No, I'm serious, the US has attitudes that are culturally much different that that of Europe. In particular, the US learned different lessons from the last century of history. For example, "Patriotism" and "Nationalism" got really bad names in Europe because of WWI and WWII and their apparent causes. Europeans became deeply suspicious of them for that reason, but USians found those attributes a good thing, because it helped them WIN those wars. I guess I'm saying that it's not the the US gets so much different information, (ignorance, FUD, etc) but that USians seem to view it with a much different perspective than the rest of the world.
I'm not sure that it is wrong or right. It just is.
China siging Kyoto doesn't "get them on the regime" They aren't going to be required to do anything unless they sign some additional agreements. But this agreement itself does nothing to address the issue, outside of some sort of "feel-good-cause China-signed-it". It doesn't guarantee future Chinese CO2 reductions at some point. China could simply agree not to sign on to new caps. China can sign this and not be obligated to do anything, now or in the future.
Secondly, forested acres in the US have increased over this century, even with the rise of suburbia. Sure, some forested areas have been permanently developed. But somehow total forest acerage has managed in increase. One reason this is possible is that for all the clearcutting we have done, most of the developed land wasn't forests, it was farmland; well, that and the fact that the land area of the US is so large to begin with that even with all of the rampant development we still haven't managed to pave most of the country.
I'm not criticizing Russia, to them this makes perfect economic sense. They can suddenly make big money off of something that they "own" that was worthless to them yesterday. Why wouldn't they want to sign on. But this doesn't hold for the US or China.
The fundamental problem is that oil has been so cheep for so long. Eventually, technology will make other energy sources cheeper as oil slowly becomes more expensive. I'm pretty sure this will start happening well before the end of the century (when the global population is predicted to start falling BTW). So I feel like we might end up devoting our public resources to the wrong place if we were to do as some suggest and start a sort of "environmental manhattan project".
The "Profligate clearcutting" all seems to have grown back in the last number of decades already, particularly in the US. As a previous poster already said, Russia has to do LESS THAN NOTHING to meet their part in Kyoto, since their target emissions levels are HIGHER than current production (because it was based on Soviet era emissions and production). China isn't restricted in any way by Kyoto, since they are considered "undeveloped' and thus Kyoto will have absolutely no effect on global warming, but it is going to cost all of the signers a pretty penny.
What he forgot, and is hilighted your India example, is that it's not "democracy" so much as freedom. Yes it is possible for more authoritarian governments to be more "free" than "democratic" countries. The question is whether authoritarian governments will be able to stay free over time and whether democracy is better at protecting freedom in the long run.
The US can be accused of doing lots of very bad things in the rest of the world, but I wouldn't say that looting is one of them. WRT Saudi Arabia, there is wealth in Saudi Arabia, but it is not a very "free" country, and that wealth is controlled by a small group of people. (The society is much more stratified than even Marx would dream of the arch-capitalists.) That, and the state-funded preaching of a particularly extreme religious sub-sect of Islam leads to all sorts of problems, and the wealthy Saudi's know it. But of course how do they deal with it without loosing their power, since that is THEIR goal.
You are only half right. Rising standards of living reduce population growth as well, so you have to take that into account. Wealthy nations also tend to make pollution reductions first. It's true that the US produces a lot of garbage and CO2, but their pollution control laws for other things (air and water) are much more strict. The reason is simple, air and water polltion became problems first, when the US starts to run out of landfill space or starts to see climate problems that can be directly attributed to global warming(in a couple decades) you will see real action in those areas. But until people begin to be SIGNIFICANTLY affected by them, you won't see much in the way of government provided solutions.
Agreed, but the Montreal Protocol was economically insignificant compared to what we would have to do to even reduce the rate of emmissions growth in CO2, let alone reduce it.
This may be because SOHO is also less able to sqeeze the big discounts out of MS. Sure linux might be easier for the large to midsize corps that have a real IT staff, but those corps also have the pricing power to be the big discount from MS. SOHOs with tech expertise will umtimately have to go first.
that those frequencies HAVE been deregulated, they just aren't unregulated. Deregulation just means that some of the regulations/restrictions have been removed, it doesn't mean there aren't any rules at all.
Im usually warm at 74F with no air movement. As I type this my place is at 72F, the thermostat doesn't kick in until the mid 60s. But then again I live in 'The Frigid North'. I like the cold.
I suppose if you call CO2 "pollution"..... which I think is the wrong term, given it's already existing connotations. You could say that the US is the country with the single greatest gross CO2 emissions, and that would be a fact. The dirty little secret that the Kyoto crowd doesn't talk about is that the US has much lower net emissions than most industrialized countries, no matter how you measure (per capita or as a proportion of GDP) (due to the large natural carbon sinks, etc). Does that mean the US can't do even more to reduce emissions? Of course not! But the self-righteous attitude of many Europeans (who had to make concessions to Russia and Austrailia that they refused to give to the US in Kyoto) irritates me to no end. It's like the Unibomer or OBL complaining about how cigarettes are killing people, because well, they aren't killing people right now, but tobacco is.
It might even surprise you to learn that the US is actually much better than much of the rest of the world in terms of ambient quality of air and water. (Though CA residents might not believe it.)
As one scientist said, science is about facts, options, probabilites, risk and consequences. Not about telling the public what is the "right thing to do". Scientists certainly can tell me more about the probable outcomes and risks of various secnarios, but their "narrow" specialization means they are probably ill equiped to decide what the best course of action is for society is. Everyone thinks that their work doesn't get enough resources devoted to it. It's the natural human response. But that doesn't make for good balanced decision making. That's why we should be represented by a wide variety of people, not ruled by an autocratic body of experts.
How can you decide if the changes in CO2 levels are "huge" if you don't have any context to compare them to? How much natural variation occurs in CO2 levels? I'm not saying you are wrong, but I object to the "do something now" attitude of many people who act like our understanding of this, in terms of the actual climatological effects, and the degree to which human interaction is the cause, is much more solid than it is.
The worst effects of global warming are a couple decades into the future. Sure, there is a cost to waiting and "doing nothing", but there is also a significant cost to "doing something" as well. Unfortunately people only want to see one cost or the other, not both.
There hasn't be a 5 degree change in one decade silly. Actually, many climatologists now think that periods of global warming and cooling happened much more rapidly than previously thought. Akin to the "punctuated equilibrium" theory in biology.
And of course higher CO2 levels will result in more favorable conditions for photosynthesis. So there is a sort of builtin stabilizer counteraction to increasing CO2 emmissions. But it does come back to making tradeoffs in terms of costs and benefits.
It's unfortunate that any debate seems to be so polarized. The environmentalist types think that everything should be subborned to their agenda, and their most vocal opponenets (well, most of them) seem to write the whole issue off because the opposing side seems to be selling claims that aren't wholely true (the rationale being the FUD is ok, since the cause is the right one).
No, we KNOW from the fossil record that the earth goes through "frequent" climate changes. The question we have right now is how much is our climate changing, how much of it is related to human activity, and what is the cost/benefit to counter act any cliamte change, regardless of the source. The last part people want to ignore. Apparently "natural" climate change would be ok, but human caused changes are "bad". Seems like a value judgement to me, not science.
Sure, we may very well be to blame for at least some of the change in climate, the question is, what are the future effects going to be, and what should we do about it? Adapt? Try to reverse climate change? What are the costs and benefits of these options.
I guess i was trying to say that the US pollutes in proportion (at least when it comes to CO2) in proportion to what they produce. I don't think that CO2 per person is a fair measurement. It has a bias towards coutries that choose large population over a high standard of living. I'm saying that the US net, not gross, CO2 emmissions are lower, due to population size versus land area. I guess I'm saying that I'm not sure that the US needs to "apologize" for it's CO2, well, not any more than any other country does.
Kyoto, won't make a dent in global warming, I'd personally prefer to spend the money that would be spent on Kyoto compliance on alternative energy and fuel research. It's going to return us way better dividends. Global warming is usually described as becomming a big problem in the later half of this century, by then we should be done using fossil fuel. All of this is IHMO.
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No, I'm serious, the US has attitudes that are culturally much different that that of Europe. In particular, the US learned different lessons from the last century of history. For example, "Patriotism" and "Nationalism" got really bad names in Europe because of WWI and WWII and their apparent causes. Europeans became deeply suspicious of them for that reason, but USians found those attributes a good thing, because it helped them WIN those wars. I guess I'm saying that it's not the the US gets so much different information, (ignorance, FUD, etc) but that USians seem to view it with a much different perspective than the rest of the world.
I'm not sure that it is wrong or right. It just is.
Secondly, forested acres in the US have increased over this century, even with the rise of suburbia. Sure, some forested areas have been permanently developed. But somehow total forest acerage has managed in increase. One reason this is possible is that for all the clearcutting we have done, most of the developed land wasn't forests, it was farmland; well, that and the fact that the land area of the US is so large to begin with that even with all of the rampant development we still haven't managed to pave most of the country.
I'm not criticizing Russia, to them this makes perfect economic sense. They can suddenly make big money off of something that they "own" that was worthless to them yesterday. Why wouldn't they want to sign on. But this doesn't hold for the US or China. The fundamental problem is that oil has been so cheep for so long. Eventually, technology will make other energy sources cheeper as oil slowly becomes more expensive. I'm pretty sure this will start happening well before the end of the century (when the global population is predicted to start falling BTW). So I feel like we might end up devoting our public resources to the wrong place if we were to do as some suggest and start a sort of "environmental manhattan project".
One of the largest wheat growing states in the US, IIRC.
The "Profligate clearcutting" all seems to have grown back in the last number of decades already, particularly in the US. As a previous poster already said, Russia has to do LESS THAN NOTHING to meet their part in Kyoto, since their target emissions levels are HIGHER than current production (because it was based on Soviet era emissions and production). China isn't restricted in any way by Kyoto, since they are considered "undeveloped' and thus Kyoto will have absolutely no effect on global warming, but it is going to cost all of the signers a pretty penny.
NT
What he forgot, and is hilighted your India example, is that it's not "democracy" so much as freedom. Yes it is possible for more authoritarian governments to be more "free" than "democratic" countries. The question is whether authoritarian governments will be able to stay free over time and whether democracy is better at protecting freedom in the long run.
The US can be accused of doing lots of very bad things in the rest of the world, but I wouldn't say that looting is one of them. WRT Saudi Arabia, there is wealth in Saudi Arabia, but it is not a very "free" country, and that wealth is controlled by a small group of people. (The society is much more stratified than even Marx would dream of the arch-capitalists.) That, and the state-funded preaching of a particularly extreme religious sub-sect of Islam leads to all sorts of problems, and the wealthy Saudi's know it. But of course how do they deal with it without loosing their power, since that is THEIR goal.
You are only half right. Rising standards of living reduce population growth as well, so you have to take that into account. Wealthy nations also tend to make pollution reductions first. It's true that the US produces a lot of garbage and CO2, but their pollution control laws for other things (air and water) are much more strict. The reason is simple, air and water polltion became problems first, when the US starts to run out of landfill space or starts to see climate problems that can be directly attributed to global warming(in a couple decades) you will see real action in those areas. But until people begin to be SIGNIFICANTLY affected by them, you won't see much in the way of government provided solutions.
Agreed, but the Montreal Protocol was economically insignificant compared to what we would have to do to even reduce the rate of emmissions growth in CO2, let alone reduce it.
This may be because SOHO is also less able to sqeeze the big discounts out of MS. Sure linux might be easier for the large to midsize corps that have a real IT staff, but those corps also have the pricing power to be the big discount from MS. SOHOs with tech expertise will umtimately have to go first.
that those frequencies HAVE been deregulated, they just aren't unregulated. Deregulation just means that some of the regulations/restrictions have been removed, it doesn't mean there aren't any rules at all.
Im usually warm at 74F with no air movement. As I type this my place is at 72F, the thermostat doesn't kick in until the mid 60s. But then again I live in 'The Frigid North'. I like the cold.
Maybe he ment that Longhorn's code base was so large it would achieve critical mass?? ...Sorry, couldn't resist.
buy a GEM car. You can carpool too.
Don't forget the "employer matching" part of FICA. Which is tax money you never see.
It's true, look at the textbook definition of socialism. Hell, that's a statement straight out of econ 101.
It might even surprise you to learn that the US is actually much better than much of the rest of the world in terms of ambient quality of air and water. (Though CA residents might not believe it.)
As one scientist said, science is about facts, options, probabilites, risk and consequences. Not about telling the public what is the "right thing to do". Scientists certainly can tell me more about the probable outcomes and risks of various secnarios, but their "narrow" specialization means they are probably ill equiped to decide what the best course of action is for society is. Everyone thinks that their work doesn't get enough resources devoted to it. It's the natural human response. But that doesn't make for good balanced decision making. That's why we should be represented by a wide variety of people, not ruled by an autocratic body of experts.
Somehow this whole discussion becomes about Iraq and oil. Parent is the definition of partisan, off-topic ranting and raving.
The worst effects of global warming are a couple decades into the future. Sure, there is a cost to waiting and "doing nothing", but there is also a significant cost to "doing something" as well. Unfortunately people only want to see one cost or the other, not both.
There hasn't be a 5 degree change in one decade silly. Actually, many climatologists now think that periods of global warming and cooling happened much more rapidly than previously thought. Akin to the "punctuated equilibrium" theory in biology.
It's unfortunate that any debate seems to be so polarized. The environmentalist types think that everything should be subborned to their agenda, and their most vocal opponenets (well, most of them) seem to write the whole issue off because the opposing side seems to be selling claims that aren't wholely true (the rationale being the FUD is ok, since the cause is the right one).
Sure, we may very well be to blame for at least some of the change in climate, the question is, what are the future effects going to be, and what should we do about it? Adapt? Try to reverse climate change? What are the costs and benefits of these options.
I hate it when other ppl do that. Note to self, check before you hit submit. :)
Kyoto, won't make a dent in global warming, I'd personally prefer to spend the money that would be spent on Kyoto compliance on alternative energy and fuel research. It's going to return us way better dividends. Global warming is usually described as becomming a big problem in the later half of this century, by then we should be done using fossil fuel. All of this is IHMO.