janpor

First of all I want to say that the reports people refer to are based on 'how much will it cost' instead of 'what will we gain'...
Some people are trying to compair China and the United States, what I think is utterly ridiculous...because China has 1 billion inhabitants, the US 'only' 300 million...

Everyone should fight Global Warming, and the discussion if it is, or it isn't because of humankind is totally beside the point...
We can't deny that our planet is warming up, and it will have great consequences for people and their enviroments around the world...

The new plan (the four 20's) of the European Commission says:

- cut emissions of greenhouse gasses by 20%
- drop of electricity usage by 20%
- 20% of our energy must come from renewable sources
=> all this by 2020

It will cost a poorly €3 per European per week, so 2 beers a week
So that's €1872 per person by 2020...

But what will it bring? A better air quality, it lower the dependance on foreign energy suppliers, it will provide cheaper energy for families and it will create millions of jobs. And of course it will give our planet a better future,...if everybody participates...people around the world will be able to stay living where they do now instead of migrating (interior or exterior) what would be the start of new problems...

__________________
"Nos pays sont devenus trop petits pour le monde actuel, à l'échelle des moyens techniques modernes, à la mesure de l'Amérique et de la Russie aujourd'hui, de la Chine et de l'Inde demain. L'unité des peuples européens réunis dans les Etats-Unis d'Europe est le moyen de relever leur niveau de vie et de maintenir la paix. Elle est le grand espoir et la chance de notre époque. Nous aussi, nous allons vers notre but, les Etats-Unis d'Europe, dans une course sans retour."

Jean Monnet - Rome 1957

AzTeK

I'm gonna try and look for an official source on the % of renewables by 2020, but thnx for the details oyu found.

I just calculated the cost of the dam in $/kW, and it does not seem rosy to me. The three gorges dam costs around $1250/kW, which is probably less than the actual costs considering not only the environmental damage but also the fact that millions of Chinese had to be relocated and the loss of invaluable archeological sites. I'm having a hard time finding comparable numbers on small or other hydro plants, but here is a PPT I find about wind, but it dates bakc to 2005:
http://www.nreca.org/Documents/Publi...esentation.ppt

Basically it says that "Large Wind plants" (whatever that might mean) cost around $900-$1000/kW. I always said that wind is more than just competitive to conventional fuels, but the fact that, according to this source, it even beats such mammuth projects as the three gorges dam (which, due to its size, should end up being relatively cheap one would think) speaks either very much for wind or very much against the dam, depending on how you look at it. The problem I mentioned with the sediments is very real as well, though. Here's what Wiki has on it:

And here's something from Three Gorges Dam, China - Encyclopedia of Earth

I still stand by my statement that the Chinese are not getting what they'r paying for...

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LessGovMrPrez

Well I hate to break reality to you, but everything costs something. If nothing is "gained" from it, financially, then it wont be done at all.

What are you going to fight it with? A stick? Club? A tax? How do you stop a planet from doing what it has always done? You are asking us to do something that is completely, humanly impossible. We cannot control a planets climate.


We cant deny that it wont cool either. What kind of consequences? Last I checked most people on this planet live in considerably warm places. The closer you get to the poles, the less people you get.

-Cutting emissions changes nothing. The planet will still warm and cool all on its own regardless.
-How do you drop electricity usage when more people are demanding it?
-Why just 20%? If this is such a dire thing, we should completely get rid of the other bad energy.
-By 2020? It will take that long to get through the EPA red tape and another 5 to 10 to start building.

All to "fight" something that will continue to happen regardless. WHy not just pull the global warming scare tactics out of it and just say, we need to get more efficient with our resources? Why all the fear tactics that we are all gonna destroy the planet? Just do it for efficiency purposes.

The planet a better future? Is the planet going somewhere? Who said anything about migrating? Better air quality? ALl 3 of these are rhetorical political mumbojumbo.

Just do it for better efficiency, no need to turn it into a religion.

TheKentuckian

I'm not big on the "it cannot be done" crowd. What limitation has man come against and not overcome?

We went from the steam engine to the moon in short order, what says we cannot harness nature?
We routinely do what was impossible just a few generations ago.

Certainly, substantive investigation into this arena is waranted, it may not be a far off time that knowledge on terraforming may directly correlate to our survival as species, for any number of reasons and applications.

We can leave our planet, possibly blow off the atmosphere, and unleash the atom. Maybe it should at least be considered that we have at least potentially the power to regulate our enviroment in a way that preserves similar to current conditions at least temporarily until we better or more fully understand natural cycles and the intricate causes and effects.

Nilisim is what this is. We must strive to be more than we are so future generations can be more than we can imagine.

Grez

Just look at it, the very vast part of Americans can't give up the one thing they need the most, gasoline. Thats the end of the story. We can recycle all we want, but when it comes to driving, we have no will to change damn thing. Thats all you need to know.

TheKentuckian

Driving, that's workable, the problem is the fixation with the fuel and sources.

Folks don't even want to talk about anything but extracting dead dinosaurs and prefer to burn as much as possible. We should have been out on the cutting edge a long time ago, setting ourselves up to be the worlds energy exporter for a season. If we're smart and determined, maybe we still can but the extra thirty years off serious effort and investment would have given us all a savings on the investment and possibly tied our hands from doing some stupid things.

sooxiwei

I guess the only way to solve all the problems is to cut down the population of human by...having less or no children, all industries are up to meet the needs of human being, without these industry things, human will not be leading a live with good utility, don't expect too much in technology breakthrough, as we don't know how long does it takes to have something to save the earth...

neotheone

How is everyone here so "certain" about the correctness of the "Theory" of Global warming ?

DanishDynamite

See here concerning the difference between the everyday understanding of the term "theory" and the meaning of "scientific theory".

I'm coming in very late to this thread, so forgive me if what I'm about to say has already been said and discussed.

What I just wanted to say was that there are a number of facts about which there is no controversy, and here they are:

a) The average temperature of the Earth is rising.
b) The level of the CO2 content of the Earth's atmosphere is rising.
c) CO2 is a greenhouse gas. The greater the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere, the more heat will get trapped in the atmosphere.

As far as I know, there is no controversy about these facts. The controversy, such as it is, is about the interpretation of these facts.

neotheone

Yes, exactly correct DD , the controversy is about whether

(a) in the above post causes (b) and (c) ,

Or is it that (b) and (c) cause (a) ??

It is also about neglecting the sun's role which is the "powerhouse", so to say, for the earth .

Some things may be beyond human control , after all.

And by the way, about the wikipedia link:
The words that make me skeptical are , and . From what I know about scientific thinking, If that statement is presumed to be correct, all that would needed to establish a would be the mass media.