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EU Ratifies Kyoto Treaty
An anonymous submitter sends: "Yahoo! News is reporting that all 15 member states of the European Union have just ratified the Kyoto treaty to cut greenhouse emissions by 8% over the next ten years (the US agreed to 7%.)"
IIRC, its not 7%, only 5% but below of the level of 1990. The final goal is 30%. Germany allready lowerd the emissions by about 10%.
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
Hmmm... China and India's combined CO2 emissions total about 70% of the United States levels as of 1995. Looky here.
Interestingly enough, their combined population is about 8 times that of the US. Don't blame the third world; while their industries are less equipped to deal with pollution control/reduction of any kind, the sheer volume of industries in more developed nations makes them much bigger polluters.
Oh, and sorry about the Geoshitties link.
Cato has the credibility of the Flat Earth Society, at this point. And the paper you linked to has no references to back it up, either.
a) It produces so much power at such a low (apparently) cost that it actively discourages the development and implementation of alternative truly renewable energy sources as solar, wind and water power. Just like with oil, we can run out of "nuclear fuel".
b) It leaves a highly toxic, radioactive and extremely expensive heritage to our children.
Actually, the biggest polluters are third world nations. The biggest polluters are nations like China and India who cannot afford to put in the more advanced technology of various industries to cut down on waste.
Basicly wrong, but the question is how you measure.
Do you measure in totals? Than probably China causes more CO2 "pollution" than e.g. Canada. If you measure per person than a US citizen produces about 100 times the CO2 polution a Indian citizen does.
Bottom line: 280M US citizens * 100 is not even close to 850M Indian citizens * 1.
If you switch from CO2 emissions to the word "polution" this indicates you are reffering to waste. In this case its true that countries like India and Taiwan produce far more waste than a country like germany per citizen. However if you compare now Italy or Switzerland with US
Another factor is that there will be some corporations, with already minimal profit margins, who will simply be unable to make such changes to their systems and would be forced out of business therefore possibly putting thousands of people out of work at a time.
You are free to make your laws for reducing CO2 emssion in any way. Only the bottom line counts. If you like to protect a certain industry from such a law you make the law accordingly.
This will immediately effect the U.S.'s economy, and inevitably the economy of both Europe and East Asian producing nations.
The number of people put out of work by lost jobs in existing industries will be compensated by the jobs created in new industries. Reduction of CO2 emissions means in the first place paying a reasonable price for energy. Currently a hughe amount of energy consumed in the western world is bought for ridiculous prices from antidemocratic regiemes in third world countries. (Anti americanism, anti globalsm, you have heared about that?)
If you start to pay a reasonable price for energy the energy costs get visible in the final products(and help the countries providing the raw resources to develop). Suddenly consumer prices get comparable or compeete wich each other. BTW: jobs will be crafted in industries where devices or processes for energy reduction are produced. Like insulation materials for houses, windmills solar cells, fuel cells, electric engines, H2 storing devices
An example for energy costs in endproducts: in germany we have a big discussion if all kinds of bottles and cans for drinks should have a deposite and get recycled.
A prime example is milk. We have basicly 3 compeeting containers for milk:
a) glass bottles which have deposite attached and get cleaned and reused
b) paper boxes with plastics at the inner side to make them water proof
c) a plastic sack, like a baloon, filled with milk
We had endless discussions which way is better for the environemnt. b) and c) get mainly deposited as waste. a) gets cleaned and reused as long as the bottles "look good" and then they get melted and new bottles are produced from the glass. c) is in rare cases burned (in waste burning power plants) or recycled to other plastic products.
Think about beer you should know that on (nearly) all bottles we have deposite in germany. But not on metal cans. Over the previous 5 years the sale of cans increades by about 100%. Customers enjoyed to buy a can and to throw it away when empty. Now we have the discussion if cans should get deposite also. For deposite collection facilities and transportation to recycle plants need to be set up.
For the cases above, a) to c) the discussion which kind of way is best for the environment never got into an aprooved or "scientific accepted" conclusion.
Problems are: energy consumed in transportation. Glass is more heavy than plastic sacks. So a truck carries more milk in plastic sacks for the same weight. Empty bottles need to be carryed back for cleaning and refilling, emty, consuming space on a truck for nothing. OTOH whine bottles have no deposite and are collected and transported as broken glass, not as empty bottles, and recycled by melting them and producing new bottles.
So the transport is better cost wise but the melting now takes energy.
Paper boxes with plastic inside are hard to recycle because you can't easy seperate the paper and the plastics later. If you can seperate them from the other waste at all. Plastic sacks are not easy to seperate from the other waste like paper boxes.
So, what to do? Well germany run mad in issuing laws how to treat waste.
It would have been far easyer to increase the energy costs
Instead of paying 50 cents for a gallon of milk, regardless in what containment we would then pay 90cents in containment A, 110 cents in containment B and 85 cents in containment C.
The customer would descide that containment B is to expensive. Simple.
The same was true for every product where a high energy consuming process for production is compeeting with a low energy process.
As energy is put into every stage of production, minig raw resources, refining raw resources to pure resources, mixing pure resources to first level products, creating parts, mounting parts to final products, and all the transportations in between the stages, we suddenly had much better competition of economies.
As the waste and energy interlock would be losened, far better living and working conditions for all workers involved would get established.
Anyway
angel'o'sphere
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
It produces so much power at such a low (apparently) cost that it actively discourages the development and implementation of alternative truly renewable energy sources as solar, wind and water power. Just like with oil, we can run out of "nuclear fuel".
With regard to developing so-called renewable sources: Continuing to burn fossil fuels is having the same effect. It's cheaper and already in place, so why switch? And what is wrong with saving money?
Solar power? Hmm, good choice, but do you know how they make solar cells? Current technology uses (IIRC) gallium arsenide crystals and fluorinated solvents. So there is a disposal problem there during manufacturing and at the end of working life. The sun only delivers 2400 watts / m^2 maximum -- do some calculations, you'd need a lot of cells to supply the average household, let alone business! And what do you do at night or on a cloudy day?
Wind power: the best solution until it shows up in your backyard. Which it will have to, again due to amount of power you can extract: the wind isn't always blowing, and you don't want to lose too much in transmission from the wind mill.
Water power: (GASP!) Tide power or river dams? Either way, the fish of the world thank you for your support!
It leaves a highly toxic, radioactive and extremely expensive heritage to our children.
But a relatively small amount compared to greenhouse gas emissions. Actually, an extremely small amount compared to the amount of coal we strip out of the ground. Go re-read my comment, it's possible to recycle waste now, and new designs will use fuel more efficiently. And do some research into the amount of natural radiation, you'll be surprised. We would never have discovered nuclear energy if there weren't so much uranium strewn about already...
Also, could you post figures to back up your claim that we'll run out of nuclear fuel?
Here's the text of the first article google pulled up about China's actual progress: DOMESTIC: World Bank Funded Research Contradicts China's Pollution Claims SUMMARY: (8/15) - New evidence funded by the World Bank contradicts China's claims that it is significantly lowering greenhouse gas emissions. Nobuhiro Horii, of Japan's Institute of Developing Economies, said coal mines in Hunan province that the Beijing government ordered closed were in fact kept open. Horii maintained talks he had with people in other provinces indicated the problem was nation-wide. Horii also said improving energy efficiency takes about a decade, and China's claims to be increasing energy efficiency in carbon dioxide production in much faster time are not credible. "Yes, China is increasing energy efficiency, but they are doing it slowly, like everyone else," he said. In April, the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in Berkeley, California reported that since 1996, China's energy output had fallen 17 percent and its carbon dioxide emissions had fallen 14 percent even as China's economy grew by 36 percent. That same month the European Union office in Beijing found that over five years, China had increased energy efficiency by 50 percent and diminished coal use by 30 percent. However, a report put out by the U.S. embassy in Beijing this month claims China's greenhouse gas emissions have hardly dropped any, if at all. And at a recent conference in Beijing, a Chinese scientist maintained that China will modify its coal consumption total for 1999, taking away half the reductions it previously claimed. Other research indicates China has underreported consumption of oil. Vehicle traffic in Chinese cities has approximately doubled every five years, yet China reported oil consumption increasing just 11.4 percent between 1996 and 1999. Zhou Dadi, director of the Energy Research Institute of the Chinese government's State Development Planning Commission, said while doubts about China's energy statistics are understandable, "we are clearly decreasing our coal consumption." (from uscpf.org)
Which part of But the Bush administration has instead announced policy changes likely to push them up by 30 percent by 2010 did you miss ?
Hmmm... China and India's combined CO2 emissions total about 70% of the United States levels as of 1995. Looky here [geocities.com].
Which by the numbers in the article would mean they accounted for 25% the amount of the industrial nations. (36% [from the story] * 0.70)
Considering the US only accounted for about 11% more of the industrial nation aggregate than that and it is the "biggest polluter in the world" maybe other countries ought to clean up after themselves before getting high and mighty? >64% of the stuff isn't made by the US.
That also goes to show what skewed nonsense these numbers are. Unless developing nations C02 is of some different nature than US created C02, the aggregate numbers should include it. By not doing so, you ignore that there are several other countries combined making as much pollution as the horrible US and greatly inflating the percent created by the US. In this case, the US's 23%, by only including 80% of the total C02 output, inflates the US percentage by nearly 25% from 18%. (23% * 0.80 = ~18%)
Also look at the huge difference in the US and other countries with ton/km. Shouldn't this sort of thing be sorted by amount of space a country takes up? The world would have ended if the US polluted half as much as Japan or Germany per ton/km.
With skewed numbers and "the sky is falling" apocalyptic rational, I'm left wondering if there isn't something else at work here.
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I'll forgive linking to Geocities, I think I had a site there in 1995 =)