I realize this. I’m at a clients site right now and will be so until maybe tuesday. I have a little cot to sleep on, plenty of coke to drink and pizza to eat…but no laptop with me. I can’t load Acrobat on the clients server.
I HAVE read through it…well, I skimmed through it when it came up in another thread. I agree…I need to read through it more carefully as it seems I might have missed some stuff I’m interested in. I also apologize…your post just hit me the wrong way at the wrong time. Sorry.
Well, I would appreciate that…or if you could just quote some of the relevent parts into the thread thats really all I was asking for. I wasn’t trying to start a fight…I just wanted to see some of my questions answered, not claiming that they wouldn’t be.
It is worth noting that historically in the U.S., the costs of environmental regulations have tended to end up being considerably less not only than the estimates made by industry but even the estimates made by the EPA (see here). The reasons appear to be at least two-fold:
(1) The estimates don’t tend to capture the lower cost solutions that the market comes up with.
(2) The macro-economics models used to make estimates tend to simplistically assume that the world is optimal now given the constraints…i.e., that if things were cost-effective to do today, they would already be done. This is one of those naive assumptions that economics love to make but bears little resemblance to the real world where people will, for example, buy the cheaper incandescent bulb even though they are spending much more once the cost of electricity is factored into the equation than if they bought the compact fluorescent. jjimm mentions some similar examples. And, then there is the case of BP, which did a Kyoto-sized cut in its greenhouse gas emissions, completing it 8 years early and claiming that they are saving money in net (~$600 million).
Leaving aside what I thought was the case, which is that Kyoto-sized cuts aren’t going to be enough but just the first step, do you think that there is a one for one comparison possible between what a single company can do, and an entire nation?
Maybe I’m missing the scope of the problem. I thought the problem was huge, that it would require serious and long term cuts in things like CO2 emmissions…massive and major cuts back to levels we haven’t seen in decades. That this would require things like reducing the emmissions from personal transport (like cars and such) by not half of today but a fraction of today. That it would require a major restructuring of how we generate power. What exactly WILL it take to reverse or even stop global warming? How much CO2 are we talking about having to stop manufacturing here in order to change things? How long will it take to reverse this course in any case?
Its possible that the answers to all or most of my questions are in reports already cited…I just haven’t seen those answers. I am simply curious…I obviously don’t know or I wouldn’t have asked this question in the past. If there are answers, fight my ignorance and clue me in!
I’ll read it again too, and see if I can frame some sort of position. If I can make time I’ll probably read Lomburg’s book again, and the various critiques of it. I must admit I’m no climatologist or economist, but those two at least make an attempt to speak to a layman’s point of view.
Stern needs to be read in its entirety I think. I’ll send you it tonight, but expect a GQ asking how to preserve tables in the conversion.
I hate to sound trite, but “a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step” and all that. If you agree that AGW is a reality, then you’d surely agree that we’ve got to start somewhere, even if that first step is a long way from what’s really needed. But refusing to do anything because that first step is inadequate is crazy! Strikes me that the current US government has been doing this. Whereas actually if the US signed, it wouldn’t be fair, but it would be a massive step towards persuading the Chinese and Indian governments to get their shit together. And in fact, if this year’s Reith Lectures have a kernel of truth in them, China might actually get the jump on the US in policy in the next few decades, which would be a huge PR coup - once China has stopped building fucking coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a week…
The problem is fucking enormous. But it’s not infeasible at a national level. That’s what I work in: a series of UK initiatives that help, for free, businesses and individuals to reduce emissions, resource usage, and waste. And we’ve got some absolutely ENORMOUS clients about to get on board. For professional reasons I can’t say which companies, but I can guarantee they’re global, and you will have heard of them. There are two reasons for this: a) it’s great marketing, and b) they’ve figured out that far from being a burden, it actually saves them a heap of money.
Yes indeed, but to be honest, personal transport is the minority part of the problem - 5-10% I think? With air travel another 5%. In personal terms you’ve got to admit, a 1.2 or 1.6 litre engine is WAY cheaper to run (and buy) than a 6 litre SUV or sports car. And it emits a hell of a lot less CO[sub]2[/sub]. So taking this into account, what are the implications on vehicle manufacturers and oil producers of droves of people buying more fuel-efficent vehicles - economically devastating?
Not really. The oil producers are up to their arses in alternative fuel technology research already, because they know what’s coming, so they’ll benefit across the board. While the car manufacturers will still manage to have a host of luxury marques, but using more efficient engines. We’re already doing it here to a certain extent anyway.
Yup. Energy generation is the biggest problem. And it’s massive. Electricity is the way it will go, and IMO nuclear. The coal-fired power stations being built in China are the scariest part of that, but so are all our energy production methods.
It’ll take buy-in. Which is why the US should ratify Kyoto, and then join us in using this as leverage to lean on the Asian industrial centres to clean up their act. And this is the recommendation:
Weeeellll, maybe not. It’s in forty or so parts on that site, and the first text conversion came complete with dozens of pages of control characters. I wonder if Word will handle the conversion better?
looks across at work machine with Office on, and notices that it’s in bits pending memory upgrades
If it’s still needed I’ll convert all pdf to word tomorrow when I go to work(on a Sunday!) and get to a machine with Adobe Pro on it. My email address is in my profile. I’ll mail the . doc files to you if you need them.
Just a heads-up: for anyone who hasn’t read Stern, it is predicated on a working axiom that AGW/ACC is real. If you are (still) a skeptic, it is not for you. I am aware that it has been mocked in certain US quarters, but from everything I’ve read, this is because it is not skeptical - in addition to other reasons best known to the minds of conservatives, not me.
Could you? That’d be brilliant if you can. I’ve got the doorstep printed page right here, and I think I’d be quicker scanning it than getting my “work” machine sorted.
There aren’t many who doubt that something is happening climate-wise which is why I was so ham-fistedly trying to encourage Xtisme to read Stern. Lomberg deals with the consequences of climate change too, but his book is a bit out of date. I think his approach of basically letting everyone get rich has some merit though.
Do you know offhand whether James Lovelock has published anything about nuclear power recently? I’ve only seen a piece or two in the broadsheets, and I was just wondering.
I don’t know if xtisme denies ACC or not - but if he does, then Stern will be irrelevant to him. While climate change is almost universally accepted in the US now, a decreasing minority in US conservative circles is still denying ACC. There are a few on the SDMB, even.
I confess I haven’t read Lomberg.
Think he’s stopped publishing academically, though he stated the case for nuclear power in The Revenge of Gaia. This is his (hideous) website - seems to be mostly endorsing other people who promote his position on nuclear power, rather than him actually doing the writing.
Sorry…things are going badly here so I have no time atm.
I’m not a GW denier…and I acknowledge that humans have a non-zero impact. I’ll even go further and say I agree that humans have a major impact on climate change. I don’t think the science is as solid as some make it out to be, but I certainly think its solid enough to form some conclusions.
That said, and where I’m skeptical, is in the people who attempt to take it to the next step…to propose solutions to the problem, solutions that involve multi-year plans that cost notable percentages of the worlds GDP. Why? Because almost invariably those plans are sketchy, with little detail and a lot of ‘every journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step’ kind of thing. Granted…every journey starts with a single step, but if you are asking me to pay for it, I want to know a few details about the path, the land marks, and the destination. To ME it sounds like a lot of these plans are simply ways to push through an agenda…in many cases a not very realistic anti-technology agenda (I know this isn’t the case with the plan cited in the thread btw…just giving an example I’ve seen a few times).
Before I am willing to jump on a bandwagon I would like somemore details…and I’m frankly skeptical when people start throwing around figures of several hundred billion dollars a year figures (for gods know how long). If we were talking about a few million dollars…well, that would be lost in the background noise. But hundreds of billions a year?!? And this doesn’t ring alarm bells without details (though folks in this thread claim the details are in the plan so I’m willing to wait until I can read the thing in detail before saying this plan is like others I’ve seen)??
Anyway, I’m obviously not going to have time to read the cites today or tomorrow for that matter so I might as well bow out of the debate if its going to focus there and let others, better read and informed do their thing. I’ve already made the points I wanted too…that I’m skeptical that there is a practical way that the effects could be mitigated in this fashion, and that IMHO a better way is to prepare for whats to come, to set up or I suppose increase funding for global relief agencies and the like, and to push our technologies forward, to try and come up with technical, logistical AND marketable solutions for the next personal transport technology. And push nuclear power…gets those hippies and others out of the fucking way and try and at least match a country like France for the percentages of power generated by nuclear…we could at LEAST do that, ehe?
