Re: Global Warming

[Ronn!Blankenship]

At 05:47 PM 8/31/03 -0400, Robert J. Chassell wrote:

Robert J. Chassell wrote:

    > Fortunately, the graphs I have seen for carbon dioxide in the air and
    > the like, and reports from people whom I respect, have all suggested
    > that the problem is human-caused and that therefore the solution is
    > not hugely expensive.
Doug Pensinger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> responded:

    But what if it's both and we are exacerbating a natural cycle?

Could be.

    Could it be like rolling a boulder over hillside prone to an
    avalanche?  And even if any of the above scenario's are only
    slightly true, what is the most _conservative_ approach?  ....
The most conservative approach is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions
sharply.
We know that greenhouse gases do have some effect.  The question is
how much?  If the effect is small, as it must be if the changes we see
are natural, then we need to make bigger reductions.
Reductions mean, for example, increasing the funding and subsidy of
public transportation, and encouraging people to use it.  Empty buses
are not good.  To get people to shift over, the action has to be
dramatic.  One way is to make and buses gratis to use and, at the same
time, sharply increasing the tax on carbon in gasoline -- not by the
US$0.10 per gallon (US$0.379 per liter) that environmentalists have
advocated (and lost) but by a much higher amount.


How about simply having bus routes that actually go where people want to go 
at the time they want to go there?  Many people these days live in one 
suburb and work in another suburb, and therefore in most areas where I have 
lived and checked into the bus system if they wish to ride the bus to work 
they have to catch a bus in the suburb where they live -- assuming there is 
a route which goes there at all -- and ride it all the way downtown, where 
they have to wait for anything from a few minutes to the better part of an 
hour to catch another bus that goes from downtown out to the suburb where 
they work -- again assuming any such route exists.  That means that a 
person who has to be at work at 8 am has to get up at 4 am to be at the bus 
stop by about 5 am or so to ride downtown, wait, then ride to the vicinity 
of work, and then to do the same thing all over in reverse in the evening, 
not getting home until maybe 7:30 or 8 pm, while if they use their own car, 
the trip each way is about 30 minutes or so, even with traffic.  Then there 
are the people who do not work 8 to 5 and so either have to get to work 
before the first bus of the morning runs or leave after the last buses of 
the evening have run, or in the case of evening or graveyard shift workers, 
both.  And while cell phones and laptops indeed allow some people to make 
productive use of commute time, most people don't have jobs where they can 
do work away from their work site and/or during other than "normal business 
hours", nor is there much they can do in the way of home chores or family 
duties while riding on a bus or sitting on a bench in the pre-dawn cold.



I don't know what the plans would be for gases such as methane.


Outlaw beans.



  On
the one hand, `natural gas', i.e., fossil methane, has less carbon per
unit of energy produced when it burns, so it is better than coal.  On
the other hand, when it leaks, it goes into the atmosphere where it
absorbs more infrared than carbon dioxide.  It is a more dangerous
`greenhouse' gas.  In the early 1990s, leaks from the former Soviet
natural gas pipeline system were a serious issues.  Cows and termites
release a great deal of methane into the atmosphere; more research
would have to be undertaken to deal with this, too, not to mention
less expensive voltaic cells, seaweed and other biological stuff to
alcohol, and the like.  In other words, the government would have to
sharply increase funding for a very wide variety of university
research projects.
Also, the conservatives would insist that all cities provide no-fee
`white' bicycles for people to pick up, ride, and then drop off.
The conservative approach means taxing home heating oil and gas and
encouraging people to wear sweaters.


Some people already do.  In fact, some people wear two or three sweaters, 
pants, heavy socks, and a wool watch cap to bed because they cannot afford 
_today's_ prices for heating oil and gas.  And what do we do about the 
emission from power plants generating electricity to run air conditioners 
in the summer?  There is only a certain amount of clothing one can _remove_ 
to stay cool, and that is even more limited if one is not in the privacy of 
one's own home with the drapes drawn.  And if things are already to the 
point where the climate is only going to get hotter, there is going to be 
more demand for air conditioning, not less.



It means encouraging yet more
insulation.  It means changing light fixtures so they do not send
light into the sky, where it is wasted.
In addition to conservation, the US government would have to spend tax
payers' money on many different research projects for hydrogen or
hydrogen-boron fusion -- not a billion dollars a year, or 10 billion
dollars a year, but a billion or 10 billion dollars a month.


Unfortunately, those who work in fusion research have a saying, "Fusion 
power is thirty years away, and probably always will be."  It certainly has 
been "thirty years away" since at least the early Seventies, and we don't 
seem to be any closer to achieving long-term sustainable fusion reactions 
which produce enough more energy than it takes to keep the reaction 
equipment running to be a commercially useful power source than we did 
thirty years ago.  And most of them don't think it is a funding problem, 
but a fundamental problem needing some breakthroughs in physics.



The
expenditures would have to rival US taxpayer spending on Iraq.
Because of the `free rider' problem, the money will have to come from
taxes.  Although there will be some people who act to reduce or change
the source of their energy use even though others do not, few are like
that.  As a practical matter, few people are saints.  It is like the
convention that everyone drives on a particular side of the road, on
the left in Great Britain, and on the right in the US:  everyone needs
to follow the convention.
In a James Bond movie, you might enjoy a scene in which our hero
drives in the on-coming lane; but outside a movie, life in the
on-coming lane is short and nasty.
Although the US is more energy efficient than it was 30 years ago, the
US is built around the use of fossil fuels and a transition is
difficult and expensive.
In my experience, people who advocate doing little or nothing are
people who do not have children and who do not care for the future of
their neighbors' children.


While many people who oppose new taxes are people who have children and can 
barely make ends meet now.



(They say that they expect someones'
children to invent solutions, but no one has any confidence that
unknown inventions will be made, or if made, will be less expensive
that acting now.)
All I can say is that I hope that the environmentalists are right and
that those who say the changes are natural or from `exacerbating a
natural cycle' are wrong.  If the current changes are even partly
natural -- which they might be -- the cost and suffering is higher.


And if the current natural variation is greater than the anthropogenic 
component of the variation -- and natural variations in the past have 
certainly exceeded anything humans can do -- then we or our descendents 
will have to adapt to warmer climates anyway, probably technologically, or 
die out.  Some say that instead of restricting the technology which may 
allow us to adapt and survive we ought to go ahead and use our intelligence 
and technology which allows us to adapt our local environment to our needs 
rather than to be at the mercy of natural variations in the environment.



-- Ronn!  :)

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