Angela Harlem
Jesus Online
No, DrTeeth (the scientist from the Netherlands), that problem was licked a long time ago.
Angela Harlem said:geez, where to start. have we had the denial that global warming is a problem yet? the comment that canada should appreciate global warming, cause, you know it snows there and shit, the apparent basing of entire viewpoints on an article, the fighting of common sense... then there's the entire politicising of the issue. i wish everyone could forget fucking al gore for just a minute, but no, we have to look local and argue local. god i can't believe i am referencing paul mccartney... ugh. anyway. in short, what worries me and leaves me utterly dumbfounded is that people firstly deny it's existence and secondly are not in a screaming hurry to fix it. how do you get to complacence on these kinds of things?
randhail said:What I would love to see is politicians stand up and decree that within 10 or 20 years that this country needs to be off or significantly on the way to being off a petroleum based economy. This is a country that was hell bent on being the first on the moon and the goal was achieved within 10 years. Maybe I'm being overly patriotic, optimistic or whatever, but I believe that this country is capable of kicking the oil habit - if we just made it a national priority. We claim to have the best this and that and the best science and ingenuity in the world - lets prove it! or we could just play in the sandbox in the middle east for who knows how long.
We can create the fund without new taxes on Americans by asking the oil companies to "Play or Pay": either they invest in alternative energy themselves, or they pay a portion of their windfall profits earned from the spike in oil prices into the strategic energy fund. We estimate that the fund will have close to $50 billion to invest in America's new energy future over the next 10 years.
Bluer White said:
Won't this result in increased prices at the pump? Does it really matter if Hillary's plan is an "official" tax or a quasi-tax? Don't we hear every single winter about seniors choosing between buying their meds or heating their home?
Bluer White said:
Won't this result in increased prices at the pump?
Bluer White said:
Won't this result in increased prices at the pump? Does it really matter if Hillary's plan is an "official" tax or a quasi-tax? Don't we hear every single winter about seniors choosing between buying their meds or heating their home?
I'm waiting for the "strategic funds" Hillary has proposed for other industries with higher profit margins than big oil, like finance and biotech. If we are going to regulate profits in one industry, why not them all, especially the highest margin ones?
anitram said:
Given that almost the whole world pays considerably more for gas than you do, I can't understand why Americans constantly complain about prices at the gas pump.
Irvine511 said:i'm a big fan of a gas tax.
it would solve SO many problems.
False analogy; in the case of typewriters and digital cameras the technology was developed and marketed to consumers without government programs forcing people to dump their old alternatives; so far there hasn't been any solutions that outcompete traditional forms in the marketplace and those that do can be greatly lacking (for instance the energy involved in making a Prius means that over the life of the car it exeeds the average hydrocarbon burning one in net carbon emissions.Again it's short sighted to think that by shifting technologies is damaging to the economy. When we shifted from typewriters to computers, we killed the typewriter industry and hurt the paper industry, when we shifted from film to digital cameras, we killed the film camera industry. There were some people who suffered economically but overall people are better off in the long run. There are companies and countries out there that will make billions off new energy technologies whether it be solar panels, innovative water heating methods or improved insulation in homes.
A_Wanderer said:
If a consortium developed a zero emission power source that was cheaper than current ones or a means to make current ones zero emission that was economically viable (in light of lawsuits due to carbon emissions and that liability) then it would be adopted.
A_Wanderer said:Outlay falls under cheaper.
A_Wanderer said:False analogy; in the case of typewriters and digital cameras the technology was developed and marketed to consumers without government programs forcing people to dump their old alternatives; so far there hasn't been any solutions that outcompete traditional forms in the marketplace and those that do can be greatly lacking (for instance the energy involved in making a Prius means that over the life of the car it exeeds the average hydrocarbon burning one in net carbon emissions.
If a consortium developed a zero emission power source that was cheaper than current ones or a means to make current ones zero emission that was economically viable (in light of lawsuits due to carbon emissions and that liability) then it would be adopted. Spending hundreds of billions of dollars if not trillions forcing it to happen isn't the same.
BonoVoxSupastar said:Here's an example. There's a town here in west TX. 5 years ago a company proposed a swith to wind power. The whole town could be powered. Not one household would have to change a thing. The cost was nothing, and the town wanted it. Well the utility company didn't, so in working with the local government they passed laws that restricted the building of these turbines, i.e. height restrictions and what not. So the local utility company halted progress due to their loss of profits. It wasn't a matter of having inferior power source or cost.
Irvine511 said:
and what it really comes down to is that people don't want to be told to change their lifestyles.
because it's inconvenient. hence ...
elevated_u2_fan said:It's seriously depressing...
I personally think New York will have to be flooded under 10 feet of water before anyone will actually sit up and start to do something...
redhotswami said:
you mean swim up?
AEON said:
Indeed.
that is another reason to be so energy saving as possable.If people look where the oil is comming from,....Venuzuela, Iran, Saudie Arabia, Russia, Africa ( all very democratic countries ) oil money is making those countries only richer.Irvine511 said:
because it's more politically expedient (in 2003, at least) to invade Iraq and pretend we're finding WMDs, and then pretending we're brining democracy, and then pretend we're fighting them there so we don't fight them here, when all along -- as has been pointed out to us in long, droning posts -- we're only in Iraq to protect the Saudi Arabian oil fields.
yes, better to keep fucking up the Middle East than develop new energy technologies.
so when are you buying your hybrid?
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=2f4cc62e-5b0d-4b59-8705-fc28f14da388
Allegre's second thoughts
The Deniers -- The National Post's series on scientists who buck the conventional wisdom on climate science
LAWRENCE SOLOMON, Financial Post
Published: Friday, March 02, 2007
Claude Allegre, one of France's leading socialists and among her most celebrated scientists, was among the first to sound the alarm about the dangers of global warming.
"By burning fossil fuels, man increased the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which, for example, has raised the global mean temperature by half a degree in the last century," Dr. Allegre, a renowned geochemist, wrote 20 years ago in Cles pour la geologie.." Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed "World Scientists' Warning to Humanity," a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming's "potential risks are very great" and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe's fragility in order to stave off "spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse."
The full Deniers series
In the 1980s and early 1990s, when concern about global warming was in its infancy, little was known about the mechanics of how it could occur, or the consequences that could befall us. Since then, governments throughout the western world and bodies such as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have commissioned billions of dollars worth of research by thousands of scientists. With a wealth of data now in, Dr. Allegre has recanted his views. To his surprise, the many climate models and studies failed dismally in establishing a man-made cause of catastrophic global warming. Meanwhile, increasing evidence indicates that most of the warming comes of natural phenomena. Dr. Allegre now sees global warming as over-hyped and an environmental concern of second rank.
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Font: ****His break with what he now sees as environmental cant on climate change came in September, in an article entitled "The Snows of Kilimanjaro" in l' Express, the French weekly. His article cited evidence that Antarctica is gaining ice and that Kilimanjaro's retreating snow caps, among other global-warming concerns, come from natural causes. "The cause of this climate change is unknown," he states matter of factly. There is no basis for saying, as most do, that the "science is settled."
Dr. Allegre's skepticism is noteworthy in several respects. For one, he is an exalted member of France's political establishment, a friend of former Socialist president Lionel Jospin, and, from 1997 to 2000, his minister of education, research and technology, charged with improving the quality of government research through closer co-operation with France's educational institutions. For another, Dr. Allegre has the highest environmental credentials. The author of early environmental books, he fought successful battles to protect the ozone layer from CFCs and public health from lead pollution. His break with scientific dogma over global warming came at a personal cost: Colleagues in both the governmental and environmental spheres were aghast that he could publicly question the science behind climate change.
But Dr. Allegre had allegiances to more than his socialist and environmental colleagues. He is, above all, a scientist of the first order, the architect of isotope geodynamics, which showed that the atmosphere was primarily formed early in the history of the Earth, and the geochemical modeller of the early solar system. Because of his path-breaking cosmochemical research, NASA asked Dr. Allegre to participate in the Apollo lunar program, where he helped determine the age of the Moon. Matching his scientific accomplishments in the cosmos are his accomplishments at home: Dr. Allegre is perhaps best known for his research on the structural and geochemical evolution of the Earth's crust and the creation of its mountains, explaining both the title of his article in l' Express and his revulsion at the nihilistic nature of the climate research debate.
Calling the arguments of those who see catastrophe in climate change "simplistic and obscuring the true dangers," Dr. Allegre especially despairs at "the greenhouse-gas fanatics whose proclamations consist in denouncing man's role on the climate without doing anything about it except organizing conferences and preparing protocols that become dead letters." The world would be better off, Dr. Allegre believes, if these "denouncers" became less political and more practical, by proposing practical solutions to head off the dangers they see, such as developing technologies to sequester C02. His dream, he says, is to see "ecology become the engine of economic development and not an artificial obstacle that creates fear."
Lawrence Solomon@nextcity.com
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- Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Urban Renaissance Institute and Consumer Policy Institute, divisions of Energy Probe Research Foundation.
CV OF A DENIER:
Claude Allegre received a Ph D in physics in 1962 from the University of Paris. He became the director of the geochemistry and cosmochemistry program at the French National Scientific Research Centre in 1967 and in 1971, he was appointed director of the University of Paris's Department of Earth Sciences. In 1976, he became director of the Paris Institut de Physique du Globe. He is an author of more than 100 scientific articles, many of them seminal studies on the evolution of the Earth using isotopic evidence, and 11 books. He is a member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and the French Academy of Science.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/03/09/wpolar09.xmlA survey of the animals’ numbers in Canada’s eastern Arctic has revealed that they are thriving, not declining, because of mankind’s interference in the environment.
In the Davis Strait area, a 140,000-square kilometre region, the polar bear population has grown from 850 in the mid-1980s to 2,100 today.
"There aren’t just a few more bears. There are a hell of a lot more bears,” said Mitch Taylor, a polar bear biologist who has spent 20 years studying the animals.
His findings back the claims of Inuit hunters who have long claimed that they were seeing more bears.