Governator outs Dubya's global-warming 'time bomb' The Governator thinks W is useless when it comes to regulating stuff spewed into the atmosphere by American cars and trucks. Yesterday, California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger and 11 other US state head honchos fired a letter at President George W. Bush, complaining that his Department of Transportation is trying to …
How can you have cars giving 25% less emissions unless the mpg goes up?
If an old diesel smoke belcher does 40mpg, and a new clean emissions car does 40mpg, then surely the effect on the environment is equal, both have put 1 gallon of burned diesel into the atmosphere and both done the same mileage, irrespective of whatever emission test you say it can now pass......
All you have done is reduce the amount of visible smoke, so it looks cleaner.
PH as I cant get my head around this....
The folks in Californicate aren't fooled by the big Austrian moron with the pretend little r under his name anymore. The guy is nothing but a publicity whore, changes his views like a feather in the wind or what ever the CA Democrat gustapo wants him to think or act. He and his D friends will Tax the Tarnished Brown state into a Third World state of affairs. You watch.
Now the big dip-shit wants to change all the FREE carpool lanes into HOT - High Occupancy Toll lanes for all the rich bastards in CA with MBs, BMWs and Hummers. Meanwhile their paying $3.85 to $3.95 per gallon for the cheapest regular and food is going thru the roofs because the truck delivery companies are raising rates because of the gas and diesel.
You can thank the asshole Democrats like Pelosi and Ah-nold that are BLOCKING the drilling of OUR Oil in Alaska, CA., the Dakotas and Gulf of Mexico (where the Commie Chinese are drilling with our buddies the corrupt Mexicans). THOSE are the villans!
I think having a breathable atmosphere should come pretty high on anyone's list of priorities - that is of course unless you're a complete fucking moron. What kind of small-minded provincial muppet buries his head in the sand over important issues like this?
I think you'll find, as you're choking to death, that having a negative balance in the whole financial fantasy game, or that there's a family of mexicans in the house next to you will seem like very trivial matters to get up tight about indeed.
We found a treasurehouse of amazing chemicals we can use for making all sorts of things! Fertilisers, plastics, medicine - everything.
Must have taken millions of years in the ground. There's no way we could ever make the stuff ourselves.
Hey! Let's burn the lot as fast as we can!
Climate change is real - the climate has been changing for millenia - INFACT, it cycles approximately every 1500 years. The Vikings were able to colonise Greenland and grow crops, until the ice (and the Inuit) forced them off.
Whole villages were swallowed up in the Alps as the glaciers advanced in the 1800's; now those slopes are being re-exposed.
During the Roman Warming period ( 2000 years ago) Greenland was over 5 degrees hotter than today (HOWEVER, the ice cap remained - polar bears in the artic didn't die out and sea levels didn't inundated the planet!) The same occurred during the medieval period. All this (and more) can be found in scientific publications and on websites.
Past warmings in the last 2000 years in particular and further back in history prove the theory of 'man-made' global warming is in fact a LIE!!
I am by no means an Arnie fan but he was elected as a REPUBLICAN and guys the greenhouse issue IS as high priority as the food prices are...
For no clean air and the food cost is irrelevant coz we wont be around anymore...
Also the drilling for a few more gallons of gas and petrol would ruin wildlife refuges and that also would affect our environment...
Anyway keep rolling over the street and crying about your petrol prices... Here in Continental Europe we pay approx $8 per gallon... boohooooo barely $4... Get your car manufacturers to build powerful engines who consume less gas...
... would make a comprehensible post. Bonus points 'cos I agree with it.
Webster Phreaky, I am steadily getting my head round privoxy and when that is done I'll write a rule to block your posts as they have low information content bulked out with a fair measure of ignorant verbiage.
And I'll release it GPL for the benefit of others.
Leslie: "...old diesel smoke belcher does 40mpg, and a new clean emissions car does 40mpg, then surely the effect on the environment is equal..."
Ah - no.
The traditional old pollutants (such as NOx) actually have significant greenhouse effects in addition to their good old fashioned air pollution effects. If I recall correctly, NOx is many many many (300?) times worse than CO2. So your old smoke belching diesel, even at 40 mpg, is an environmental pig from both the traditional air pollution view AND the greenhouse gases view. Sorry...
It is only the VERY latest clean burning diesels that are actually anything close to being green and clean. Congratulations to the engineers that made it so.
Unfortunately for the fate of the world, this fact makes a lie of the purported 'Global Warming' benefits of many public transit systems that relay on old smoke belching diesel powered buses. If those public transit systems were rapidly updated with modern clean-burning diesels, then perhaps they'd help. But I've noted that the smoke belching buses in many cities are THE prime source (by far!) of sidewalk level air pollution, not to mention noise pollution (only knuckle-dragging idiots on Harleys are worse), not to mention plugging up the roads, not to mention driving around most of the day empty. If only they provide the benefits attributed to them, oh if only...
This just in:
The CO2 output from the pine beetle infestation of British Columbia may exceed the entire CO2 output attributed to all Canadian human activities (excluding I suppose the long term mismanagement of the BC forests...).
So if humans were a logical species, we would immediately turn our attention to solving the pine beetle infestation in BC as the top Canadian priority. One single problem that would halve (HALVE!!!!) the CO2 output from Canada. But no... it's all window dressing and a primal, almost homosexual (not that there's anything wrong with that), fixation on automotive tail pipes. Even just the manufacture of concrete emits MANY times the CO2 of cars and airplanes combined.
We're doomed. And deservedly so. Because we're idiots.
Hey, don't blame America because your country taxes it's fuel so high... out of 107.9p/litre, you knuckleheads pay 16.07p in VAT, the fuel itself costs 32.90p (source http://www.petrolprices.com/price-of-petrol.html). At 3.78 liters to the US gallon, you're then paying 407.8p/US gallon (again assuming 107.9p/litre) as of today, the English pound is worth $1.98...so you're paying 2.059/Gallon for fuel.
DeJa Vu !
Read President Jimmy Carter's Proposal regarding the motoring options after he had curtailed the rather excessive rampant stagflation from the repuke terms of Nixon/ Mostly Asleep at the Wheel Ford presidential terms . These proposals to fix the US Economy and put the Government on the right path to fiscal sanity were sunk on the same day a former Hollywood Z grade actor(Bozo the chimp was far better) mostly full of propaganda and of no real substance in depth or otherwise assumed the oval office !
Whilst principally known for the so called ending of the cold war(hot in places but that is another story for another day suffice to say Russians scored a minimum of 296 planes from the US and allies flying in other peoples controlled airspace ended up with zero nil score of VVS planes(now you know a few of MOD's bigger lies from those years) apart from a lot of broken ship windows from suicidal frustrated self wanking pilots of Phantom jets travelling at Mach 1.5 at under 100 feet proximity range outside exclusion ranges !)
Anyway I digressed from the main point of contention , whilst some remember him fondly mainly because he opened the flood gates for a select few people to make a lot of money at a lot of other peoples expense called "Reaganomic's(elusive fantasy by any other name if truth be told as it is a drop short big time with a real killer of a long term price tag as we have seen)" and supposedly ended the cold war (Gorbachev did that from the time he assumed the mantle and allowed the Baltic States independence prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall) but quietly overlook the fact he in fact laid down the basic foundations which have yet to be corrected that are causing all the headaches we now see today in the US economy from A through Z , one of life's ironies was that he totally screwed up in more ways then one and everyone deliberately ignores that , but the man he replaced who fixed things up is only recalled less fondly for one irrelevant minor glitch in the overall picture(repukes in the background ran very deliberate/evil interference to extend the crisis for political reasons only) . One of the problems was that he listened to a bunch of greedy idiotic wankers in which he allowed the US auto industry to super size and morph the average US overweight unsafe(crap brakes and handling) fuel guzzler of a car made by the big three of the time to the numerous fuel guzzling ineffective fat even more overweight Women's Terrorist Urban Assault Hummer plus size vehicles using obsolete boat anchor engine designs (a vast majority of drivers of these units are barely in control of these beasts 98% of the time)! These companies abandoned a whole sections of the market and quite literally opened the floodgates for the ever on the virtual edge of bankruptcy Japanese Auto Makers(still are!) to dominate the scene , whilst now three decades later they are helplessly confined to a boot note in history reduced to watching from the sidelines as they ceased to be the leaders in the industry and became part time bit players by self choice !
Choices ? , some look good on the day , but will ultimately kill you , Darwin was right !
Gropenator , is merely following on a very old proposal from another era , which shows history moves in the same circles all the the time !
"I think having a breathable atmosphere should come pretty high on anyone's list of priorities - that is of course unless you're a complete fucking moron. What kind of small-minded provincial muppet buries his head in the sand over important issues like this?
I think you'll find, as you're choking to death, that having a negative balance in the whole financial fantasy game, or that there's a family of mexicans in the house next to you will seem like very trivial matters to get up tight about indeed."
I never realised that we were on the cusp of making Earth's entire atmosphere unbreathable. /sarcasm
You sir are precisely the kind of complete moron who gives environmentalism a bad name. I strongly recommend topping yourself, as this will also reduce CO2 emissions a little, lest we all "choke to death" on that 0.03% of CO2 in the atmosphere.
I'm absolutely, 100% behind you on that one.
One's view on global warming is as good as irrelevant. With crude oil we are talking about a finite substance. We need alternative means of generating electricity so that oil can be used in amazing ways, other than just burning it so inefficiently in vehicles and heating homes.
I'm a patient man, but even my patience has limits.
Phuck Off!
And take your right-wing, bigoted, homophobic, racist, recidivist, misogynistic, spittle-flecked bilious rants with you. Go away and annoy someone else for a while. You are a narrow-minded intellectual pigmy.
To everyone else: I'm sorry to be abusive, but not only is it fully justified, it's long overdue. Enough is enough.
At least a Hummer isn't as polluting as that eco-fad vehicle, the Prius.
Personally, I'm going to keep my 20yo civic going - it gets over 40mpg still, and its at almost 300k miles. The majority of any car's lifetime pollution is in it's manufacture, and the batterius in the Toyota Poser, I mean Prius give it a HUGE black mark there. I think at the 10 year mark, after doing 150k miles, the prius' (not all that impressive) fuel economy is such that it brings the total energy usage to almost the level as the Hummer doing the same milage, but then you have to replace the batteries, which is a whole HELL of a lot more pollution
"I never realised that we were on the cusp of making Earth's entire atmosphere unbreathable. /sarcasm"
No, but we're close to dramatic rises in sea levels. Slightly more important than immigration and financial debt.
"During the Roman Warming period ( 2000 years ago) Greenland was over 5 degrees hotter than today (HOWEVER, the ice cap remained - polar bears in the artic didn't die out and sea levels didn't inundated the planet!) The same occurred during the medieval period. All this (and more) can be found in scientific publications and on websites.
Past warmings in the last 2000 years in particular and further back in history prove the theory of 'man-made' global warming is in fact a LIE!!"
There is no doubt that climate change occurs naturally - all environmentalists agree on that. However, there is also no doubt that we are having a profound impact upon the environment and climate change, despite what Fox News may tell you is the reality. Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth" highlighted the discrepancy between scientific reports and the media in regards to our impact - no scientific journal suggested we're not having an impact, whereas 50% of media articles did. This is part of the uncertainty principle that is perpetuated by pro-oil industries. We're also seeing uncertainty spread about bio-fuels and suggestions that it will cause food supply shortages - what is overlooked is the amount of tobacco, coffee, cocoa and other "luxury" goods that take up huge land mass, versus bio-fuels which are a good interim until something more efficient comes along. We need to make choices as a society and capitalism certainly isn't the best judge - that's why we need governments to step in and legislate.
I think Arnie is doing a great job of highlighting important issues. He might not be perfect but at least he's trying.
Oooh yeah right Webster Phreaky, I think you're not even reading the news lately, have you? So you got it all BASS-ACKWARDS!!!
It is precisely the US ... and Spain ... that are really wanting to get their grimy hands on OUR (Mexican) oil. Which our current right-wing bigoted government has been trying to give away to Shell, ExxonMobil, Texaco, Repsol and such. If the proposed changes to the law/constitution go forward, all the aforementioned oil companies would be the ones actually extracting the deep-sea reserves in Mexican waters. Oops! And I fail to see your "Commie Chinese", as they are on the OTHER side and have no direct access to the Gulf of Mexico.
And stop crying for those prices, we've been paying $3.02/gallon (or $0.76/liter) since some time ago, maybe that's why we prefer cars with 15 km/L fuel efficiency (or better).
I agree that the Toyota prius seems more of a marketing exercise, albeit a regrettably successful one. However, that's not my point: the bullshit about the majority of the car's energy is in its production rather than its lifetime use is spouted by people who haven't given it a moment's thought (or don't want to). Likewise the bit about a prius being as polluting as a Hummer is totally weird.
I always think references a great so here's one: <http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/04/21/ask_pablo_cars/>. It addresses both points and it's even got numbers and stuff in it.
>>The same occurred during the medieval period. <<
I think that was caused by His Holiness Torquemada and the Spanish Inquisition burning all those heretics. All that greasy smoke wafting into the air and blotting out the sun !!
@Webster Phreaky - "Gulf of Mexico (where the Commie Chinese are drilling with our buddies the corrupt Mexicans). THOSE are the villans!"
Ah, now I understand. Americans drilling in the Gulf of Mexico are good ol' boys that are patriotically saving the nation but anyone else doing the same are villains !! And, of course, the US is relieving the poor Iraqis of their burden of an excessive supply of oil while those dastardly Iranians have not only refused to sell you any but actually have the temerity to quote their oil in EUROs instead of good ol' greenbacks !!
amazing indeed: Webster drove amfM to lucidity.
Arnie has done a much better job than originally expected (i thought his life experience as a steroid-packed, stoner musclehead didn't seem relevant to this work), and when it comes to this issue, he's been excellent.
aside from anthropogenic GW, climate change, or whatever all the lobbyists are arguing against these days, it seems like a really good idea to pollute the atmosphere (and the rest of the planet) less, rather than more. Earth is the ONLY PLANET WE HAVE, and the only one your children will have (for those of you who have some), likely for several generations, at least (as a species, we spend far more resources on war, than we do on space exploration).
don't dump your toxic crap where your descendants will live - how controversial can this be?
we already have an Asian Brown Cloud, and California gets a piece of it on a fairly regular basis. i think one permanent industrial-pollutant cloud is enough. only deranged right-wing nutjobs like Phreaky and Hewittt (i know you're out there...) would argue against such a simple idea. it doesn't take all kinds, but we've got them anyway.
dead bird, because humans do that to wildlife far too often.
"you're paying 407.8p/US gallon ... the English pound is worth $1.98...so you're paying 2.059/Gallon for fuel"
I can tell maths isn't your strong point.
407.8p = £4.078 per US gallon {that's four pounds and seven point eight pence}
£1 = $1.89 so £4.078 = $7.707
which is *slightly* more than the $3.85/$3.95 you guys are currently up in arms about.
Consider yourselves very lucky to have cheap fuel.
What's all this climate change bullshit anyway, I wish so many clever people wouldn't be so collectively stupid along with all the other stupid ones.
"Past warmings in the last 2000 years in particular and further back in history prove the theory of 'man-made' global warming is in fact a LIE!!"
Actually, they don't. They add weight to the interpretations that since current warming trends are significantly faster than anything we've seen before and not linked to any of the cycles we've discovered caused the previous warmings that there must be*something else* causing the warming. That the warming matches the astonishing increase in greenhouse gases since the height of the industrial revolution is only the very start of a string of convincing models and correlations that your denialist position always conveniently forgets.
You argue like a creationist: badly and ineffectually. You take single anomalies and extrapolate them to mean the whole model is broken and that the actual scientists doing the work are covering them up when, in fact, they are working hard to find out where their model is wrong and correct it.
The arguments that mankind is not significantly affecting the world's climate have been addressed and within acceptable error bars been debunked. Yet the denialists refuse to accept the consensus even though their arguments are based on shaky interpretations of old data.
Go crawl back under your non-scientific rock.
Ambitious?
Once the dumb yank car industry realise that sticking a 15litre 500hp engine is 15 tonne pile of shit (yes yank cars as a whole are badly built, inefficient, handle like a oil tanker, gas guzzling, piles of crap), they may actaully join the 21st century
If you learnt about high output, lean burn engines, lightweight bodies & chassis, then this 25% reduction is a piece of piss.
Why do you think the best selling cars are not American?
At least we dumped the UK car industry because we knew are cars were crap, unrealiable rust buckets (The specialist sports car makers are exempt from this staement)
>> I always think references a great so here's one: <http://www.salon.com/mwt/feature/2008/04/21/ask_pablo_cars/>. It addresses both points and it's even got numbers and stuff in it.
Damn shame the "stuff" far outweighs the numbers. Believe it or not... a battery is not just bits of steel, iron, copper, plastic, etc. According to that site, either roughly 50% of the BTUs of the Prius manufacturing comes from the battery (and it's otherwise the most efficiently manufactured car on the planet), or it's off by at least 25%.
But, that was only one of the glaring problems with the reference...
Maybe I'd listen to what Arnie had to say, if he didn't fly a private jet to work each day. Although, he did convert one of his Hummers to LPG, that'll help, Arn.
As for the prius - I seem to remember reading in (possibly, not sure) the Graun that the Prius's batteries are all actually recycled, this would change the assumed energy requirements for manufacture rather a lot.
"Past warmings in the last 2000 years in particular and further back in history prove the theory of 'man-made' global warming is in fact a LIE!!"
I guess the IPCC didn't get your memo.
Why do these people always think that their "evidence" that so obviously proves there is no AGW could have been overlooked by the entire climatology community?
Unless you studied science at university there's probably a 50/50 chance that anything you think you know about science is either flat out wrong or massively oversimplified (and therefore inaccurate).
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
