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Pollution From Asia Affects US Climate
sciencehabit writes "China and India are some of the world's top polluters, with countless cars, factories, and households belching more than 2 million metric tons of carbon soot and other dark pollutants into the air every year. The pall hanging over the region has come to be known as 'the Asian brown cloud.' These pollutants aren't just bad news for the countries themselves. A new study reveals that they can affect climate thousands of kilometers away, warming the United States by up to 0.4C by 2024, while cooling other regions (abstract)."
And all the pollutants created in the USA gets dispersed on the wind to other places - as does the pollution from Europe and everywhere else on the planet. It's not that america is therefore suffering unduly - it's just that we should recgonise the world is a closed system and it's not a good idea to crap on each others doorsteps.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Rather pollution from US consumption affect the global climate.
Whatever it's pollution or animal slaughter it is the consumer who make the demand and got the power to choose.
The people in the US (and hence you could say the US) is the biggest polluters by far. And it make no sense to compare countries with differences in population size (I'm from Sweden so we never have to worry about pollution because we're such a small nation anyway?) but rather per capita.
If the Chinese and Indian people would live as the average person in the US I assume we would more than doubled the pollution? But they don't. And why should they who are far behind restrict themselves then people in the US doesn't?
I hate these kind of posts. The US consumers are the filthiest and they are the one who order all (well, not all..) that crap from China for instance. Stop complaining on people in China and India damnit.
You don't want global warming, pollution, ecological disasters and what not? Consume less. (Or rather just what nature provides on a local scale and take care about how you do it.)
This isn't news. There is already strong evidence indicating that circa 1970's/80's US pollution played a key part - if not the cause of - the 1980's Ethiopian Famine. I think people forget that we live in a fish bowl. Excuse the expression but what I shit you eat...and vice versa.
$action = empty(PHP) ? backToC() : unset(PHP) ; "when the concrete cases are understood, the abstractions are readily
There's always a misconception from people in the U.S. that China and India are the polluters of the world. Please understand that they are the ONLY countries left that can manufacture all the stuff we need at bargain basement price. They are the reason why we can have a RC car for $24.99 or $5 for a 4GB USB flash drive. The majority of the factories and cars in these countries are used to make stuff and deliver for us. The average citizen of these countries use about 1/10 of the energy and resources of any developed countries. If only that the rest of the world stops consumerism and start paying more, please don't bitch about the pollution. We made it happen.
Just like it wasn't forseeable that trading with China (read: getting cheap labor in exchange for IP and quasi-building up their infrastructure closer to 1st world standards) would mean we're just making our own competent competitors for resources and business in the next generation.
Next up: Captain Obvious Reports that Invading Iraq has not been a cost effective means to reducing terrorism.
Someone post a chart showing the world's oil consumption by country.
If, by any criteria, US does not top such charts, it's only because of outsourcing of manufacturing. Meaning - most of second-hand "smoke" is because of US consumption too.
Also, see this. Just for example, additional llustration:
http://www.cnbc.com/id/44781282/World_s_Most_Polluted_Countries
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
"Our emissions are actually quite clean"
Dude, US is the mother of polluters. I'll just consider you tried to enact Steven Colbert and made a joke.
Pollution and trash are NOT the same. Your streets can be sparkly clean and yet your air dirty as hell. That said, this article just reaffirms what we long known. Pollution is a global problem that affects everyone much like how cigarettes affects those next to you. That said, America is no saint either...
CO2 isn't smog. Smog is composed of CO, NO2, O3 and various particulate matter, all of which are substantially more dangerous than CO2 is.
I think the hope is that pollution standards will (continue to?) rise along with living standards in Asia, and at that point the West will already have developed certain practices and technologies that the newly developed countries can adopt. E.g. the price of PV panels has dropped significantly in the past years (along with the energy required to build them), fueled by an increase in demand in the Western countries. If it drops a bit more, it'll be cost effective enough to at least be a part of the strategy dealing with the rapidly increasing energy needs of the Asian countries. That's just the general argument and you don't need to "believe" in PV power generation to buy the argument itself.
Of course that's just one part of it, there's also the fact that despite much better environmental regulations, our per-capita emissions are still much worse (even you don't consider "exported" emissions via product manufacturing) and of course the fact that we've been emitting for a much longer time than the newly developed countries[0]. Those are moral arguments, the first one is more utilitarian -- e.g. even if you don't think per-capita emissions should be the important figure, the argument holds water.
[0] We have been emitting since the industrial revolution, that is. I wonder, though, considering the growth of both population and world economy -- 28% of the human hours lived were lived in the 20th century and, incredibly, "over 23% of all the goods and services made since 1AD were produced from 2001 to 2010" --, if the (CO2) emissions of the past 10 or 20 years don't exceed all emissions made prior to that.
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I think both of you might not be parsing his comment correctly. He says he's been living in Asia long term and looks around himself to see belching smoke and dumping factories. You've seen the "I'm European" part and connected it to looking around Europe to see smoke and factories. I spent a couple of years in China and saw nonstop belching smoke and dumping factories.
Whether the guy is an idiot, a troll, or just a dumbass doesn't change one simple fact...Free Trade DOES NOT WORK because it is just what we see in TFA, we are simply exporting our pollution to the third world!
This is why i have been saying for years you just can't have free trade with countries like China and India which let corps dump toxins out the back and belch toxic clouds of filth into the sky because, and I'm sure the free market types will scream for me daring to point this out, but we live in a fishbowl folks and anything you dump on one side eventually affects everyone. all that crap dumped into rivers ends up in the ocean, all that crap in the air ends up carried over here or likewise settles in the oceans, it all comes around.
This is why we should simply not allow trade with countries that don't have similar environmental regulations to us, because all that is happening is the mutilnationals are playing three card monty with the pollution and they enjoy higher profits the more they pollute.
So frankly the "greenies" can stick it right in their ass, because as long as we allow multinationals to just pollute the third world while selling to the first all that green shit is fucking pointless. Its like simply throwing all the garbage in the basement and then bragging about how clean your house is, you're just putting the nasty shit out of sight, not actually doing anything about it. You can screw Americans with carbon credits and give huge tax breaks to electric cars but so long as damned near every thing in every store is made in pollution friendly countries then none of it will make a damned bit of difference, not a damned bit at all.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.