Believe me, you and I co-exist very pleasantly compared to some of the complete (*&#$*(@&s I've had to put up with in here (those people are thankfully very few in number)
Good to know.
And I don't see why our (alleged) need to cut emissions suggests that China and India don't need to reduce theirs. They do. If China and India are not handled (by threat of violence if nothing else) the problem will not be solved.
I think they do. But they're not going to stop, as they've said themselves. Nor would they ever stop in the face of a diplomatic solution, because I think the West would have any such thing tailor-made to ensure we're getting the better deal.
A military solution certainly is an option, one that may even need to be considered later, seeing as a concentrated bombing campaign would pretty much solve the problem. I just don't think the US public is ready to stomach that one.
Frankly, however (this is something I completely forgot about until just now) the problem probably already has been solved. With oil prices what they are right now, China and India are pretty seriously hosed. Their economic development has been badly hampered by the high price of oil. Maybe that was George Bush's plan all along.......
It is an interesting issue, it'll be interesting to see what the Chinese government does about they're oil subsidies as the price continues to climb to reasonable levels. (I think $135/b is still undervalued).
Dude, I've seen that one a couple million times already in the past.....errr.....however many years it was that I've argued this sort of thing online. A lot of years.
Lead by example, eh? Lemme tell you what will actually happen. The U.S. will lead by example, bend over and take it in the ass to save the planet. We will cut our emissions and shaft our economy in the process--which will allow China to continue their massive and extremely dirty industrialization, and pass us up as the Number One Superpower. Human history has always been this way.
The U.S. led by example and gave women the right to vote. You don't see a lot of other nations following our example.
Actually, New Zealand had it first
And then 9/10 Canadian provinces beat you by a solid 2 years.
The U.S. led by example and is destroying its stocks of chemical and biological weapons. Same result.
The U.S. has reduced its nuclear armament several times since the Reagan Administration. Same result again.
The U.S. led by example and kicked Saddam Hussein's ass so hard he had to take off his shoes to watch television. You know how that ended: NOBODY ELSE ON THE ENTIRE PLANET FOLLOWED OUR EXAMPLE. In fact everybody else on the planet stood there all jaw-dropped and went "WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU YANKEES DOING!?!?!?"
Well, Iraq is something of a special case (unless you mean Desert Storm), seeing as people still don't think that was the right idea, and it hasn't exactly turned out to be the cake walk the administration was adverstising.
But I agree, the US unilaterally imposing emissions cuts and such won't be enough to pull China and India along. But I do think that unless the West shows their own willingness to change, any effort to force that change on China and India will be very poorly recieved by the world community, and outright rejected by the Chinese and Indians themselves.
I also believe it shows we're actually taking the threat seriously. I wouldn't be surprised at all if a great deal of Indians and Chinese believed the GW was just some demon cooked up by the West as an excuse to keep developing economies down, and so maintain the West's position in the world.
When you lead by example, you get screwed.
But in this case, we're only screwed faster if we don't lead by example. Set the precedent, then enforce it on the rest of the world.
Where are you gonna get the electricity.....?
Burn fuel oil if you want. My big problem with a future of gasoline vehicles is that it's very expensive to increase efficiency, and difficult for a government to control and enforce standards on older vehicles, since there are what, billions of them in the United States alone?
Electric and Hydrogen vehicles produce no emissions at the car itself, instead displacing thier emissions to whatever plant is producing the power/cracking hydrogen. It seems like a zero sum problem, but it's not. Obviously, building a consumer level solar powered car is impossible with current technologies. But if we could run electric vehicles off a central grid, suddenly we could use solar power, as we could just build a massive field of them in the middle of some desert. The same logic applies to any renewable source.
The real beauty however, it that the same idea also applies if we were generating this power from fossil fuels. It is vastly easier, and vastly cheaper to install scrubbing technologies in one huge powerplant (or many smaller ones) rather than in millions, if not billions of vehicles. It's also easier to replace the equipment in one power plant should more efficient designs come along. Really it's just economy of scale.
Plus electric cars have better acceleration, and make that cool screaming noise when you really push them
Where are you gonna get the power to produce the hydrogen gas.....? Do you know how much electricity it takes to separate hydrogen out of water? I'll give you a hint: more than you would gain from burning the gas you produce.
This is true, but like I said above, it gives us more options for power sources, and it's easier to scrub afterwards. You do lose efficiency in the dual burn situation, but you make it up by not moving billions of barrels of oil around.
The same problem holds with these new-fangled hybrid cars. Where do you get the motive force to charge the battery??? From gasoline. Hybrid cars actually don't save anything emission-wise.
This isn't so true. Yes, gasoline is still the only real mover, but normally when you brake, energy is just being bled away, and is irrecoverable by the vehicle. If you push it into a battery, and then use this charge to accelerate the car later, you've wasted less energy, and so require less gasoline to burn.
Phew. Long post. Here's hoping this thread doesn't go all "greenpeace" on me. Probably too late.
No kidding on the length. As for greenpeacing the thread, I don't really know what you mean, but I'm no fan of Greenpeace myself. I've just read one too many article on the benifits of centralizing our power production.
