trash 50 years ago? Simple! We burned it! Today, burning trash is an illegal act in most places, because of strict laws propagated by the EPA (but not voted on by Congress). Is burning trash all that bad? Trash has been burned for literally thousands of years.
The smog and putrid air over major cities, is not caused by burning trash, which is EXTERNAL COMBUSTION, but by millions of autos and trucks, using INTERNAL COMBUSTION engines. External combustion, is simply burning something in either an enclosed or open place, but not under compression. Internal combustion engines, burn petroleum under high compression, their exhaust combines with ambient air and causes highly toxic and ugly ’brown clouds’ over cities around the world. Smog from internal combustion engines, is decaying priceless buildings, statuary, and even paint, besides causing the death of trees and other living things. External combustion causes none of this.
Steam locomotives and coal burning furnaces, for 150 years, caused dirty cities streaked with soot and grime. Coal burning was, and is, external combustion. Coal and wood smoke does not turn into smog. External combustion causes ash and soot, which falls to the ground or seas as a nutrient. Smog ruins things. The point is that burning trash doesn’t cause air pollution, other than for the amount of time it takes for the ash to fall to earth. Smog hangs there indefinitely and poisons us.
The fire which decimated Yellowstone Park, was far more fire (and the Arizona fires and volcanoes now) than would be created by cities burning trash for a hundred years, yet there was no smog type air pollution created. It all fell to the earth and became fertilizer. The air remained clear. In Kuwait, 6 million barrels of oil burned every day under external combustion conditions, not internal combustion. No smog and no ill effects; just smoke. The Yellowstone fires, Mt. St. Helens eruption, Kuwait, and yes, trash burning, are simple, natural, external combustion, causing smoke, with resulting ash becoming instant fertilizer wherever it falls. Trash has been burned throughout all of recorded history, and no one has ever been the worse for it.
What has not been going on for all of recorded history, are hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines burning gasoline and diesel, and literally ruining the earth with their chemical exhausts. Trash should be burned, householders should once again be allowed to burn leaves in the fall, and we should all stop worrying about external combustion.
There is enough money being wasted each year for landfills, compaction, and hauling trash from place to place, to give every American a nice cash bonus each year, or tax reduction, which could be spent on consumer goods, helping America’s economy. The E.P.A. is probably the most out of control bureaucracy ever conceived by the dim bulbs of Congress and White House. It is making life unbearable for the citizen as well as the businessman. Burn trash, just exactly as man has done since his beginning. Landfills don’t benefit the earth. The earth loves ashes falling on its farms and gardens as enrichment for the soil.
That was chapter 30 of “I Hold These Truths”, long out of print, which I wrote in 1991 and copyrighted in 1992. I picked a copy off of a shelf and discovered that I had some neat stuff 20 years ago, and things no one seems to be aware of today. Today, you’d go to jail if you were caught burning, leaves or trash. In 1962, Congress made steam locomotives illegal in Washington D.C. That was the year they ordered all of Washington’s clean, modern, streamlined streetcars to be scraped, to the vehement protest of the citizens and owner of the streetcar lines. A year later, JFK was shot and killed, and two years later, was the end of silver coinage. Times have indeed changed, with Obama the worst change of all.
In 1948, when I was 14, my uncle and aunt took me to Southern California. It was wonderful! Pacific Electric had over 1100 miles of track, where freeways are now, and ran hundreds of electric trains everywhere. No smog and no freeways.
We are now open eleven hours a day, from 8:20 AM Eastern, to 5 PM Pacific time. Melissa starts at 8:20 AM Eastern time, David comes on an hour later at 8AM Central time and I am next at 10AM Mountain time, with Morgen finishing the day and open till 5PM Pacific time. Big drop in metals this morning. Fine buying opportunity. Why? Because yesterday, gold exceeded its previous high, and a lot of profit taking resulted, flooding the markets with paper gold. Not to worry, it’ll go back and go higher. People wonder whether metals will “peak out.” My answer is that unless you believe that lettuce, tomatoes, tires, lumber, paint, appliances, carpet, clothes, or fuel will “peak out,” how could anything tangible “peak out” when Bernanke keeps printing, which is all he can do. Everything tangible, will continue to ’go up’ in dollar prices, as the dollar goes down in value. It’s is simple 3rd grade economics and logic. Get out of dollars! If you want to do a bit of research, go back to a couple of my columns in March, 2004, where I predicted the housing bust. I was correct about that, and I am supremely correct in urging people to get OUT OF DOLLARS, and into gold and silver.