The left wanted the US economy changed to service-based and that's all but complete, CO2 has plunged. HaHaHa. Fakeout on all the politicians who believed the left when they said it was just about CO2. The left still insists on "forcing congressional action" and signing a "global treaty" (see end of this post, 6/12 citation). The point is the end of US and its culture. As in the article below, this is seen as good. They don't mind if others make things, they just don't want the US to.
1/15/11, "Recession Special: Cleaner Air," NY Times, Matthew Wald
"The previous Congress failed to pass climate change legislation, and the new House is openly hostile to the idea. But what the government has not mandated, the economy is doing on its own: emissions of global warming gases in the United States are down.
According to the Energy Department, carbon dioxide emissions peaked in this country in 2005 and will not reach that level again until the early 2020s.
“It’s important to note that the future isn’t what it used to be,” said David Doniger, policy director of the Climate Center at the Natural Resources Defense Council. He pointed out that the Energy Department’s projection of emissions in 2020 was lower in 2008 than in 2007, and has kept falling.
How could that be? In part, the Great Recession has been good for something.
“The recession has led to a smaller economy, less activity and less energy consumption,” said Revis W. James, director of the Energy Technology Assessment Center at the Electric Power Research Institute, a utility consortium.
Electricity consumption had been growing at a rate of 1 percent to 1.5 percent a year, but the recession brought on the steepest drop in decades. When demand fell, the utilities cut back on the use of their least-efficient generating stations, the ones that emit the highest amounts of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour.
Of course, the recession will end one day, but the economy will look different when it does, experts say. By then, the United States will be further along in its multidecade trend away from energy-intensive industries and toward a service-based economy.
The other big change is in the price and availability of natural gas. New drilling technology allowing for the recovery of gas from shale formations has led the government to double its estimate of how much natural gas can be recovered from shale. The result is that its price, already at bargain-basement levels, is likely to stay low for years to come.
That means that even if the mix of electric generating plants does not change, the cleaner gas-fired ones will run for more hours and the dirtier coal-fired ones will run for fewer. Making a kilowatt-hour from gas means emitting about 40 percent less carbon dioxide, compared with coal.
At the same time, some of the oldest coal plants are being retired because of new rules restricting not carbon but conventional pollutants like soot, mercury, ash, sulfur dioxide and oxides of nitrogen. In their place, electric utilities are increasingly turning to plants powered by natural gas. Some coal- and gas-fired plants will also be displaced by wind as renewable-fuel quotas,
- enacted by more than half the states, take effect.
Total electricity use will be about 20 percent higher in 2035 than it is today, the Energy Department estimates, but renewable energy, which was 10 percent of the mix in 2009, will be 14 percent in 2035. Use of coal as a fuel is predicted to fall to 43 percent from 45 percent.
And who knows? ...Gasoline prices could rise above $4, though the government says that is unlikely. A viable gasoline substitute might be found. New nuclear plants might be built.
Even so, all of this falls far short of putting America on the road to the goal stated by President Obama on the campaign trail two years ago, an 80 percent reduction by 2050. And even if the United States continues to reduce its carbon output by shifting to less energy-intensive industries and by importing more cars, appliances and other energy-intensive goods, the carbon required to make those things will still go into the global atmosphere.
The emissions just won’t come from the United States." via Tom Nelson, Junk Science
.
----------------------------------------------------
.
Scroll down to second article on TomDispatch.com
.
6/3/12, "The Planet Wreckers," Bill McKibben, "Climate-Change Deniers Are On the Ropes -- But So Is the Planet"
.
"Since the president can’t sign a treaty by himself, it’s effectively meant stifling any significant international progress on global warming."...(this item in parag. 13 of McKibben piece)
.
---------------------------------------------------
.
NRDC guy says congress must be forced to act about the environmental crisis just as it was about Civil Rights, gender equality, and Aryan supremacy. He doesn't say what exactly the US environmental crisis is, the laws he wants passed, how he knows the laws will change the US environment, and why that will be better for the US than what we have now:
.
7/17/12, "The Greening of Professional Sports," NY Times, Allen Hershkowitz Op-ed
.
"Lessons from previous cultural shifts that have moved our society forward suggest that the change needed today in our thinking about the environment will not be led by government. The Civil Rights Act was not enacted because Congress led the way on race relations. The Vietnam War did not end because Congress led the way on defunding United States participation in that conflict. The same is true of other social issues like drunken driving, gender equality and marriage equality. In each case, government did not lead on the reforms needed to address these issues, it followed. Congress was forced to act by public opinion.
.
.
Clearly, Congress is not leading the way in addressing the urgent issues of global climate disruption, biodiversity loss and so many other ecological threats. We must encourage government to respond to these threats, and in order to do that, we need to promote a cultural shift in how Americans view their relationship to the planet.
.
.
To instigate this, few sectors can be as influential as the sports industry. There is a reason some of the largest industries on earth pay millions of dollars to affiliate with professional sports. They know it is an effective way
- to influence the culture of the marketplace."...
.
7/19/12, "Journalists beware: Shell Arctic hoax signals move from subtle spin to activist deception," Poynter.org, Jeff Sonderman
.
----------------------------------------------------
.
7/28/10, "The secrets 10 states and Wall Street don't want you to know," by Mark Lagerkvist, NJ Watchdog
"Under the RGGI scheme, the smell of profiteering is powerful. New Jersey and nine other Northeast states have sold
- $662 million in carbon dioxide permits since 2008.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment