As one of Obama's last regulatory tidbits was from the EPA and essentially will, within a couple of years, regulate things as trivial as 3-way light bulbs out of existence along with others styles previously exempt, the more Trump can lock down the EPA bureaucratic idiocy the better. There's just too many bureaucrats with too much time on their hands trying to tell the American people "gummit knows best" how to run their lives and what things they should and shouldn't be able to do, buy or use. "You need more corn in your gas tank". "You shouldn't be using this kind of light bulb". Etc., etc., etc.
Besides, last time I checked I don't believe my employer - or probably any employer - has granted me the right to use the company Twitter feed as I see fit. I think this is much ado about nothing. No First Amendment issue here. Move along.
But then I think...REALLY? There are actually folks who spend a slice of their life reading tweets from national park staff and we are using tax money to pay people to write messages in 140 characters or less on such stuff? This is a "government is good" example? If this is government waste, I doubt one can ever come up with a valid example of one.
"Burning one gallon of gasoline puts nearly 20lbs of carbon dioxide into our atmosphere. #climate". I say, "So?"
According to , there are approximately 2.996 X 10 to the 12th power tonnes (not pounds, mind you) of CO2 in the atmosphere. So working a little Excel magic, I get the following:
1) That's 2,996,000,000,000 tons of CO2
2) Or, 5,992,000,000,000,000 pounds of CO2
3) burning a gallon of gas contributes 0.00000000000000334% more CO2 to the atmosphere.
My point? It's a useless tweet. There's no way to know if 20 lbs is good or bad or makes no difference at all. Of course, we have no idea if this actually ADDS to the amount of CO2 or some part of it is mitigated through carbon absorption by plants, trees, etc.
A quick "googling" yields that humans 2.3 pounds of CO2 per day to the atmosphere. That means, simply by existing, Americans contribute 713,000,000 lbs of CO2 to the atmosphere PER DAY. The world population contributes almost 17,000,000,000 pounds - 17 BILLION - to the atmosphere just by existing - PER DAY.
And then, if you exercise, that might go as high 8 lbs per day. And if all that exercise leads to a longer life, that means you may be contributing more than your "fair share" of CO2 to the atmosphere during your life and maybe we ought to consider a "carbon tax" on you or cap your limits by "capping" you.
(I trust the regulars here recognize that last one as a bit of satire. Keith will be displeased with me, but at times its hard to take this climate stuff seriously.)
I'm Ed Thompson, and I approve this message.