>From the Huffington Post today: REH BEIJING - China said Friday it would cut emissions this year by rejecting construction projects that pollute too much and developing new technologies that curb greenhouse gases.
The Ministry of Environmental Protection set a target to cut emissions of major pollutants such as sulfur dioxide, ammonia nitrogen and nitrogen oxide by 1.5 percent in 2011 compared to last year, a report on the ministry's website said. China is the world's largest polluter, with energy demands growing sharply every year. The consumption boom reflects the country's transformation from a nation of subsistence farmers to one of workers increasingly trading bicycles for cars and buying energy-hungry home electronics. Environmental Protection Minister Zhou Shengxian said in the report that construction projects that fail to meet environmental standards will not be approved or suspended. New technologies, such as treatment plants for waste recycling and wastewater treatment, are also in development, Zhou said. Other measures include developing technology to remove sulfur, nitrogen and other polluting materials from industrial manufacturing. It wasn't clear how the technologies being developed would be applied this year. The report said more efforts will be made to control vehicle emissions and heavy-polluting industries such as paper-making, textiles, leather and chemical plants, but did not give any details. In international climate change talks, Beijing has long said developed nations should make bigger cuts, reflecting their larger historical contribution to greenhouse gases. China also has resisted international pressure for it to take a larger role in curbing greenhouse gas emissions. China's total 2009 energy consumption, including sources ranging from oil and coal to wind and solar power, was equal to 2.265 billion tons of oil, compared with 2.169 billion tons used by the United States, the Paris-based International Energy Agency said last year. -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of pete Sent: Saturday, January 15, 2011 11:32 PM To: RE-DESIGNING WORK, INCOME DISTRIBUTION, EDUCATION Subject: Re: [Futurework] The rise of miserity On Sat, 15 Jan 2011, Harry Pollard wrote: > > Actually, in 1979, Henry George in Progress and Poverty trounced > Malthusianism and properly so. I doubt his opinion would change if he were > to be alive today. When I began teaching in the US, I would divide the > population of the earth into families of four and put them in single family > homes in the State of Texas. They weren't crowded. Probably, today I would > have to put them into fourplexes (four apartment buildings) - I haven't > checked it but it's easy enough to do. The absurdity of this comment is stupefying. Are you telling us that you are one of those physics-defficient economists who believe that endless growth is possible on a finite planet? Populations limits are not about whether it is possible for us all to Stand on Zanzibar. I can assure you that there is not a tiny fraction of the fresh water needed to support seven billion people in Texas, but it is not the supply side which limits populations. Whatever fresh water they had to start with would soon be polluted to the point of unusable by their wastes, which would also destroy the land, and the oceans. It doesn't really matter where the 7B people are, they require more inputs than the biosphere can possibly deliver while still absorbing their excretions, both bodily and industrially. It may take a while before our current poulation overshoot really rears up to bite us, but the day is coming, and it is likely already too late to avert it. We are currently vacuuming up the oceans, and there is very shortly going to be a nasty situation when all the asian nations that rely heavily on seafood are going to see their fishboats coming back empty cuz there's nothing left to catch. Our "green revolution" agriculture is totally dependent on refilling the nutrients stripped from the soil in crops, using fertilizers processed with fossil fuels, and resources whose low cost high concentration sources are almost depleted. Soon remaining phosphate sources will be low-grade, requiring far more processing, just when the supply of fossils fuel reaches critical depletion. Well, hey, we can always use other energy sources, right? except that there is no planning in place to meet the impending demand in a timely fashion, and other sources usually means solar, which has a serious density limit; collection of solar energy will compete with agriculture for space. And again, it is the sinks rather than the sources that will really do us in. 7 Billion people trying to live a technological lifestyle generate an immense amount of toxic swill, which is poisoning our garden. Harvests suffer in consequence. CO2 is just one of the excretions whose effects happen to appear relatively rapidly. There are lots of others, and we will continue to discover them to our dismay. -Pete _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework _______________________________________________ Futurework mailing list [email protected] https://lists.uwaterloo.ca/mailman/listinfo/futurework
