Posted by
michael
on from the take-a-deep-breath dept.
geek42 writes "Looks like Russia has picked up where the U.S. failed: they've ratified Kyoto, and now it's going to be law (on Feb 16). The BBC has coverage. 'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.'"
Treaty Doesn't Even do what It Claims to do
by
Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Well they don't have to lower greenhouse emission. In the case of Russia, for example, hey can actually riase their current levels of emission since they had more meissions in 1990.
Also, most of the meat of this deal are based on carbdon ton credits. If the UK can't make their target they can "buy" a carbon ton of rainforest (defined as the amount of trees it would take to scrub 1 carbon ton from the air) and keep them from being destroyted to "even out" the carbon levels. Costa Rica is "selling" their national parks (which were not going to be cut down anyways) for this purpose.
This treaty is functionaly a joke if you are concerned about lowering greenhouse emissions.
Re:Treaty Doesn't Even do what It Claims to do
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saigon_from_europe
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Well they don't have to lower greenhouse emission. In the case of Russia, for example, hey can actually riase their current levels of emission since they had more meissions in 1990.
Why they should not be allowed to rise their CO2 generation? Because God gave some right to Americans to generate most CO2 per capita in world? American CO2 production per capita is far largest in the world. Christians should believe that all people are equial, or maybe born-again Christians in USA believe that they are better than others?
-- No sig today.
Who's the rogue state now?
by
nightsweat
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· Score: 1, Interesting
I just don't get the US's non-participation in this treaty. Cutting pollution is good for the economy. Making green products requires a high level of technological sophistication which is supposed to be our specialty, right? If everyone is getting green and we have the sophisticated products necessary we make money, right?
I guess we'll just have to be happy shipping fibers and scrap metal and timber to Asia and getting back manufactured goods.
200 years ago we were a materials colony and market for a power on the other side of the Atlantic. Now we're a materials colony and market for a power on the other side of the Pacific.
Some progress.
--
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Re:Who's the rogue state now?
by
nightsweat
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· Score: 4, Interesting
We arent' required to stop using those fuels, only to cut back on emission of carbon into the atmosphere. Scrubbers, filters, whatever you want can be used to meet those goals.
In fact, if the treaty's ratification were expected instead of resisted, there would be a capital spending boom as companies geared up for the treaty. Those that didn't want to convert would end up subsidizing the industries that did.
A recent clean burning coal generation plant in Clark County Kentucky produced the following benefits, according to the Kentucky Association of Electric Cooperatives:
Up to 700 construction jobs at an average of $60,000 a year.
$11 million in state property taxes in its first 20 years of operation.
$1 million in revenue for Clark County from payroll taxes during construction.
New market for up to 1.2 million tons of coal each year.
Sharply reduced emissions through the latest, proven clean-coal technology called "circulating fluidized bed."
98 percent less sulfur dioxide and 5 times less nitrogen oxide than a conventional pulverized coal power plant.
Enough electricity to supply 19 cities the size of Winchester - 278 megawatts - that's dedicated to serve the cooperative member-owners in Kentucky.
Kyoto isn't the business busting treaty you think it is. We'll see the effects over the next ten years as signatories lap American industries.
--
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Re:Consequences?
by
salvorHardin
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Perhaps one day there will be significant consequences. For example - nations who fail their Kyoto obligations will find their exports subjected to higher taxation in the rest of the countries which have signed up to the son-of-kyoto.
Until then...
Re:'Failed' Is a Relative Term
by
NardofDoom
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· Score: 5, Interesting
On the contrary, a lot of people think the US will suffer because they won't be in the newly formed 'carbon market.'
And, besides, this will force European nations to develop methods and technologies that produce clean power and/or use less fossil fuels. Then, when the oil really starts to run dry they'll have the upper hand, and China, India, and the US will be buying technology from them.
It's already happening in the emerging wind generation technology, where Denmark is the leader.
Think of it this way: Imagine all the coffee in the world was going to run out eventually, maybe soon. Wouldn't you be better off inventing a better way to make tea instead of a better way to make coffee?
-- You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
Horray for Science!
by
JBMcB
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· Score: 4, Interesting
'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.'
Fantastic! Just a couple questions: 1. What constitutes an "Industrialized" country? 2. What constitutes an "Emission" ? 3. Why those six particular greenhouse gasses? 4. Why 5.2%? Why not 10.2? Or 2.7? 5. Why 1990 levels? Why not 1980? 1994?
I tried to glean the answers from the protocol itself: http://unfccc.int/essential_background/ky oto_proto col/items/1678.php
And, well, it's unreadable legaleese. It's like an obfuscated code contest, half the articles point to other articles and those point to other paragraphs. It looks like there's about two paragraphs of substance in it's 20 pages.
This doesn't mean Republicans hate clean air and throw caution about potential global warming concerns to the wind.
Out of curousity, what exactly has the Republican executive branch done in regards to global warming (or as they refer to it "climate change") in the past 4 years and what are they proposing to do in the next 4 years?
I'm Canadian. We ratified Kyoto, we have a healthy economy. We have a social safety net, and a large federal surplus. We have universal health care. Our unemployment rate is a little higher than the US but we are doing extremely well, thank you for asking.
-- This is not a sig.
Re:Or they'll have until only 2022... (etc.)
by
wa5ter
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· Score: 4, Interesting
A commonly held misapprehension.
In the UK, you don't have a gun, the police call out an armed response unit and shoot you in the back of the head for carrying a table leg in a plastic bag.
It is easy to say "Kyoto treaty will cause lost jobs" but much tougher to prove it.
It's only tough for those that don't understand economics and blindly follow the liberal/environmentalist party line.
If anything, initiatives like the Kyoto treaty will create demand for cleaner technologies and upgrades.
This is the old theory that if we demand cleaner technologies it will not hurt the economy because we'll be spending money to invent and deploy those technologies. That's a short-sighted interpretation.
Let's say you have an energy plant that employs 10,000 people and generates power for 100,000 consumers at a cost of $100B (all made up numbers). Now let's say they are subject to certain environmental restrictions to become "cleaner." They are forced to raise the price of their product to, say, $120B and $20B is being spent on cleaner technology which employs, say, 2,000 people.
So how has the economy been improved? Instead of 10,000 people being employed by $100B of electric bills, 12,000 people and $120B are now required. More people and more money is required to produce the same amount of electricity. And the 2,000 people that were added are not doing something else that could have a useful contribution to the economy. The industry and ecomomy have become less efficient and the 2000 additional people to pull it off may have been able to do something that would have materially helped the economy.
Feel free to say "It's worth it to save the environment" but please don't pretend that implementing environmental regulations will help the economy because that is B.S.
Force Grandfathered Coal Fired Plants to Modernize
by
Black-Man
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Clinton waited until the last month of his 8 year administration for the EPA to draft changes to the grandfathering of coal fired plants and the Clean Air Act. Bush cancelled that directive and has since instituted a new directive. And the utilities with these plants have moved forward with plans to add scrubbers.
You just don't submit legislation or directives without a plan by the utilities to implement. And I think that is where the greenhouse gas issue has to be treated with "credits". Utilities can buy tracts of forestland and keep it as such - i.e. no logging. There is no magic bullet technology to convert coal-fired plants to non-greenhouse gas. It just doesn't exist!!
The only reasonable thing that can be done along with the "credits", is to raise minimum requirements for MPG in automobiles and trucks. I see that happening during this administration.
The carbon market
by
siskbc
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· Score: 4, Interesting
On the contrary, a lot of people think the US will suffer because they won't be in the newly formed 'carbon market.'
Those people are math-challenged, or those who are trying to spin. The US would have, for the forseeable future, been a buyer on the carbon market. So yes, we'll be out of the carbon market, in the sense that we won't be paying other countries for the privelege of doing what we're doing now.
As for Russia, they did not sign out of altruistic purposes. They did because their current carbon emissions are over 30% below that of 1990, the benchmark for establishing the carbon market. This is the case not because they have developed clean fuel, or learned to reduce consumption, but because their economy completely imploded. So basically, Europe won't change much, nor will Russia, but the rest of Europe will end up paying Russia money.
That's why Russia ratified. It's free money. Why wouldn't they do it?
some thoughts on this
by
khallow
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I have opposed the Kyoto protocol for several reasons.
The Kyoto protocol was based on some dubious science. While it's pretty clear that human activity has boosted CO2 levels to record levels, and there's strong evidence that global warming is occuring, the two aren't properly linked. For example, it hasn't been shown that reducing CO2 levels will reverse global warming. Another possibility is that increasing solar output is responsible for global warming not human activity. There's some evidence that the IPCC study (I am unable to find the "first assessment" report on the web) that the Kyoto treaty is based on was presented in a misleading light (eg, the summary of the report doesn't agree with the body of the report).
Second, only reduction in CO2 production is considered for the Kyoto treaty. Some work has been done on carbon sequestration. While these methods may prove infeasible, it seems absurd to ignore them in the treaty.
Further, developed countries have to cut back, but underdeveloped ones do not. I wonder how long this disparity can continue before we see countries withdraw from the treaty. In particular, I suspect that Russia will withdraw once it has entered the WTO (apparently the carrot used to lure them into the treaty by the EU).
No cost/benefit analysis has been performed. Is it really better to restrain economic activity rather than to deal with the costs of global warming due to greenhouse gases? The apparent reduction in economic activity that would be experienced by the EU (the most likely ones to comply with the treaty) might mean a significant drop in global standards of living.
Wow, how is it that so few people realize...
by
Tickenest
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· Score: 2, Interesting
that Russia ratified Kyoto pretty just solely to get support from several EU nations in their attempt to join the EU? They didn't do it out of some desire to help the environment. It was politics. (Even NPR's story about Russia's ratification said that this was the reason.)
-- This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
The argument goes (and I'm not saying I agree with it, in fact I don't) like this: If you upgrade a plant to new technology, it will become more efficient than it was. So along with the pollution controls, which are a waste from an economy point of view, you also get better efficiency to offset this. So the new plant would NOT cost $120B per 100,000 consumers served (100 as before, plus 20 in wasted overhead) to serve 100,000 consumers. It would cost about $100 still (80 or so for improved efficiency, plus 20 in wasted overhead). (Again, just like yours, these numbers of mine are made up.)
If you are going to criticize a point, you really should criticize the actual point being made, not an invented strawman of it. In this case the right way to critisize it would be to shoot down the premise that the newer plants would be efficient enough to have that effect.
My problem with Kyoto is that it measures pollution produced but doesn't compare it to products produced. When a Canadian buys an automobile made in Detroit, he is contributing just as much to the US industrial pollution figures by doing so as a US citizen buying an automobile made in Detroit is.
I do think an environmental treaty was needed, but Kyoto wasn't it. By being punative toward countries with large pollution, it is simultaneously punative toward countries with large economies. What would be better would be if the punative measures were based on the RATIO of pollution to economic benefit produced. If one small factory only outputs $100,000 into the economy, and yet it pollutes just as much as a factory that outputs $5,000,000 into the economy, then its pollution is less justifiable. We should be looking at pollution as being like a cash payment - how much benefit will this pollution buy us? If it is a large enough benefit, it becomes more justifiable.
--
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
Re:Irony
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 0, Interesting
How many 'other countries' are giving aid to countries abroad?
As a percentage of GDP, the USA gives less in aid than almost all other developed nations.
As a real number rather than a percentage the amount makes your reply look stupid as it probably exceeds the GDP of your own country.
How many other countries rush in to defend their allies to the death?
Rush in? Tell that to the victims of the Blitz. Where was the USA when Poland was invaded? When the tanks swept into Paris? The USA only got involved in WWII when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
Yes, rush in. If the Germans hadn't been so silly as to declare war after the Japanese made their cowardly attack then you might have got to play with them all by yourselves. In case you've forgotten (or never knew in the first place) there was a strong isolationinst movement in the United States during this period since we had just come through a massive depression. A lot of the American people didn't want any part of the problems they percieved to be as "someone else's problems." They just wanted to mind their own business and get on with their lives. Sort of like Europe now.
How many other countries liberate people from dictators?
The USA helped install General Pinochet, a dictator with a fondness for torture, in the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile. Ironically, the date of the coup was September 11.
Doesn't mean we don't still do the occasional liberation from dictators. And besides, if the dictator is our dictator or plays nice with us what's the problem? Especially if he gives us nice kickbacks from illegal oil sales... WAIT A MINUTE!!! He was our dictator and giving you guys kickbacks not us!!! That SOB!!! Time for him to go.
How many other countries lead by innovating?
The USA has used the Echelon global surveillance system for the purposes of industrial espionage, to give its failing corporations an unfair advantage over more-competitive foreign operations.
Of course we know the French and Germans have never, ever, ever even harboured the slightly remotest possibility of a suggestion of the merest hint of a thought about doing such a thing.
How many other countries allow their people to own property?
Most of them, in fact, Russia included.
Seems to me this is a rather recent innovation on Russia's part. Hopefully one they will continue to endorse for the foreseeable future. But if they decide it is no longer desireable and seek to isolate themselves from the West once more I'd strongly reccommend their buffer zone extend a bit closer to the Atlantic this time, perhaps up to the ocean itself.
Re:IF Global Warming were not due to man made caus
by
Teancum
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Who knows? Perhaps the Viking probes, the Mars Rovers, and all of the other dozen or so spacecraft that have crashed on Mars have released all of that pollution and nuclear waste to start damaging the environment on Mars as well.
There are a number of things that could be causing substantial changes in the Earth's global climate picture, and man-made pollution is only one of them.
I conceed that there are local environments that have changed substantially from 10,000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, and that local environment is different directly due to human influence. Witness Los Angeles, where the first settlement in that location died off to the last person due to a lack of water, and now there is a city of over 10 million people living there (with suburbs, etc.) It is a city that wouldn't exist except for modern (20th century+) technology. Cities like Ur and Basra have also changed their local environment, and in those cases the changes are positively ancient in nature, because the original changes happened several thousand years ago.
There are also some very notable situations where the local environment has not only improved, but improved so substantially that criticisms are totally unwarrented. Most notable in this regard is Pittsburg, PA, where in 1880 the smoke was so thick that you couldn't see more than 1/2 a city block anywhere within city limits. And the Ohio river was so polluted that every fish in it was dead, with oil slicks a very common sight, and almost no plant life at all along the banks of the river. If you go to that same city today, with many more people living there than in 1880, the skies are almost always clear except when it rains, and the rivers are clean enough to fish in (I'm not sure I'd try to eat them, but at least the fish are living there now). I could give similar stories about Minneapolis, NYC, Liverpool, and other 19th Century industrial centers where the environment is in much better shape on a local basis now than in the late 19th Century. And this is stuff we have data on, unlike the 19th Centry satellite telemetry monitoring the ozone hole in Antartica.
Re:Consequences?
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tepples
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Why in the world should the U.S. (or any other country) willingly give up competitivity to other countries?
Trade sanctions. Watch some country with a big market impose import tariffs on products from non-Kyoto countries.
Re:Consequences?
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Anonymous Coward
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· Score: 1, Interesting
That would be illegal if that "big market" country is also a WTO member. Which it would be.
Re:So who's signed it?
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Idarubicin
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Are these the same senators that passed PATRIOT and the DMCA?
Quite. The vote on the USA PATRIOT Act was 98-1 (the lone dissenter was Feinstein, D-CA), and the DMCA passed unanimously (99 senators voted for it).
Since the Senate has shown such excellent judgement on these other issues, we can no doubt trust that their rejection of the Kyoto Protocol was equally well-reasoned and based entirely on rational scientific investigation.
Does anyone seriously believe that Senators read (or even look at) most of the bills and treaties on which they vote?
-- ~Idarubicin
Re:So who's signed it?
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cozziewozzie
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Sadly, that's not the only treaty the US is conspicuously absent from:
- Convention on the Rights of the Child. Here the US is in the respectable company of Somalia and nobody else. - The Landmine Ban Treaty (would hurt the weapons industry). - Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty - Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty - Basel Convention on hazardous waste - Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention - International Criminal Court
You can try to justify not signing Kyoto through bunk science claiming that greenhouse gasses are good for you and make your children more clever, but the fact of the matter is that whenever the world at large signs some treaty that would make the world a better place (even if it is only symbolic), the US, more often than not, chooses not to give a fuck. Not the first or the last time.
Now mod me into oblivion.
Re:Consequences?
by
farble1670
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· Score: 3, Interesting
what % of the world must disagree with the US before we start doing some self examination to see if we've gone wrong somewhere?
this reminds of a person that goes around claiming everyone is an asshole. what's more likely? everyone he meets is an asshole, or that he's the asshole?
there are real, concrete reasons americans are hated thoughout the world. most of them stem from our unfair use of power, and our unfair consumption of the world's (no, not just those on american soil) resources.
even if none of this appeals to your sense of fairness, it should appeal to your sense of self-preservation. being the most despised nation in the world does not bode well for our longevity. sure we can womp on iraq. but what if we had to deal with korea at the same time? and maybe throw in iran?
It looks even worse if you look at how emissions have changed since 1990. While Western and Eastern Europe and China have reduced their levels of emissions, the US and Japan increased theirs by 13% and 12% respectively between 1990 and 2002.
Environmental FAILURE
by
Mulletproof
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· Score: 3, Interesting
"Looks like Russia has picked up where the U.S. failed..."
It's amazing what ones choice of words can tell you about the person who wrote this story. Failure? Failure assumes one wanted to be involved in the first place. No, don't be so self-centered, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about national policy in general. The US didn't want to be involved in Kyoto period. There was no failure. There was no effort, policy or want to join Kyoto. And as long as we're being unbiased, maybe it was because of studies such as this:
The Sun is Getting Hotter Global warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research. A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.
Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtm l?xml=/ne ws/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/i xnewstop.html
Or this:
Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high
The Sun, Stanford University Sunspots are plentiful nowadays A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.
This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.
Sunspots have been monitored on the Sun since 1610, shortly after the invention of the telescope. They provide the longest-running direct measurement of our star's activity. The variation in sunspot numbers has revealed the Sun's 11-year cycle of activity as well as other, longer-term changes. In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface.
This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. Ice core disc, Epica Ice cores record climate trends back beyond human measurements It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/386975 3. stm
Or possibly even (and slightly more combative):
Global Warming Activists Studiously Ignore History's Cycles of Warming and Cooling The latest pseudo-scientific parlor game is pretending that the Little Ice Age didn't happen. We're supposed to ignore the historic reality that the world's mean temperatures dropped sharply by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit from about 1300 AD until at least 1850 AD and fell perhaps a freaky 9 degrees below today's average temperatures in the 13th century.
Let's pretend this well-documented spasm of freezing cold, advancing glaciers, and terrible storms did not freeze the Viking settlers on Greenland to death or create Europe's "year without a summer" in 1315, when crops failed and created massive famine. The silly game of "hide the Little Ice Age" is being played to support the g
Re:Japan has more CO2 credits than the US...
by
Maltheus
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Yeah, I just got back from Kyoto and Tokyo. I could hardly breath in Tokyo because of the air pollution. I actually ducked into some smokey bars just so that I could breath freely at times. The sky was nothing but haze all throughout the country. They shouldn't have spare credits. The US has much cleaner air. Although, I haven't been to California in quite some time, I can't imagine it being as bad as Tokyo. NYC is much better in any case. Nice country though, aside from that.
Carbon dioxide is not odorless. It literally smells like pure pain, at high enough concentrations. The same olfactory nerve cells responsible for the sense of smell will send "a sharp sense of pain" to the brain if, for example, you take a big whiff of dry ice. Lung tissue will react the exact same way.
Out of curousity, what exactly has the Republican executive branch done in regards to global warming (or as they refer to it "climate change") in the past 4 years and what are they proposing to do in the next 4 years?
about as much as the Democrats have done.
Ah, but which party has had almost complete congressional, executive and judicial control for the past four years? Now your smart-ass remark just sounds juvenile.
Re:Consequences?
by
St.+Arbirix
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· Score: 1, Interesting
So the U.S. creates an organization open to all countries in order to fight Communism, the Cold War ends, that organization (which no longer has a "lion's share of its operation" needing to be done) gets stacked with anti-U.S. nations, and now it's shame on the U.S.?
I understand what you mean though. The U.N. has done a good bit of adapting since its primary purpose fell apart. One part you didn't quite get right though: "Unless things change with the way the US does business, it's going to find itself alone when bad things start to happen." That "alone" you speak of isn't going to be economic, we're just too loaded with resources. No, it's likely going to be if the U.S. removes all the other countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Well they don't have to lower greenhouse emission. In the case of Russia, for example, hey can actually riase their current levels of emission since they had more meissions in 1990.
Also, most of the meat of this deal are based on carbdon ton credits. If the UK can't make their target they can "buy" a carbon ton of rainforest (defined as the amount of trees it would take to scrub 1 carbon ton from the air) and keep them from being destroyted to "even out" the carbon levels. Costa Rica is "selling" their national parks (which were not going to be cut down anyways) for this purpose.
This treaty is functionaly a joke if you are concerned about lowering greenhouse emissions.
I just don't get the US's non-participation in this treaty. Cutting pollution is good for the economy. Making green products requires a high level of technological sophistication which is supposed to be our specialty, right? If everyone is getting green and we have the sophisticated products necessary we make money, right?
I guess we'll just have to be happy shipping fibers and scrap metal and timber to Asia and getting back manufactured goods.
200 years ago we were a materials colony and market for a power on the other side of the Atlantic. Now we're a materials colony and market for a power on the other side of the Pacific.
Some progress.
the major advances in civilization are processes which all but wreck the societies in which they occur - A.N. White
Perhaps one day there will be significant consequences. For example - nations who fail their Kyoto obligations will find their exports subjected to higher taxation in the rest of the countries which have signed up to the son-of-kyoto.
Until then...
And, besides, this will force European nations to develop methods and technologies that produce clean power and/or use less fossil fuels. Then, when the oil really starts to run dry they'll have the upper hand, and China, India, and the US will be buying technology from them.
It's already happening in the emerging wind generation technology, where Denmark is the leader.
Think of it this way: Imagine all the coffee in the world was going to run out eventually, maybe soon. Wouldn't you be better off inventing a better way to make tea instead of a better way to make coffee?
You have two hands and one brain, so always code twice as much as you think!
'Industrialised countries will have until 2012 to cut their collective emissions of six key greenhouse gases to 5.2% below the 1990 level.'
y oto_proto col/items/1678.php
Fantastic! Just a couple questions:
1. What constitutes an "Industrialized" country?
2. What constitutes an "Emission" ?
3. Why those six particular greenhouse gasses?
4. Why 5.2%? Why not 10.2? Or 2.7?
5. Why 1990 levels? Why not 1980? 1994?
I tried to glean the answers from the protocol itself:
http://unfccc.int/essential_background/k
And, well, it's unreadable legaleese. It's like an obfuscated code contest, half the articles point to other articles and those point to other paragraphs. It looks like there's about two paragraphs of substance in it's 20 pages.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
This doesn't mean Republicans hate clean air and throw caution about potential global warming concerns to the wind.
Out of curousity, what exactly has the Republican executive branch done in regards to global warming (or as they refer to it "climate change") in the past 4 years and what are they proposing to do in the next 4 years?
I'm Canadian. We ratified Kyoto, we have a healthy economy. We have a social safety net, and a large federal surplus. We have universal health care. Our unemployment rate is a little higher than the US but we are doing extremely well, thank you for asking.
This is not a sig.
A commonly held misapprehension.
In the UK, you don't have a gun, the police call out an armed response unit and shoot you in the back of the head for carrying a table leg in a plastic bag.
Maybe I've had my head up an orifice for all my life, but could you cite a credible source for your "50% in 50 years" claim?
That just sounds like extreme hyperbole to me, but if it's true, it's a real eye-opener.
K thx bye
Slashdot still doesnâ(TM)t support Unicode after it was added to the HTML standard in 1997.
It's only tough for those that don't understand economics and blindly follow the liberal/environmentalist party line.
If anything, initiatives like the Kyoto treaty will create demand for cleaner technologies and upgrades.
This is the old theory that if we demand cleaner technologies it will not hurt the economy because we'll be spending money to invent and deploy those technologies. That's a short-sighted interpretation.
Let's say you have an energy plant that employs 10,000 people and generates power for 100,000 consumers at a cost of $100B (all made up numbers). Now let's say they are subject to certain environmental restrictions to become "cleaner." They are forced to raise the price of their product to, say, $120B and $20B is being spent on cleaner technology which employs, say, 2,000 people.
So how has the economy been improved? Instead of 10,000 people being employed by $100B of electric bills, 12,000 people and $120B are now required. More people and more money is required to produce the same amount of electricity. And the 2,000 people that were added are not doing something else that could have a useful contribution to the economy. The industry and ecomomy have become less efficient and the 2000 additional people to pull it off may have been able to do something that would have materially helped the economy.
Feel free to say "It's worth it to save the environment" but please don't pretend that implementing environmental regulations will help the economy because that is B.S.
Clinton waited until the last month of his 8 year administration for the EPA to draft changes to the grandfathering of coal fired plants and the Clean Air Act. Bush cancelled that directive and has since instituted a new directive. And the utilities with these plants have moved forward with plans to add scrubbers.
You just don't submit legislation or directives without a plan by the utilities to implement. And I think that is where the greenhouse gas issue has to be treated with "credits". Utilities can buy tracts of forestland and keep it as such - i.e. no logging. There is no magic bullet technology to convert coal-fired plants to non-greenhouse gas. It just doesn't exist!!
The only reasonable thing that can be done along with the "credits", is to raise minimum requirements for MPG in automobiles and trucks. I see that happening during this administration.
Those people are math-challenged, or those who are trying to spin. The US would have, for the forseeable future, been a buyer on the carbon market. So yes, we'll be out of the carbon market, in the sense that we won't be paying other countries for the privelege of doing what we're doing now.
As for Russia, they did not sign out of altruistic purposes. They did because their current carbon emissions are over 30% below that of 1990, the benchmark for establishing the carbon market. This is the case not because they have developed clean fuel, or learned to reduce consumption, but because their economy completely imploded. So basically, Europe won't change much, nor will Russia, but the rest of Europe will end up paying Russia money.
That's why Russia ratified. It's free money. Why wouldn't they do it?
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
The Kyoto protocol was based on some dubious science. While it's pretty clear that human activity has boosted CO2 levels to record levels, and there's strong evidence that global warming is occuring, the two aren't properly linked. For example, it hasn't been shown that reducing CO2 levels will reverse global warming. Another possibility is that increasing solar output is responsible for global warming not human activity. There's some evidence that the IPCC study (I am unable to find the "first assessment" report on the web) that the Kyoto treaty is based on was presented in a misleading light (eg, the summary of the report doesn't agree with the body of the report).
Second, only reduction in CO2 production is considered for the Kyoto treaty. Some work has been done on carbon sequestration. While these methods may prove infeasible, it seems absurd to ignore them in the treaty.
Further, developed countries have to cut back, but underdeveloped ones do not. I wonder how long this disparity can continue before we see countries withdraw from the treaty. In particular, I suspect that Russia will withdraw once it has entered the WTO (apparently the carrot used to lure them into the treaty by the EU).
No cost/benefit analysis has been performed. Is it really better to restrain economic activity rather than to deal with the costs of global warming due to greenhouse gases? The apparent reduction in economic activity that would be experienced by the EU (the most likely ones to comply with the treaty) might mean a significant drop in global standards of living.
I don't know about the 50%/50 years stat, but this should be eye-opening enough:
http://www.iucn.org/redlist/redbook/
that Russia ratified Kyoto pretty just solely to get support from several EU nations in their attempt to join the EU? They didn't do it out of some desire to help the environment. It was politics. (Even NPR's story about Russia's ratification said that this was the reason.)
This is the NFL, which stands for "Not For Long" if you keep making those bulls*** calls.
The argument goes (and I'm not saying I agree with it, in fact I don't) like this: If you upgrade a plant to new technology, it will become more efficient than it was. So along with the pollution controls, which are a waste from an economy point of view, you also get better efficiency to offset this. So the new plant would NOT cost $120B per 100,000 consumers served (100 as before, plus 20 in wasted overhead) to serve 100,000 consumers. It would cost about $100 still (80 or so for improved efficiency, plus 20 in wasted overhead). (Again, just like yours, these numbers of mine are made up.)
If you are going to criticize a point, you really should criticize the actual point being made, not an invented strawman of it. In this case the right way to critisize it would be to shoot down the premise that the newer plants would be efficient enough to have that effect.
My problem with Kyoto is that it measures pollution produced but doesn't compare it to products produced. When a Canadian buys an automobile made in Detroit, he is contributing just as much to the US industrial pollution figures by doing so as a US citizen buying an automobile made in Detroit is.
I do think an environmental treaty was needed, but Kyoto wasn't it. By being punative toward countries with large pollution, it is simultaneously punative toward countries with large economies. What would be better would be if the punative measures were based on the RATIO of pollution to economic benefit produced. If one small factory only outputs $100,000 into the economy, and yet it pollutes just as much as a factory that outputs $5,000,000 into the economy, then its pollution is less justifiable. We should be looking at pollution as being like a cash payment - how much benefit will this pollution buy us? If it is a large enough benefit, it becomes more justifiable.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
How many 'other countries' are giving aid to countries abroad?
As a percentage of GDP, the USA gives less in aid than almost all other developed nations.
As a real number rather than a percentage the amount makes your reply look stupid as it probably exceeds the GDP of your own country.
How many other countries rush in to defend their allies to the death?
Rush in? Tell that to the victims of the Blitz. Where was the USA when Poland was invaded? When the tanks swept into Paris? The USA only got involved in WWII when Pearl Harbor was bombed.
Yes, rush in. If the Germans hadn't been so silly as to declare war after the Japanese made their cowardly attack then you might have got to play with them all by yourselves. In case you've forgotten (or never knew in the first place) there was a strong isolationinst movement in the United States during this period since we had just come through a massive depression. A lot of the American people didn't want any part of the problems they percieved to be as "someone else's problems." They just wanted to mind their own business and get on with their lives. Sort of like Europe now.
How many other countries liberate people from dictators?
The USA helped install General Pinochet, a dictator with a fondness for torture, in the 1973 CIA-backed coup in Chile. Ironically, the date of the coup was September 11.
Doesn't mean we don't still do the occasional liberation from dictators. And besides, if the dictator is our dictator or plays nice with us what's the problem? Especially if he gives us nice kickbacks from illegal oil sales... WAIT A MINUTE!!! He was our dictator and giving you guys kickbacks not us!!! That SOB!!! Time for him to go.
How many other countries lead by innovating?
The USA has used the Echelon global surveillance system for the purposes of industrial espionage, to give its failing corporations an unfair advantage over more-competitive foreign operations.
Of course we know the French and Germans have never, ever, ever even harboured the slightly remotest possibility of a suggestion of the merest hint of a thought about doing such a thing.
How many other countries allow their people to own property?
Most of them, in fact, Russia included.
Seems to me this is a rather recent innovation on Russia's part. Hopefully one they will continue to endorse for the foreseeable future. But if they decide it is no longer desireable and seek to isolate themselves from the West once more I'd strongly reccommend their buffer zone extend a bit closer to the Atlantic this time, perhaps up to the ocean itself.
Who knows? Perhaps the Viking probes, the Mars Rovers, and all of the other dozen or so spacecraft that have crashed on Mars have released all of that pollution and nuclear waste to start damaging the environment on Mars as well.
There are a number of things that could be causing substantial changes in the Earth's global climate picture, and man-made pollution is only one of them.
I conceed that there are local environments that have changed substantially from 10,000 years ago, or even 200 years ago, and that local environment is different directly due to human influence. Witness Los Angeles, where the first settlement in that location died off to the last person due to a lack of water, and now there is a city of over 10 million people living there (with suburbs, etc.) It is a city that wouldn't exist except for modern (20th century+) technology. Cities like Ur and Basra have also changed their local environment, and in those cases the changes are positively ancient in nature, because the original changes happened several thousand years ago.
There are also some very notable situations where the local environment has not only improved, but improved so substantially that criticisms are totally unwarrented. Most notable in this regard is Pittsburg, PA, where in 1880 the smoke was so thick that you couldn't see more than 1/2 a city block anywhere within city limits. And the Ohio river was so polluted that every fish in it was dead, with oil slicks a very common sight, and almost no plant life at all along the banks of the river. If you go to that same city today, with many more people living there than in 1880, the skies are almost always clear except when it rains, and the rivers are clean enough to fish in (I'm not sure I'd try to eat them, but at least the fish are living there now). I could give similar stories about Minneapolis, NYC, Liverpool, and other 19th Century industrial centers where the environment is in much better shape on a local basis now than in the late 19th Century. And this is stuff we have data on, unlike the 19th Centry satellite telemetry monitoring the ozone hole in Antartica.
Why in the world should the U.S. (or any other country) willingly give up competitivity to other countries?
Trade sanctions. Watch some country with a big market impose import tariffs on products from non-Kyoto countries.
That would be illegal if that "big market" country is also a WTO member. Which it would be.
Quite. The vote on the USA PATRIOT Act was 98-1 (the lone dissenter was Feinstein, D-CA), and the DMCA passed unanimously (99 senators voted for it).
Since the Senate has shown such excellent judgement on these other issues, we can no doubt trust that their rejection of the Kyoto Protocol was equally well-reasoned and based entirely on rational scientific investigation.
Does anyone seriously believe that Senators read (or even look at) most of the bills and treaties on which they vote?
~Idarubicin
Sadly, that's not the only treaty the US is conspicuously absent from:
- Convention on the Rights of the Child. Here the US is in the respectable company of Somalia and nobody else.
- The Landmine Ban Treaty (would hurt the weapons industry).
- Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
- Persistent Organic Pollutants Treaty
- Basel Convention on hazardous waste
- Protocol to the Biological Weapons Convention
- International Criminal Court
You can try to justify not signing Kyoto through bunk science claiming that greenhouse gasses are good for you and make your children more clever, but the fact of the matter is that whenever the world at large signs some treaty that would make the world a better place (even if it is only symbolic), the US, more often than not, chooses not to give a fuck. Not the first or the last time.
Now mod me into oblivion.
what % of the world must disagree with the US before we start doing some self examination to see if we've gone wrong somewhere?
this reminds of a person that goes around claiming everyone is an asshole. what's more likely? everyone he meets is an asshole, or that he's the asshole?
there are real, concrete reasons americans are hated thoughout the world. most of them stem from our unfair use of power, and our unfair consumption of the world's (no, not just those on american soil) resources.
even if none of this appeals to your sense of fairness, it should appeal to your sense of self-preservation. being the most despised nation in the world does not bode well for our longevity. sure we can womp on iraq. but what if we had to deal with korea at the same time? and maybe throw in iran?
It looks even worse if you look at how emissions have changed since 1990. While Western and Eastern Europe and China have reduced their levels of emissions, the US and Japan increased theirs by 13% and 12% respectively between 1990 and 2002.
"Looks like Russia has picked up where the U.S. failed..."
It's amazing what ones choice of words can tell you about the person who wrote this story. Failure? Failure assumes one wanted to be involved in the first place. No, don't be so self-centered, I'm not talking about you. I'm talking about national policy in general. The US didn't want to be involved in Kyoto period. There was no failure. There was no effort, policy or want to join Kyoto. And as long as we're being unbiased, maybe it was because of studies such as this:
The Sun is Getting Hotter
G lobal warming has finally been explained: the Earth is getting hotter because the Sun is burning more brightly than at any time during the past 1,000 years, according to new research. A study by Swiss and German scientists suggests that increasing radiation from the sun is responsible for recent global climate changes.
Dr Sami Solanki, the director of the renowned Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Gottingen, Germany, who led the research, said: "The Sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures. The Sun is in a changed state. It is brighter than it was a few hundred years ago and this brightening started relatively recently - in the last 100 to 150 years."
Dr Solanki said that the brighter Sun and higher levels of "greenhouse gases", such as carbon dioxide, both contributed to the change in the Earth's temperature but it was impossible to say which had the greater impact.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtm l?xml=/ne ws/2004/07/18/wsun18.xml&sSheet=/news/2004/07/18/i xnewstop.html
Or this:
Sunspots reaching 1,000-year high
T he Sun, Stanford University Sunspots are plentiful nowadays A new analysis shows that the Sun is more active now than it has been at anytime in the previous 1,000 years. Scientists based at the Institute for Astronomy in Zurich used ice cores from Greenland to construct a picture of our star's activity in the past.
They say that over the last century the number of sunspots rose at the same time that the Earth's climate became steadily warmer.
This trend is being amplified by gases from fossil fuel burning, they argue.
Sunspots have been monitored on the Sun since 1610, shortly after the invention of the telescope. They provide the longest-running direct measurement of our star's activity. The variation in sunspot numbers has revealed the Sun's 11-year cycle of activity as well as other, longer-term changes. In particular, it has been noted that between about 1645 and 1715, few sunspots were seen on the Sun's surface.
This period is called the Maunder Minimum after the English astronomer who studied it. Ice core disc, Epica Ice cores record climate trends back beyond human measurements It coincided with a spell of prolonged cold weather often referred to as the "Little Ice Age". Solar scientists strongly suspect there is a link between the two events - but the exact mechanism remains elusive.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/386975 3. stm
Or possibly even (and slightly more combative):
Global Warming Activists Studiously Ignore History's Cycles of Warming and Cooling
The latest pseudo-scientific parlor game is pretending that the Little Ice Age didn't happen. We're supposed to ignore the historic reality that the world's mean temperatures dropped sharply by 2 to 4 degrees Fahrenheit from about 1300 AD until at least 1850 AD and fell perhaps a freaky 9 degrees below today's average temperatures in the 13th century.
Let's pretend this well-documented spasm of freezing cold, advancing glaciers, and terrible storms did not freeze the Viking settlers on Greenland to death or create Europe's "year without a summer" in 1315, when crops failed and created massive famine. The silly game of "hide the Little Ice Age" is being played to support the g
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Yeah, I just got back from Kyoto and Tokyo. I could hardly breath in Tokyo because of the air pollution. I actually ducked into some smokey bars just so that I could breath freely at times. The sky was nothing but haze all throughout the country. They shouldn't have spare credits. The US has much cleaner air. Although, I haven't been to California in quite some time, I can't imagine it being as bad as Tokyo. NYC is much better in any case. Nice country though, aside from that.
Carbon dioxide is not odorless. It literally smells like pure pain, at high enough concentrations. The same olfactory nerve cells responsible for the sense of smell will send "a sharp sense of pain" to the brain if, for example, you take a big whiff of dry ice. Lung tissue will react the exact same way.
about as much as the Democrats have done.
Ah, but which party has had almost complete congressional, executive and judicial control for the past four years? Now your smart-ass remark just sounds juvenile.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
So the U.S. creates an organization open to all countries in order to fight Communism, the Cold War ends, that organization (which no longer has a "lion's share of its operation" needing to be done) gets stacked with anti-U.S. nations, and now it's shame on the U.S.?
I understand what you mean though. The U.N. has done a good bit of adapting since its primary purpose fell apart. One part you didn't quite get right though: "Unless things change with the way the US does business, it's going to find itself alone when bad things start to happen." That "alone" you speak of isn't going to be economic, we're just too loaded with resources. No, it's likely going to be if the U.S. removes all the other countries.
Direct away from face when opening.