Today, President Bush spoke at a nuke plant in PA. He said:
“As a matter of fact I try to tell people let’s quit the debate about whether greenhouse gases are caused by mankind or by natural causes. Let’s just focus on technologies that deal with the issue.”
Huh? What’s the debate? Isn’t it well established that greenhouse gases are caused by mankind as well as through Earth’s natural processes? Or am I missing something? Is he confusing greenhouse gases and global climate change?
If you don´t look at the causes you can´t adress them.
What it sounds like to me is applying cold towels to a fevered patient while whistling away the gangrene on the leg causing the fever.
Bush’s approach seems to be to throw lots of subsidies at nuclear power, a little bit of subsidy at renewables and somehow believe that technology will magically solve everything.
The way you get technology to solve problems in a market-based economy is to internalize the externalized costs…and one way to do that would be to implement a cap-and-trade system for greenhouse gas emissions, which the Bush Administration has adamently opposed. Another way would be to directly put some sort of carbon tax on emissions, which I haven’t heard of any groundswell of support for. Bush is just talking smoke-and-mirrors here as far as I can tell.
Yeah…You are right on this. The only people who debate whether the fact that CO2 levels in the atmosphere are the highest in 700,000 years (and likely the highest in ~20 million years) is due to mankind or something else are the complete wackos. There are many ways we know unambiguously that this buildup of greenhouse gases is due to us.
There is at least a little more room to debate whether most of the actual climate change that has been observed in the last 30 years or so is due to mankind…although the debate on that is basically settled now in the scientific community. And, there is even less room to debate the notion that (barring some sort of natural catastrophe like an asteroid hitting the earth), man will be the primary driver of climate change in the current 21st century.
I assume Bush meant to be referring to the debate about climate change (i.e., how much of it is being caused by the anthropogenic buildup of greenhouse gases) and not about what is causing the buildup of these gases.
Or maybe he’s agreeing that the debate is settled and is now pointless, and it’s time to focus on solutions.
Thats good. I remember about a decade ago Rush Limbaugh claiming natural causes caused global warming, and he felt it probably didn’t exist at all:
http://bigmac.cee.mtu.edu/public_html/classes/ce459/projects/t16/rush.htm
RUSH FICTION:
“A fact you never hear the environmentalist wacko crowd
acknowledge is that 96 percent of the so-called ‘greenhouse’ gases
are not created by man, but by nature.” 31
This is a step forward that Bush openly admits global warming exists and needs to be dealt with. Good for him.
He didn’t say he was gonna deal with it, though.
Then it would be enormously helpful if he were to make this absolutely explicit - that those who deny anthropogenic climate change are as flat-out wrong as Holocaust deniers.
And the solution is to somehow reduce emission rates, such that those graphs don’t continue their unbelievably steep +2.5 ppm per year trajectory. We could, for a start, try and get back to, say, 1990 emission rates, giving us more time in future to develop alternatives before reaching the Dangerous Anthropogenic Interference (DAI) limit, wherever that is.
This agreement (or “protocol”) to try to reduce emission rates somehow could be made in a beautiful city somewhere like, say, Japan.
Yay, solutions! Oh, if only Bush had significant power and influence and could actually do something to foster effective and timely solutions, rather than just making speeches vaguely exhorting us to “focus” on them! If only he were President or something like that!
Hey, wait a minute…
I doubt you’ll see any “absolutely explicit” acknowledgement from Bush himself, but it has been acknowledged by the White House press secretary, according to an article I found:
However, as jshore points out, “new technologies” aren’t going to do jack-diddly about greenhouse gas emissions unless we implement either government regulations or market structures, or both, that provide incentives to develop them. And Bush has been at best completely flaccid in his support for such measures.
Bush’s comment sounds to me essentially like code for “I’m not going to take any politically unpopular measures to curb greenhouse gas emissions. I want people to shift their attention to vague utopian promises of new technologies that will fix everything without our having to make any serious sacrifices or lifestyle changes. In particular, I don’t want them to think about the causes of the problem or to blame me for not doing more about it.”
Translation, he’s conceding that his side has lost the debate but he wants to get past that concession as fast as possible so that he doesn’t actually have to face up to the fact that he and his people were wrong and thereby admit making a mistake for the first fucking time in his useless fucking administration and probably his whole fucking life.
Research will lower the cost of providing alternative energies which will make them more marketable.
Wind power has dropped dramatically in the last 25 years, down to almost $0.035 per kwh from $0.80 per kwh in 1980.
http://www.awea.org/faq/cost.html
Solar power dropped from $7.50 to $4 per watthour between 1990-2005, and Vivian Alberts of South Africa recently developed solar power for around $1.60 per watthour that goes into production in Germany this year, so in 16 years the price dropped by about 75%.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_power
Combine research into lowering the cost of alternative fuels with a carbon tax and the incentive for clean energy goes up. According to an article I read in scientific american hydrogen should be cost competitive by the middle of the next decade.
However people generally aren’t going to do anything to actually use alt. energies on their own intiative, even if it is economical (you can save money with a solar water heater, but most people don’t use them). Right now people can buy & demand more fuel efficient cars, install solar water heaters and ask their power company for the green option and probably decrease their carbon emissions by 60% by doing those few things. But few people do them either out of apathy or a lack of knowledge. The problem isn’t really technology or market initiatives, it is getting the average american to do something to use these things. We already have the research for alternative energies and fuel effective cars. Government regulations are the only thing that’ll work. Relying on personal initiative probably will not do anything, people are by nature too timid to do this on their own, even though most people agree climate change is a major problem and are alot more willing to address it than most politicians give them credit for.
There are dozens of these so-called ‘wackos’ on the SDMB. Unfortunately, in US terms, you can’t yet dismiss their views, erroneous as they appear to be. Good on Bush for facing up to it - I wonder if Blair had any effect on him, or whether his admin finally copped on.
jjimm: While there have definitely been people here on the SDMB who question anthropogenic global warming, I don’t seem to recall any who question whether the observed rise in greenhouse gases like CO2 is due to humans (although I could be blocking out the bad memories). I think it is more the next link…that this has led / will lead to significant warming…that they tend to dispute.
Disagree with the thrust of these remarks.
People currently pay for the extraction of fossil fuels: they don’t pay for the damage that CO2 does to the environment (or the future costs of, say, rising sea levels).
The good news is that slapping a tax on CO2 could rectify matters. Once consumers face the total costs of their behavior, adjustments would follow. It’s fairly established that higher prices lead to lower consumption of a given commodity.
Even better, the least cost measures will tend to be adopted first (with admittedly some exceptions – there’s a role for setting standards on vampire appliances for example). Personally, I suspect that conservation, wind and hybrid cars have more potential than solar power over the next decade or so, but a smart tax policy would make such guesses superfluous: those with least-cost methods for lowering CO2 emissions will be rewarded by the market.
Wasnt ten years ago. he said same thing last week.
I’d sure as fuck love to think that he’s going to concede his side’s point on the debate. I just don’t see it.
Yay, nuclear power. And it’s run by private enterprise! That works SO well for the power grid now, doesn’t it? I assume he’s pretty good friends with the ones that would profit from nuc-u-lar power
So…what would we do with the nuclear waste? Shoot it into space?
And now for something completely different:
Stone and Parker did it better.
That bastard Manbearpig…
Steven Milloy, the man behind that website, is a dishonest PR whore paid by Exxon-Mobile and Philip Morris. He is not a scientist.
