Obama Reveals Climate Change Plan

Today President Obama gave a speech outlining the administration's plan to take on climate change. (Video of the speech available on YouTube, and the White House published an infographic as well.) Most significantly, Obama's plan would have the EPA set limits on carbon pollution from all U.S. power plants, a goal already meeting resistance from Republicans. The plan also sets the goal of funding enough solar- and wind-based energy projects on public lands to power over 6 million homes by 2020. By 2030, it aims to use efficiency standards to reduce carbon pollution by 3 billion metric tons. Obama called for new efforts to deal with extreme weather like Hurricane Sandy. He also pointed out the difficulty in getting emerging industrial economies to be environmentally conscious. To that end, the plan calls for the end of U.S. support for financing coal power plants in foreign countries, unless those plants use carbon capture and sequestration technologies. The speech addressed the controversial Keystone XL pipeline, which would carry up to 800,000 gallons of oil per day from Canada into the U.S. Obama indicated that approval for the pipeline would be tied to emissions goals.

Comments

Don't believe the hysterics

[urughak5965]

I'll just leave this here for you all to ponder- One of the wisest men on the planet. Dennis Prager. Please read with an open mind. :) http://www.dennisprager.com/transcripts.aspx?id=1167

Re:Don't believe the hysterics

[Mashiki]

Hyperbole

Ah, talking about the church of global warming are we?

Re:Don't believe the hysterics

[flyingfsck]

Here are a few thoughts for you:
1. Periodic Ice Ages. The last one was 11,000 years ago. The earth is still warming up towards 'normal'. What we have now, is not normal yet. The cavemen must have burned a helluvalot of wood to bring the last ice age to an end...
2. Layered coal seams. Each seam represents a period of 150 to 200 million years of fern covered swamps. We are now in a cold period, before the next coal seam will be created.
3. Medieval mini ice age. The earth is still colder than it was during the height of the Roman empire, when people produced wine in England.
4. The earth is mostly covered with water and most of the land is desert. Humans only mess with a small percentage of the earth's surface and in those areas, we mostly replace wild grass with special grass, bisons with cows, boar with pigs, birds with chickens etc. Farming is controlled by the climate and farmers only produce what will grow in that particular area - they don't really change anything, while the surface area covered by cities is very small indeed.
5. Radiation is related to the square of the temperature difference. If you heat the atmosphere slightly, heat is radiated faster into space.
6. What caused those hot swampy periods? Dinosaur farts?
7. Climate change is real, but man has precious little to do with it, if anything.

Just think about things rationally.

Re:Don't believe the hysterics

[thedonger]

You can have all the opinions you want. If you want me to seriously consider them you might want to say something I agree with.

Fixed that for you.

Good, this is an urgent problem

[sideslash]

All you have to do is look at predictions from 10 and 20 years ago to see what a disaster would befall us even right now in 2013. That the predictions turned out to be overblown and wrong is missing the point. Now, how can we redistribute some of that carbon-associated wealth?

Washington D.C.

[sycodon]

There should be a rule that whenever there is a power shortage attributable to power plants being shut down due to government regulations, Washington D.C. is the first place that is blacked out.

Re:Microsoft and Bill Gates

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because reducing annual output by a global pittance and thus driving up costs for everyone solely in the US along with adding more inconsistent generators of energy while doing nothing to solve the actual problem is certainly preferable to setting up programs which look for actual solutions.

Re:Didn't think it was possible

[flyingfsck]

If you have ever been to Africa, or just watched CNN or BBC a little bit, then you'd realize that Africa doesn't have anything to lose. Africa is just one big shit hole with a permanent case of dysentry.

Re:Microsoft and Bill Gates

[Nadaka]

Yea. You just try getting funding for a program to look for actual solutions past the republicans. We already have an actual solution. Its called building a massive solar thermal complex in the southwestern desert and rolling out an upgrade to the national power grid. Invest a trillion dollars in it over the next 10 years and you can replace over half of our dirty power plants with clean solar thermal with salt reservoirs producing power 24/7.

Re:No real solutions - and we're doing what?

[angel'o'sphere]

You don't live in a first world nation.

The only thing first world in your nation is your military (and even there many people will disagree).

On second or third world level in your country is:
Health care
School System
Power Grid
Water supply
Voting system
Judical system
Weapon laws
Work and vacation laws
Pension system
Banking system

All above made sense 200 or 400 years ago, but most of it you never changed or adopted it to our days reallity.

A voting system for the president where you have a "presidental elector" in our days? So that by "bad luck" a minority can win the election by having more electors? Braindead!