Cart before the horse, I'm afraid. Wealth doesn't buy good governance. Example, the Middle East nations that contain a good deal of the world's oil. Good governance can, however, create wealth. Example, South Korea. In 1954, it was one of the poorest nations in the world, on par with the poorest in Africa. Today, it's a first world nation with the world's 12th largest economy. Democratization, in the case of South Korea, proceeded slowly, but good governance, and the sociological factors were there in 1954, and wealth followed
It was when the European middle-class began to develop that democracy began to sprout in Europe.
Um, no. The Magna Carta didn't come about because a bunch of burghers were pressing for their rights. It was a squabble between rich nobles and an even richer king. And yet, it's one of the most significant democratizing documents in human history. And has absolutely nothing to do with a middle class.
Another significant democratizing influences were things like the Protestant Reformation. Again, had nothing to do with the middle class.
Once you have a group of people with some free time on their hands, they can start hassling their government, getting involved in politics, giving money to the right people to fund the right initiatives, etcetera.
Affluence breeds democracy, and democracy preserves affluence. A quick look at the history of the US should demonstrate that to you.
Absurd, and obviously false given the facts.
You seem to think it's like a recipe. Have some wealth, bake for a period, and voila! Democracy! Good government! Um, no. The Roman Empire had a large, vibrant middle class for much of it's history, enabled by good governance..and, ultimately, grinded down to serfdom by bad.
For the first 100 years, most people in the United States were essentially peasant farmers. The difference between a peasant farmer who owned his land in Pennsylvania as opposed to a peasant farmer who "owned" his land in Africa, however, were little things like established property rights, the rule of law, and a well functioning government. Take out the rule of law, and a well functioning government and the US would not have made it this far.
Good governance preserves and builds wealth, and bad governance destroys it. Affluence, in and of itself, does nothing positive. A good example of this is looking at the result of windfalls, either at an individual level or a national level. On an individual level, look at lottery winners. Or a national level, look at what happened to Spain and its New World fortune. Squandered. Or Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. It's in the process of being squandered. And again compare them to South Korea. South Korea had good governance before they had wealth.
Good governance, btw, isn't the same thing as democracy. You can have a poorly run democracy (which won't last, of course), and a well run autocracy. South Korea, for much of it's history, was a well run autocracy.
Wealth will not be built and sustained in the developing world until those countries build a culture and society that is capable of sustaining a well run government first. The last and only experience most of these countries have with that is, unfortunately, the colonial administrations that ruled over them briefly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
No, the Democrats would just shift the target of domestic spying to "right wing extremists" like Republican members of Congress, or to frame up whistle blowers on felony charges like the White House travel office which was fired. Both of these were carried out by the prior residents of the White House.
It appears that the tendency to abuse power is a universal, not a party trait.
Mugabe gets all of his support from uneducated rural people, while city people consistently vote for the opposition. As long as Mugabe can promise farms for landless people and keep his majority base from trusting anyone else, he will stay in power.
The flaw with this premise is that it hinges on the assumption that Zimbabwe has a functioning democratic government. It doesn't. Zimbabwe's last election didn't pass international scrutiny becaus of vote fraud and intimidation carried about by Mugabe's people.
In other words, even If those rural people had electricity and water, they might have the ability to hear dissenting views over the radio that they can't hear right now, they would likely be intimidated into not voting for the opposition, or have their votes not counted, just like it happened in the cities (not to mention, having rural opposition figures arrested or killed).
People living in abject poverty are a lot more willing to surrender power than the middle class and the wealthy.
People living in abject poverty have no power to surrender. The only power at their disposal is the power of the mob, and even is manipulated by the middle class and wealthy for their own ends.
Look at the collapse of every democracy since the beginning of the 20th century -- they all had to do with selling the poor on promises of a stronger nation if they only surrendered themselves to the state. The impoverishment of a people is one of the first steps towards totalitarianism, whether it be communism or fascism.
No, ever democracy since the beginning of the 20th century collapsed because of corruption and/or tribalism. Democracatic governments don't need to be rich or technocratic to be successful, but they do need to be founded in a society that respects the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of man, and has a fundamental appreciation of the difference. Democracy gestated in the west gradually for 500 years before exploding onto the scene. In contrast, we're taking many sub-national groups that, one century ago were moribund in an illiterate iron-age (or worse) tribal society, and expecting them to leapfrog to representational government. At least, that is what happened in the 60's when Europe started their decolonization efforts. Democratic governments were put in place, without the evolutional societal improvements necessary to sustain the governments. And in short order, almost every single one of those governments was toppled, and replaced by a corrupt strongman spoils system, which was the standard form of "government" prior to the Europeans coming in. Most of these states are simply regressing to the mean. And the mean for that area is really, really low.
I'm not worried about a population explosion in Africa. It will last at most a century before Africa becomes subject to the lowered birth rates of every other industrialized nation.
Well, you should be. Africa already has a larger population than North and South America and the Caribean, combined, despite having 3/4 of the comparable land area, and ecologically speaking, a lot less usable land area than that. And they are much farther behind in the stabilization game, on average, than the worst Latin American country. You want a distopian ecological catastrophe, just double the population of Africa (and say good bye to most ape, big cat, and elephant populations to name a few).
Corruption and tribalism are the worst problems facing Africa, but they cannot disappear until they are connected with the rest of the world, and that requires technology.
Again, a flawed premise. Getting rid of corruption and tribalism doesn't require technology, it requires education and an ethical society. Technology with corruption and without ethics gives you Nigerian phone and internet scams. Technology and "connectivity" aren't solutions to sociological problems.
is good governance and a lot less corruption. A lot of those other things would take care of themselves if you took care of the first two. And without it, you're not going to get the other things. Look at Zimbabwe. Used to be the largest net exporter of food in Africa. Corruption, mismanagement, and ethnic violence by the indigenous blacks against white farmers have turned the place into a pauper's paradise, complete with famine and babies being thrown into sewers.
As for roads, they used aid money to build roads in the Congo. Nobody uses them (for the most part). They use the bush trails. Same thing with schools.
Until you (or they) solve the tribalism and corruption issues in the development world, all we are doing is throwing good money after bad in offering up "solutions".
What will happen when you magically solve the clean water, food, and medical care issues in the developing world? Population explosion even worse than they are experiencing today, without the social revolutions that preceeded and enabled the developed world's evolution. And at the end of the line, population crash, and more misguided intervention on the part of the developed world.
I fail to see how ending the taxpayer subsidies required to make driving a Hummer universally affordable
What subsidies are you talking about? And really, since when has driving a Hummer been "universally affordable"? I make a pretty good living (>6 figures) and consider driving a Hummer extragant. I could afford it, but am not sure how someone with half my income and all the other responsibilities could. Unless those phantom subsidies really do exist. And looking at the breakdown, I see about 40% of the price of gasoline is local, state, and Federal taxes. That's not including, of course, the blending regulations that add a "tax" to each gallon. Taxes, at least in traditional economics, are the opposite of subsidies. I think what you meant to say is that we don't tax gasoline as heavily as the Europeans do. Or maybe you are being intentionally dishonest.
Also, even if we get rid of Hummers and all manner of SUVs that does exactly what for our consumption? Reduces it by about 1%. If that. In other words, less of an effect than opening ANWR does. And, ANWR isn't significant enough, at least according to the anti lobby, to be worth bothering with. Using the same logic, neither is getting rid of SUVs.
About half of our energy consumption, as a nation, goes to electricity production. The other half goes to transportation. About half of that transportation budget goes to the production and transport of agricultural products. The remainder approximately goes to commercial and non-commercial transportation. Only a small component of that is taken up by SUVs.
If we merely ended the oil subsidies - including the failure to recognize that iraq is an oil war, and to tack the cost of the war onto the price at the pump - the American ingenuity (cost-avoidance experts) would react by designing both cars and cities for minimal cost. Viola - no war
Iraq isn't an oil war any more than Afghanistan was an oil war (and that claim was made by the left as well, and I probably have more oil in my car than Afghanistan has in the ground). Iraq is about geopolitics. Oil is part of it, but only because oil is the underpinning of the industrialized economies, and having a psychopath in direct control of the revenue from the world's second largest reserves (potentially) doesn't make sense geopolitically, especially since sanctions were about to be scuttled at the behest of France and Russia. The situation is a lot more complex than a money making scheme for Haliburton, which is all the left seems to be able to come up with when it comes to Iraq.
Lovelock may be one of the founding fathers of Greenpeace, but he is completely out of step with the mainstream of the movement with regards to nuclear power. With respect to the Green Party in Germany, when they took power they committed Germany to the complete abandonment nuclear power. Without nuclear energy, you only have coal, light and heavy fuel oil, and natural gas as primary electricity producers. With respect to Lovelock, nuclear energy, and the environmental movement, he's a voice in the wilderness.
The bottom line is that the world will use oil as a source of energy until it no longer makes sense to do so. We can hasten that arrival with governmental policies like subsidising carbon-alternative energy sources and assessing a carbon tax. However, taking exploitable energy sources off the table, especially when we aren't pursuing alternatives with any real fervor, is stupid.
The reason nuclear power plants aren't being built in the US today has nothing to do with safety or economic efficiency of nuclear power, and everything to do with the environmental movement and the penchant of groups and people like the NRDC and Robert Kennedy Jr to sue to stop any new construction of nuclear power. As long as people like that are stopping progress on the nuclear front, we have no choice but to pursue development of carbon energy sources.
There are rich deposits of petroleum and natural gas on the outer continental shelf (OCS), especially off the Pacific coasts of California and Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty basins have been identified that could contain enormous oil and gas reserves. It is estimated that 30 percent of undiscovered U.S. gas and oil reserves are contained in the OCS.
Today, there are more than 4,000 drilling platforms, servicing thousands of wells. OCS production supplies approximately 30 percent of the nation's natural gas production and 24 percent of its oil production. Most of the active wells are in the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico, with additional wells off the coast of California.
Although there are no producing wells in other areas, there is believed to be significant oil potential in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska, as well as natural gas potential in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and in certain basins off the Atlantic Coast.
On December 31, 1997, President Clinton excluded the Pacific OCS, the North Atlantic and North Aleutian areas, and parts of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico from energy development until the year 2007.
"The total quantity of technically recoverable oil in the assessment area is estimated to be between 5.7 and 16.0 billion barrels of oil."
U.S. consumption is in the neighborhood of 7.5 billion barrels per year. So, depending on how much oil there is in ANWR, it amounts to a little under a year, or a little over two years worth of supply for the US. That is a very substantial amount of oil.
Certainly not 10 years, but not your 6 months either, and not another poster's 30 days.
* * *
As for forcing a switch to alternative fuels...these are what exactly? Hydrogen? Ethanol? Where are you going to get your hydrogen from if not oil? How are you going to grow your ethanol without gasoline and fertilizers?
In order to get off oil completely, we need to build a crash program of nuclear power plants, supplemented by wind farms where practical (solar is too expensive unless we can put orbital platforms up).
Efficiency gains do not produce less power demand. It's a myth. Consumption only goes down when standard of livings fall.
I agree we need to find an alternative. I don't agree with people that claim exploiting the petroleum resources we DO have is a waste of time, however, nor that searching for more reserves, or technical innovation in exploiting sub-optimal reserves is a waste of time. Everything, at the end of the day, is a waste of time. Having oil lets us spend that time in a lot more efficient ways than not having it does.
I think what you wrote was a fair indicator of what you believe, or you have a problem communicating your beliefs. Your communicated position is that we are going to run out of oil regardless of what we do, so the search for additional oil is functionally useless.
How long do you think it's gonna take to get at that extra oil? How long do you think it's gonna last with our current usage? The answers are too long and not long enough, respectively.
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
Ok, lets agree on one thing. Oil is a finite resource. We are going to run out eventually.
Ok, now that we've agreed, lets also agree that there are significant, exploitable reserves left in the world, and additionally, left in the United States.
If "peak oil" has truly been hit, the only reason is because those significant reserves are not being exploited. And in almost all cases, this is happening because of political reasons. And people like you.
"The sky is falling!" is an excuse not to do anything: "Why should we exploit ANWR when it will only push back the clock for 10 years?"...because it will push back the clock for 10 years. Lets draw an analogy. A patient can have surgery that will allow him to live another 10 years, or he can die today. You guys would rather he die today.
The anti-oil people are ideological relatives of the "Earth First" crowd. Their goal is a massive reduction in world population and per capita energy consumption, and along with it, standard of living. Drilling in ANWR, exploiting offshore reserves, that stuff just pushes back the date when we can usher in Gaia and all million of us go back to living an agrarian or hunte gatherer life-style.
Humanity needs time. Time to build and generate alternatives to the petro-economy. Some of us actually like the benefits of an industrial, technological society and don't want to see it come crashing down around us because environmentalist idiots think that drilling in ANWR is going to be an ecological catastrophe. So when people start starving (because we can't make fertilizer or pesticides from oil by-products, and don't have gasoline to transport the food anyway), what do you think is going to happen to the cute curry animals? Famine is a worse ecological catastrophe than polution. Forests are burned and wild animals are slaughtered wholesale to stave off starvation in the third world.
The world needs time to transition. The neo-luddites like the parent of this post don't want to give the world time. They want those people to starve to death. You, your family, your friends, your city, state, country, your race, your species stands in the way of their vision for Gaia. Think of that the next time we consider voting to drill in ANWR or opening up some of the 98% of the coast in the US that is currently off limits for exploratory drilling.
Question: is the ratio of D2O to H2O consistent even after evaporation and precipication? One would think that whatever fractionation that occurs in a liquid because of differences in specific weight would be useless once the water has gone to vapor, formed clouds, mixed with evaporated water from other places, and then precipitated back down again.
As for slashdot collapsing whitespaces, below your post, there is a drop down box that says "HTML formatted"...if you change it to "plain old text", it will preserve your white spaces.
First, recommendation: break out your comments from my post...helps to read.
Secondly, I commend you on your ability to be insulting without actually responding with any facts to buttress your insults.
Again, how do ice core samples show any but the most basic temperature data (obviously, 31 C or lower to freeze)? Aside from it having to be 31 C or lower to freeze, I don't see how any temperature data is recorded. And please, try to refrain from using a computer model as your basis.
how ice core samples give any idea of what conditions were like globally?
Ice core samples have a built in bias...they only show local conditions where it was cold enough to freeze.
From the global warming evangelists, we know that global warming may result in colder temperatures in some areas, but warmer temperatures overall (global mean temperature). People that say, "we'll, it was colder this year where I live than last year" are making the mistake of taking a local experience and applying it to a global phenomenon. Scientists that take ice cores and plug the data into a model are making the exact same mistake. They don't have climate data for areas where ice wasn't formed. Even the trace atmospheric composition is a local phenomenon, as local methane composition varies heavily based on the foilage in the area.
The global mean temperature is extremely difficult to capture. It takes us thousands of sensor stations, satellites, and other devices to do it today. But we're supposed to trust some scientist's estimates of global mean temperature from some ice cores pulled from Greenland that carbon date to 600,000 years ago as an accurate indicator of global warming? If so, you're talking religion, not science.
You're simply insane. Your little persecution complexes fuel your ego trip. "The government is out to get me because I criticized George Bush".
Every time I turn on the television, and frequently, when I open up a browser to read the news, I'm bombarded with information about how bad a president Bush is. Just about anyone that wants to get their anti-Bush message out can find a sympathetic media ear. Ipso facto there can be no serious censorship or oppression. It is not a common characteristic of Nazi, fascist, right-wing dictatorships to allow free ranging criticism for 6 consecutive years.
No, Xonstantine's problem is even worse. He states that Muslims are not all terrorists but then justifies arresting Muslims based on nothing more than racial profiling because they are perceived to be terrorists.
Thanks for trying to understand my problem. If I may take a break, your problem appears to be reading comprehension.
To be clear: I haven't "justified" anything. Arresting terrorists, meaning people who have committed acts of terror or are planning to commit acts of terror is not the same thing as racially profiling. It's not the same thing as sending in truncheon welding storm troopers to beat a bunch of people senseless who's biggest conspiracy is stretching in the park.
I'll try to simplify things a little bit so the more befuddled of the/. crowd can understand.
Any comparison of the Chinese treatment of Tai Chi/Falun Gong/Christians to US treatment of Muslims is flawed because:
1) there is no oppression of Muslims in the United States. Racially profiling is ILLEGAL. And it's a really bad term to use when we are talking about a religion that spans all racial lines.
2) Tai Chi/Falun Gong/Christians have not carried out terrorist acts resulting in the deaths of thousands, hundreds, or even tens of Chinese.
3) Terrorist actions carried out by Islamic groups have killed thousands of people in the US. Whatever you think the appropriate response from the US government should be to that, some response is warranted.
Guess what? I'm not advocating the Chinese solution, which is a lot worse than simple racial profiling against a much more innocuous group of people than the US is dealing with. I'm not even advocating racial profiling of Muslims. I'm attacking the idea that the actions of the China and the US are anyway similar, or are based on remotely similar justifications.
Beating people with truncheon welding storm troopers and then sending them to forced labor camps for the state crime of stretching = trying to catch Muslim terrorists before they carry out another 9-11 by limited wire tapping is equivilent? Sorry, don't think so. And until we start rounding up random Muslims within the US and torturing them, it won't be, and we won't do that.
The "jihadis" represent the Muslim faith just as much as the KKK represented the Christian faith.
The claim that jihadis don't represent the Muslim faith is often made but it's just wishful thinking. The jihadis represent the Muslim faith. They don't represent all Muslims, but they are living the Muslim faith as handed down generation after generation since the rise of Mohammed. Islam is jihad...and just about every notable Muslim scholar and imam has said so. There has been no repudiation of this basic idea in the Islamic ummah. The only arguments you see around the jihad is semantic parsing as to who is a legitimate target (or victim) and who isn't.
Islam is undergoing a reformation, but unfortunately it's a conservative reformation, not a liberal one.
And regarding the KKK...the goals of the KKK weren't the world wide spread of Christianity. It was the oppression of other people. The goal of the jihad, and the duty of every devout Muslim is the submission of the world to Allah.
Dressing in Muslim garb and reading aloud from the Koran in the Washington Mall is not illegal, and won't get you arrested.
Furthermore, fundamentalist Muslims (aka the jihadis) aren't a threat to Americans in power, they are simply a threat to Americans and non-Muslims period.
As far as I know, Tai Chi practicioners in China aren't executing daily suicide bombers, beheading people and sending the videos to sympathetic journalists, and don't subscribe to a philosophy advocating that Tai Chi take over the world. Now, I'm a little ignorant about Tai Chi, so maybe I'm wrong about the above. Maybe the evil US government has censored that information from reaching me.
Oppressing people who like to stretch in parks for stretching in parks because they scare you is not the same as arresting terrorists because they are planning to blow up more citizens.
This is the problem when people who don't understand morality try to argue moral equivilence.
Slashdot Mirror
Good governance is a side-effect of affluence
Cart before the horse, I'm afraid. Wealth doesn't buy good governance. Example, the Middle East nations that contain a good deal of the world's oil. Good governance can, however, create wealth. Example, South Korea. In 1954, it was one of the poorest nations in the world, on par with the poorest in Africa. Today, it's a first world nation with the world's 12th largest economy. Democratization, in the case of South Korea, proceeded slowly, but good governance, and the sociological factors were there in 1954, and wealth followed
It was when the European middle-class began to develop that democracy began to sprout in Europe.
Um, no. The Magna Carta didn't come about because a bunch of burghers were pressing for their rights. It was a squabble between rich nobles and an even richer king. And yet, it's one of the most significant democratizing documents in human history. And has absolutely nothing to do with a middle class.
Another significant democratizing influences were things like the Protestant Reformation. Again, had nothing to do with the middle class. Once you have a group of people with some free time on their hands, they can start hassling their government, getting involved in politics, giving money to the right people to fund the right initiatives, etcetera.
Affluence breeds democracy, and democracy preserves affluence. A quick look at the history of the US should demonstrate that to you.
Absurd, and obviously false given the facts.
You seem to think it's like a recipe. Have some wealth, bake for a period, and voila! Democracy! Good government! Um, no. The Roman Empire had a large, vibrant middle class for much of it's history, enabled by good governance..and, ultimately, grinded down to serfdom by bad. For the first 100 years, most people in the United States were essentially peasant farmers. The difference between a peasant farmer who owned his land in Pennsylvania as opposed to a peasant farmer who "owned" his land in Africa, however, were little things like established property rights, the rule of law, and a well functioning government. Take out the rule of law, and a well functioning government and the US would not have made it this far.
Good governance preserves and builds wealth, and bad governance destroys it. Affluence, in and of itself, does nothing positive. A good example of this is looking at the result of windfalls, either at an individual level or a national level. On an individual level, look at lottery winners. Or a national level, look at what happened to Spain and its New World fortune. Squandered. Or Saudi Arabia's oil wealth. It's in the process of being squandered. And again compare them to South Korea. South Korea had good governance before they had wealth.
Good governance, btw, isn't the same thing as democracy. You can have a poorly run democracy (which won't last, of course), and a well run autocracy. South Korea, for much of it's history, was a well run autocracy.
Wealth will not be built and sustained in the developing world until those countries build a culture and society that is capable of sustaining a well run government first. The last and only experience most of these countries have with that is, unfortunately, the colonial administrations that ruled over them briefly in the 19th and early 20th centuries.
No, the Democrats would just shift the target of domestic spying to "right wing extremists" like Republican members of Congress, or to frame up whistle blowers on felony charges like the White House travel office which was fired. Both of these were carried out by the prior residents of the White House.
It appears that the tendency to abuse power is a universal, not a party trait.
Mugabe gets all of his support from uneducated rural people, while city people consistently vote for the opposition. As long as Mugabe can promise farms for landless people and keep his majority base from trusting anyone else, he will stay in power.
The flaw with this premise is that it hinges on the assumption that Zimbabwe has a functioning democratic government. It doesn't. Zimbabwe's last election didn't pass international scrutiny becaus of vote fraud and intimidation carried about by Mugabe's people.
In other words, even If those rural people had electricity and water, they might have the ability to hear dissenting views over the radio that they can't hear right now, they would likely be intimidated into not voting for the opposition, or have their votes not counted, just like it happened in the cities (not to mention, having rural opposition figures arrested or killed).
People living in abject poverty are a lot more willing to surrender power than the middle class and the wealthy.
People living in abject poverty have no power to surrender. The only power at their disposal is the power of the mob, and even is manipulated by the middle class and wealthy for their own ends.
Look at the collapse of every democracy since the beginning of the 20th century -- they all had to do with selling the poor on promises of a stronger nation if they only surrendered themselves to the state. The impoverishment of a people is one of the first steps towards totalitarianism, whether it be communism or fascism.
No, ever democracy since the beginning of the 20th century collapsed because of corruption and/or tribalism. Democracatic governments don't need to be rich or technocratic to be successful, but they do need to be founded in a society that respects the rule of law, as opposed to the rule of man, and has a fundamental appreciation of the difference. Democracy gestated in the west gradually for 500 years before exploding onto the scene. In contrast, we're taking many sub-national groups that, one century ago were moribund in an illiterate iron-age (or worse) tribal society, and expecting them to leapfrog to representational government. At least, that is what happened in the 60's when Europe started their decolonization efforts. Democratic governments were put in place, without the evolutional societal improvements necessary to sustain the governments. And in short order, almost every single one of those governments was toppled, and replaced by a corrupt strongman spoils system, which was the standard form of "government" prior to the Europeans coming in. Most of these states are simply regressing to the mean. And the mean for that area is really, really low.
I'm not worried about a population explosion in Africa. It will last at most a century before Africa becomes subject to the lowered birth rates of every other industrialized nation.
Well, you should be. Africa already has a larger population than North and South America and the Caribean, combined, despite having 3/4 of the comparable land area, and ecologically speaking, a lot less usable land area than that. And they are much farther behind in the stabilization game, on average, than the worst Latin American country. You want a distopian ecological catastrophe, just double the population of Africa (and say good bye to most ape, big cat, and elephant populations to name a few).
Corruption and tribalism are the worst problems facing Africa, but they cannot disappear until they are connected with the rest of the world, and that requires technology.
Again, a flawed premise. Getting rid of corruption and tribalism doesn't require technology, it requires education and an ethical society. Technology with corruption and without ethics gives you Nigerian phone and internet scams. Technology and "connectivity" aren't solutions to sociological problems.
is good governance and a lot less corruption. A lot of those other things would take care of themselves if you took care of the first two. And without it, you're not going to get the other things. Look at Zimbabwe. Used to be the largest net exporter of food in Africa. Corruption, mismanagement, and ethnic violence by the indigenous blacks against white farmers have turned the place into a pauper's paradise, complete with famine and babies being thrown into sewers.
As for roads, they used aid money to build roads in the Congo. Nobody uses them (for the most part). They use the bush trails. Same thing with schools.
Until you (or they) solve the tribalism and corruption issues in the development world, all we are doing is throwing good money after bad in offering up "solutions".
What will happen when you magically solve the clean water, food, and medical care issues in the developing world? Population explosion even worse than they are experiencing today, without the social revolutions that preceeded and enabled the developed world's evolution. And at the end of the line, population crash, and more misguided intervention on the part of the developed world.
I fail to see how ending the taxpayer subsidies required to make driving a Hummer universally affordable
What subsidies are you talking about? And really, since when has driving a Hummer been "universally affordable"? I make a pretty good living (>6 figures) and consider driving a Hummer extragant. I could afford it, but am not sure how someone with half my income and all the other responsibilities could. Unless those phantom subsidies really do exist. And looking at the breakdown, I see about 40% of the price of gasoline is local, state, and Federal taxes. That's not including, of course, the blending regulations that add a "tax" to each gallon. Taxes, at least in traditional economics, are the opposite of subsidies. I think what you meant to say is that we don't tax gasoline as heavily as the Europeans do. Or maybe you are being intentionally dishonest.
Also, even if we get rid of Hummers and all manner of SUVs that does exactly what for our consumption? Reduces it by about 1%. If that. In other words, less of an effect than opening ANWR does. And, ANWR isn't significant enough, at least according to the anti lobby, to be worth bothering with. Using the same logic, neither is getting rid of SUVs.
About half of our energy consumption, as a nation, goes to electricity production. The other half goes to transportation. About half of that transportation budget goes to the production and transport of agricultural products. The remainder approximately goes to commercial and non-commercial transportation. Only a small component of that is taken up by SUVs.
If we merely ended the oil subsidies - including the failure to recognize that iraq is an oil war, and to tack the cost of the war onto the price at the pump - the American ingenuity (cost-avoidance experts) would react by designing both cars and cities for minimal cost. Viola - no war
Iraq isn't an oil war any more than Afghanistan was an oil war (and that claim was made by the left as well, and I probably have more oil in my car than Afghanistan has in the ground). Iraq is about geopolitics. Oil is part of it, but only because oil is the underpinning of the industrialized economies, and having a psychopath in direct control of the revenue from the world's second largest reserves (potentially) doesn't make sense geopolitically, especially since sanctions were about to be scuttled at the behest of France and Russia. The situation is a lot more complex than a money making scheme for Haliburton, which is all the left seems to be able to come up with when it comes to Iraq.
Lovelock may be one of the founding fathers of Greenpeace, but he is completely out of step with the mainstream of the movement with regards to nuclear power. With respect to the Green Party in Germany, when they took power they committed Germany to the complete abandonment nuclear power. Without nuclear energy, you only have coal, light and heavy fuel oil, and natural gas as primary electricity producers. With respect to Lovelock, nuclear energy, and the environmental movement, he's a voice in the wilderness.
The bottom line is that the world will use oil as a source of energy until it no longer makes sense to do so. We can hasten that arrival with governmental policies like subsidising carbon-alternative energy sources and assessing a carbon tax. However, taking exploitable energy sources off the table, especially when we aren't pursuing alternatives with any real fervor, is stupid.
The reason nuclear power plants aren't being built in the US today has nothing to do with safety or economic efficiency of nuclear power, and everything to do with the environmental movement and the penchant of groups and people like the NRDC and Robert Kennedy Jr to sue to stop any new construction of nuclear power. As long as people like that are stopping progress on the nuclear front, we have no choice but to pursue development of carbon energy sources.
From http://www.noia.org/info/petroleum.asp:
Offshore Oil Reserves
There are rich deposits of petroleum and natural gas on the outer continental shelf (OCS), especially off the Pacific coasts of California and Alaska and in the Gulf of Mexico. Thirty basins have been identified that could contain enormous oil and gas reserves. It is estimated that 30 percent of undiscovered U.S. gas and oil reserves are contained in the OCS.
Today, there are more than 4,000 drilling platforms, servicing thousands of wells. OCS production supplies approximately 30 percent of the nation's natural gas production and 24 percent of its oil production. Most of the active wells are in the Central and Western Gulf of Mexico, with additional wells off the coast of California.
Although there are no producing wells in other areas, there is believed to be significant oil potential in the Beaufort Sea off Alaska, as well as natural gas potential in the Eastern Gulf of Mexico and in certain basins off the Atlantic Coast.
On December 31, 1997, President Clinton excluded the Pacific OCS, the North Atlantic and North Aleutian areas, and parts of the Eastern Gulf of Mexico from energy development until the year 2007.
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From http://www.sibelle.info/orig/usgs.pdf:
"The total quantity of technically recoverable oil in the assessment area is estimated to be between 5.7 and 16.0 billion barrels of oil."
U.S. consumption is in the neighborhood of 7.5 billion barrels per year. So, depending on how much oil there is in ANWR, it amounts to a little under a year, or a little over two years worth of supply for the US. That is a very substantial amount of oil.
Certainly not 10 years, but not your 6 months either, and not another poster's 30 days.
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As for forcing a switch to alternative fuels...these are what exactly? Hydrogen? Ethanol? Where are you going to get your hydrogen from if not oil? How are you going to grow your ethanol without gasoline and fertilizers?
In order to get off oil completely, we need to build a crash program of nuclear power plants, supplemented by wind farms where practical (solar is too expensive unless we can put orbital platforms up).
Efficiency gains do not produce less power demand. It's a myth. Consumption only goes down when standard of livings fall.
I agree we need to find an alternative. I don't agree with people that claim exploiting the petroleum resources we DO have is a waste of time, however, nor that searching for more reserves, or technical innovation in exploiting sub-optimal reserves is a waste of time. Everything, at the end of the day, is a waste of time. Having oil lets us spend that time in a lot more efficient ways than not having it does.
Is that you, Chicken Little?
I think what you wrote was a fair indicator of what you believe, or you have a problem communicating your beliefs. Your communicated position is that we are going to run out of oil regardless of what we do, so the search for additional oil is functionally useless.
How long do you think it's gonna take to get at that extra oil? How long do you think it's gonna last with our current usage? The answers are too long and not long enough, respectively.
"The sky is falling! The sky is falling!"
Ok, lets agree on one thing. Oil is a finite resource. We are going to run out eventually.
Ok, now that we've agreed, lets also agree that there are significant, exploitable reserves left in the world, and additionally, left in the United States.
If "peak oil" has truly been hit, the only reason is because those significant reserves are not being exploited. And in almost all cases, this is happening because of political reasons. And people like you.
"The sky is falling!" is an excuse not to do anything: "Why should we exploit ANWR when it will only push back the clock for 10 years?"...because it will push back the clock for 10 years. Lets draw an analogy. A patient can have surgery that will allow him to live another 10 years, or he can die today. You guys would rather he die today.
The anti-oil people are ideological relatives of the "Earth First" crowd. Their goal is a massive reduction in world population and per capita energy consumption, and along with it, standard of living. Drilling in ANWR, exploiting offshore reserves, that stuff just pushes back the date when we can usher in Gaia and all million of us go back to living an agrarian or hunte gatherer life-style.
Humanity needs time. Time to build and generate alternatives to the petro-economy. Some of us actually like the benefits of an industrial, technological society and don't want to see it come crashing down around us because environmentalist idiots think that drilling in ANWR is going to be an ecological catastrophe. So when people start starving (because we can't make fertilizer or pesticides from oil by-products, and don't have gasoline to transport the food anyway), what do you think is going to happen to the cute curry animals? Famine is a worse ecological catastrophe than polution. Forests are burned and wild animals are slaughtered wholesale to stave off starvation in the third world.
The world needs time to transition. The neo-luddites like the parent of this post don't want to give the world time. They want those people to starve to death. You, your family, your friends, your city, state, country, your race, your species stands in the way of their vision for Gaia. Think of that the next time we consider voting to drill in ANWR or opening up some of the 98% of the coast in the US that is currently off limits for exploratory drilling.
Question: is the ratio of D2O to H2O consistent even after evaporation and precipication? One would think that whatever fractionation that occurs in a liquid because of differences in specific weight would be useless once the water has gone to vapor, formed clouds, mixed with evaporated water from other places, and then precipitated back down again. As for slashdot collapsing whitespaces, below your post, there is a drop down box that says "HTML formatted"...if you change it to "plain old text", it will preserve your white spaces.
First, recommendation: break out your comments from my post...helps to read.
Secondly, I commend you on your ability to be insulting without actually responding with any facts to buttress your insults.
Again, how do ice core samples show any but the most basic temperature data (obviously, 31 C or lower to freeze)? Aside from it having to be 31 C or lower to freeze, I don't see how any temperature data is recorded. And please, try to refrain from using a computer model as your basis.
how ice core samples give any idea of what conditions were like globally?
Ice core samples have a built in bias...they only show local conditions where it was cold enough to freeze.
From the global warming evangelists, we know that global warming may result in colder temperatures in some areas, but warmer temperatures overall (global mean temperature). People that say, "we'll, it was colder this year where I live than last year" are making the mistake of taking a local experience and applying it to a global phenomenon. Scientists that take ice cores and plug the data into a model are making the exact same mistake. They don't have climate data for areas where ice wasn't formed. Even the trace atmospheric composition is a local phenomenon, as local methane composition varies heavily based on the foilage in the area.
The global mean temperature is extremely difficult to capture. It takes us thousands of sensor stations, satellites, and other devices to do it today. But we're supposed to trust some scientist's estimates of global mean temperature from some ice cores pulled from Greenland that carbon date to 600,000 years ago as an accurate indicator of global warming? If so, you're talking religion, not science.
You're simply insane. Your little persecution complexes fuel your ego trip. "The government is out to get me because I criticized George Bush".
Every time I turn on the television, and frequently, when I open up a browser to read the news, I'm bombarded with information about how bad a president Bush is. Just about anyone that wants to get their anti-Bush message out can find a sympathetic media ear. Ipso facto there can be no serious censorship or oppression. It is not a common characteristic of Nazi, fascist, right-wing dictatorships to allow free ranging criticism for 6 consecutive years.
No, Xonstantine's problem is even worse. He states that Muslims are not all terrorists but then justifies arresting Muslims based on nothing more than racial profiling because they are perceived to be terrorists.
/. crowd can understand.
Thanks for trying to understand my problem. If I may take a break, your problem appears to be reading comprehension.
To be clear: I haven't "justified" anything. Arresting terrorists, meaning people who have committed acts of terror or are planning to commit acts of terror is not the same thing as racially profiling. It's not the same thing as sending in truncheon welding storm troopers to beat a bunch of people senseless who's biggest conspiracy is stretching in the park.
I'll try to simplify things a little bit so the more befuddled of the
Any comparison of the Chinese treatment of Tai Chi/Falun Gong/Christians to US treatment of Muslims is flawed because:
1) there is no oppression of Muslims in the United States. Racially profiling is ILLEGAL. And it's a really bad term to use when we are talking about a religion that spans all racial lines.
2) Tai Chi/Falun Gong/Christians have not carried out terrorist acts resulting in the deaths of thousands, hundreds, or even tens of Chinese.
3) Terrorist actions carried out by Islamic groups have killed thousands of people in the US. Whatever you think the appropriate response from the US government should be to that, some response is warranted.
Guess what? I'm not advocating the Chinese solution, which is a lot worse than simple racial profiling against a much more innocuous group of people than the US is dealing with. I'm not even advocating racial profiling of Muslims. I'm attacking the idea that the actions of the China and the US are anyway similar, or are based on remotely similar justifications.
Beating people with truncheon welding storm troopers and then sending them to forced labor camps for the state crime of stretching = trying to catch Muslim terrorists before they carry out another 9-11 by limited wire tapping is equivilent? Sorry, don't think so. And until we start rounding up random Muslims within the US and torturing them, it won't be, and we won't do that.
The "jihadis" represent the Muslim faith just as much as the KKK represented the Christian faith.
The claim that jihadis don't represent the Muslim faith is often made but it's just wishful thinking. The jihadis represent the Muslim faith. They don't represent all Muslims, but they are living the Muslim faith as handed down generation after generation since the rise of Mohammed. Islam is jihad...and just about every notable Muslim scholar and imam has said so. There has been no repudiation of this basic idea in the Islamic ummah. The only arguments you see around the jihad is semantic parsing as to who is a legitimate target (or victim) and who isn't.
Islam is undergoing a reformation, but unfortunately it's a conservative reformation, not a liberal one.
And regarding the KKK...the goals of the KKK weren't the world wide spread of Christianity. It was the oppression of other people. The goal of the jihad, and the duty of every devout Muslim is the submission of the world to Allah.
Very bad in fact. Let me humbly explain why.
Dressing in Muslim garb and reading aloud from the Koran in the Washington Mall is not illegal, and won't get you arrested.
Furthermore, fundamentalist Muslims (aka the jihadis) aren't a threat to Americans in power, they are simply a threat to Americans and non-Muslims period.
As far as I know, Tai Chi practicioners in China aren't executing daily suicide bombers, beheading people and sending the videos to sympathetic journalists, and don't subscribe to a philosophy advocating that Tai Chi take over the world. Now, I'm a little ignorant about Tai Chi, so maybe I'm wrong about the above. Maybe the evil US government has censored that information from reaching me.
Oppressing people who like to stretch in parks for stretching in parks because they scare you is not the same as arresting terrorists because they are planning to blow up more citizens.
This is the problem when people who don't understand morality try to argue moral equivilence.