An American view of Global Warming

Hi all.

I'd better say from the outset that I'm not having a go at our friends across the pond, but I came across a rather amusing website earlier. Unfortunately it is amusing for the wrong reasons.

Here it is:
http://www.fightglobalwarming.com/index.cfm

Here's a couple of bits that amused me:

Surely people do that anyway?

Surely this one translates as "Throw away your perfectly good but slightly out of date appliance so that someone has to expend loads of energy disposing of it, and someone else has to expend loads of energy making your new one".

Surely people do this anyway? Even if you don't care for the environment, most people care about their energy bills.

BUT, saving the best til last, I just loved this bit:

Holy mackerel. I drive a 16 year old 2.3 litre Volvo estate. It weighs in at nearly 2 tonnes, I have to admit it is the most thirsty car I've ever owned, but even that gives me 30mpg. Let us not forget that a US gallon is only 3.8 litres, as opposed to our 4.5, so in English money that "Average car does 21 miles to the gallon" can be translated as "An average car that gets 17.7 mpg". Do they have holes in their petrol tanks over there?

 

I am getting pretty fed up of all this talk of global warming.

Don't get me wrong - I believe it is real and is extremely serious.

But as long as the world population continues to expand - what is the point of cutting our personal carbon emissions? Even in Britain, almost the world's most overcrowded country, the government is still happy for the population to rise by another 10 million - as long as we drive 5 miles less a week!

There is no point in trying to put the fire out, without first trying to turn off the fuel supply that's feeding it.

 

This goverment's pathetic attempts at trying to disguise the way that they want to guilt tax us with the global warming problem really annoys me.
The efforts we could make in bankrupting ourselves doing this would be the same as declaring a no ***ing area in a swimming pool.
Whilst India and China open a coal-fired power station every week, we're wasting our time.
Put global warming on the back-burner until after the major polluters each attain the standards we achieve (and I don't mean "per capita") that's a cop out.

 

Surely that is the other way round. If it does 21 miles to one of their gallons then it does 21 miles to 3.8 litres or 24.8... to one of ours - or have I got that wrong?

Still rubbish though.

I remember my dad's first car a Zephyr 4. Lovely car but I think that got about 16mpg at the end - mind you petrol was a lot cheaper ;-)

 

Yes, you're right. I'd got my sums wrong:flag:

As for the bigger 'global warming' theme, I too am getting a bit tired of it all. Yes I believe it is a real issue, but what annoys me is that ordinary individuals are made to take the blame, when those that have the power to change things, the governments and corporations, just use it all as an excuse to make money out of us.

To my mind, there are loads of simple and cheap (by government standards) things that can be done to reverse the current trend. Many of which are pretty obvious, and talented scholars and scientists keep telling everybody about them and backing them up with science, so the government and corporations can't plead ignorant. For example it is now widely accepted that sewage doesn't need lots of high energy processing when a reed and willow bed does exactly the same job and provides a habitat for wildlife, and a source of carbon neutral solid fuel, yet we still see expensive sewage plants being built. Another group of scientists did a study and found that Hemp produces five times as much ethanol as rapeseed, can be grown in poor ill-maintained ground so as not to take ground away from food production, and actually improves the soil so that it can later be used for food production. Do we see Hemp fields popping up? Nope. Instead we see food prices going up because the land is being used for biofuel, and we see rainforests being cleared to make way for Palm oil. A personal bugbear of mine is the living roof thing. I look at my top floor window at work and see loads of flat grey roofs, all while people are complaining about rising CO2, declining wildlife, increased flooding, heating costs and environmental impact etc.

 

Agree with you all the way.

but we know what happens to experts who don't agree with the government. Brave New World meets 1984

 

I'm with Peter. Population rise is the biggest contributor to global warming, but no government is going to stand up and enforce a population control, not even China these days. Too hot a potato to touch.

Unfortunately, so many people seem to assume that having children is something they're entitled to.

The latest figures about population increase in Britain have everyone screaming about immigration (as usual) but a lot of it was down to the fact that we are all just living longer.

As for American cars, so many of them are totally impractical - massive jeeps that must nearly use an entire tank just to reverse out of the driveway.

 

I think population growth has to be controlled somehow, but how? We can't tell people not to have kids. I hate to say it, but what gives an old person who's had their go the right to deny someone else a turn?

Population growth can only be limited, morally, by education and enforced to some extent by thinking about how the current benefits system works. Not just in the UK, but everywhere. If young people could be educated to know just how much having kids changes your life, then maybe some would be a bit more careful.

As for benefits, in China the state only pays for the schooling of the first child. You can have more if you want (these days) but you have to find the money for your second and subsequent child to go to school. In Spain, if nobody in your household works, you get a benefit that is fixed per household, so the more mouths you have to feed, the more you struggle. I don't know if these initiates have paid off, but it is something that should be at least looked at.

Another, perhaps more important consideration, is the sheer amount of waste we are all responsible for, and, frankly, greed. Somehow, during WW2, people apparently managed to eat despite rationing that would make most people nowadays freak in panic. Certainly I don't know how I'd cope if I had to feed my family on next to nothing. I saw a documentary the other week about perfectly good food being chucked away. Some folks went to the back of a supermarket and took car loads of perfectly good food from the bins. They then handed it over to a team of chefs, and over 100 people had a good nosh up on it all. I wonder what my grandmother, who was a genius at avoiding waste, would have made of that little revelation.

It seems to me that modern society has lost a big chunk of wisdom. There is an old saying that Greenpeace once quoted (they were quoting someone else - not sure who): "There is enough in this world for every man's need, but not enough for every man's greed". I'm not sure that is still true, it will have been said when the population was a fair bit smaller, but the point is that for centuries people managed on very little, and now, within just the last 50 years, we've lost that ability. My dad and I were talking about this while stood on my land a little while ago. He said to me "On this three acres, even if you do nothing to it, there is enough food here to feed yourself and your family". I'm sure he's right, but I don't know how to utilise it, and I would bet that not many others do either.

 

What to me is the saddest thing is the inevitability of global warming. As SussexG says - no one has got the guts to do anything except tinker around the edges. No one will take any serious action until it is too late.

I see it as exactly the same as the global financial crisis. Gordon Brown and so many others say they never saw it coming. Of course they did. Gordon Brown prided himself that he was a student of economic history, and history is littered with crashes from the South Sea bubble to the 1929 crash. They all had exactly the same cause - too much credit. The signs of overheating were glaringly obvious to anyone who cared to look. But most people didn't care to look. No one had the guts to take any action as everyones job depended on continuing on the then course and hoping that everything would turn out all right.

I am told that at Alcoholics Anonymous, the first thing that an alcoholic has to do is to admit that they are an alcoholic - that's the most difficult step. I think that the first thing that the world has to do is to admit that it has a population problem. You can't start to find the solution until you define the problem. I understand the arguement of "who has the right to prevent other people having children?". But what if you rephrase it as "who has the right to prevent other people from destroying our planet?".

 

I must admit I am not too worried about the planet because nature has her own set of checks and balances, if it means we will eventually become extinct then so be it, nature will turn on us all one day. The planet will be in existence long after the last human being dies.

As far as population control I am not sure how it could possibly be enforced. What would we do with the excess children should one of those sneaky breeders pop out a surplus infant? Having children is not a right, nor a privilege, it is a natural instinct, rabbits do it, mice do it, sharks do it, heck even those darn amoebas have the audacity to divide every so often.

Of course we could always look at it from yet another perspective-that of mandatory euthanasia at the age of 60? Just wonder how the 59 yr olds would respond lol. If 60 is ok why not 55, or 50? Don't see the problem, it's the oldies clinging on for dear life that's causing global warming, cluttering up the supermarkets, using all the NHS resources, getting in our way when we are trying to drive somewhere in a hurry, get shot of them I say lol.

 

I think we could make a start by only giving tax relief or child benefit, (whatever the name for it is at this particular time), for only the first child.

It would make a few of those out there with six or ten kids struggle, but we must do something to stop climate change after all.:D

Or perhaps its not considered to be quite that important.

 

The current global population is around 6.5 billion. The current UK population is around 60 million. That means the UK has less than 1% of the world population. That in turn means that no matter what the UK does about population growth, it will be futile unless the rest of the world does something too.

So at which end to we make cuts? We can't start getting rid of people, but we need kids because they will be the ones that grow up to hopefully make changes. Although that said, it hasn't happened so far. At the start of the industrial revolution someone must have looked at all the smog and said 'that can't be good', yet 200+ years later, here we are still doing it.

 

I totally agree, we in the UK are never likely to make any impact on what is a world problem.

The answer is in my view, no one ever bothered up to now about what they were leaving behind for future generations, so why should we.

You only live once.

Having said that, a few less of us would be a good starting point.

Any one person that has more than one offspring is increasing the population.
Simple.

PS, I'm not sure the industrial revolution was about cutting emissions, probably the opposite.

 

Perhapsit would help if the Catholic Church stopped telling 3rd World Christians that contraception was evil, wrong and a sure route to hell, and instead promoted and encouraged it (plus it would go a long way to combating sexually transmitted diseases).

Oh sorry, did I just see some pigs flying??

 

Yes, so Americans, children, old people, family allowance and the Catholic Church are to blame for global warming, I knew it all along.........lol lol