why wont the US get behind this?

10/22/2005 12:02:46 AM

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$
it costs too much

10/22/2005 12:16:53 AM

And was written by socialists in an attempt to seize sovereignty away from the United States.

Global warming is not a sufficiently large problem to justify doing anything about it, regardless of how you suggest we fix it.

Oh yea, and the United States Senate voted unanimously against it. If you have any appreciation for representative democracy, this must be saying something.

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 12:21 AM. Reason : .,.]

10/22/2005 12:21:11 AM

but doesnt it look really bad when you have all these countries backing it and then we are like no we dont wanna sign it

i would think the country that pollutes the most wouldnt mind spending the $$ to clean it up

10/22/2005 12:37:57 AM

do you have data that shows we pollute the most?

i'm not saying we don't
but thats a large claim to make

10/22/2005 12:39:40 AM

the problem is that it is a feel-good measure only and doesn't address the nations that are causing the worst polution

10/22/2005 12:45:37 AM

^^ummmmmm thats not a very big claim honestly i know i've heard that a couple times

i think we are like double the next highest or something

i'm gonna google it cause i'm pretty sure i'm atleast close to being right

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 1:16 AM. Reason : china was second i think]

10/22/2005 1:12:15 AM

is it normalized for geographical area?

10/22/2005 1:12:54 AM

http://yosemite.epa.gov/oar/globalwarming.nsf/content/emissionsindividual.html

Quote :

"The U.S. presently emits more greenhouse gases per person than any other country."

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 1:26 AM. Reason : mythbusters]

10/22/2005 1:22:22 AM

geographical area thx

10/22/2005 1:53:56 AM

eh
fuck it

let nature fight back

it did well by trying to take out a lot of oil processing in the gulf

but lets see if we can get some earthquakes in texas or some real shit in the middle east, fucking floods

WHEN NATURE FIGHTS BACK, then maybe i'll support nature

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 2:13 AM. Reason : STAND UP FOR YOURSELF EARTH]

10/22/2005 2:08:15 AM

oh i see you're avoiding the question

nevermind, i'll ask again!

is it normalized for geographical area?

10/22/2005 8:16:16 AM

What is sad here is that some of the assclowns here think that the United States is the problem and that people like Chavez and Red China are the heroes.

10/22/2005 8:28:21 AM

considering what were the topic is im pretty sure we have chavez beat in the amount of pollution we create... and for that matter like the post said earlier we even still have "red china " beat. so how are they any a bigger problem than us. of course am i not saying the kyoto treaty is necessarily the way to go, but dont go claiming that were not a part of the major environmental problem...

10/22/2005 9:40:10 AM

You are begging the question. CO2 is not a pollutant. If you only measure things that ARE a pollutant then I'm pretty sure china has us beat. Things like sulfur dioxide and particulates are heavily regulated in America because they ARE pollution. As such, the emission of pollution by the United States is down 25% from 1970.

10/22/2005 10:09:37 AM

Quote :

"the problem is that it is a feel-good measure only and doesn't address the nations that are causing the worst polution"

The nation that causes more pollution per person is the US. Unless you seriously think that more than a billion CHinese should produce as much pollution as a quarter of that of Americans.

10/22/2005 11:00:15 AM

because countries like China, who are the number 1 threat of the remaining industrial jobs in this country and abroad, will not sign, which will continue to undercut the western nations ability to compete internationally.

10/22/2005 12:03:31 PM

OK, so the problem is not that China is the worst pollutor. The problem is that the US cannot compete unless they pollute many times more than China (per capita).

10/22/2005 12:58:25 PM

No. The problem is the rest of the world cant compete with slave labor and worker servitude from a country which continues to do everything it can to undercut the market. There is a balance, and until China is playing ball more fairly, I see no need to continue to make the U.S. less competitive globally. I believe the stated U.S. stance is that they will sign the Kyoto agreement when the rest of the industrialized world signs Kyoto. Since our industrial segment is already suffering to the point of complete failure, I say its a great stance.

And the Kyoto accords... Why do you keep bringing up per capita? Of course we are going to pollute more. Most people actually have cars here. The sticking point with Kyoto has been with factory emissions, and you are going to have a hard time convincing me that China is doing better than the U.S. in protecting the environment.

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 1:06 PM. Reason : .]

10/22/2005 1:04:46 PM

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA the US dumps their shit ino everybody's air and water and CHINA must play more fairly. LOL

Quote :

"Why do you keep bringing up per capita? Of course we are going to pollute more. "

Why is it "of course" that my wife has to pay for her asthma medication because of you? What in the fucking fuck kinda conservative are you?

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 1:21 PM. Reason : .]

10/22/2005 1:17:45 PM

CarZin, shut up, you know not what you speak about.
If the Chinese want to live as slaves (your words, not mine) that would be their business. Americans are better off the harder the Chinese work, regardless of the circumstances.

None of this has any impact on the fact that Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant.

I suggest everyone look at a REAL pollutant, such as Sulphur Dioxide from China:

Quote :

"A total of 23.7 mm tons of SO2 was discharged in 1995, the largest figure on earth, and it is expected to rise to 27.3 mm tons in 2000, Xie said. In 1995, economic losses arising from acid rain damage to crops, forests and human health amounted to more than 110 bn yuan ($ 13.25 bn), approximately 2 % of that year's gross national product."

http://www.pnl.gov/china/sulfcont.htm

Meanwhile, back in the USA, in 1999 we emitted 17.1 mm tons of SO2. So, China is not only a larger polluter, as expected, but their rate of pollution is increasing dramatically while America's is decreasing, albeit slowely.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sulphur_dioxide

10/22/2005 1:54:32 PM

Loneshark I know exactly what I speak of. However, I am a fan of fair free trade. We dont have that with the Chinese. Up until recently, they had their currency fixed to a value beneath the dollar. Thats not allowing the market to work naturally. And thats just the start of it.

10/22/2005 2:11:06 PM

you guys have latched so hard onto the "per person" metric that i'm beginning to think that the "per square mile" metric completely demolishes your argument.... how bad is it for you guys? I bet USA is one of the least polluting nations according to that metric

10/22/2005 2:11:07 PM

The Chinese can do whatever they want, Americans will be better off. Other nations are being hurt, no doubting that. All our other trading partners (Canada, Mexico, EU, etc) are being damaged to no end by China's trading policies (fixed currency, for example). But American's themselves are actually benefitting substantially from China's activities.

10/22/2005 2:20:24 PM

Quote :

"What is sad here is that some of the assclowns here think that the United States is the problem and that people like Chavez and Red China are the heroes. "

1) i missed the thread where people were not saying chavez is being a moron with all these claims of his. economy? the verdict's still out...
2) in case you havent been paying attention in the past, oh, 25 years, China isnt very communist in its economics and development any more. google "socialist modernization" or "special administrative regions". theres a reason why their economy has really come around in the past decade.

10/22/2005 2:26:54 PM

Quote :

"you guys have latched so hard onto the "per person" metric that i'm beginning to think that the "per square mile" metric completely demolishes your argument.... how bad is it for you guys? I bet USA is one of the least polluting nations according to that metric"

I won't argue with this since I've never seen a pollution stat per square mile. That said, why do you consider it important? Square miles aren't the root cause of pollution--people are. Being less densely populated as a nation doesn't give a "free pass" to pollute. That's why most readily available stats are per capita (or just total pollution).

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 2:33 PM. Reason : ]

10/22/2005 2:30:17 PM

Well, you do recognize why having a larger country would tend to drive up transportation costs, right? Because more land is available it would be economically wasteful not to use some of it, so are cities are larger and spread further apart.

Nevertheless, the most important fact is the degree of our economic efficiency. As such, we can afford a far higher energy bill. The Chinese economy would go bankrupt with our energy bill, so they only use as much energy as they can afford.

This extends to comparative advantage, as well. America may use a lot of energy, but we are also rediculously efficient in our energy use. China uses approximately six times the resources to produce the same dollar of goods and services (eight times that of Japan).

10/22/2005 4:42:56 PM

Quote :

"Square miles aren't the root cause of pollution--people are."

CERTAIN people are the cause - namely, people living in first world conditions. lets have an apples to apples comparison using either SQUARE MILES as a metric or using the number of people living in first world conditions as the metric.

china and india artificially drive down their "per person" averages with their billions of people living in third world conditions

but, again, i understand why liberals and supporters of the kyoto protocol are loathe to engage in THAT discussion - because it basically flushes their entire argument

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 10:47 PM. Reason : s]

10/22/2005 10:42:44 PM

Isn't the square miles metric fairly meaningless? I don't really know enough about the whole situation, but it seems to me that, while both the US and China pollute too much, the pollution per capita is more meaningful even if you take into account the fact that different segments of the population have markedly different rates of usage of pollution producing fuels.

Would you not agree that pollution is a cost, in some way, of having an idustrialized society? There are benefits associated with it, of course, which is why it is acceptible to have some amount of pollution. How much is acceptible would be dependent, mainly, on how much it benefits said society, and if that is the case then I think that would largely be proportional to the number of people in the society, with the area covered by the society meaning little or nothing.

10/22/2005 10:57:24 PM

^ you just nailed why the US rejected Kyoto

because it would force us to meet the standard of a third world nation.

i don't know many HIPPIES who would be willing to start living in poop houses and eating millet dropped from airplanes, much less normal americans

10/22/2005 11:11:39 PM

If China and others dont have to meet the same standard per GDP dollar, then every company whose industrial manufacturing or other polluting process doesnt require a highly skilled workforce would simply relocate those portions of their firm to those countries.

Now most people who favor this sort of thing dont mind because they would simply call for more protectionism.

If you really want to help reduce CO2 emissions the best way to do it is to tax home energy consumption and increase the tax on gasoline. See how well that goes over with people.

[Edited on October 22, 2005 at 11:30 PM. Reason : ]

10/22/2005 11:30:29 PM

I think that the US would get behind it if it didn't mean cutting off our growth.

Maybe if it was something like reducing CO2 emissions from factories & cars (I.E. on a per factory basis as compared to the previous generation of technologies used; also the amount of CO2 emitted per vehicle) from non-renewable fuels by a certain percentage every year they'd be more game. They (the industry and people who drive cars) probably wouldn't mind being able to switch to biodiesel (or maybe a 20/80 mix, then a 40/60, 80/20, etc) and still drive and do all the things they like.

Now, if they require a nation with a growing economy to cut its CO2 emissions by a large percentage (25% or so), instead of doing it on a per factory and per car basis (which is what we should be concerned about since simply castrating the member countries ability to build instead of controlling what they build is not the way to go), they are going to end up doing more damage in the short run, with the long run probably being that, in the future, new factories will be built to replace old ones that may produce the same amount of emissions, but are able to produce 50% more goods and result in more profits. If they reduced growth of CO2 emissions on a per factory/per car basis, overall emissions may go up, but (if everybody got their shit together and followed along with it) maybe emissions only go up maybe 3-5% over those years instead of 10-15%. Maybe, even better, as older, higher emission level cars and factories are worn out and replaced, the CO2 levels would go down overall (with negative emissions growth per year), and new technologies would continue to be developed that would allow us to continue to grow while continuing to reduce emissions.

So yeah, that's a bit of crap without anything to back it up (as its only an idea), but really, I look at it as having two options. We can do something immediately which has a strong, negative impact on the economy, but has a strong, positive impact on overall emissions and pollutants. We can also do something that we could start on immediately that will also have a negative impact on the economy (although the effect will not be as bad) and will not have a very noticeable immediate impact, however in the long run it will have the same impact that the first option would have, with the possibility of it doing even more (since we didn't decide to just knock the shit out of the current economy by pushing down CO2 emissions and putting a limit on them that would hamper growth for the first ten to twenty years).

Ah I made a post about this a while back with some kind of accurate info on the Kyoto agreement, it was way the hell better than this post.

10/23/2005 2:43:29 AM

And nevermind the fact that CO2 is not a pollutant? Or is no-one going to even touch that one?

10/23/2005 8:49:14 AM

ignoring everything else in this thread...

Quote :

"but doesnt it look really bad when you have all these countries backing it and then we are like no we dont wanna sign it"

this is a horrible reason for doing ANYTHING... what if a large number of countries were to back destroying all cars, would that be a good idea for a country this size? (strawman, i know, but it's still a bad reason to do anything)

10/23/2005 8:51:46 AM

Hmm, they may agree with that one...

you should have picked a less acceptable strawman, such as "What if all other countries were to back imprisonment and execution of all Asians, would that be a good idea for a country this size?"

10/23/2005 10:13:28 AM

Quote :

"because countries like China, who are the number 1 threat of the remaining industrial jobs in this country and abroad, will not sign, which will continue to undercut the western nations ability to compete internationally."

OK, so this and other comments make me think that most of you know a lot less about this than you claim to. China signed the Kyoto protocol way back in 1998, less than a year after it was opened for signature at the COP3.

The main reasons why the US did not agree to the pact when it was first developed was because we wanted to merely stabilize emissions, not cut them, and also a lot of lobbying from the oil and coal industries to discredit the conference. The main reason why the Bush administration has continued to oppose the protocol is because it does not stipulate that developing nations, like China and India, have to reduce emissions. I suspect this is where CarZin has gone wrong; China actually has signed the pact, although they are not as constrained by it as the US would have been.

The problem with the Bush administration's viewpoint, however, has been that China actually has in fact reduced its emissions since signing the protocol, even though they were not required to do so. From 1996 to 2000, they reduced CO2 emissions by over 7%, and methane emissions by over 2%. The main source of these reductions has been China's modernisation of their coal facilities, resulting in more efficient combustion. Many small and inefficient plants have been shut down. They have also begun to promote reforestation, which aids in absorption of CO2.

10/23/2005 3:48:33 PM

how about india

10/23/2005 4:06:25 PM

i like how you people not backing this are just playing into the coal/oil lobbyist's hands. morons.

10/23/2005 4:21:10 PM

I cant believe people actually advocate a policy where every possible positive benefit is completely unknowable to them.

And Im not being a skeptic on global warming here so dont get me wrong.

The world has emitted all this manmade CO2 for the last 100 years, so thats already given. If we push through all these environmental laws and treaties then we are talking about maybe keeping our emissions level or decreasing them very slightly.

We have absolutely no idea if or how much a difference that slight reduction would make.

And for this people want to try and rise the price of an inelatic good until people cut down. Higher gas prices, higher energy prices, higher prices for many goods and services and for what? NO ONE KNOWS.

[Edited on October 23, 2005 at 4:39 PM. Reason : ]

10/23/2005 4:32:29 PM

I like how you people backing this are just playing into the socialist's hands.
morons.

Again, CO2 is NOT a pollutant. SO2 and NOx, however, most certainly are. And countries seem to be doing a fairly good job of managing the emission of real pollution. China emits more, but kinda sorta needs to, at least for right now. Meanwhile, America continues to reduce its emission of these acid-rain producing gases.

10/23/2005 4:39:08 PM

CO2 is a greenhouse gas.

But, man-made CO2, IIRC, represents less than 5% of all the CO2 going in to the atmosphere from Earth.

10/23/2005 4:41:48 PM

so now the argument becomes greenhouse gases versus pollutants?

doesnt too much of either fuck us up?

10/24/2005 12:12:03 PM

No. Too much CO2 just makes plants grow faster... You see, it depends on who you ask.
Well, if CO2 ever became anything other than a trace-gas (less than 1/10%) it might cause some unforseen consequences, such as turning the oceans into a mild acid comparable to coke-a-cola, but that result remains beyond mankinds ability.

10/24/2005 1:30:09 PM

I like things clean. I just do. Fuck off.

not to protect anyone's governments, but i just dont see why anyone would trust industry the most in this situation.

[Edited on October 24, 2005 at 3:01 PM. Reason : .]

10/24/2005 2:54:27 PM

yeah, so a couple of weekends ago i attended an open house hosted by jeff martin (some high-up at microsoft) who built his house utilizing various renewable resources (solar, geothermal, etc)...his house cost 12% more to build than a comparable "regular" house, but he MAKES money each year, selling energy back to the grid...the house isn't tiny, either, coming in at 6000 living square-feet, with a basement and garage...he lives down near charlotte, and here's the link to the article he wrote for Solar Today

http://www.solartoday.org/2003/sept_oct03/living_solar_dream.htm

this has very little to do with the kyoto agreement...my point is that we're all responsible for the pollution we produce, because there ARE alternatives that we REFUSE to endorse (of course it's going to be more expensive for the first decade or so, but it'll become reasonable once it's the norm)...our country sucks more than all the rest because in this society we're all so proud of, we have the knowledge and financial ability to make changes - but we're too lazy, too ignorant, too afraid of change

countries signing the kyoto protocol are those who recognize a NEED to make changes, while we, like usual, hold back...mostly because those in power (not necessarily bush, but i hate him too), recognize that they can't make nearly as much money cleaning up the planet as they can trashing it

[Edited on October 24, 2005 at 3:17 PM. Reason : link]

10/24/2005 3:15:51 PM

ok not to like switch arguments but 6000 square feet is pretty big, not many people can afford a house thats 12 percent less than that super duper one he got

you cant say thats a viable option if like only the really rich mf's are the only one that can do it

[Edited on October 24, 2005 at 3:51 PM. Reason : i'm pretty sure 6000 sq ft house is expensive]

10/24/2005 3:50:17 PM

^^ Nevermind the fact that a 6000 square foot mansion would probably cost well over a million and a half dollars and that 12% of that is as much as a lot of people would expect to pay for the average man's "house."

If it was cheaper to do on a smaller level, people would do it.

10/24/2005 3:53:47 PM

yeah ^^ is basically easier to read in ^

[Edited on October 24, 2005 at 3:58 PM. Reason : .]

10/24/2005 3:58:08 PM

Quote :

"i don't know many HIPPIES who would be willing to start living in poop houses and eating millet dropped from airplanes, much less normal americans"

wow

[user]Excorciator[/user] is a mean guy

bigotted too

10/24/2005 7:05:53 PM

Quote :

"how about india"

India ratified the Kyoto Protocol in 2002. As a developing nation, similar to China, they do not have firm constraints on production of greenhouse gases; however, their signing the agreement is a sign of willingness to be bound by it in the future. It also means that they are putting more investment now into areas like clean technology, renewable energy sources, etc in order to help with their development.

10/24/2005 7:58:17 PM