I don't understand why more people don't get that the effect on the economy is only about rate of change.
The answer is really quite simple: a vocal minority believe that government intervention in a free market is immoral and counter-productive. There are some very good arguments for this, but the idea has been reduced to absurdity, in part, because it is a useful meme for entrenched interests who want to preserve their "right" to pollute. The motives are more complicated than merely money -- there is huge institutional pressure to protect the status quo, and so denial of the polluting effect of CO2 is cognitively easy, and so is claiming that any action will blow up the world economy.
Except Obama didn't spend the money. Congress did. Obama signs laws. The laws the gave the budget crunch were on the books before he got to office. There would be less debt if there were a grand bargain in 2011.
That breezy assertion will be proven false when the condition I specified happens. It probably won't be California electricity crisis bad, but hard caps are idiotic, and you'll see why.
Your assertion has *already* happened, and it is *already* being dealt with. You can read, right? right?? (face-palm.)
fyi, the RGGI carbon targets are decreased each year. RGGI has been around for a long time (before the gas boom), and successfully reducing the carbon footprint of NE USA. The gas boom has lead to an unforeseen reduction in CO2 emissions, which have left the projected caps too high. The RGGI is working to develop revised targets.
There are some that say it is impossible to reduce emissions to the amount needed so artificial sequestration is needed. Some see the taxing if carbon as only a political ploy to increase control of the people.
The opposition to AGW has a vested interest in painting mitigation efforts as expensive, for a combination of ideological reasons (government interference == teh evil), and $$ reasons (oil/coal funds the GOP and conservative think tanks.)
Economists believe that the cost of mitigation will be small, based on the costs of existing mitigation efforts (RGGI and similar), and the history of similar programs.
The USA has implemented cap and trade over 20% of its economy. Energy prices have come down in this part of the USA relative to the rest of the country, for both factories and consumers. Furthermore, the part of the USA has seen relative economic growth compared to the rest of the USA. It is because of RGGI, similar carbon regulations in other parts of the world, and the history of such programs, that economists think that the cost of climate action will be negligible. The true alarmists are the ones preaching economic Armageddon.
It is quite difficult to figure out the true cost of energy, and subsidies are only part of the problem. Consider the cost of building a coal power-plant. It will be used for 50 years. So... what's the price of coal in 50 years? Not so easy.
Engineers, town planers, investors, and other technocrats follow levelized cost of energy, which attempts to find the fundemental cost of a particular energy source.
Wind is cheaper without subsidies -- and part of what makes it cheap is that you only need to price in spare parts and maintenance teams for 20-odd years.
I guess I am if I throw another log in the wood stove today...
Burning a log is just part of the normal carbon cycle. You do know that the CO2 in the log returns to the atmosphere anyway, right? Maybe it would take 10 years instead of 5 minutes; however, the CO2 remains out of the carbon cycle only if you bury the wood underground.
The whole point is that CO2 was sequestered out of the atmosphere over billions of years, and stored underground in oil and coal. Now we're dredging that up and returning it to the atmosphere.
And make no mistake, change is coming. The USA, Germany and China are leading the way in creating alternative sources of energy. The Germans and northern Europeans in particular are figuring out the engineering problems of using renewables on the grid. And the price of renewables is decreasing exponentially. Wind is now cheaper than every fossil fuel save gas, and will be cheaper than gas in five or so years. Solar is a little behind, but exponential is exponential.
Sure there are problems left to solve, but don't let anyone fool you into thinking that nobody cares. In fact, some of the smartest engineers and scientists in the world are figuring this out, and there is plenty of government and industry money to do "right" by the next generation.
If there's one major problem, its that the issue is a political football, but in the end, the smart money will move on, and the fluff heads will be left with wild conspiracy theories about how coal/oil was better all along, and a bunch of communists destroyed a perfectly good industry.
I know where it comes from, but it would invoke Godwin's law if I explained.
Haha, you just did break Godwin's law!
It is a lie of omission. They make it sound like it is scientists everywhere, it is only scientists who are members of the publishing body.
You know, science isn't a card that you get when you finish a bachelor's degree that gives you authority over the fluff heads on every topic. The world is far more complex than that.
This is simply not true. A few scientists investigated the possibility, and Time magazine and a few news-papers ran with a sensational story. There was no consensus -- just honest investigation, which was abandoned.
You could work all of this out for yourself, but that would be like asking a young earther to learn something about radiometric dating, when they already think themselves expert.
Yeah, except that 97% is a made up statistic in the category of "repeat a lie often enough and people will think it is the truth.
97% of IPCC climate scientist agree with the IPCC findings.
That's called projection. See "Merchants of Doubt" for the history of "repeat a lie enough"
1) Nobody is claiming that climate doesn't change - the debate is over the source(s) of that change.
People *do* claim that the climate is getting cooler, which is balls stupid on the face of it. And there is no serious scientific debate on the origins of recent warming, just like there's no serious debate on evolution.
1) Nobody is claiming that climate doesn't change - the debate is over the source(s) of that change.
And problems right now. A scientist will not say that AGW caused such and such a storm, and that *does* give weasel room for fluff-heads to claim that there's nothing to worry about; however, the dice are loaded for bigger storms, the jet-stream is changing (more floods/drought/cold/warm weather in the northern hemisphere), and sea levels are rising. (Storm surges are higher.) This is what the theory predicts, and this is what we see.
You do know that not every country in the world is a signatory to the UDDA. (You know what I'm talking about, right?). There are whole *countries* in the world besides the USA! Furthermore, the UDDA does not equate brain-death with death-death. Do you know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is?
I also don't really think that bioethics has much to do with the scientific, factual matter (despite its being interesting).
On the contrary, bioethics has a lot to do with it, because a human is asking the question... thus the conclusions are always going to be informed by human nature (in the veridical sense), and also the culturally rooted frames that we use. There really is no way to separate them out. That doesn't mean things cannot be right or wrong and everything in-between. But it does mean that any absolute truth would need to be grounded in an absolute notion of who we are and what we're part of -- some sort of moral realism, or alternatively, mathematical realism if that is what you go for. And realising the incomplete nature of one's own understanding, I believe the best we can do is state our interpretations of natural phenomena explicitly in the context of the frames we use, which is just being intellectually honest, and "awake".
You seem to be under the impression that just because I think life does (more or less) begin at conception that I have some particular collection of moral opinions that I may want to impose on others. That's not the case.
Great =0.
I'm pro-life in that I wand less abortion. Empirical evidence clearly shows that there are three policies that work:
(1) Scientifically grounded sex education reduces unplanned pregnancy.
(2) Access to contraception reduces unplanned pregnancy. (As such, the ACA will do more to reduce abortion in the USA than any single policy to date.)
(3) Social safety net for single mothers also removes a key motive for abortion, and provably reduces abortion.
I find (3) despicable, because I believe in personal responsibility -- however -- if you place life _above_ paying (a small amount) for other people's mistakes, then you will reveal yourself as being truly pro-life. As such, I believe that there should be a frugal safety net for women in trouble.
Finally, note that banning abortion doesn't really affect the abortion rate that much (if at all), and countries with safe access to abortion also have the lower abortion rates, both universally, and when controlling for education and socio-economic factors.
So I may be pro-life, but I disagree with pretty much everything the main-stream pro-life movement carries on about. Furthermore, though I'd only support restricting a women's access to abortion if, and only if, (1), (2), and (3) were implemented, (3) was considered absolutely shameful, and all of this was drilled into teenagers so that they know the consequences of their actions.
If you look at it, there is no hard line for life beginning. (And indeed, life ending. Check out all the legal definitions of death around the world, and the bizarre ethical implications.) The bible says that god "breathed life" in Genesis 2:7, which suggests that life begins at breath. That is obviously unsatisfying, but we are talking about the bible here. Strictly speaking, a sperm and egg is alive too... but obviously not a human being. But these are just concepts... not the reality of the thing. (Think Kant: Das Ding an Sich.) After-all, there is no hard line between "alive" and "not-alive" when you look for it. Prions? Viruses? Debatable they are living organisms. There's not dividing line between animal and plant (or sentient/non-sentient) either. If you're intellectually honest and after simple answers, then you'll just be disappointed.
If you are really interested in figuring out when life "begins", then you should study Embryology and bioethics, and accept that there is not going to be a simple answer, or even a consensus opinion. But you will develop your own informed opinion by studying nature and ethical arguments. The "answer" does indeed depend on how you conceive of the question. For example, twinning is no longer possible after two weeks. (Are twins one "life" or two?) 20 weeks for a plausible neurological system. (Does a human need to have a "proto-brain"). Close to birth if you're talking the viability of the baby. Conception if you want to ban hormonal contraceptives. (This last argument is actually incoherent, since hormonal contraceptives on average prevent a lot of fertilized embryos from being destroyed -- but we are talking about the land of motivated reasoning here.)
If you work from conclusion back to arguments, then you have no place at my table, intellectually speaking, but I'll have a beer with you and talk about the weather.
Slashdot Mirror
Hi, kudos for being interested, and not just throwing bombs.
The article you linked isn't relevant to your question, since we're interested in the question on whether gasoline lead is being measured in the ocean. As such, we only need to look at a time course for Pb in the ocean over the time period in question. (i.e., the age of leaded gasoline.) Your linked paper is concerned with much larger time scales, on the order of 10k years.
Somehow I don't think you are interested in the answer to this question.
I don't understand why more people don't get that the effect on the economy is only about rate of change.
The answer is really quite simple: a vocal minority believe that government intervention in a free market is immoral and counter-productive. There are some very good arguments for this, but the idea has been reduced to absurdity, in part, because it is a useful meme for entrenched interests who want to preserve their "right" to pollute. The motives are more complicated than merely money -- there is huge institutional pressure to protect the status quo, and so denial of the polluting effect of CO2 is cognitively easy, and so is claiming that any action will blow up the world economy.
Except Obama didn't spend the money. Congress did. Obama signs laws. The laws the gave the budget crunch were on the books before he got to office. There would be less debt if there were a grand bargain in 2011.
I love how Obama signs 100 executive orders a day ordering various federal agencies to implement his radical agenda
Obama has only signed 170 executive orders since 2009.
That's less than Bush and Clinton btw.
It was Netflix that withheld high-quality streaming from Time Warner Cable customers last year, not vice versa
AFAIK, Time-Warner wasn't allowed to.
That breezy assertion will be proven false when the condition I specified happens. It probably won't be California electricity crisis bad, but hard caps are idiotic, and you'll see why.
Your assertion has *already* happened, and it is *already* being dealt with. You can read, right? right?? (face-palm.)
fyi, the RGGI carbon targets are decreased each year. RGGI has been around for a long time (before the gas boom), and successfully reducing the carbon footprint of NE USA. The gas boom has lead to an unforeseen reduction in CO2 emissions, which have left the projected caps too high. The RGGI is working to develop revised targets.
These people aren't idiots.
The vast majority of political coal/oil money goes to conservative groups. For every joe manchin there are a dozen joe bartons. Deal with it.
There are some that say it is impossible to reduce emissions to the amount needed so artificial sequestration is needed. Some see the taxing if carbon as only a political ploy to increase control of the people.
And yet, in the reality of science and engineering, the cost is not as much as most think
The opposition to AGW has a vested interest in painting mitigation efforts as expensive, for a combination of ideological reasons (government interference == teh evil), and $$ reasons (oil/coal funds the GOP and conservative think tanks.)
Economists believe that the cost of mitigation will be small, based on the costs of existing mitigation efforts (RGGI and similar), and the history of similar programs.
Ha ha. The RGGI states just get their power from non-RGGI states and Canada.
Question: How CO2 is produced out-of-state to support RGGI states??
Answer: of course you don't know what you are talking about
And Eastern Canada is doing the same thing as RGGI. Heard of Dunning-Kruger?
The USA has implemented cap and trade over 20% of its economy. Energy prices have come down in this part of the USA relative to the rest of the country, for both factories and consumers. Furthermore, the part of the USA has seen relative economic growth compared to the rest of the USA. It is because of RGGI, similar carbon regulations in other parts of the world, and the history of such programs, that economists think that the cost of climate action will be negligible. The true alarmists are the ones preaching economic Armageddon.
It is quite difficult to figure out the true cost of energy, and subsidies are only part of the problem. Consider the cost of building a coal power-plant. It will be used for 50 years. So... what's the price of coal in 50 years? Not so easy.
Engineers, town planers, investors, and other technocrats follow levelized cost of energy, which attempts to find the fundemental cost of a particular energy source.
Wind is cheaper without subsidies -- and part of what makes it cheap is that you only need to price in spare parts and maintenance teams for 20-odd years.
I guess I am if I throw another log in the wood stove today...
Burning a log is just part of the normal carbon cycle. You do know that the CO2 in the log returns to the atmosphere anyway, right? Maybe it would take 10 years instead of 5 minutes; however, the CO2 remains out of the carbon cycle only if you bury the wood underground.
The whole point is that CO2 was sequestered out of the atmosphere over billions of years, and stored underground in oil and coal. Now we're dredging that up and returning it to the atmosphere.
That is just simply wrong. There are powerful intrenched interests with their misinformation campaign, and a bunch of sheep who think they're rebels for repeating the tortured logic of others, but that is really the sum total of the opposition to change.
And make no mistake, change is coming. The USA, Germany and China are leading the way in creating alternative sources of energy. The Germans and northern Europeans in particular are figuring out the engineering problems of using renewables on the grid. And the price of renewables is decreasing exponentially. Wind is now cheaper than every fossil fuel save gas, and will be cheaper than gas in five or so years. Solar is a little behind, but exponential is exponential.
Sure there are problems left to solve, but don't let anyone fool you into thinking that nobody cares. In fact, some of the smartest engineers and scientists in the world are figuring this out, and there is plenty of government and industry money to do "right" by the next generation.
If there's one major problem, its that the issue is a political football, but in the end, the smart money will move on, and the fluff heads will be left with wild conspiracy theories about how coal/oil was better all along, and a bunch of communists destroyed a perfectly good industry.
Haha, it takes a special type of person to fall for such obvious smears, when they are so obviously made up whole cloth.
I know where it comes from, but it would invoke Godwin's law if I explained.
Haha, you just did break Godwin's law!
It is a lie of omission. They make it sound like it is scientists everywhere, it is only scientists who are members of the publishing body.
You know, science isn't a card that you get when you finish a bachelor's degree that gives you authority over the fluff heads on every topic. The world is far more complex than that.
that was the AGW crowd in the 70s,
This is simply not true. A few scientists investigated the possibility, and Time magazine and a few news-papers ran with a sensational story. There was no consensus -- just honest investigation, which was abandoned.
You could work all of this out for yourself, but that would be like asking a young earther to learn something about radiometric dating, when they already think themselves expert.
Yeah, except that 97% is a made up statistic in the category of "repeat a lie often enough and people will think it is the truth. 97% of IPCC climate scientist agree with the IPCC findings.
That's called projection. See "Merchants of Doubt" for the history of "repeat a lie enough"
1) Nobody is claiming that climate doesn't change - the debate is over the source(s) of that change.
People *do* claim that the climate is getting cooler, which is balls stupid on the face of it. And there is no serious scientific debate on the origins of recent warming, just like there's no serious debate on evolution.
1) Nobody is claiming that climate doesn't change - the debate is over the source(s) of that change.
And problems right now. A scientist will not say that AGW caused such and such a storm, and that *does* give weasel room for fluff-heads to claim that there's nothing to worry about; however, the dice are loaded for bigger storms, the jet-stream is changing (more floods/drought/cold/warm weather in the northern hemisphere), and sea levels are rising. (Storm surges are higher.) This is what the theory predicts, and this is what we see.
ok, I'm not sure why you think the scientific consensus is that we should reduce GHG,
Ever heard of the green-house effect?
You do know that not every country in the world is a signatory to the UDDA. (You know what I'm talking about, right?). There are whole *countries* in the world besides the USA! Furthermore, the UDDA does not equate brain-death with death-death. Do you know what the Dunning-Kruger effect is?
If so you are the only one that does.
Hyperbole much?
I also don't really think that bioethics has much to do with the scientific, factual matter (despite its being interesting).
On the contrary, bioethics has a lot to do with it, because a human is asking the question... thus the conclusions are always going to be informed by human nature (in the veridical sense), and also the culturally rooted frames that we use. There really is no way to separate them out. That doesn't mean things cannot be right or wrong and everything in-between. But it does mean that any absolute truth would need to be grounded in an absolute notion of who we are and what we're part of -- some sort of moral realism, or alternatively, mathematical realism if that is what you go for. And realising the incomplete nature of one's own understanding, I believe the best we can do is state our interpretations of natural phenomena explicitly in the context of the frames we use, which is just being intellectually honest, and "awake".
You seem to be under the impression that just because I think life does (more or less) begin at conception that I have some particular collection of moral opinions that I may want to impose on others. That's not the case.
Great =0.
I'm pro-life in that I wand less abortion. Empirical evidence clearly shows that there are three policies that work:
(1) Scientifically grounded sex education reduces unplanned pregnancy.
(2) Access to contraception reduces unplanned pregnancy. (As such, the ACA will do more to reduce abortion in the USA than any single policy to date.)
(3) Social safety net for single mothers also removes a key motive for abortion, and provably reduces abortion.
I find (3) despicable, because I believe in personal responsibility -- however -- if you place life _above_ paying (a small amount) for other people's mistakes, then you will reveal yourself as being truly pro-life. As such, I believe that there should be a frugal safety net for women in trouble.
Finally, note that banning abortion doesn't really affect the abortion rate that much (if at all), and countries with safe access to abortion also have the lower abortion rates, both universally, and when controlling for education and socio-economic factors.
So I may be pro-life, but I disagree with pretty much everything the main-stream pro-life movement carries on about. Furthermore, though I'd only support restricting a women's access to abortion if, and only if, (1), (2), and (3) were implemented, (3) was considered absolutely shameful, and all of this was drilled into teenagers so that they know the consequences of their actions.
If you look at it, there is no hard line for life beginning. (And indeed, life ending. Check out all the legal definitions of death around the world, and the bizarre ethical implications.) The bible says that god "breathed life" in Genesis 2:7, which suggests that life begins at breath. That is obviously unsatisfying, but we are talking about the bible here. Strictly speaking, a sperm and egg is alive too... but obviously not a human being. But these are just concepts... not the reality of the thing. (Think Kant: Das Ding an Sich.) After-all, there is no hard line between "alive" and "not-alive" when you look for it. Prions? Viruses? Debatable they are living organisms. There's not dividing line between animal and plant (or sentient/non-sentient) either. If you're intellectually honest and after simple answers, then you'll just be disappointed.
If you are really interested in figuring out when life "begins", then you should study Embryology and bioethics, and accept that there is not going to be a simple answer, or even a consensus opinion. But you will develop your own informed opinion by studying nature and ethical arguments. The "answer" does indeed depend on how you conceive of the question. For example, twinning is no longer possible after two weeks. (Are twins one "life" or two?) 20 weeks for a plausible neurological system. (Does a human need to have a "proto-brain"). Close to birth if you're talking the viability of the baby. Conception if you want to ban hormonal contraceptives. (This last argument is actually incoherent, since hormonal contraceptives on average prevent a lot of fertilized embryos from being destroyed -- but we are talking about the land of motivated reasoning here.)
If you work from conclusion back to arguments, then you have no place at my table, intellectually speaking, but I'll have a beer with you and talk about the weather.