Andrei.Hicks wrote on Oct 19^th, 2012 at 9:03am:


You are still ignoring the fact that the major economy in the US, California has a price on carbon and is at the cutting edge in research and development in renewables.
The poor states in the US will always be poor because they dont have the political courage to look to the future so its no good waiting for the "basket case" states to do anything except swell the ranks of the unemployed.
I would follow the lead of California before I followed Tennessee or Arkansas

rabbitoh07 wrote on Oct 19^th, 2012 at 8:29am:

You can come up with as much BS as you like. The earth has not warmed for 16 years.

rabbitoh07 wrote on Oct 19^th, 2012 at 9:10am:



The United States is reducing its emissions - like everyone else.

China is not.

Prosperity has exacted a steep environmental toll, however.

The colossal industrial expansion of recent decades has depleted natural resources and polluted the skies and streams. China now consumes half the world's coal supply. It leads all nations in emissions of carbon dioxide, the main contributor to global warming. Pollutants from its smokestacks cause acid rain in Seoul and Tokyo.China's experience shows how rising consumption and even modest rates of population growth magnify each other's impact on the planet.


The U.S. consumes much more per person. But with a population four times larger, China has a greater collective appetite — and a greater ecological impact — than any other country.

The compounding forces of economic and population growth are a source of increasing concern to scientists. An international team of 1,300 researchers organized by the United Nations concluded that evidence points to "abrupt and potentially irreversible changes" in ecosystems in the next few decades, including mass extinctions and rapid climate change.

Within China, signs of environmental damage are pervasive: massive fish kills, lung-searing smog, denuded landscapes. They have stirred popular discontent and the beginnings of greater official concern for curbing pollution and preserving natural resources.
How this drama plays out is not merely China's concern. Because of the nation's sheer size, the rest of the world has an enormous stake in the outcome.

"To solve China's problems is to solve the world's problems," said Yu Xuejun, a director-general in the country's National Population and Family Planning Commission

In Shanghai, whose population of 23 million exceeds that of Australia, high-rises sprawl in all directions until their silhouettes slip from view, obscured by brown haze.

China, by varying estimates, has more than 100 cities with 1 million or more residents, compared with 9 in the United States. The number of million-plus cities will reach 221 within two decades, according to the McKinsey Global Institute, an economics research firm. More than a dozen will have populations of 25 million or more each.

The U.S. automotive fleet, by far the largest in the world, is less than half that size.
China isn't hustling just to satisfy the demand from the United States and other countries for cheap merchandise. Increasingly, it is bent on meeting the needs of its own people.

More and more, it is being forced to confront the environmental consequences.

A half-day's drive south is the ancient city of Linfen, identified by the World Bank six years ago as the most polluted city on Earth.
The city, once known for its fruit and flowers, is now infamous for respiratory illnesses and the shroud of smog that regularly blots out the sun. When the sun does manage to poke through, it appears as a burnt orange fireball, reminiscent of Southern California's eerie skies during raging wildfires.

China likes to consider itself the world's factory. Yet it has also become the world's smokestack.

Tendrils of soot extend across the Pacific. On some days, almost 25% of the pollutants in the air above Los Angeles originated in China, the Environmental Protection Agency has found.


Such steps reduce pollution at the local level. But they do nothing to curb China's consumption of coal or the resulting carbon dioxide emissions.
China relies on coal to meet about two-thirds of its energy needs. Despite major investments in solar, wind and nuclear energy, coal consumption continues to climb.
Although China has the third-largest reserves in the world, it is reaching around the world for more. It overtook Japan this year as the world's largest coal importer, drawing mostly from Indonesia and Australia. Its imports are expected to double by 2015.

Those trends are worrisome to climate scientists, who say that in order to avoid a potentially catastrophic rise in global temperatures, worldwide carbon dioxide emissions must be cut in half by 2050.

For that to happen, China's emissions would have to peak by 2020, said Nobuo Tanaka, former director of the Paris-based International Energy Agency, which advises governments on energy issues. But by China's own projections, its output will rise at least 50% from current levels before peaking around 2035.

It would be all but impossible for other nations to compensate for such an increase, Tanaka said.

Chinese leaders say that capping emissions would cripple industrial growth and urban development in a country that still has 100 million poor people.

The industrialized countries polluted their way to prosperity, their argument goes, so why should the Chinese be penalized?

China's leaders also have sought credit for their population control policies, which they say averted 400 million births and thus billions of tons of greenhouse gas emissions.

- Los Angeles Times.

And according to you guys, none of this is a problem.....

John Smith wrote on Oct 19^th, 2012 at 9:20am:

The earth has not warmed for 16 years. That is not making up my mind, that is the earth not warming for 16 years.

What China emits in 15 days is equivalent to what Australia is trying to reduce by 2020

Howard had an ETS, Abbott has an expensive carbon reduction policy and Labor has the carbon tax Abbott proposed years ago.
Who are u gonna vote for if you dont want anything done about carbon emissions?

Andrei.Hicks wrote on Oct 19^th, 2012 at 10:35am:


And of course if we all had that mindset there would never be any change.
I reckon China could burn all the fossil fuel left until it runs out and it still wouldn't go near the carbon emission's of the west since the beginning of the industrial revolution.