The Tea "Party" gets press because it is indeed very well organized. FreedomWorks and other corporate funded professional groups, led by some of the most veteran Republican politicians, fundraisers and staff, are tightly plugged into corporate media led by Fox News. The Tea "Party" is entirely a creation of the corporate class in the corporate media, and has managed to attract a small number of actual private people from the most extreme parts of the Republican Party.
The people occupying Wall Street are mostly just people. The closest to an organization behind them is AdBusters magazine, which has nearly no money, nearly no staff, nearly no political connections. Mostly the people occupying Wall Street are making it up as they go along, on their own money or spontaneous donations.
But in fact that also makes them different from the usual demonstrators you mentioned. It really is different, and it really is much more real. Which is itself a story that many Americans would find interesting. Especially because finally these demonstrators are opposing crimes that actually directly hurt most Americans, not abstractions like the G8 or popular crimes like fraud-driven wars.
Or you could stand on the sidewalk in the afternoon talking to your friend and get maced for no reason. Like what actually happened, not what your bizarre violence fetish dreamed up.
You're lying. Your friend, if she does exist, did no such thing. If she exists and did tell you that then she was lying.
So what if you expect the protesters are not peaceful. In fact they are, and the cops attacked them without reason.
Wall Street is full of the people who actually robbed us of our money and freedoms. I know; I worked supporting a hedge fund in Midtown through 2010.
You are just another authoritarian who will lie based on your preconceptions, totally uninterested in fact especially when it contradicts your expectations.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. The women who were maced by the cop weren't provoking anyone. They were actually calmly accepting being netted on the sidewalk like cattle when the cop maced them for no reason.
You're an idiot. You evidently couldn't cut it in NYC. Just shut up and stop slandering the people who are here dealing with these cops.
All correct, if you ignore that women, gay people and Black people actually got closer to equal rights with straight White men, all through 1960s street demonstrations. It took until 1970 for street demonstrations to start to end the Vietnam War, which otherwise would have gone on forever. Forever: just as the Iraq War has gone on longer than the Vietnam War, even if you don't count the Iraq War that we waged in Iraq 1989-2003.
And that's just to name a few. Also accomplished was the birth of environmental protection from corporate pollution and any number of other advances underwritten by people going into the streets to show their anger or just unity in opposition.
When I get the VLC Android code when its released, will I be able to distribute my own movie (therefore my copyright) integrated into a custom Android app with the VLC player? Will the license let me charge people to download the app from my site or from the Market?
Will I be able to bundle with my movie a skeleton app that looks to see whether VLC is already installed on the device, and play my movie via IPC intents, and download the VLC player code only if it's not already installed by some other app?
But corruption isn't rooted out in all of its forms. In the energy industry, in nearly none of them. For solar to compete in that reality, it needs people to subsidize some of the risks. Because otherwise it'll be crushed, as it has been for generations, by the incumbent energy cartel that is totally corrupt and totally subsidized. Since American investors don't take real risks, and certainly not in alternative energy R&D, that's up to the government, on behalf of the American public. Not all risks are safe - they're risks. Solyndra was a risk on a strategy of pushing high-performance solar as a US industry, that was undercut by completely corrupt and subsidized Chinese low-performance solar competition. But meanwhile the tech has been pushed, the rest of the US solar industry was boosted by Solyndra's research, spending and signal to other investors about the domestic industry.
Solyndra's cronies, chiefly the Walmart's Walton family via Bush, lost a lot of money - that was spent in the US economy on tech jobs. There's a lot worse effects we could expect - and can see elsewhere. Not just in the energy industry that is actually changing, under pressure from the US government against vast resistance from the minority Republican Party and its corporate sponsors (like the Koch billionaires).
I mean, show me your posts about the hundreds of times more waste, fraud and theft as it was revealed in Iraq, and I'll take your absolutist stance against all corruption more seriously. But it'll still be naive to think that we'll remove corruption before we dethrone the petrofuel industry, rather than far easier after we have.
I'm not a partisan. I'm a realist. I'm not a member of any party, and I am happy to call out Democrats when they're too corrupt. But hating everything about the Republican Party and its propaganda system is totally earned by them. Attacking that party doesn't make me a champion of the other.
As for the "eco-industrial complex", the term modeled after the "military-industrial complex", there is no such thing. There is no system of giant ecology corps buying patronage locked into the US economy by the government as an institution. There is an energy-industrial complex that completely dwarfs any collection of environmental or sustainable energy corps. Talking about an "eco-industrial complex" is like talking about Democrats and Republicans as if they're the same. They're not. Democratic corruption and incompetence exists, but at a scale that is sustainable, if not quite acceptable. Republican corruption and incompetence is terminal for this country. Likewise, the energy-industrial complex is an existential threat to the country - largely indistinguishable from the Republican Party and a handful of fellow "Conservative" Democrats. Saying "eco-industrial complex" is perpetuating the propaganda that keeps the energy corps, their Republican/Conservative representatives and total corruption at the throat of the country. If you want to be reasonable, you'll stop helping them.
The Western US is 8000 miles from China. These heavy metals don't get very far from the Chinese coast. At least, not representing the kind of threat that their CO2 pollution poses.
Of course you'll vote for the Republican. It doesn't matter who they are - you'll vote for whoever you're told. Just like you did last time. And the time before that, when you voted for Bush/Cheney twice, and your local Republican representative and senator, you voted for them to deregulate and despoil the country. You voted for them to spend us into incomprehensible debt, making us by far the poorest country in history. Debt that Obama inherited. But you don't care about any of that. You are a perfect pawn in the game Republicans and their corporate sponsors have used to destroy the US. This is the fault of you and the rest of you Republicans. And you are still hungry for more. China's pollution, CO2 or otherwise, is nothing compared to the poison you and your party have injected inside America. It brings all the poison along with it, including China's industry that you Republicans sent to them.
You said "tl;dr", but then posted something 5x as long.
Power plants are "terminal" storage sites. As demonstrated at Fukushima, where they stored far more waste than fuel. As at practically every reactor in the US, and probably elsewhere. After a half century, it's obvious that's how we do it. Any other "plans" are science fiction or worse.
What you did say:
I wasn't aware that the preferred means of permanently storing nuclear waste was to have a tsunami hit a badly-maintained nuclear power plant. (I am aware that NPPs store some waste onsite but that's neither intended not in any way related to permanent storage plans.)
Most or all permanent nuclear storage facilities have flaws but the possibility of a meltdown causing widespread dispersal is not one of them. Whether your point is valid or not, using badly-researched arguments to make it will make you look like a crackpot.
Your sarcasm was inane, talking like Fukushima's waste storage was a unique situation. The fact is that waste is stored onsite. Then the site does get damaged, as Fukushima has most recently and undeniably demonstrated, and the radiation moves more than the few inches the earlier post tried to assure us was the safe and sound case.
You'd 'assume that "an explosion or fire disperses the waste over a large area" is a rather unlikely scenario.' even though it's eventual certainty was just proven at Fukushima.
You also just said in that post:
that's actually the first statement regarding nuclear safety I've made in this thread
Yet you said in the post before that, the one on which you so boldly and bullshittingly entered:
Most or all permanent nuclear storage facilities have flaws but the possibility of a meltdown causing widespread dispersal is not one of them.
You haven't even bothered to acknowledge that in my last post I set you straight on the most basic reading comprehension. You are full of shit. Why should I care about your concern that in the long term people might not accept my arguments, when your reasons for doing so are that you're full of shit?
You're a crackpot, or worse. Since you won't shut up, I'm not giving you an excuse for posting more bullshit. Goodbye.
Even if that's true - I don't just accept uncited Anonymous Coward assertions - the way we stop it from happening is by making sure that CFCs aren't leaving the hole already bigger when nature enlarges it.
And of course the extreme cold weather is part of climate change, which you also no doubt have some inane excuse to tell yourself "doesn't exist", then "isn't our fault", and eventually "is too late to change", and finally "is good for us".
Duh. Where you went wrong is that your counter "arguments" imply that the Earth is round. And that's just hating on the oil corps, dontcha know.
That's why I put "waste" in quotes: it's not really waste, except if you waste it. And I did say in that very sentence that the energy is made by burning it.
Of course "North" is relative, as even paper mulch doesn't do any good in Inuit country.
So apart from the point where you weren't clear, you're not even reading the sentences that you're complaining about. No wonder you're totally wrong about the amount of energy it takes to recycle vs produce new paper.
Even after seeing the undeniable evidence you weren't aware that's what they do? They also like to store nuke waste in nuke plants that get hit by earthquakes. You probably missed that in Virginia last month, too. And the one in Nebraska that the month before was a few inches from being flooded and facing the same pump failures that widely dispersed nuke waste in Japan.
The meltdown didn't cause widespread dispersal of the nuke waste in Fukushima. It was the explosion and fires. But so what? Each reactor is different, each has a variety of threats, and already several this year in the US have come within reach of what we saw in Fukushima just a little earlier. All of which have a terrible cost when those risks finally materialize, as we see in these plants that have been corruptly extended far beyond their designed or originally permitted operating lifetime.
But the risks, however real, are not what I was talking about. I was debunking the other lie about how nuke waste is dangerous only within a few inches. Which Fukushima just demonstrated, and intolerable cost, is just a lie. Now you're moving the goalposts, another favorite fallacy you nuke fetishists favor.
Japan just nuked itself because people with actual power to run nuke plants think like you talk. You should at least have the courtesy to shut up. You are among the most dangerous crackpots our species has ever produced, with your lies perpetuating these ticking time bombs. Shut up already.
The heavy metals pollution in China is not much of a pollution problem outside of East Asia and some parts of SE Asia (closely downwind and downstream of China). The CO2 pollution is a threat to everyone.
The US pollutes an unusually large amount, primarily because it produces so much; an unusually small amount by economic efficiency, as I have explained. CO2 is not equivalent to other pollution, as I have explained.
The Republican Party (that you can't even bring yourself to name, but for which you will vote in 2012 as you have every chance you've gotten) doesn't take any beliefs, or anything else, seriously, except the most deranged, dangerous and corporate sponsored (typically all 3 at once). There is absolutely no doubt that its deranged, dangerous corporate beliefs have always damaged the environment, and is poised to do unprecedented, possibly irreversible, damage if it gets any more power. And of course it's not just CO2 pollution, but all kinds of pollution. Like far more heavy metal pollution from burning far more coal at the bidding of the Koch brothers, but any pollution that might possibly increase immediate corporate profits by externalizing liability is welcome to them. The mere possibility of that happening makes mentioning it in the consideration of the US ranking in pollution mandatory.
No, things are changing as large numbers of people are coerced by government and economics to make do with much less waste, and currently somewhat less useful consumption. That's the only way that works nearly all the time. Giving up incandescent lightbulbs is saving money and prolonging our civilization's lifetime, but it needed to be forced. Even just measuring the energy consumption of buildings in NYC, which is the necessary step to reducing it and saving money/civilization took a law. Sure, most people make the irrational shortsighted decisions every year that you just indulged in. But the rest of us with sense, and a sense of the realities of actual alternate futures, will not let you drag us down with your willful ignorance and greedy self destruction.
Which human history also features, although mostly recently and mostly in the US. I will continue to side with the American way instead of with blythe suicide.
You obviously never compared the medical bills sent to insured people with those sent to uninsured people. The insurers have clout to bargain down the prices the medical industry charges them. Individuals without insurance have no such clout. The medical industry charges the uninsured far more for the same stuff, and charges for all kinds of nonsensical stuff that insurers have staffs to investigate and prevent. So the uninsured pay a lot more than do the insured. Otherwise insurers could never make any money, since most healthcare costs are inevitable, not avoidable. The number of uninsured is large (about 45 million Americans), but most of them are young and healthy, who don't cost anything. While the old and the poor are largely insured by Medicaid and Medicare (which use their clout to cost even less than private insurance, even before considering they're sicker - except for the Medicare Part D heist Republicans pulled for the pharmacos). The number of uninsured people who don't pay is far smaller than the number of wasteful middlemen at insurers, and unearned cartel profits for insurer and pharmaco shareholders and execs, and wasteful incompetents in the medical industry, who are really driving up the cost of your healthcare.
But why consider the facts when Teabaggers can whine about welfare queens?
The power of the US state is used to subsidize oil, coal and nukes every which way, many $BILLIONS a year - before even counting the endless wars for oil and damage from all the pollution.
You Teabaggers are the most lopsided liars in American history. Quite a feat - take a bow! And exit the stage already.
The per-capita emissions are meaningless. The only Chinese people who count are the ones doing the emitting, which is fewer than the number of Americans. Most Chinese people live lives in undeveloped activities, but nearly all Americans pollute a lot. On the other hand, both American and Chinese pollution is largely on behalf of the rest of the world's consumers, who outsource their manufacturing to our two countries.
Which is why the meaningful measure is pollution per dollar (or yuan; convertible). The US GDP is about $14.5T; China's is about $5.9T. China emitted about 7Gt CO2 while the US emitted about 5.5Gt. That's about 0.38Gt CO2:$ in the US; about 1.19Gt:$ in China. China pollutes about 3.12x as much as the US does per dollar output. Since both the production and the pollution are mostly exported around the world (though initially primarily from China to the US), this is the meaningful comparison. Not surprisingly, China's inefficient industry and corrupt government far outperform America's largely efficient industry and mildly corrupt government.
However, the USA is entirely capable of becoming #1 in pollution again. Especially if the people denying climate change get the controlling power in Washington again, the way they did 1994-2006. While China instead invests in cutting its pollution by 17% without reducing GDP growth, as its current 5 year plan calls for.
If you planted some trees every year, they'd accumulate. So after 10 years the trees you'd planted would be sequestering 10x the carbon of a single year's planting. And of course the sapling/seed you plant weighs only a tiny percentage of the CO2 it sequesters when it's 20-50 years old.
And then there's these machines and organizations that specialize in things. They can plant 100x the amount a single person would have to, so only 1% of the people have to plant any.
Oh, and we could also stop burning as much carbon, and save loads of money, our health, and our safety from the foreign dictators (and domestic dictator wannabes) we buy so much of the carbon from.
Tell that to the quarter of Japan that just got stored nuke waste blown all over it.
You nuke fetishists can't even remember the worst nuke disaster in your lifetime even when it happened only earlier this year. Evidently radiation's brain poisoning power turns out to be unlimited by distance or shielding.
You are wrong. Cutting and processing trees into paper costs lots more energy, typically made by burning the tree "waste" into the atmosphere, than does recycling paper (which uses electricity, which usually produces less pollution than that).
You who live in the North lost your topsoil 100 years ago when you clearcut your forests. And you're still lying about the damage you're doing.
CO2 doesn't saturate our atmosphere overnight, either. It's the steady, relentless pumping of excess CO2 into the atmosphere that's going to destroy us.
If we planted a lot of trees now, we'd at least mitigate the worst effects of Climate Change, and possibly keep the atmosphere from jerking into a new, stable cycle far different from what we built a civilization in. We have a little time, and depending on the trees possibly enough to do it with trees.
Or just every rooftop and backyard filled with marijuana plants, some of the fastest growing big weeds known. It's more fun to eat it than to smoke it, anyway. If you have the time...
Slashdot Mirror
The Tea "Party" gets press because it is indeed very well organized. FreedomWorks and other corporate funded professional groups, led by some of the most veteran Republican politicians, fundraisers and staff, are tightly plugged into corporate media led by Fox News. The Tea "Party" is entirely a creation of the corporate class in the corporate media, and has managed to attract a small number of actual private people from the most extreme parts of the Republican Party.
The people occupying Wall Street are mostly just people. The closest to an organization behind them is AdBusters magazine, which has nearly no money, nearly no staff, nearly no political connections. Mostly the people occupying Wall Street are making it up as they go along, on their own money or spontaneous donations.
But in fact that also makes them different from the usual demonstrators you mentioned. It really is different, and it really is much more real. Which is itself a story that many Americans would find interesting. Especially because finally these demonstrators are opposing crimes that actually directly hurt most Americans, not abstractions like the G8 or popular crimes like fraud-driven wars.
Or you could stand on the sidewalk in the afternoon talking to your friend and get maced for no reason. Like what actually happened, not what your bizarre violence fetish dreamed up.
You're lying. Your friend, if she does exist, did no such thing. If she exists and did tell you that then she was lying.
So what if you expect the protesters are not peaceful. In fact they are, and the cops attacked them without reason.
Wall Street is full of the people who actually robbed us of our money and freedoms. I know; I worked supporting a hedge fund in Midtown through 2010.
You are just another authoritarian who will lie based on your preconceptions, totally uninterested in fact especially when it contradicts your expectations.
You obviously have no idea what you're talking about. The women who were maced by the cop weren't provoking anyone. They were actually calmly accepting being netted on the sidewalk like cattle when the cop maced them for no reason.
You're an idiot. You evidently couldn't cut it in NYC. Just shut up and stop slandering the people who are here dealing with these cops.
All correct, if you ignore that women, gay people and Black people actually got closer to equal rights with straight White men, all through 1960s street demonstrations. It took until 1970 for street demonstrations to start to end the Vietnam War, which otherwise would have gone on forever. Forever: just as the Iraq War has gone on longer than the Vietnam War, even if you don't count the Iraq War that we waged in Iraq 1989-2003.
And that's just to name a few. Also accomplished was the birth of environmental protection from corporate pollution and any number of other advances underwritten by people going into the streets to show their anger or just unity in opposition.
Where is the link to "their own pages" where the people maced by cops on Wall Street arranged to be maced?
When I get the VLC Android code when its released, will I be able to distribute my own movie (therefore my copyright) integrated into a custom Android app with the VLC player? Will the license let me charge people to download the app from my site or from the Market?
Will I be able to bundle with my movie a skeleton app that looks to see whether VLC is already installed on the device, and play my movie via IPC intents, and download the VLC player code only if it's not already installed by some other app?
But corruption isn't rooted out in all of its forms. In the energy industry, in nearly none of them. For solar to compete in that reality, it needs people to subsidize some of the risks. Because otherwise it'll be crushed, as it has been for generations, by the incumbent energy cartel that is totally corrupt and totally subsidized. Since American investors don't take real risks, and certainly not in alternative energy R&D, that's up to the government, on behalf of the American public. Not all risks are safe - they're risks. Solyndra was a risk on a strategy of pushing high-performance solar as a US industry, that was undercut by completely corrupt and subsidized Chinese low-performance solar competition. But meanwhile the tech has been pushed, the rest of the US solar industry was boosted by Solyndra's research, spending and signal to other investors about the domestic industry.
Solyndra's cronies, chiefly the Walmart's Walton family via Bush, lost a lot of money - that was spent in the US economy on tech jobs. There's a lot worse effects we could expect - and can see elsewhere. Not just in the energy industry that is actually changing, under pressure from the US government against vast resistance from the minority Republican Party and its corporate sponsors (like the Koch billionaires).
I mean, show me your posts about the hundreds of times more waste, fraud and theft as it was revealed in Iraq, and I'll take your absolutist stance against all corruption more seriously. But it'll still be naive to think that we'll remove corruption before we dethrone the petrofuel industry, rather than far easier after we have.
I'm not a partisan. I'm a realist. I'm not a member of any party, and I am happy to call out Democrats when they're too corrupt. But hating everything about the Republican Party and its propaganda system is totally earned by them. Attacking that party doesn't make me a champion of the other.
As for the "eco-industrial complex", the term modeled after the "military-industrial complex", there is no such thing. There is no system of giant ecology corps buying patronage locked into the US economy by the government as an institution. There is an energy-industrial complex that completely dwarfs any collection of environmental or sustainable energy corps. Talking about an "eco-industrial complex" is like talking about Democrats and Republicans as if they're the same. They're not. Democratic corruption and incompetence exists, but at a scale that is sustainable, if not quite acceptable. Republican corruption and incompetence is terminal for this country. Likewise, the energy-industrial complex is an existential threat to the country - largely indistinguishable from the Republican Party and a handful of fellow "Conservative" Democrats. Saying "eco-industrial complex" is perpetuating the propaganda that keeps the energy corps, their Republican/Conservative representatives and total corruption at the throat of the country. If you want to be reasonable, you'll stop helping them.
The Western US is 8000 miles from China. These heavy metals don't get very far from the Chinese coast. At least, not representing the kind of threat that their CO2 pollution poses.
Of course you'll vote for the Republican. It doesn't matter who they are - you'll vote for whoever you're told. Just like you did last time. And the time before that, when you voted for Bush/Cheney twice, and your local Republican representative and senator, you voted for them to deregulate and despoil the country. You voted for them to spend us into incomprehensible debt, making us by far the poorest country in history. Debt that Obama inherited. But you don't care about any of that. You are a perfect pawn in the game Republicans and their corporate sponsors have used to destroy the US. This is the fault of you and the rest of you Republicans. And you are still hungry for more. China's pollution, CO2 or otherwise, is nothing compared to the poison you and your party have injected inside America. It brings all the poison along with it, including China's industry that you Republicans sent to them.
You said "tl;dr", but then posted something 5x as long.
Power plants are "terminal" storage sites. As demonstrated at Fukushima, where they stored far more waste than fuel. As at practically every reactor in the US, and probably elsewhere. After a half century, it's obvious that's how we do it. Any other "plans" are science fiction or worse.
What you did say:
Your sarcasm was inane, talking like Fukushima's waste storage was a unique situation. The fact is that waste is stored onsite. Then the site does get damaged, as Fukushima has most recently and undeniably demonstrated, and the radiation moves more than the few inches the earlier post tried to assure us was the safe and sound case.
You'd 'assume that "an explosion or fire disperses the waste over a large area" is a rather unlikely scenario.' even though it's eventual certainty was just proven at Fukushima.
You also just said in that post:
Yet you said in the post before that, the one on which you so boldly and bullshittingly entered:
You haven't even bothered to acknowledge that in my last post I set you straight on the most basic reading comprehension. You are full of shit. Why should I care about your concern that in the long term people might not accept my arguments, when your reasons for doing so are that you're full of shit?
You're a crackpot, or worse. Since you won't shut up, I'm not giving you an excuse for posting more bullshit. Goodbye.
Even if that's true - I don't just accept uncited Anonymous Coward assertions - the way we stop it from happening is by making sure that CFCs aren't leaving the hole already bigger when nature enlarges it.
And of course the extreme cold weather is part of climate change, which you also no doubt have some inane excuse to tell yourself "doesn't exist", then
"isn't our fault", and eventually "is too late to change", and finally "is good for us".
Duh. Where you went wrong is that your counter "arguments" imply that the Earth is round. And that's just hating on the oil corps, dontcha know.
That's why I put "waste" in quotes: it's not really waste, except if you waste it. And I did say in that very sentence that the energy is made by burning it.
Of course "North" is relative, as even paper mulch doesn't do any good in Inuit country.
So apart from the point where you weren't clear, you're not even reading the sentences that you're complaining about. No wonder you're totally wrong about the amount of energy it takes to recycle vs produce new paper.
Even after seeing the undeniable evidence you weren't aware that's what they do? They also like to store nuke waste in nuke plants that get hit by earthquakes. You probably missed that in Virginia last month, too. And the one in Nebraska that the month before was a few inches from being flooded and facing the same pump failures that widely dispersed nuke waste in Japan.
The meltdown didn't cause widespread dispersal of the nuke waste in Fukushima. It was the explosion and fires. But so what? Each reactor is different, each has a variety of threats, and already several this year in the US have come within reach of what we saw in Fukushima just a little earlier. All of which have a terrible cost when those risks finally materialize, as we see in these plants that have been corruptly extended far beyond their designed or originally permitted operating lifetime.
But the risks, however real, are not what I was talking about. I was debunking the other lie about how nuke waste is dangerous only within a few inches. Which Fukushima just demonstrated, and intolerable cost, is just a lie. Now you're moving the goalposts, another favorite fallacy you nuke fetishists favor.
Japan just nuked itself because people with actual power to run nuke plants think like you talk. You should at least have the courtesy to shut up. You are among the most dangerous crackpots our species has ever produced, with your lies perpetuating these ticking time bombs. Shut up already.
The heavy metals pollution in China is not much of a pollution problem outside of East Asia and some parts of SE Asia (closely downwind and downstream of China). The CO2 pollution is a threat to everyone.
The US pollutes an unusually large amount, primarily because it produces so much; an unusually small amount by economic efficiency, as I have explained. CO2 is not equivalent to other pollution, as I have explained.
The Republican Party (that you can't even bring yourself to name, but for which you will vote in 2012 as you have every chance you've gotten) doesn't take any beliefs, or anything else, seriously, except the most deranged, dangerous and corporate sponsored (typically all 3 at once). There is absolutely no doubt that its deranged, dangerous corporate beliefs have always damaged the environment, and is poised to do unprecedented, possibly irreversible, damage if it gets any more power. And of course it's not just CO2 pollution, but all kinds of pollution. Like far more heavy metal pollution from burning far more coal at the bidding of the Koch brothers, but any pollution that might possibly increase immediate corporate profits by externalizing liability is welcome to them. The mere possibility of that happening makes mentioning it in the consideration of the US ranking in pollution mandatory.
The heavy metals pollution is worse for the people in China. The CO2 pollution is worse for everyone else.
Which ax are you referring to?
No, things are changing as large numbers of people are coerced by government and economics to make do with much less waste, and currently somewhat less useful consumption. That's the only way that works nearly all the time. Giving up incandescent lightbulbs is saving money and prolonging our civilization's lifetime, but it needed to be forced. Even just measuring the energy consumption of buildings in NYC, which is the necessary step to reducing it and saving money/civilization took a law. Sure, most people make the irrational shortsighted decisions every year that you just indulged in. But the rest of us with sense, and a sense of the realities of actual alternate futures, will not let you drag us down with your willful ignorance and greedy self destruction.
Which human history also features, although mostly recently and mostly in the US. I will continue to side with the American way instead of with blythe suicide.
You obviously never compared the medical bills sent to insured people with those sent to uninsured people. The insurers have clout to bargain down the prices the medical industry charges them. Individuals without insurance have no such clout. The medical industry charges the uninsured far more for the same stuff, and charges for all kinds of nonsensical stuff that insurers have staffs to investigate and prevent. So the uninsured pay a lot more than do the insured. Otherwise insurers could never make any money, since most healthcare costs are inevitable, not avoidable. The number of uninsured is large (about 45 million Americans), but most of them are young and healthy, who don't cost anything. While the old and the poor are largely insured by Medicaid and Medicare (which use their clout to cost even less than private insurance, even before considering they're sicker - except for the Medicare Part D heist Republicans pulled for the pharmacos). The number of uninsured people who don't pay is far smaller than the number of wasteful middlemen at insurers, and unearned cartel profits for insurer and pharmaco shareholders and execs, and wasteful incompetents in the medical industry, who are really driving up the cost of your healthcare.
But why consider the facts when Teabaggers can whine about welfare queens?
The power of the US state is used to subsidize oil, coal and nukes every which way, many $BILLIONS a year - before even counting the endless wars for oil and damage from all the pollution.
You Teabaggers are the most lopsided liars in American history. Quite a feat - take a bow! And exit the stage already.
The per-capita emissions are meaningless. The only Chinese people who count are the ones doing the emitting, which is fewer than the number of Americans. Most Chinese people live lives in undeveloped activities, but nearly all Americans pollute a lot. On the other hand, both American and Chinese pollution is largely on behalf of the rest of the world's consumers, who outsource their manufacturing to our two countries.
Which is why the meaningful measure is pollution per dollar (or yuan; convertible). The US GDP is about $14.5T; China's is about $5.9T. China emitted about 7Gt CO2 while the US emitted about 5.5Gt. That's about 0.38Gt CO2:$ in the US; about 1.19Gt:$ in China. China pollutes about 3.12x as much as the US does per dollar output. Since both the production and the pollution are mostly exported around the world (though initially primarily from China to the US), this is the meaningful comparison. Not surprisingly, China's inefficient industry and corrupt government far outperform America's largely efficient industry and mildly corrupt government.
However, the USA is entirely capable of becoming #1 in pollution again. Especially if the people denying climate change get the controlling power in Washington again, the way they did 1994-2006. While China instead invests in cutting its pollution by 17% without reducing GDP growth, as its current 5 year plan calls for.
If you planted some trees every year, they'd accumulate. So after 10 years the trees you'd planted would be sequestering 10x the carbon of a single year's planting. And of course the sapling/seed you plant weighs only a tiny percentage of the CO2 it sequesters when it's 20-50 years old.
And then there's these machines and organizations that specialize in things. They can plant 100x the amount a single person would have to, so only 1% of the people have to plant any.
Oh, and we could also stop burning as much carbon, and save loads of money, our health, and our safety from the foreign dictators (and domestic dictator wannabes) we buy so much of the carbon from.
Tell that to the quarter of Japan that just got stored nuke waste blown all over it.
You nuke fetishists can't even remember the worst nuke disaster in your lifetime even when it happened only earlier this year. Evidently radiation's brain poisoning power turns out to be unlimited by distance or shielding.
You are wrong. Cutting and processing trees into paper costs lots more energy, typically made by burning the tree "waste" into the atmosphere, than does recycling paper (which uses electricity, which usually produces less pollution than that).
You who live in the North lost your topsoil 100 years ago when you clearcut your forests. And you're still lying about the damage you're doing.
When sequestering carbon replaces filthy nuke plants, that is genius.
Any nuke plant should be replaced by a geothermal power plant on the grid instead.
False. The paper industry is one of the most toxic manufacturing industries, and destroys whole ecosystems even when it farms trees (by monoculture).
That must be a nice check the paper mills are sending you to astroturf Slashdot.
CO2 doesn't saturate our atmosphere overnight, either. It's the steady, relentless pumping of excess CO2 into the atmosphere that's going to destroy us.
If we planted a lot of trees now, we'd at least mitigate the worst effects of Climate Change, and possibly keep the atmosphere from jerking into a new, stable cycle far different from what we built a civilization in. We have a little time, and depending on the trees possibly enough to do it with trees.
Or just every rooftop and backyard filled with marijuana plants, some of the fastest growing big weeds known. It's more fun to eat it than to smoke it, anyway. If you have the time...