Kyoto Protocol Renewal Efforts Struggling 393
Hugh Pickens writes "Economics trumps the environment. The emission targets set by the Kyoto Protocol will expire next year, and negotiators are fighting to keep UN climate talks on track while efforts to save the Euro push the struggle to save the planet down the priority list. In the United States, seen as the biggest single obstacle to a new global climate deal, academic opinion says an 'iron law' means economics trumps the environment in times of crisis. Meanwhile, some leading voices on climate science have suggested the Kyoto Protocol be put to pasture, since clinging to hopes of a renewal of that agreement does more harm than good in achieving meaningful dialogue on how to fight climate change. When the agreement was negotiated in the 1990s, the world was more clearly divided into 'rich and poor' countries. However, China and India have seen unexpectedly strong economic growth since then, and currently make up 58 per cent of global emissions. 'Against this backdrop, it is no surprise that countries such as Japan, Canada and Russia adamantly refuse to assume new binding targets unless the other major economies at present outside Kyoto's reach — most notably, the United States and China — do so as well,' writes Elliot Diringer, executive vice-president of the U.S.-based Center for Climate and Energy Solutions. 'And for now, the odds of that happening are nil.'"
Priorities (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
One world government is a horrible, horrible idea. Where can you escape to when the one world government becomes intolerable?
Truly representative government on such a scale is impossible--we might as well have a global hereditary monarchy.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
pray tell me, where can you escape to now ? Our multinational overlords are everywhere.
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Here's where you've missed the most important lesson the US had to teach the world - you're only ruled by those you accept ruling you.
The historic European model of being the chattel of your leaders is of course a barrier to accepting this.
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Wait a sec. You are implying that, as a US citizen, I accept our current Batshit insane governmental leadership? Sorry, I have to disagree. I am finding it quite difficult to come up with a mechanism that fundementally changes who is pretending to run the US. Voting, the classic way of changing government, has a distinctly empty feeling these days. I can't watch more than a few minutes of political posturing by any party without getting nauseated.
What the US brought to the world (again) was the concep
One vs. Many (Score:3)
where can you escape to now ? Our multinational overlords are everywhere.
Not satisfied with the Ford overlord? Escape to the Toyota overlord. What's the point you're trying to argue?
The post you replied to mentioned that a single world government would be bad because there would be no alternative governments. You replied with a tired 19th century meme of Marxist ideology that some mods thought insightful.
It's not a valid analogy at all. A single world government would be like a single multinational corporation. The current system of many countries is equivalent to the current sy
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
Oh piss off. He made a completely valid point and you killed the possibility of rational conversation with your bullshit.
Both points are perfectly valid and worthy of discussion.
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One world government is a horrible, horrible idea.
Yet it seems inevitable. Tribes became villages. Villages became cities became city-states became states became nations became trading blocks. There seems to be a pattern. The real question is will we have any say in the One World Government or will we deny that it is going to happen and allow it to be formed by politicians and CEOs.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
One world government is a horrible, horrible idea.
Yet it seems inevitable. Tribes became villages. Villages became cities became city-states became states became nations became trading blocks. There seems to be a pattern. The real question is will we have any say in the One World Government or will we deny that it is going to happen and allow it to be formed by politicians and CEOs.
You seem to believe that mankind will continue 'forward' in it's attempt to homogenize the planet. It is just as likely, perhaps more likely, that mankind simply cannot manage to create planet spanning governments but will instead devolve into smaller, more manageable groups. Which will later merge together over time, form nation states, form regional cooperatives, fight other regional cooperatives, form larger entities and collapse again.
That's more along what has happened historically.
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If you're living under a horrible government, what makes you think you'll be able to escape? See the Berlin Wall, North Korea etc.
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While an all-powerful world government would certainly not work, there are some global issues that should be handled by an international organization, like ecological problems or Internet regulations.
Old family? (Score:5, Insightful)
you already have a hereditary monarchy in the USA. Look at what happened when someone who isn't from an old family got into the top spot.
Did you mean Richard Nixon or Jimmy Carter or Ronald Reagan or Bill Clinton?
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>the European Union needs saving
we will save ourselves.
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In all honesty, the European Union (as the first true step towards one world government) needs saving more than the environment.
No, the EU needs to die. Put a stake in its heart. It was never a great idea in the first place. You can't have a federal Europe when you have so many differing languages and cultures. Canada can barely manage with two languages. A nation... and that was the eventual goal of the whole EU dream... has to have something in common other than the currency. You were never going to erase the French from a Frenchman in an effort to make him some generic "European".
A common market for Europe makes sense. But a comm
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
This concept of yours is based on...?
A nation... and that was the eventual goal of the whole EU dream...
Quite simply wrong. The EU, as a concept, was formed in the crucibles of WW1 and WW2.
You were never going to erase the French from a Frenchman
More hyperbole. Where exactly do you get all these kooky ideas from?
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Informative)
"This concept of yours is based on..."
Quebec nationalism see the Meech lake accord:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meech_Lake_Accord [wikipedia.org]
And...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quebec_nationalism [wikipedia.org]
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This concept of yours is based on...?
I'd say he get's it based on reality. If you live in Canada, you already know what he says is true. Then again the only reason why quebec sticks around is because the feds give them large sums of money. And the last time we had a national referendum on it, was just shy of the country at large telling Quebec to piss off and go away. That was after the ambiguous question to try and force separation.
That question was: ""The Government of Quebec has made public its proposal to negotiate a new agreement with
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GP's assertion was that my country can 'barely manage' two languages. We're managing that just fine.
As to the issue of Quebecois nationalism, it really gets blown out of proportion in other countries. Like any major voting bloc, they want their dicks stroked and so they make noise. Once a generation or so, they even like to make a big stink, as in the referendum (which I know is scary-sounding, but that's how things work when you don't delegate your democracy.)
It's just pol
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If you're Canadian, then you already know that we're not managing two languages at all. Quebec has "one language for us," just shy of outright banning english, with their own anti-english police force. Some provinces in Canada are english only, except federal government services. And a couple of provinces are English and french. Though most have bilingual services. It was far from politics in the 80's, in fact the original point of the 80's referendum was to deliberately twist and lie when making the qu
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Canada can barely manage with two languages.
This concept of yours is based on...?
You should really read this text, it describes the situation in Canada as civil war with juridical means [in-other-news.com].
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Canada can barely manage with two languages.
This concept of yours is based on...?
Oh, I don't know... Canada having a large secessionist movement [wikipedia.org] among the French speaking population perhaps?
A nation... and that was the eventual goal of the whole EU dream...
Quite simply wrong. The EU, as a concept, was formed in the crucibles of WW1 and WW2.
The whole point of the Maastricht Treaty was, in the words of Herman Von Rompuy, the President of the European council, "Ever closer union". The proposed EU constitution was supposed to further cement this, until those pesky elections got in the way.
Henry Kissinger once said in the 70's "If I want to talk to Europe, who do I call". R
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Which is a much bigger issue than just language. Also, do yourself a favour and read to the end of the article you linked, especially link #21. The issue is about as dead and buried right now as it's ever been in Canada's history, but thanks for concern trolling us.
in the words of Herman Von Rompuy, the President of the European council, "Ever closer union"
This is the weak shit we're using as arguments on Slashdot now?
That sure
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
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Reality.
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a common political structure? A disaster waiting to happen.
It might be just me, but I think that the EU politicians tend to make much more rational decisions than the European national ones. The current crisis is not because of the EU, it's because of the mistakes of certain national governments. And if the EU had more power, we might have been able to prevent it.
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The current crisis is NOT an EU crisis. It's and EMU crisis.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Informative)
Uh, a federation is a collection of states or empires that have agreed to come together on certain issues.
EU started out with the goals of guaranteeing food security for Europe with agricultural programs to stabilize prices, and also to boost international trade by harmonizing safety and export legislation. They also allowed free movement of people between countries without the bureaucracy of visa permits.
Problem now is that basic foods are now traded on world markets, manufactured goods come from China, and we get illegal immigrants from South of Europe migrating to certain islands on West Europe. At the same time the UK pays 18 billion pounds/year to help subsidize other EU countries like Italy. It's like the Roman Emptre but 2000 years on.
Re:Priorities (Score:5, Insightful)
EU started out with the goals of guaranteeing food security for Europe with agricultural programs to stabilize prices, and also to boost international trade by harmonizing safety and export legislation.
No. I hope you're American, because at least you have a reason to be clueless about the reason behind the existence of the EU. If you're british..... well, I hope the US won't save your ass next time the continent decides to blow up again.
Here's how the EU got started: http://europa.eu/about-eu/eu-history/1945-1959/index_en.htm [europa.eu] The start of the EU was a steel and coal industry treaty. It's purpose? To keep countries from trying to monopolize steel and coal to build the best armies. In short, the EU has its roots in a very simple idea: the only way to prevent Europe from being engulfed in another massive war is to economically integrate everybody. France won't start a war with Germany for the same reason you don't shoot your foot (on purpose, at least).
That is why everyone is up in a fucking tizzy over the possible breakup of the Euro, and consequently the EU. There WILL be another war in Europe in our lifetime if that happens. There might be one if the EU sticks around, but it's far less likely.
Re:Priorities (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't understand this. If there's one thing I've learned from the media (and from Slashdot in recent years), it's that Europeans are peaceful, enlightened New Humans, in contrast to us backwards, redneck, violent hicks in the states. Are you telling me Europeans have any concept of war?
Yeah right. Show me one example.
- aj
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Canada can barely manage with two languages.
Don't know about that, but Switzerland manages with four official languages. In the UK English is the default language, but there are minorities speaking Welsh, Scots Gaelic and Irish. In France you have (among others) native speakers of German, Basque and Corsican. Belgium (somewhat unsuccessfully) has to manage with three official languages: Dutch, French and German. Germany also has Sorbian as an official language in a (rather small) region. Spain has as co-
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What exactly is wrong with EU on such a grand scale? Even whiny moronic right in the UK that currently is in power is forced to acknowledge that EU is simply necessary at the moment, in spite of all their populistic bullshit.
Reality is, the future is in the hands of superpowers, and for European nations to be taken seriously in that environment, they will have to team up in some meaningful way.
EMU (monetary union) is the whole different story however.
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I hear ya....getting tough in the US.
More and more you're having to learn fscking spanish to be able to communicate in this country....is a PITA.
Why would you want one-world government? (Score:3, Insightful)
In all honesty, the European Union (as the first true step towards one world government)
Why on earth would you want a one-world government? The more you remove power from the people, the less popular sovereignty they have, the less representative the government becomes. Bureaucrats in Washington are bad enough at ignoring the people. You want international Bureaucrats running the world? Why?
This is the real world, not Star Trek. Newsflash: People in the world disagree with each other, and frankly, I'd be scared of a Star Trek-like world where everyone on earth agreed on things. I'm almost
Re:Why would you want one-world government? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think the main key point in Star Trek is that it's really easy to get a majority of people to agree to a policy of "Hey, lets use our totally awesome technology to make life comfortable for everyone on Earth, and use the spare resources for R&D, exploration, and defense."
For a greater or lesser degree of comfort, I would say that this has been a possibility for the people of Earth for some time now, and that the major obstacle is the entrenched power blocs who continue to consolidate their hold on our resources.
As Picard says in First Contact "We have an evolved sensibility". I wonder what needs to evolve the most? The 1%, who need to grow up enough to realize that they could be happy and fulfilled just making things better for people and forgoing the 2nd yacht with a gold toilet, or the 99%, who are starting to realize that they are really pissed off with the oligarchs. Or perhaps the trekkers who need to realize that fictional techno-utopia may be beyond the abilities of the human race.
The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:3, Interesting)
And here I would have thought that the biggest obstacle would be one or the other of the two nations that have already stated that they will NOT accept restrictions on CO2 emissions - China and India.
The USA isn't really likely to do so, but at least it's admitted of the possibility, unlike China and India.
Re:The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:4, Insightful)
The USA won't accept significant change either, but there's enough of an ecomental vote that some token pretence of greenwashing is politically astute. China and India are at least being honest, and that has value as it shows that there's no mileage in beggaring ourselves voluntarily now before [insert current buzzword for global warming] beggars us later.
It's a technological problem, it needs a technological solution. Just setting goals and targets doesn't achieve that. Throwing a trillion dollars at fusion power might, and that's essentially what it's going to take to get us off the fossil teat before the last scrap of coal has been dug up, gas extracted, and oil squeezed out of it.
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Well, as it stands now, the only FEASIBLE technological solution is world war 3, which would annihilate most of the manufacturing base and humans that consume resources. There really are no other feasible "technological solutions" that offer either a reduction of total amount of people on the planet or reduction of total amount of resources consumed by each person to a meaningful level in any feasibly fast way without severe social incentives.
There are however many social solutions and incentives, one of wh
Re:The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:5, Insightful)
The USA won't accept significant change either, but there's enough of an ecomental vote that some token pretence of greenwashing is politically astute.
What you consider mental illness is the mainstream view in Europe and the EU does a lot to pursue it, even to the point of forcing China and the US to clean up. ROHS is a good example, the EU banned hazardous substances in consumer products and China and the US were forced to comply because Europe is such a large and important market.
Frankly I find the attitude of many Americans completely detached from reality. When Germany, Japan and a few others decided to abandon nuclear power in favour of clean energy most comments were along the lines of "looks like the decided to go back to the stone age". Hyperbole perhaps but it appears many Americans really think that the mainstream green views of the rest of the developed world at actually insane and a road to certain ruin, fuelled by mass hysteria and extremism. Actually we see it as improving out environment (no-one who lives in a city likes pollution from combustion) and getting an early lead in new and lucrative technologies.
At least China just doesn't care beyond the point where it makes economic sense for them. The US actually appears at best to have accepted economic and social ruin through addiction of fossil fuels and labels anyone who dares question this policy as an extremist and mentally unbalanced.
It's a technological problem, it needs a technological solution. Just setting goals and targets doesn't achieve that.
Well the US is one of the most technically advanced countries in the world and hasn't made much headway. The EU and Japan have due to a combination of legally mandated targets and consumer demand.
Re:The USA is the biggest obstacle?? (Score:5, Insightful)
Ah, some of us Americans are actually engineers and whatnot. People need energy. You need to produce energy semi-locally. If you move power from Maine to California, you're going to lose a lot of juice along the way. This is very important, because reliability can be more important than just the base cost of electricity production.
A power grid needs large, cheap, reliable electricity generation. Solar/wind are not (yet?) reliable, even if they could scale cheaply. Reliable as in "It WILL make X, on demand, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%." Tidal/geothermal may pan out in the scaling, availability and cost. We'll see, and we should explore it. Hydro, coal and nuclear are RELIABLE. That is why we are dependent on them for electricity. Base cost is not everything.
Nuclear power currently is the cleanest and safest power source that can scale, is highly available and cheap enough. Safest, if you factor number of deaths per TWh. We can build reactors that are even safer, cheaper and more efficient, and very much should. Being environmentally clean is a form of efficiency, of course. Problem is, America and the world is filled with too many folks with superstitious beliefs regarding nuclear power. But we cannot do without nuclear power. As a result, we are stuck with aging, marginally safe reactors. Largely because of anti-nuclear activists who are attempting to create a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Don't get me wrong. Anything involving nuclear power should be monitored very closely. It does have danger, and only a fool would think otherwise.
Big surprise, any specific industry has considerations that are complicated. Simple "clean energy is our only consideration" positions are nice and all. Some of us have to actually keep the lights on while the ideology debate rages on. All I ask is you do your homework, and counterbalance your ideology with education. I don't necessarily want you to agree with me, just be informed enough to actually have a knowledgeable opinion.
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Ah, some of us Americans are actually engineers and whatnot. People need energy. You need to produce energy semi-locally. If you move power from Maine to California, you're going to lose a lot of juice along the way. This is very important, because reliability can be more important than just the base cost of electricity production.
This is no longer a big problem, especially now that we have efficient non-mechanical ways of converting between AC and DC. In fact the EU is looking at building solar thermal plants in north Africa with transmission back to Europe. EU countries also regularly sell each other electricity, transmitted over long distances from country to country.
Solar/wind are not (yet?) reliable, even if they could scale cheaply. Reliable as in "It WILL make X, on demand, with a guaranteed uptime of 99.99%."
They are in fact 99.99% reliable, more reliable in fact that nuclear due to lower maintenance requirements. Solar thermal works 24 hours a day, even with cloud cover.
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Expecting China and India to abide by a regime wherein they have to trade emission credits with people who have a 100 year head start on the industrial revolution was probably always going to be a non-starter.
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I agree with you: the biggest problem now are China and India. It's no longer correct to put the blame entirely on the US.
That said, if the US would get of their ass, then together the West could probably force China and India to move as well. They are both dependent on trade with the West. (And the other way round, to be sure - but that gives both sides some leverage, no side has to accept entirely what the other one wants.)
The Economy Trumps the Economy (Score:5, Insightful)
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I was going to say something similar. Perhaps when we start seeing the costs, we'll start working on the problem. Hopefully it won't be too late by then.
I don't understand why the environmentally-minded folks don't try to talk more about the costs. Basically, speak in a language that Conservatives/Republicans can understand, to get them to take actions in their own interest.
The way I like to put it is this: Imagine 9 out of 10 doctors tell you that you're going to die unless you take some specific actions.
Re:The Economy Trumps the Economy (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is the costs to the environment are intangible. There's no easy way to say emitting a tonne of CO2 costs $X. Or that cutting down a tree or removing carbon from the ground and putting it in the air (fossil fuels) how much it will cost.
Because of this, it's usually taken as free. If you're paying and your neighbour is not, then you're seen as a chump. This is especially true since the effects are often not seen until many years later.
Really, the environment is a tragedy of the commons. It's too big for any one individual to have a large effect, and the effect of many individuals is seen only years later. It's why ecosystems are so diverse and why there seems to be an organism for every job (enough that disrupting one can have untold effects).
But even though humans are forward-looking people (generally), the environment is just something that's too big to comprehend, and our minds and models (including economic models) are incapable of understanding it all.
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Global warming will have enormous associated costs... but not yet, so it somehow doesn't count?
I'd be interested to see if you have reasonable estimates regarding these costs. A lot of people I've seen argue that it would be better to invest the money now into growing the economy, and dealing with those problems once we have a stronger economy (for example, Thailand is going to be much more capable of dealing with flooding once they have the economic capacity to build better levees and dams).
But if you have numbers I would be very interested in seeing them.
Yes, we're boned (Score:5, Insightful)
Here's the problem in a nutshell: You have a global common resource, in this case the ability to put CO2 into the atmosphere before it heats things up so much that we all die (regardless of whether you think the current warming trend is anthropogenic, there's very little argument that there is some point at which too much CO2 is a problem). But the short-term incentives for each actor using that common resource are to use up as much of the common resource as quickly as possible, because if they don't then somebody else will, and we'll all be dead anyways.
Now, in most cases, commons problems are solved by government action. For instance, when the population of lobsters off the North Carolina coast dropped precipitously due to over-harvesting, the government put severe restrictions on how many lobsters everyone could get, and it sucked for the lobstermen, but saved the commons and allowed the industry to survive. But in the case of a global commons like the atmosphere, there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule, so each country has no choice but to use up the common resource as quickly as possible, collectively racing to disaster.
And it doesn't help that both of the worst offenders in this department, the US and China, are firmly committed to the path of destruction.
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Well, the way they probably see it, they're firmly committed to the path of "prosperity" (that is, using up as much of the commons as possible as fast as possible). It's the other side of the same coin, I realize, but it better explains their positions -- and why they are unlikely to change them.
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"Here's the problem in a nutshell"
The problem in a nutshell is capitalism, countries will do everything to save their wealth over doing what needs to be done. This is what we get when we turn a political economic model into a religion.
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:4, Insightful)
"Nothing to do with capitalism - just good old fashioned geopolitics"
Nonsense, things like oil spills happen because companies are only spend the minimum they can on safety. This is a result of the PROFIT MOTIVE and hence capitalism there is massive incentive to do things as cheaply and badly as possible for maximum profit and this is common knowledge. Corporations externalize costs and download risks because the model itself fundamentally leads to such outcomes we keep learning this lesson over and over again There's REALLY EXISTING capitalism (the human beings that actually make the decisions) and there's the theoretical capitalism that exists in your head. In the real world companies will do all sorts of bullshit and this fact has never been proven wrong by those who wish for utopian capitalism. You americans are really illiterate religious bunch when it comes to free market ideology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deepwater_Horizon_oil_spill [wikipedia.org]
It's like you've learned nothing from the bailout:
See here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bP362CWj2fo [youtube.com]
Here:
http://dailybail.com/home/there-are-no-words-to-describe-the-following-part-ii.html [dailybail.com]
And here:
http://www.dailybail.com/ [dailybail.com]
You need to get a clue buddy. Your ignorance of what has occurred just recently is off the charts.
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I'd be more impressed by this line of argument if the communist nations hadn't been worse polluters than any corporation ever dreamed of being.
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Not necessarily. Capitalism with significant control over it can manage it's resources. Take a look at oil wealth in US - it makes a brilliant example. US has domestic oil to last decades if not centuries, and it would be cheap. But smart people agreed that it's much better to burn someone else's oil first, and save US oil for when oil in other parts of the world will start running out and become difficult to get.
US spends a shitload of resources to keep enough production from other countries to be sold to
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The Soviets were some of the worst polluters ever. Not even counting stuff like Chernobyl, you have things like the Aral Sea which was completely devastated and there are a number of abandoned polar nuclear lighthouses, which are as bad as you can imagine.
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there's nobody who has the ability to enforce that kind of rule,
So maybe the Nazis had it right?
Suggestion to moderators: 20% funny, 30% troll, 50% insightful.
Re:Yes, we're boned (Score:5, Insightful)
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in this case the ability to put CO2 into the atmosphere before it heats things up so much that we all die
No scientist thinks this will happen. It's hard reasonably determine your course of action if you don't have an accurate view of the results of your various choices. Hyperbole serves nothing but to cloud your vision.
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Regarding the original article: good, it should die, it's a shitty agreement.
Is it really an environmental policy agreement? Then any state that has or will have measurable amounts of industry should be constrained by it.
Or is it a state-actor-level welfare bill, where the 'haves' are expected to either constrain their actions or spend money to help the have-nots? If so, then let's call a spade a spade and argue honestly about whether China really deserves "poor little developing country" status.
In regard
So full of shit and a fool as well. (Score:4, Informative)
We hit 20 tonnes and have dropped to 17.5 by 2008. [wikipedia.org] Considering that Electricity Generation accounts for more than 41% of all of US emissions and our coal % is dropping, then it is a CERTAINTY that we will continue to drop. I know that just in Colorado, we are killing a number of our coal plants and replacing them with Natural Gas, wind and solar PV.
Hell, it terms of amount that has dropped, we are one of the best out there and better than many other western nations.
Germany went from 12 to 9.6 which makes them LESS than us.
Canada has gone from 17.5 to 16.4 (1.1)
UK went from 10.3 to 8.5, which is less than 2 tonnes per person savings.
Ireland went from 11.3 to 9.8 (yeah, like that is major cut).
France went from a high of 7.1 to 6.5(yeah, with all the nukes there, they are REALLY making major changes).
Japan has stayed right around 9.5-10 (no growth, but no cuts either)
And yes, there is still plenty of growth out there.
South Korea is at 10.6 and continuing to grow (why? To make it possible to dump on the market economically).
Australia has gone from 16.9 to 18.9 (i.e. they beat America)
Norway is at their second highest at 10.5, AND GROWING.
South Africa from a low of 6.6 to 8.8 and growing.
China? They have gone from 2.2 to 5.3 and have said that they have ZERO intentions of slowing. Worse, they are mostly on coal and will continue that. Yes, there is more hydro to come on-line, but not that much. But the REAL issue is that once OCO2 goes up there, we will see that emissions are 3x what we thought they were. The groups that have done 'measuring' announced it when they went over and emissions controls were turned on for it. When one group was allowed to QUIETLY monitor but not allowed to publish, they found out RADICALLY different results. And when it comes out, ppl are going to scream that OCO2 must be wrong, or that the AGW scientists were fool (and neither was true).
Note that nearly every single nation is on a growth curve and only a few are bring it down. And at the top of that is America. That differs from China, India, Brazil, South Africa, South Korea, Norway, etc. Hell, nearly all of EU except for France, is going to have loads of issues going down because they are tearing down their nuke plants.
The problem with kyoto and the fools that back it, is that it actually sends more manufacturing on over to 3rd world nations as well as China (china is NOT 3rd world). That means that production per tonne of CO2 CONTINUES TO INCREASE MASSIVELY, rather than drop.
The blame will NOT be USA. The blame are the idiots that scream that we must all adopt a protocol that has done LITTLE TO NOTHING TO DROP EMISSIONS. In fact, all I have seen is an outsourcing of jobs to 3rd world nations whose emissions then jump faster then the meager savings that were in the developed nations.
So, quit being a fool and look at the facts. Even when you use something as irrational as emission per capitia, America comes up selling of roses in terms of turning things around, while others, esp. those under kyoto and fast growth nations, stink to high heaven.
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Ppl here want to push the per capitia garbage. I just used the same metric that I have argued against to show that it is a totally worthless measurement. What I find interesting is that many here will argue that it is the 'FAIREST' of them all. Yet, in terms of ABSOLUTE PER CAPITA, America is absolutely at the top of the western nations to drop. And that does not even include the fact that we do not have a decent handle on our illegals. There is a good chance that our per capita is MUCH lower an
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But there are also places where gov getting in the middle has created problems. ... Removal of derivative trading boundaries.
Not that I disagree with your point, but I find it funny that you cite deregulation as a problem that government "causes". Most people would call that a *lack* of government.
There are many solutions to overreaching/unfair government, but anarchy is not one of them.
Huh?? (Score:3, Insightful)
Looks like some is upset that the USA realized the current Kyoto was a farce when refusing that sign that one.
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The point is that if USA was to sign, it would be MUCH easier to get India and China to sign on as well. Big worldwide agreements like that become easier and easier to get others to join the more big players are in already.
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"if USA was to sign, it would be MUCH easier to get India and China to sign on as well"
This is completely unsupported speculation. To my knowledge, these countries have never said, "Well, gosh. We'll sign it if the U.S. leads the way!"
Allow me to suggest that I have much more respect for these countries than you do, as I understand that they are perfectly capable of determining their own best interests.
- aj
Just not going to happen until (Score:4, Insightful)
They start erecting sandbags and levees around New York City and Washington DC. They the US won't just participate, but will be pushing the agenda with the threat of economic sanctions and possibly war to those who continue to pump out the greenhouse gasses.
And of course the response to anyone who says, 'Back in 2011 we told you so!' will be a not so diplomatic 'Shut up!'
Re:Just not going to happen until (Score:5, Insightful)
At the current rate of sea-level increase, in about 100 years, you'll need one row of sandbags around Washington DC or New York. And that's if you assume that both cities get water in the streets at high tide now (hint: they don't).
In other words, that particular problem is so far out in the future as to be safely ignorable right now.
If you are really concerned about AGW, I trust you're pushing for nuclear power plants to replace coal plants worldwide? Unlike entirely too many "environmentalists" who seem to think that electricity just happens, and that banning use of coal will magically cause paradise on earth....
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I'm pushing for using less energy. Period.
and the best way to reduce dependence upon it is to raise the price of it. Of course, democracies being what they are, the stupid and venal people will oust the leaders who have the gumption to do the right thing and replace them with spineless lackeys who sup at the trough of the lobbies.
Re:Just not going to happen until (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm pushing for using less energy. Period.
But that's not what the Kyoto Protocol was about. It was about, "Hey, you rich countries. Stop! Us poor countries need to go through our dirty coal plant and Cadillac with tail fins phase just like you did."
Bullsh*t! Modern, low pollution technologies are available to everyone. And in the final analysis, they tend to be cheaper as well (more efficient). Everyone needs to adhere to the same set of rules.
The alternative 'just use less' philosophy is based upon some crazy idea that 7 billion people can just live in yurts. That is so crazy its not even worth discussing.
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Modern, low pollution technologies are available to everyone. And in the final analysis, they tend to be cheaper as well (more efficient).
I'm not sure this is true........do you have examples of what you mean?
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"The alternative 'just use less' philosophy is based upon some crazy idea that 7 billion people can just live in yurts."
Yeah I don't get this either. All these thread commenters use terms like "wealth" or "consumption." Do they understand that they are talking about *standards of living*? This is the basic quality of life for everyone that we're supposed to be trying to *improve*. When you drain "wealth" from a society, it is the POOR who take in on the chin. It is the wealthy who have the money, education
Re:Just not going to happen until (Score:5, Insightful)
In other words, that particular problem is so far out in the future as to be safely ignorable right now.
That's exactly the type of short-sighted thinking that got us hip deep in shit in the first place. No regard for posterity because we'll be dead by then, right? What about the people who will have to live with the consequences of all our apathy, laziness and greed today? Fuck 'em? That's what you're saying. God-forbid that we as a species come together and do something for the good of the species, something without immediate payoff, something that might be hard.
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There's already an island nation where the highest elevation won't shelter them in a storm with the surge waves. Tide is one thing, tide combined with storm surges are quite another, as Japan's unfortunate Earthquake shows, coastal communities can greatly suffer from unforeseen circumstances / perfect storms - and great percentage of world population lives in costal cities or densely populated coastal provinces. One good storm at sea coinciding with high tide and New York City would be an interesting plac
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Pretty much.....yes.
I'm only here for a little while, and I want to make my short life as comfortable and pleasurable as I can while I'm here.
"I don't no what's going to happen man, but i want to have my kicks before the whole shit house goes up in flames ..."
-Jim Morrison
The ONLY international GHG framework (Score:4, Insightful)
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neither did a lot of the vikings
reason greenland is called greenland is because back then it was green, full of life and no glaciers
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Good, hair shirts won't save us (Score:2)
Kyoto is a "no you may not", and that doesn't play in the sticks. Enclaves of the super rich (hello) telling the struggling impoverished that they can't aspire to the same standard of living is a risible strategy. We're trying to tell the rural population of India and China that refrigerators and showers are a luxury that they should live without.
What we need is a "yes we can" of Apollonian proportions. Throw a trillion dollars at fusion, see if it sticks. Heck, throw five, or ten trillion at it. Bet
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Couldn't 5-10 trillion afford a mass switch to solar/wind? And that's based on well-established technology rather than theoretical physics.
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No, but they could switch to nuclear, which is one of the easiest way of cutting CO2 emissions to near-zero when it comes to power generation.
Example for reference: France.
It was a brain-dead plan from the beginning. (Score:2)
It always seemed like it was designed to punish wealthy polluters more than it was meant to end increasing CO2 concentrations and mitigate the consequences of of that CO2. What needs to be done is obvious:
1) Replace energy infrastructure with wind and solar (Nuclear isn't an option because people won't let the plants be built).
2) Replace the majority of automotive transit with electrically powered light rail.
3) Build appropriate flood control and irrigation infrastructure in countries where these are lackin
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The idea was that if you change the incentives around, you make those engineering projects seem more cost-effective, and thus more likely to happen.
It's the difference between getting more efficient gasoline engines by mandating 55 miles per gallon, versus getting more efficient gasoline engines by increasing gasoline taxes to the point where it's cost-effective to pay more for a car that gets 55 miles per gallon, causing car buyers to switch, causing car manufacturers to switch.
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No, it's the difference between your heavy handed, brain-dead ideas, and actually building a better car. It's the difference between being a bully, and being an inventor.
Bacteria in a Petri dish. (Score:4, Insightful)
We're supposed to be smarter, but really, not much difference when it comes down to it. Consume all the resources, over breed, destroy the habitat in which we live, die en masse.
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Vinaash Kale Vipreetaha Buddhi --during the time of destruction, we go against our intelligence.
Re:Bacteria in a Petri dish. (Score:5, Informative)
We absolutely shit where we eat.
We poison the land, the air, the sea.
We pour sewage, garbage and industrial waste just over the horizons and beyond the nearest hills, and don't expect it to come back at us.
We change the environment to the point that we're in danger of making a good chunk of the planet uninhabitable, but refuse to acknowledge it.
We deforest the planet, without thought to the fact that not only are we using up a renewable resource faster than it grows back, we're also chewing through the planet's primary carbon sink.
Don't shit in our nest? Absolutely untrue. As a race, we've taken the steroidal version of Ex-Lax, and are wallowing in our own filth.
We don't need no stinkin' humans (Score:2)
The environment and the planet will do just fine thank you very much.
As soon as people finish themselves off, the forces of nature will clean up the shit left behind by the upright roaches. Enjoy life while you can afford it. Soon enough even the wealthy will not have the resources needed to breathe.
KILL KYOTO. (Score:4, Interesting)
It is time for nations to put taxes on ALL GOODS based on the CO2 emissions (and ideally, later add in other pollution) from the nations where items come from. This means that they put the tax on their OWN goods as well. By doing this, it will force all nations to participate, esp. those with large economies or quickly growing by cheating. Measurements should be by the soon to be, OCO2 sat, rather than ppl playing games with GUESSING how much emissions is happening. In addition, it should NOT be tied to population, as that is not just error prone, but designed to encourage more growth (last thing we need). Instead, it should be tied to land (a fixed value), economic output (responsible for bulk of the emissions; this is esp. true when good times come, nations cheat even more), or some combination of these two.
Could it be (gasp!) Climategate? (Score:4, Insightful)
Throw in that the UAH temperature anomaly since 1981 -- evaluated with openly accessible methods from openly available datasets and not susceptible to e.g. UHI "corrections" liberally applied, unlike e.g. HadCRUT3 -- is a whopping 0.11C. That would be 30 years, call it a third of a century, and 0.11C net warming as of October. Over that time, CO_2 has gone from 335 ppm (Mauna Loa) to around 390 ppm. That is a 55/335 = 16% increase. Since the 1998 El Nino peak (and the end of the series of Grand Solar Maxima of the 20th century) global temperatures have gone down (or held nearly steady). The most pessimistic trending of post 1997 data is 0.2 C. During that interval CO_2 concentration went up around 8%. Even the IPCC is backing off from predictions of much warming "for a while" and of course everybody but Al Gore is sober enough to be able to see that there is no correlation between e.g. the frequency or energy in tropical storms and either the UAH (fairly reliable satellite derived) data or the God-knows-how derived HadCRUT data and especially not with raw CO_2 concentrations.
Now let's see. The earth's mean temperature is roughly 280 C give or take a bit. Let's assume that the thirty year anomaly is 0.28C, in rough agreement with UAH -- it won't matter for this argument. CO_2 up by 16%, T up by -- what would that be? Yes, that's right, by 0.1%! I won't even bother discussing climate sensitivity -- that's dead in the water right there! There are two things anybody can see from simple back of the envelope calculations, the sort one should do just to see if complex models (in the end) make sense. One is that 0.1% -- hell, 1% -- is surely within the bounds of natural variability for a tipped planet with warm, complex oceans, and the most cursory glance at temperatures over the entire Holocene stand is clear evidence that it is a lot larger than that, with or without human civilization. The other is that if 100% of that gain was pure response to CO_2 forcing without any confounding factors or fudge factors contributing, the noise from non-CO_2 fluctuations greatly exceeds this signal and we cannot explain the noise!. For the last decade, temperature trends haven't even had the same sign as a nearly 10% increase in atmospheric CO_2.
This leaves a CAGW enthusiast doubly damned. If solar state is irrelevant, decadal oscillations are irrelevant, oceanic heat reservoir forcing (with up to 1000 year timescales, so some fraction of the energy contributing to the current SST comes from sunlight that warmed the ocean when Columbus was sailing the ocean blue!) is irrelevant (and unpredictable besides), and volcanic aerosols over that decade irrelevant, then that leaves only CO_2 and the sign of the tempera
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Re:Good riddance? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a shell-game and always has been. Rich countries were supposed to pay for poor countries to pollute more heavily (because it was cheap) while they created less polluting technology that would trickle down.
It's no wonder it failed so spectacularly.
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From what I recall (correct me if you have better data), India has a major problem with distribution of power generation. They have a very large amount of small and extremely polluting (relative to amount of power produced) power plants. That's not just in terms of CO2, we're looking at far nastier local pollutants as well.
I believe in A LITTLE warming (Score:2)
When the "scientists" say that there is no evidence for warming, but we should believe in it anyway [in-other-news.com], I'd say it's a religion.
Actually I'm a bit between the tables as I believe that higher CO2 levels might make for a slightly warmer climate, but I don't subscribe to the "Florida will be gone" doomsday scenarios.
Indeed, it looks like we have already reached the plateau - We have warmer weather than we had 40 years ago, but it doesn't seem to get any warmer.
Too bad, I guess I will be modded down by both sides now...
Re:Is global warming science or a religion? (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, if give credence to the whole peer review thing, and acknowledge the fact that 97% of the world's scientists say it's real and caused at least in part by man:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/sciencefair/post/2010/06/scientists-overwhelmingly-believe-in-man-made-climate-change/1 [usatoday.com]
Then it's science.
In fact, I'd argue that it is deniers who are going for the faith based approach. Something like believing that hiding under the blanket will protect you from the monsters under the bed.