Climate Change Measure Should Be Set Aside, U.S. Senators Say -
Close your eyes. Imagine for a moment that some how, some way, the White House and Congress cobble together a civilized public health care system. Within a decade, Americans are healthier than they’ve been in a generation. Preventative care available to everyone has led to fewer ER visits and fewer instances of chronic, avoidable diseases, like diabetes, heart disease, and some forms of cancer. We have more money in our pockets because we’re not paying for inefficient, privately-controlled health care. More and more of us are spending it on healthier, fresh food, and the obesity epidemic is finally turning a corner.
Guess what? We’re still fucked. Because the Senate decided one crisis is enough.
Bloomberg reports:
The U.S. Senate should abandon efforts to pass legislation curbing greenhouse-gas emissions this year and concentrate on a narrower bill to require use of renewable energy, four Democratic lawmakers say.
“The problem of doing both of them together is that it becomes too big of a lift,” Senator Blanche Lincoln of Arkansas said in an interview last week. “I see the cap-and-trade being a real problem.”
The resistance by Lincoln and her Senate colleagues undercuts President Barack Obama’s effort to win passage of legislation that would cap carbon dioxide emissions and establish a market for trading pollution allowances, said Peter Molinaro, the head of government affairs for Midland, Michigan- based Dow Chemical Co., which supports the measure.
“Doing these energy provisions by themselves might make it more difficult to move the cap-and-trade legislation,” said Molinaro, who is based in Washington. “In this town if you split two measures, usually the second thing never gets done.”
Forget the threat of another Katrina, or Lower Manhattan under water, or drought and famine in Sub-Saharan Africa, or even the effin’ polar bears — French wine is in danger:
Leading figures from the French wine and food industries are urging their government to push for a strong global agreement at a United Nations climate summit in Copenhagen in December, warning that failure to cut greenhouse gases will devastate their sector.
“The jewels of our cultural heritage, French wines, elegant and refined, are today in danger,” a group of 50 winemakers, sommeliers and chefs wrote in an opinion piece published on Aug. 12 in the newspaper Le Monde and addressed to French President Nicolas Sarkozy.
HA! Ha. ha….
Oh. Laughing through my tears.
Hat tip to Nathan.
Here's the Meat of the Problem -
According to a 2006 United Nations report, livestock accounts for 18 percent of worldwide greenhouse gas emissions. Some of meat’s contribution to climate change is intuitive. It’s more energy efficient to grow grain and feed it to people than it is to grow grain and turn it into feed that we give to calves until they become adults that we then slaughter to feed to people. Some of the contribution is gross. “Manure lagoons,” for instance, is the oddly evocative name for the acres of animal excrement that sit in the sun steaming nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. And some of it would make Bart Simpson chuckle. Cow gas — interestingly, it’s mainly burps, not farts — is a real player.
But the result isn’t funny at all: Two researchers at the University of Chicago estimated that switching to a vegan diet would have a bigger impact than trading in your gas guzzler for a Prius (PDF). A study out of Carnegie Mellon University found that the average American would do less for the planet by switching to a totally local diet than by going vegetarian one day a week. That prompted Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to recommend that people give up meat one day a week to take pressure off the atmosphere. The response was quick and vicious. “How convenient for him,” was the inexplicable reply from a columnist at the Pittsburgh Tribune Review. “He’s a vegetarian.”
(Via azspot.)
Teen Decomposes Plastic Bag in Three Months -
Plastic takes thousands of years to decompose — but 16-year-old science fair contestant Daniel Burd made it happen in just three months.
The Waterloo, Ontario high school junior figured that something must make plastic degrade, even if it does take millennia, and that something was probably bacteria.
(Via Arif Mamdani.)
Yeah, we’ve been hearing it for years — but guys! They’re serious this time! Electric cars are coming soon to a driveway near you!
A big ol’ tip of the hat to Nathan.
William Shatner continues his reign of comedic terror -
You’ve seen him do a dramatic interpretation of Governor Palin’s incoherent resignation speech, now hear his voicemail chiding Hewlett-Packard employees for breaking the company’s 2007 promise to stop using toxic chemicals in its computers. On the same day the message turned up in their voicemail boxes, Greenpeace activists wrote “HAZARDOUS PRODUCTS” on the roof of HP headquarters in Palo Alto, CA.
Hat tip to Nathan.
squashed’s response to this idiotic exchange is awesome.
sds writes:
[A] new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience … found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.
Notes James Taranto (emphasis mine):
The Union of Concerned Scientists, a left-wing advocacy group, put out a press release claiming that the study shows “the potential consequences of global warming are likely worse than what scientists are predicting”—as if carbon is the only thing that can cause warming.
So first the global warmists insist that the question is settled beyond debate, then, when it turns out not to be, they insist that uncertainly can only mean their theory is even more true than they had thought. This just is not how real science operates.
squashed writes:
Taranto’s position is absurd. Imagine your an EMT at the scene of an accident. There is blood everywhere. The driver appears to have a massive head wound. However, there seems to be too much blood for the head wound to be the only injury.
You know there is blood. You know there is a head wound. Everything you know about medicine tells you headwounds bleed and need immediate attention. There may be an additional injury causing additional blood loss—in which case the need for immediate action is even more pressing because something else is compounding the problem. Taranto’s seems to take the position that we should 1) question the existence of the head wound and 2) do nothing.
“When it comes to eliminating actual pollutants such as mercury, particulate matter, and sulfur dioxide, coal burning power plants have done a truly remarkable job cleaning up their act. Thanks to rational EPA regulations and narrowly focused cap-and-trade solutions, Pittsburgh is no longer covered in soot and acid rain isn’t killing trees in New England. Through it all, regulators paid attention to physics so the utility industry hasn’t gone bankrupt.
But none of these pollutants are desired end products of coal combustion. This means they can be eliminated without destroying the fundamental energy releasing activity of burning coal. The same is not true for carbon dioxide. Building a coal burning power plant that spits out electricity without producing carbon dioxide is like asking water to flow uphill.”
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Bill Frezza: Clean Coal: An Unsustainable Political Myth
This whole, short article is worth a look.
(via mattlehrer)
From “Jeb Bush: The Future of the Republican Party”:
Do you believe global warming is primarily man-made?
I’m a skeptic. I’m not a scientist. I think the science has been politicized. I would be very wary of hollowing out our industrial base even further… It may be only partially man-made. It may not be warming by the way. The last six years we’ve actually had mean temperatures that are cooler. I think we need to be very cautious before we dramatically alter who we are as a nation because of it.
Y’know, he’s got a point. I was a bit chilly coming into work today.