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Global Warming - It's Our Fault

#562
Unrepresented said:
I may be wrong, but I don't think increasing living standards is limited to big screen television ownership. I assume access to healthcare, education, economic mobility and security are what they're looking to offer, although some may use their newfound health, education, and economic mobility and security to purchase televisions among other consumer goods.
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Living large involves a large carbon foot print.
 
#564
Unrepresented said:
I may be wrong, but I don't think increasing living standards is limited to big screen television ownership. I assume access to healthcare, education, economic mobility and security are what they're looking to offer, although some may use their newfound health, education, and economic mobility and security to purchase televisions among other consumer goods.
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Big-screen TV's aside, he does have a point that the more affluent nations play a much larger role in climate change than the poorer nations. What's worse is that those poorer nations are also the ones that will be most impacted by a warming planet.

Unfortunately, upward economic mobility generally translates into greater resource consumption and larger climate impacts.
 
#566
NWB said:
Big-screen TV's aside, he does have a point that the more affluent nations play a much larger role in climate change than the poorer nations. What's worse is that those poorer nations are also the ones that will be most impacted by a warming planet.

Unfortunately, upward economic mobility generally translates into greater resource consumption and larger climate impacts.
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Not always. Compare the US to the former Soviet Union. Or China.

We still have a clean nation thanks to the foresight of many companies. Thanks to the resources generated by entrepreneurial types we are able to enjoy a clean enviorment.
 
#569
aborgman said:
we DO know who funds agribusiness like Cargill and ADM. We DO know who funds the American Farm Bureau.

major agribusiness like Cargill and ADM, as well as farm representation organizations that have existed for 100 years like the AFB and Nations Farmers Union are merely front organizations....:eyebrow:
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You're just paraphrasing what I've already said and repeating it back to me.

These groups were mostly raking in piles of money before, and saw a potential increase in income.
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I've said that, as well:

The corn industry simply saw an opportunity to cash in on a new (and lucrative) demand for their existing product so they naturally jumped on the bandwagon. --hbar


Agribusiness and ethanol producers using false environmentalism as a way to push profit aren't environmentalists - no matter what words are coming out of their mouth.

The newly created counterparts to the fossil fuel industry are largely other, large, national and multinational corporations driven by profits and not environmental concern.
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Apparently you agree with me on this, also.




You seem to be conflating the push for ethanol as an oxygenate additive (and replacement for MTBE) with the large scale push for ethanol as a fuel. They are two completely different things, pushed by two very distinct populations.
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Not correct. The push for ethanol was started by environmentalists and only picked up by Big Agribusiness who saw an opportunity to make money by going along with them.
The push to ethanol began in earnest well before 2008. It was well under way in the early 90's and it was being driven by environmentalists. The corn industry simply saw an opportunity to cash in on a new (and lucrative) demand for their existing product so they naturally jumped on the bandwagon. --hbar
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#574
BawanaRik said:
I spent some time in St Chuck in the 70s.

It's get's cold in the winter.
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Yep. Brutal summers too.

p.s. St. Chicklets was WAY better in the 70s than it is now. It's a freaking mess. I would never live there. Working there ain't so bad because you're going opposite of traffic, but all those people trying to get out in the AM and in in the PM are stuck in hell twice a day. Although the Page extension helps a lot. I live considerably further south. Southern tip of Jefferson County. I work mostly in Baden, Wellston, Jennings, N.STL, Pine Lawn, Kinloch, etc..
 
#575
BawanaRik said:
Ethanol puts out out more CO2 than gasoline. And it only gives about 2/3 the energy.
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Untrue. Ethanol and gasoline, when burned cleanly, put out nearly the same amount of CO2 per energy unit created.


And it takes a lot of energy to make corn based ethanol. I wouldn't be surprised if it takes a gallon of gas to make a gallon of ethanol.
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The process of making ethanol from corn that is employed in the U.S. is truly wasteful. But this is only because the headlong rush to get ethanol on the market as quickly as possible (initiated by environmentalists who were scared about global warming) meant that we were making ethanol with technology that wasn't economically feasible and from a product (corn) that isn't economically suitable.

Incidentally, you do understand that it takes a lot of energy to produce a gallon of gasoline and bring it to market, don't you?


The environmental impact of ethanol far out weighs any imagined benefit.
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Not when done properly. That's point I've been trying so hard to get across. Ethanol is an excellent fuel that, when properly produced, burns cleaner than gasoline or any other fossil fuel and is inherently CO2 neutral, unlike all fossil fuels. If reducing our CO2 output is the goal here, then Ethanol is, by far, the best fuel for vehicles. This is not really debatable from a science and technology standpoint.

I repeat: the problem with ethanol is that it's been produced using methods that are horribly inefficient because of the rush to get the product on the market ASAP. If we, as a society, had thought it wise to take more time to come up with a more prudent plan to phase out fossil fuels, we could have developed a process that uses any cheaply available source of cellulose (instead of corn) or plant that can be made into sugar as a source for ethanol and we could have ethanol refineries that operate much more efficiently, as well.

Instead, we used what was already at hand (corn) and refined it using the inefficient technology which existed at the time. Now we're stuck with it because it's been subsidized so much that it's grown too big to simply shove aside and replace it with something better.
 

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