Slashdot Mirror

Let's be honest. This was a $40 billion dollar attack on the coal industry, revenge on the people of West Virginia for switching from Blue to Red. Nothing about the rule was done legally; the Obama administration claimed a $40B benefit for reducing "other pollutants" that the ruling didn't address. The Supreme Court threw out that approach, appropriately. So, this isn't a Trump ruling, it's a regulatory response to the Supreme Court decision (Michigan v.s. EPA) in June of 2015.

And, don't worry, the tens of billion of dollars in damage to our infrastructure is already done. That won't be rolled back; nobody trusts the EPA enough to put a few hundred million into building infrastructure. Total cost of implementation of MATS was over $20B for just the largest power producers, and that doesn't include the generating capacity that was thrown away.

These folks have done pretty damn well: https://www.edf.org/true-cost-... [edf.org]

And where are their estimates validated? How do you know that they calculated both costs and benefits? In particular, where do opportunity costs enter into the equation?

It's a bipartisan, science-backed effort. Of course, we can't have perfect accuracy with anything, but you can reflect the best currently available estimate,

The "best currently available estimate" is useless; we can't even predict the effects of changes to tax rates on revenue. The idea that we can calculate the global cost of climate change, attribute responsibility to emitters, and then tax them accordingly is beyond ludicrous.

Really? Who do you think can "accurately" calculate those externalities?

These folks have done pretty damn well: https://www.edf.org/true-cost-...

It's a bipartisan, science-backed effort. Of course, we can't have perfect accuracy with anything, but you can reflect the best currently available estimate, considering all the science (which itself accounts for uncertainty ranges, measurement error, etc) - and that is going to lead to much better outcomes than just sitting around and trusting that things will magically work themselves out.

An these deaths will occur in the third world because they are most dependent on food shipments from first world countries.

Because of the CO2 generated by shipping food? Let's do the math. We know that trucks emit 161.8 grams of CO2 per ton-mile of freight. If a person eats a ton of food per year, and if that food comes from 1,000 miles away, then that's 161.8 kg of CO2 per person per year in food shipping carbon emissions. If climate change costs 4 cents per kg of CO2, that's $6.47 per person per year, or a little under 2 cents per day.

So I think you've blown this way out of proportion.

Given the carbon circulation in the environment a a whole, cow burps are lost in the noise.

"The [livestock] sector emits 37 percent of anthropogenic methane... most of that from enteric fermentation by ruminants."

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...

"[Methane] is more than 100 times more potent at trapping energy than carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal contributor to man-made climate change. When considering its conversion to carbon dioxide over time its impact on an integrated weight basis is 84 times more potent after 20 years and 28 times more potent after 100 years."

https://www.edf.org/climate-im...

"About 25%of the manmade global warming we’re experiencing today is caused by methane emissions (EDF calculation based on IPCC AR5 WGI Chapter 8)."

https://www.edf.org/methane-ot...

It seems people who study this believe that methane is a significant factor in climate change, and livestock burpage is a significant factor in methane emissions.

Given the carbon circulation in the environment a a whole, cow burps are lost in the noise.

"The [livestock] sector emits 37 percent of anthropogenic methane... most of that from enteric fermentation by ruminants."

http://www.europarl.europa.eu/...

"[Methane] is more than 100 times more potent at trapping energy than carbon dioxide (CO2), the principal contributor to man-made climate change. When considering its conversion to carbon dioxide over time its impact on an integrated weight basis is 84 times more potent after 20 years and 28 times more potent after 100 years."

https://www.edf.org/climate-im...

"About 25%of the manmade global warming we’re experiencing today is caused by methane emissions (EDF calculation based on IPCC AR5 WGI Chapter 8)."

https://www.edf.org/methane-ot...

It seems people who study this believe that methane is a significant factor in climate change, and livestock burpage is a significant factor in methane emissions.

Your friends are not climatologists and have not been seriously looking at the data. Climate change in the last 100 years or so has definitely been caused by Man. The science over this is absolutely settled.

Now the consequences can be debated if you want, but most scientists agree that if mean temperature rise by another 2 degrees centigrade, we are in deep shit.

You are free to be as intellectually dishonest as you want, you are free to believe what you want and argue in whichever direction you want until you are blue in the face. You are free to fool yourself but you cannot fool Nature.

it's pointless trying to avoid exposure to "ANY level of lead."

Sure, but we can keep exposure down to undetectable levels - as we manage to do pretty well with adult foods. Again, not so much for baby foods.

It's the higher concentrations of lead which you have to worry about. So OP is correct that without knowing how much lead was found, it's pointless.

So why not read the source report that the article cites? The actual numbers are all right there (I quoted some in a different comment). But the overall conclusion, that there is more lead found in baby food, still leads to the not-at-all-pointless question of "Why?"

Just as a guess, I'd say because baby food is finely minced into a gruel, any contamination is spread throughout the product instead of just sitting on the surface where it can be easily washed off

Your guess doesn't explain why simple drinks like apple juice are more than twice as likely to contain detectable lead if they're produced for babies (55% of samples vs 25%). There are many other examples in the report, and in other citations from the Ars article.

Non-idiots would have simply checked the cited source, where all the numbers you're looking for are clearly displayed, before declaring it not worth reporting.

If you had, you'd see the 1993 FDA lead limit was no more than 6 micrograms/day for young children - and that e.g. baby rice cereal was found to contain up to 82 parts per billion. Which means that feeding your baby 100g of that cereal would already exceed the daily limit by 37%, without including other sources.

And again, you missed the whole point of the article, which was asking why baby food has more detectable lead in it than similar adult foods, especially as babies are so much more sensitive to its toxic effects.

...a report on Thursday found those pledges would see temperature rises significantly overshoot the threshold, with 3C of warming. Environmental groups urged governments to do more.

Oh, you mean like climate engineering to take positive steps to reduce the temperature and soak up excess carbon already up there and maybe prevent the damage already on track to happen? No?? That's so evil that we shouldn't even consider it?

How about nuclear energy? That doesn't fart out carbon, and then we can still use, you know, electricity rather than... "Unequivocally no" again? Oh, right, because Chernobyl happened that proves it can't work. I'm sure a similar nuclear disaster now is just as likely and would be much worse than a silly little 3 degree temperature rise.

So the solution is... wishes, everyone riding around on bikes, and moral superiority? Because it looks to me like we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. The rock of fossil fuel interests keeping us from actually doing anything before it's a crisis, and naive environmentalists groups who rule out actual solutions on the grounds that they might not be completely perfect.

So what's "noticeable"? The problem is that the changes occur so slowly we aren't likely to notice.

Yep we won't notice In case you're too lazy to read those, they go from pending flooding to already uninhabitable and cover descriptions of vanishing land due to rising seas over the last 80 or so years.

I live in a major city - we had our first major snowfall over two weeks ago and temperatures have been at or below 0C for nearly a month. There are still THOUSANDS of kilometers of land (many million square km) between me and the north pole, btw. Also, this snow cover will likely last until next May (8 months out of the year).

So, from this we can surmise that you live at least 3k km south of the north pole. Given that London or Tokyo are also just over 3000 km south of the north pole and aren't covered by snow for 8 months, we can also surmise that you live inland and possibly at altitude. You might just as well complain that you suffer from heat, year round snow, or daily rainfall and high humidity and live 13k km south of the north pole (all are possible, it's merely geography)

A warming trend seems like a good thing, and if you're telling me I'll live to see a point where we don't have winter like conditions for over two thirds of the year, we're all just going to laugh.

You could just move as it appears you severely dislike your climate instead of advocating that the rest of the world become potentially uninhabitable to make your apparently miserable location bearable.

The number I've heard kicked around is $40/ton of CO2.

https://www.edf.org/blog/2014/...
http://costofcarbon.org/faq

I'm sure you know about Westinghouse and Edison setting up parallel electricity networks in New York, but it was even more extreme for the telegraph. In 1850 there were 75 telegraph companies, ten of which served New York; in 1866 there was only one. ... The government mostly stepped in *after* these natural monopolies formed, to keep them from abusing their power,

False. Since you specifically mentioned New York, here's an article about how that technology developed. Specifically, it states that "To encourage growth in this new electricity infrastructure, New York, like all of the other states, protected the utilities’ investment by granting them an exclusive right to serve customers." (Emphasis mine.) Believe what you want about the importance of monopoly busting, but the sad truth is that for every common example people give of "natural" monopolies, the government had a hand in why the service in question is a monopoly market.

You could start by comparing the expenditures of a single "green" lobbying group, the "Environmental Defense Fund" of $120 million with the TOTAL lobbying dollars for all of the oil industry, which came in at about $71 million.

Why would you compare the **total revenues** (not even expenditures) for a group like the EDF with the lobbying expenditures of the oil industry? Let's see what they actually spent on lobbying... oh, about $940,000. Sierra Club? $280,000. Greenpeace? A laughable $23,387.

opensecrets.org can help you correct your numbers, if you actually care.

If the greenies and those making billions off of CO2 hysteria, like Gore,

1) Citation needed.

Well, let's see. You could start by comparing the expenditures of a single "green" lobbying group, the "Environmental Defense Fund" of $120 million with the TOTAL lobbying dollars for all of the oil industry, which came in at about $71 million. Of course, we've left out all the big ones like the Sierra Club, SELC, Greenpeace, etc. To see what it's really like here is a handy chart for you.

I agree. This anti-coal and nuke attitude is attacking base load power supply which is critical to the grid till either feasible energy storage is available. People don't realize that you need peak conditions for most renewables to be profitable and the environments that are usually suitable for those assets are from the populations they serve (transmission loss). Take a worst case scenario such as a winter storm: Cloudy for days (solar is out), the wind can blow so cold and be so hard that wind turbines are shut down so they don't destroy themselves. It's winter, so dams are prob shut down waiting for the spring thaw. Without coal and nukes, your left with nat gas. Now you have the nat gas infrastructure being sucked dry all at once where the storm is. We need to have a diversified power generation portfolio. Also, this shot power prices up today: http://www.edf.org/media/supre... It's not cheap being green.

without proof that the regulated activity will harm anyone.

Give me a break. What happens is the EPA acts based on scientific evidence like this:

The E.P.A., following the recommendation of its scientific advisers, had proposed lowering the so-called ozone standard of 75 parts per billion, set at the end of the Bush administration, to a stricter standard of 60 to 70 parts per billion.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/03/science/earth/03air.html?pagewanted=all and then the politicians caves in to industry. Mercury regulations were delayed 20 years despite that based on the scientific evidence.

EPA estimates that the new safeguards will prevent as many as 11,000 premature deaths and 4,700 heart attacks a year. The standards will also help America’s children grow up healthier – preventing 130,000 cases of childhood asthma symptoms and about 6,300 fewer cases of acute bronchitis among children each year.

http://yosemite.epa.gov/opa/admpress.nsf/d0cf6618525a9efb85257359003fb69d/bd8b3f37edf5716d8525796d005dd086!opendocument of course, now industry is suing to block the new regulations. http://www.edf.org/health/timeline-delay

My point was not to answer your question but to point out that this man should never have been taken seriously.

Now, for your question about climate models, do you mean predict "past WEATHER" or "past CLIMATE". Please clarify.

In any case, it's a difficult subject and I'm not an expert. I'll start you off with one link and you can befriend Google for the rest - but I suspect you already know where to look.

http://blogs.edf.org/climate411/2007/07/18/models_how_good/

You might have had me if it wasn't that gasoline engined cars cause around 1.2M deaths a year from accidents. I mean, in Toronto alone, they blame around 400 deaths a year on automobile emissions.

I mean, take your 740k cases of 'premature aging' - balance that against China's 750k premature deaths due to air pollution. While it's noted that most aren't due to air pollution from cars, it seems that a Chernobyl level event is along the order of 'once every 25 years' - leading to an annualized cost of ~30k/year. Assuming that the article from a anti-nuclear organization is true and not an over-exaggerated scenario(which, given that the numbers exceed that of most other oganizations, is probably the case). I don't really count most of the abortions because they were done in panic, more from the fear of mutation than the actual risk.

Gasoline engines, on the whole, are nasty, and sadly enough, it's fairly easy for me to come up with numbers comparable to the biggest disaster in nuclear history, on an annual basis.

The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking, not growing. It's losing volume, which is the only significant definition of size when one considers climate issues.

Albedo has no relevance recent research seems to indicate. What's the reasoning behind that again? Something to do with polar bear habitat shrinkage isn't it?

the ice caps are not melting. One is in a decline (the Arctic) and one is growing (Antarctic)

I wonder by which definition you say the Arctic ice cap is in "decline", but not melting?

The Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking, not growing. It's losing volume, which is the only significant definition of size when one considers climate issues. It's losing volume the only way a polar ice cap can lose volume, by melting. But, of course, you'll never know this if you have only one news source.

Warmer oceans cause increased water evaporation, which then precipitates as snow or rain. Considering that a large part of Antarctica is still well below freezing point, it's only natural that *some* regions of Antarctica have had more snowfall caused by global warming. Yes, global warming does cause both more snowfall and colder winters. Which is more than offset by hotter summers and increased ice melting.

You are assuming most of the new paper made from virgin fiber remains intact. In fact, most of it will be disposed of: Either incinerated or stored in a landfill. Landfill storage turns out to be problematic: "Quantification of methane emissions from landfilled paper is still imprecise, but if it is included, at the least, the yield, measured in terms of CO2 equivalents, will be increased by a factor of 2.5 compared with the CO2 emitted during complete incineration." [Wood in Our Future: The Role of Life-Cycle Analysis: Proceedings of a Symposium (1997) ]

Either way, paper is a net contributor of greenhouse gasses. Also note the original reference I chose was from a "green" paper company. Estimates from environmental groups, such as the Environmental Defense Fund Paper Calculator, indicate far higher net CO2-equivalent impact - 5882 lb CO2 equivalent per ton of copy paper according to the EDF, a ton more than Verso's estimate.

Well, third-hand smoke is considered by at least some docs to be a direct cancer risk.

The NYT doesn't say anything about peer reviews of the study though. Now it does list some of the substances that so called third-hand smoke contains but it doesn't mention what vehicle exhaust contains or the poisons that food is sprayed with. Nor does it say anything about the emissions from the paper industry.

Falcon

We don't know with any confidence that we are poisoning the earth. We know that we are having effects on it but we simply don't know if any or all of those effects are poisonous.

Really? When the recommended allowance of some fish is ZERO servings, i think it is pretty clear that we have poisoned the waters. http://www.edf.org/page.cfm?tagID=17694

Beluga whales are toxic waste

As for giving out children asthma, I have never seen a causation study blaming pollution for the cause of asthma.

It is probably because you haven't looked.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10674285
From the abstract: "...In asthmatics, epidemiological studies generally show a positive correlation between the particulate fraction of air pollution and increased morbidity, although roles for other co-pollutants (for example, ozone) are implicated as well. Direct experimentation using air pollutants, especially particles, to investigate their effects on humans or on animal models of asthma provides corroboration of the epidemiology and has begun to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms involved...."

Am I a "religious" environmentalist? Maybe. I don't really know what that means. And when i mentioned destruction/mutation of species, I should have been clear, that i also don't really care about the species pre se ... during the Cretaceousâ"Tertiary extinction event about 3/4 of species were extinguished. I just mentioned it as evidence of the poisoning of the earth.

I am not worried about the earth. The earth will be fine. Long after humans are gone, the Earth will still be around. I am only an environmentalist because I want to preserve the current beauty of the planet for future generations of humans.

Zealots are those who use faith instead of reasoning to determine their acts.

So this, this, and this are all based on faith? Zealots are fanatics. I'm telling you, I don't qualify. The 10 minutes it took me to come up with some links hardly qualifies me as a fanatic.

The "market" has nothing to do with global warming. Communist countries are no better than the west and are generally far worse in regard to their non-respect of the environment.

What communist countries? Please tell me you're not thinking of China as a communist country.

What "flaw" do you think you pointed out? The only flaws so far in your posts have been in your reasoning. Global warming killed the dinosaurs? Nope, dinosaurs lived in a time of globally warmer temperatures than those prevalent today and were in fact warmer than those forecast in other than the most extreme "the sky is falling"/"we are all doomed" global warming forecasts. The first entry for ":define budgie" on google is: budgerigar: small Australian parakeet usually light green with black and yellow markings in the wild but bred in many colors I, like Freeman Dyson am upset that people like you who are incapable of looking up a words are pushing politicians who know even less into spending our limited resources on what will ultimately turn out to be a minor problem compared to others that confront us.

Wtf are you doing here? I thought your ass was banned http://www.edf.org/article.cfm?ContentID=4407

I actually like dams too. The thing is, they often do things like screw up wetlands and mess around with fish like salmon which have to navigate the river.

1. Open source library of knowledge for developing nations (making the world's intellectual wealth available to all)
http://www.oneworld.org/globalp roj ects/humcdrom/
http://www.oneworld.org/globalprojects/& lt;/a>
http://www.oneworld .or g/globalprojects/humcdrom/copyrigh.htm
http://payson.tulane.edu:8888/
; http://www.globalprojects.org/
; http://www.humanitylibraries.net/ http://www.villageearth.org/
http://www.villageearth.org/ATLi bra ry/cdrom.htm

2. Open source knowledge management systems
http://www.bootstrap.org/
http://bootstrap.org/colloquium/ar chi ves.html
http://www.bootstrap.org/dkr/discussion /

3. Self-replicating space habitats (support trillions of humans in style without overrunning the earth)
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs/s ett le.htm
http://members.aol.com/oscarcombs /sp acsetl.htm
http://www.permanent.com/
http://science.n as. nasa.gov/Services/Education/SpaceSettlement/
http://www.luf.org/
http://www.ssi.org/
http://www.ssi.org/alt-plan.html http://www.spacedev.com/
http://www.spacehab.com/
http://www.kurtz-fernhout.com/oscomak/

4. Pursue the "Ecocity Berkley" vision in the book by that name by Richard Register and look for related visions of sustainable development
http://www.amazon.com/exec/ob ido s/ASIN/1556430094/
http://www.co-intelligence.or g/y 2k_commtyorgs.html
http://www.fuzzylu.com/greencenter/h ome .htm
http://www.ulb.ac.be/ceese/meta/sust vl. html
http://www.rmi.org/

5. Work towards ending the drug war and pardoning hundreds of thousands of Americans imprisoned on non-violent drug charges. (I believe drug use is wrong and should be avoided, and by all means as it is now illegal, so don't do drugs! But as with alcohol and tobacco and caffeine, drug abuse should be considered a medical problem, not a legal one (except when like DUI it hurts or puts at risk others directly)).
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pag es/ frontline/shows/drugs/
http://www.drcnet.org/facts/

6. Teaching tolerance and compassion
http://www.splcenter.org/
http://www.splcenter.or g/t eachingtolerance/tt-index.html

7. Open source educational simulations and simulation construction toolkits (one of the most meaningful ways to use computers in the classroom).
http://www.gardenwithinsight.com/ http://riceinfo.ri ce. edu/armadillo/Simulations/simserver.html
http://www.creativeteachingsite .co m/edusims.html
http://www.workingmodel.com/
http://www.idsia.ch/~andrea/simtools.h tml

8. Preserving biodiversity (when it's gone, it's gone forever)
http://www.tnc.org/
http://www.environment.about.com/newsissues/enviro nment/library/weekly/aa091700.htm

9. Develop any specific sustainable technology in energy (e.g. solar), recycling (e.g. recycle computers), materials (e.g. plastics from starch), society (e.g. participatory democracy & social justice).
http://www.google.com/sear ch? q=sustainable+technology
http://www.edf.org/issues/Recycling.htm l
http://www.sustainable.doe.gov/

10. Make corporations more accountable to human needs
http://www.adbusters.org/inform ati on/foundation/
http://www.adbusters.org/c amp aigns/charter/death.html
Previous link vanished, try instead:
http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.adbuste rs.org/ campaigns/charter/death.html+corporate+death+penal ty&hl=en
http://www.cwsl.edu/news/n_corpo rat e_death.html
http://monkeyfist.com/articles/340& lt;br> http://www.chaordic.org/

11. Reform the "Intellectual property" laws and their related organizations, perhaps so that copyrights are for a couple decades and most patents are for a dozen years and only for true innovations. Ensure that any IP developed with any government money is immediately put into the public domain.
http://danny.oz.au/fre e-s oftware/advocacy/against_IP.html
(Lots of other Slashot links!)

12. If you don't want to get you hands dirty volunteering your own time, look around and find good people (not organizations, although the people may be in organizations) already doing good things. Pick people with a track record of years of fighting for the common good or who have already made a major accomplishment demonstrating commitment and just anonymously give them $100K without strings attached. Example: Marty Johnson at Isles, Inc.
http://www.isles.org/mileston.html& lt;br> Find people just starting a career of public service or a charitable venture and struggling to do good things and give them $20K and tell them you believe in their promise and cause. Expect a bunch of the money to be wasted but give it anyway and learn how to give effectively. For ideas, look at the grantees list of any foundation. Then ask those people who they know who are just starting out and trying to do a good job.
http://www.beldon.org/grants2000_07.htm l

When I was about thirteen, I got about seven books out of the library on money thinking I wanted to become a millionaire. Six told me how to get rich (start a business and run it well.) One of them asked me "why do you want to be rich?" That is the one whose name I remember and the ideas in it have changed my life. For advice on setting a direction of what to do with wealth, read the Book "The Seven Laws of Money" by Michael Phillips and Sally Raspberry, especially the chapter on how foundations fail in their mission and how grants go to people who sound good but usually can't deliver (i.e. how hard it is to give money away).
http://www.seeingmoney.com/SevenLaws.ht m
http://www.hallbusi nes ses.com/biographies_primers/1420.shtml

My wife and I are working on a few of these issues ourselves (and a few example links are to our stuff). We make money contracting and spend it to "buy" our own time for making quality software the market can't or doesn't seem to want to pay for. Even without IPO riches, any competent software developer can make $75K-100K in today's market. Graduate students can live on $20K a year, and so can many software developers (kids make it harder) if they follow the path of Voluntary Simplicity. It's a question of priorities.
http://www.life.ca/subject/simplicity .ht ml
http://www.simpleliving.net/slj/ http://www.scn.org/earth/lightly/ http://www.thegarden.net/simplicity/

Voluntary simplicity leaves a lot of funds for doing good deeds - even if they are done on your own time by using your own money to take time off and develop open source software or do other worthwhile ventures. Or take a job that doesn't pay as well but involves helping an organization that you believe in.
http://www.idealist.org/

There are awesome things happening over the next twenty to forty years. According to Moore's law, desktop computers in twenty or so years will be a million times faster than today's. Already computers can drive cars somewhat well and identify vegetable better than humans.

http://www.research.ibm.com/resources/magazine/199 9/number_3/machine399.html ;

Other breakthrough innovations are happening in technological areas like energy, materials, nanotechnology, communications, agriculture, biotechnology, and robotics. Use your wealth to think deeply about what all this means and do something to ensure human survival with style.

It is saddening to see people spend so much money on less important stuff (another night club in this case). Now if it was a night club where these issues are discussed, then maybe it makes sense.

Capitalism without charity is evil, because capitalism only meets the needs of people with money.