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Scientists Fear Impact of Asian Pollutants On US
During the Olympics we discussed the international monitoring effort as China shut down factories and curtailed automobile travel in an attempt to reduce pollution. Now reader Anti-Globalism sends in a story that reveals that monitoring effort to be ongoing, with a bigger mandate: assessing the impact of China's pollution on the US. In fact the problem is bigger still because, as one researcher put it, "It's one atmosphere." Scientists are finding that pollution from, for example, Europe can travel right around the globe in three weeks. "By some estimates more than 10 billion pounds of airborne pollutants from Asia — ranging from soot to mercury to carbon dioxide to ozone — reach the US annually. The problem is only expected to worsen: Some Chinese officials have warned that pollution in their country could quadruple in the next 15 years. While some scientists are less certain, others say the Asian pollution could destabilize weather patterns across the North Pacific, mask the effects of global warming, reduce rainfall in the American West and compromise efforts to meet air-pollution standards."
Asian pollutants come to the US without a penny in their pocket. Within a year, they usually have a thriving business.
... the solution is simple. Just forbid imports from polluting Chinese factories.
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
kettle.
Isn't the US still number one polluter or did China overtake recently? Either way the per capita pollution is still worse in the states by a hefty margin. Talk about being hypocritical.
They're learning the art of capitalism from the best.
Unsafe cost-cutting isn't just a Chinese thing, you know.
partisans on the left, partisans on the right, nationalists of every nationality...
please shut the fuck up
the earth is our planet, and we must steward it
this applies to you on the left: a hands off attitude to mother gaia is complete bullshit in a world of 6 billion technologically inclined homo sapiens
this applies to you on the right: yes, human activity actually has an impact on our planet's climate, and yes, we must do something about it. we are sorry you are in denial on this subject. please learn to adapt to reality
furthermore, it does not matter who fucked up our environment, it simply matters that we must manage it, all of us. talking about blame is simply a desire to avoid responsibility. we all have the responsibility for our planet
we must must find ways to turn up the thermostat, we must find ways to turn down the thermostat, and then, we must actively do this. we have plenty of time to adjust and anticipate and counteradjust our manipulations. the scaremongers wish to talk about run away processes, but we are very much in the middle of a fluid and forgiving climate model. no atmosphere would have survived this long on earth were it so fragile and susceptile to runaway change. millenia of abuse from volcanoes and sun cycles and life processes has proven our atmosphere to be quite rugged
but not invulnerable, and certainly totally indifferent to our well-being and our need to grow crops. the earth has no problem turning into tundra or desert. but we have a problem with that. so let us actively manage the atmosphere to stay within comfortable parameters. this is of course completely artificial. the natural evolution OR human-made greenhouse gases migth dictate that the atmosphere go to a hellish extreme at some point. who cares WHY it might drift to an uncomfortable fringe state, natural or man-made, are we to simply sit back and suffer and wait for things to get comfortable again in a couple of thousand years?
no. we are mankind. unlike other animals, we do not adapt to our environment. we wear clothes, build huts: we adapt our environment to us. in this way, we conquer the taiga, and conquer the sahara. therefore, we must begin to actively engineer and manage our atmosphere to our liking, to homo sapiens comfort level. which is, pretty much as the climate is right now globally. freeze the status quo for all eternity
who CARES who is to blame, if anyone. active management is simply what we must begin to do. obviously, this should be a world body, something attached to the un. meanwhile, if we simply sit around passing the buck, blaming something else, nothing gets done, and we all go to hell. literally, in the case of climate change
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
no, but they did have to shutdown traffic through Midtown. The effects of this (other than security and traffic management) were a 20-25% reduction in childhood asthma as measured by the CDC.
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That study had such crap methodology it should be dismissed offhand..
1) Not a year over study, they compared two three back to back to back 4 week periods (not year over)
2) The study covered the five counties around Atlanta which as a whole saw little change in traffic patterns not just the county in which traffic was actually effected.
3) It measured the decrease of 1.8 cases per day via medicade accounting not hospital records
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None of this is not to say that we don't pollute and that car pollution is noxious but to compare what goes on in Beijing to Atlanta is like comparing locking your kid is his basement with giving them a midnight curfew.
"Ahh! Arrogance and stupidity in the same package, how efficient of you!" --Londo Molari
Well, as I recall, in Athens, things were pretty bright. I don't recall seeing a good shadow this last olympics. Additionally, the last time I was in china, I did not see the sun for 4 weeks. And no, its not "fog" its pollution so bad that when it rains, the streets and buildings get covered with a film of black stuff.
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
If you consider pollutants as a consumption issue, rather than as a production issue, then USA, being the largest consumers, should take some of the environmental responsibility too: That electronic gizzmo cost you $100 + your share of environmental "guilt".
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Overregulation is mostly the doing of companies
1)Pollute
2)New regulation
3)Hire lawyer to fight new regulation
4)Lawyer find a loophole in the regulation so one can continue polluting while respecting the
letter of the regulation.
5)Regulators close the loophole, increasing the word count of the regulation.
6)Repeat 4 and 5 100 times
7) Regulations are now 10000 pages long.
8) Complain about the red tape you contributed creating by not obeying the spirit of the regulations in the first place.
Of course this is nothing new. Not long ago, Japan was "the place that produced cheap crap". Now Japanese labor is relatively expensive and Japan offshore their work. Same thing is happening in Korea and many other places too.
What really has to change to ward of fear of diminished resources is for people to stop linking quality of life with material consumption. When you're starving then it makes sense, but right now obese people outnumber starving people so there is no food shortage, there is a consumption problem. It really needs people to stop using excessive consumption as a pill for their social ills. Getting a new cellphone every year != a high quality of life.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
All of that is well and good, but it's so much more enlightened crack on the U.S. while excusing other countries.
There has to be a huge disconnect from reality to think that our environmental policy is equivalent to the total disregard that the Chinese government shows. <sarcasm>I'm sure that you can walk into any Chinese factory and see their MSDSs, I'm sure that if 5 gallons of fuel is spilled at a Chinese gas station they have to go through the same remediation steps as in the U.S., and I'm sure that there are toys and everyfuckingthing else made with lead in the States.</sarcasm>
I been all over the world and, aside from Western Europe, Canada, Australia and the U.S., the disregard for pollution in the rest of the world is so bad that when you get home your fucking clothes smell like diesel or sulphur. The people who posted that shit above have obviously never been to China or any other developing nation.
Indeed. The US would have far more influence in the world by simply not being so embarrassingly hypocritical. (One of many, many examples: Bush telling the Russians that they have no right to invade other countries. Gag. Cringe.)
You wrote a lot of words, made a lot of false assumptions, and attempted to perpetuate misinformation about human impact on the environment (aka global warming).
In all that, you still reinforced my point by saying "So to recap, Sure the US pollutes more. That's because it does more."
Thank you.
Efficiency, restriction, and your other elaborate reasonings, have no actual impact on the REAL end result: We pollute more than those we complain about. The reasoning you provided are only diversion of focus from one topic to another. We could be talking about efficiency, but we aren't. We are talking about pollution production and whether one country ought point fingers at another country of equivalent pollution production.
If you want to change the subject to your ballpark, just say "I'm going to argue about efficiency, not real pollution."