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Carbon Dioxide Emissions Fall Worldwide In 2009
Hugh Pickens writes "The Christian Science Monitor reports that the good news is that emissions from burning coal, oil, and natural gas fell 1.3 percent compared with emissions in 2008 primarily because of the global economic downturn and an increase in carbon-dioxide uptake by the oceans and by plants on land. One big factor was La Niña, a natural seesaw shift in climate that takes place across the tropical Pacific every three to seven years, where the climate is cooler and wetter over large regions of land in the tropics, encouraging plant growth in tropical forests. However the bad news is that even with the decrease in emissions the overall concentration of CO2 rose from 385 ppm in 2008 to 387 ppm in 2009, as concentrations continue to rise even as emissions slip because even at the reduced pace, humans are pumping CO2 into the atmosphere faster than natural processes can scrub the gas. Many countries have agreed in principle to try to stabilize emissions at 350 ppm by century's end, which would result in a 50 percent chance of holding the increase in global average temperatures to about 2 degrees C over pre-industrial levels."
They passed a regulation that made it illegal to deny a mortgage application even if the citizen was too poor to pay it back. Hence a run-away boom.
Bullshit.
The Community Reinvestment Act (originally passed in 1977, long before Clinton though revised numerous times since then) made it harder to avoid making loans for housing in the same neighborhoods that the banks were getting savings from, but it never required mortgages to people who could not afford them. Most of the "sub-prime" loans were made outside of the CRA. On average, "sub-prime" loans made under the CRA fared better than loans made outside of the CRA. The CRA did not cause the investment bankers to slice and dice bad loan portfolios and package them up as "safe" investments. The CRA did not give stupidly high ratings to those bad loan packages. The CRA did not sell credit default swaps back and forth on those companies with bad loan portfolios until there was a recursive dependency with no chance of paying off in case of default.