Starship Asterisk*

wonderboy wrote:In britain, its illegal to run your car on cooking oil because no tax has been paid on it. If it were to be taxed it would just cost the same as normal petrol or diesel. I do NOT see how a government has the right to intervene when you have bought cooking oil (which has Value Added Tax applied to it already) and modified your own car using your own money so it runs using the cooking oil. Intervention on that basis, to me, is a breach of your fundamental freedoms.

BMAONE23 wrote:Is it true that Petrol is heavily taxed in GB? I had heard that the taxes practically double the cost. If that is the case, and refining cooking oil for fuel costs even $1 per gallon, I would gladly set aside an additional $1 to cover the proportional taxes
and at $.10 the additional dime would be even better

beyond wrote:What a planet!! Just one taxing situatiion after another. Sheesh :roll:

beyond wrote:What a planet!! Just one taxing situatiion after another. Sheesh

Guest wrote:If all humans stopped doing everything, running electricity, automobiles/boats, factories, dumps, deforestation, everything that includes pollution, the earth would repair itself in a week. (at least, it was an insanely short period of time, can't remember exactly how long.)

Chris Peterson wrote:...the longer we wait, the longer it will take for more natural systems to start dominating things again.

Guest wrote:If all humans stopped doing everything, running electricity, automobiles/boats, factories, dumps, deforestation, everything that includes pollution, the earth would repair itself in a week. (at least, it was an insanely short period of time, can't remember exactly how long.)

BMAONE23 wrote:But when you die and decay, you release all the Carbon that has been sequestered by your body back into nature. Prepare for the hefty Carbon Tax on Dying

Chris Peterson wrote:Releasing carbon into nature isn't necessarily a problem, it's releasing carbon dioxide, or other forms that will quickly become carbon dioxide. Cremation is probably quite un-green.

neufer wrote:Do you realize how much gasoline is burned to mow cemeteries.

Chris Peterson wrote:

BMAONE23 wrote:But when you die and decay, you release all the Carbon that has been sequestered by your body back into nature. Prepare for the hefty Carbon Tax on Dying

I think most of your carbon remains sequestered for a long time. Obviously the carbon in your bones isn't released, and much of your soft tissue is converted to carbon compounds in the soil, and ideally is taken up by growing things.

Chris Peterson wrote:

neufer wrote:Do you realize how much gasoline is burned to mow cemeteries.

So don't mow them. Our little town cemetery doesn't have a lawn. It just grows whatever grass and flowers are happy under the ponderosas- all of it sequestering carbon from the subterranean occupants.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fear_of_being_buried_alive wrote:
<<Fear of being buried alive is the fear of being placed in a grave while still alive as a result of being incorrectly pronounced dead. The abnormal, psychopathological version of this fear is referred to as taphophobia (from Greek taphos, meaning "grave"), which is translated as "fear of graves". Before the advent of modern medicine, the fear was not entirely irrational. Throughout history, there have been numerous cases of people being buried alive by accident. In 1905, the English reformer William Tebb collected accounts of premature burial. He found 219 cases of near live burial, 149 actual live burials, 10 cases of live dissection and 2 cases of awakening while being embalmed. In 1896, an American funeral director, T.M. Montgomery, reported that "nearly 2% of those exhumed were no doubt victims of suspended animation."

There have been many urban legends of people being accidentally buried alive. Legends included elements such as someone entering into the state of sopor or coma, only to wake up years later and die a horrible death. Other legends tell of coffins opened to find a corpse with a long beard or corpses with the hands raised and palms turned upward. Of note is a legend about the premature burial of Ann Hill Carter Lee, the wife of Henry Lee III. On his deathbed in 1799, George Washington made his attendants promise not to bury him for two days.

Literature found fertile ground in exploring the natural fear of being buried alive. One of Edgar Allan Poe's horror stories, "The Premature Burial", is about a person suffering from taphophobia. Other Poe stories about premature burial are "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Cask of Amontillado".

Fear of being buried alive was elaborated to the extent that those who could afford it would make all sorts of arrangements for the construction of a safety coffin to ensure this would be avoided (e.g., glass lids for observation, ropes to bells for signaling, and breathing pipes for survival until rescued). An urban legend states that the sayings "Saved by the bell" and "Dead ringer" are both derived from the notion of having a rope attached to a bell outside the coffin that could alert people that the recently buried person is not yet deceased; these theories have been proven false.>>

Henning Makholm wrote:I don't think plants take up carbon from the soil -- on the contrary, they're famous for doing their own carbon fixation.

The carbon in decomposing organisms goes into a heterotroph food chain in the soil, a large fraction in each step being oxidized to CO₂ for entropy disposal. It takes very few steps on average for it to end up in the air.

Chris Peterson wrote: Certainly, a lot of carbon ends up in the structure of funguses, which effectively takes it out of atmospheric circulation. And plants depend on soil nutrients provided by decaying organisms, which then fix carbon from the air, acting as a CO2 sink. I think it's entirely possible that the net impact of a dead body buried underground can be a reduction in atmospheric carbon, but it no doubt depends a lot on local conditions.

People who care about improving the environment in life may soon be able to do so after death. Entrepreneurs in Europe have developed two new and unusual methods of body disposal — including a low-heat cremation method and a corpse compost method that turns bodies into soil — that could provide environmentally friendly alternatives to those now in use. That's the topic of an article in the current issue of Chemical & Engineering News (C&EN), ACS' weekly newsmagazine.

Start-up companies introduce two routes to stay environmentally friendly after you’re dead and gone