The Most Extra New Super Global Warming Thread

[Guardianx11x]

Originally Posted by Kerostasis

Far be it from me to get between you and Leejo while you're arguing...but thats a really bizarre assumption to make, considering the direction of Leejo's semantics debate. Why not assume he is directly considering the "net benefit" of the process to include the, well, the benefits of the process for humans as well as the waste by-products?

I completely agree. Honestly, I was trying to modify his argument so it made any sense. If we are to consider the "net benefit" of the process included as you stated above, I'd be forced to make a statement along the lines of.

"Oh yeah, well I submit that you're incorrect, that ALL commercial processes have a net negative impact on the environment. Prove me wrong?" And then we would debate more semantics and redefine terms. It would be a huge mess. He is trying to offset the harm done with intangible evidence that is inherently impossible to quantify. Not to mention completely irrelevent to the argument (see reasoning in above post). I chose to make that assumption because atleast it provides something real.

[leejo]

OK you are getting pretty annoying. Do I need to start counting the insults you have directed at me? How many snarky ways can you call me stupid, I wonder? And thanks for quoting me out of context in your sig.

Maybe I'm an old neo-con and maybe you're a punk kid who's too dumb to know what he doesn't know yet. Maybe the more times you insult my intelligence the more likely I am to want to buy a pair of sandals. Or maybe you need to stop typing and start reading more carefully. Who knows?

I've already made my points. If you read what I say, and not what you think I said, you'll answer some of your own questions and maybe change your sig, since we're all friends here.

[ednos]

How can you people get so worked up to the point of flaming over such an irrelevant issue?

[leejo]

FWIW I'm not worked up, but I'm also not interested in having a pleasant chat with someone who keeps saying I'm stupid. Especially when they demonstrate poor reading comprehension. One without the other I can live with.

[Guardianx11x]

I'm not some dumb kid, I'm a grad. student in mechanical engineering who has experience in manufacturing, coal power plant design, and I even have a patent pending on a "green" technology. I also am not a hippy, in fact, I hate everying related to hacki-sacs (sp?). My goal has never been to save fuzzy creatures, it is and has always been progress. You might argue as to what "progress" means to you, but for me it is adapting new technologies to better our way of life. That includes improving the environment.

I find it frustrating when an individual doesn't take the time to consider the things I'm saying to them while responding to their argument.

You're quote is hilarious. Don't be ashamed I'll remove it at your request.

[Kerostasis]

Alright then, posit two battery factories located on the same river.

Battery factory number one makes batteries, dumps the residual chemicals into the nearby river, and then carries the batteries next door where they pay a local incinerator operator to burn all their batteries. This battery factory is clearly harming the environment. They are also clearly going to go out of business in a few days, unless the Federal Government is subsidizing their battery operation. So they won't be harming the environment for very long...

Battery factory number two makes batteries, dumps the residual chemicals into the nearby river, and then sells the batteries to consumers to power consumer appliances. If you consider "the environment" to be "this river", then battery factory 2 is also harming the environment. If you consider "the environment" to include the river, the human sitting near the river having a picnic, and the battery-powered radio set that human has sitting next to him to play music, the picture isn't so clear anymore. If the battery factory shut down, the river would have less chemicals in it, which is good, but the radio would run out of power and stop playing music, which is bad. So is the net impact of the battery factory good or bad?

The only way we've found to quantify this apples-to-oranges comparison so far is to use Dollars. If the factory is overall beneficial, it will earn dollars. If it is overall detrimental, it will lose dollars. And if it is losing dollars, it will cease operations before long, thus providing a built-in check for the system that ensures that only beneficial processes will continue long term.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to distort the system and prevent the checks from working correctly. So I wouldn't go so far as Leejo to say that there are no currently running net-negative processes, because there are almost certainly some that have managed to dodge the system. But I don't think they're nearly as common as you believe either, Guardian.

[ThePromQueen]

Originally Posted by Rakkasan21

Will it affect the polar bears too? if so i will be saddened

No. However, when the polar ice-caps melt they will be plunged into the ocean and become water creatures. This will be the final step to bring natures two deadliest creatures face to face. Natural Selection will determine who the new King of Beasts will be.

[Guardianx11x]

Originally Posted by Kerostasis

Alright then, posit two battery factories located on the same river.

Battery factory number one makes batteries, dumps the residual chemicals into the nearby river, and then carries the batteries next door where they pay a local incinerator operator to burn all their batteries. This battery factory is clearly harming the environment. They are also clearly going to go out of business in a few days, unless the Federal Government is subsidizing their battery operation. So they won't be harming the environment for very long...

Battery factory number two makes batteries, dumps the residual chemicals into the nearby river, and then sells the batteries to consumers to power consumer appliances. If you consider "the environment" to be "this river", then battery factory 2 is also harming the environment. If you consider "the environment" to include the river, the human sitting near the river having a picnic, and the battery-powered radio set that human has sitting next to him to play music, the picture isn't so clear anymore. If the battery factory shut down, the river would have less chemicals in it, which is good, but the radio would run out of power and stop playing music, which is bad. So is the net impact of the battery factory good or bad?

The only way we've found to quantify this apples-to-oranges comparison so far is to use Dollars. If the factory is overall beneficial, it will earn dollars. If it is overall detrimental, it will lose dollars. And if it is losing dollars, it will cease operations before long, thus providing a built-in check for the system that ensures that only beneficial processes will continue long term.

Of course, there are plenty of ways to distort the system and prevent the checks from working correctly. So I wouldn't go so far as Leejo to say that there are no currently running net-negative processes, because there are almost certainly some that have managed to dodge the system. But I don't think they're nearly as common as you believe either, Guardian.

Ahhh, well there are a few problems with this (aside from the dubious choices of factory 1). If you take battery factory two and consider what happens to the batteries after they have been depleated...they get tossed away and burned. So in your example, they harm the environment that same.

The situation I am talking about is like this (Both companies actually sell their products ):

Battery factory A produces batteries and sells them, they dump the chemical waste in the river.

Battery factory B produces batteries, but uses a better process and dumps less or no waste in the river. Then sells their batteries.

In both cases you get to sit by the river with your radio, but in one, there are fish in the river...This is how most real world situations are constructed. The problem is, why would factory B switch? There is little economic insentive to do so, that is why these are mainly policy driven changes. But what is true, is that cleaining up a polluted area costs much more money than preventing it from being polluted.


Also in the specific case of batteries, Pb-Acid batteries are often relaimed because parts of them can be re-used. The problem is with the dry cell and Li-ion.

[Kerostasis]

(I had edited this into the prior post, but since I was too late to get to it before you responded I'll throw it into a new post of its own. This does not specifically respond to your post, but seems fairly relevant.)

Now posit battery factory number 3, which makes the same batteries with only half as much chemical waste, but their process is more expensive and the batteries will cost twice as much when they go to sale. Is this better or worse than the previous process? Based on your previous comments, I would guess Guardian would evaluate factory 3 as having the superior process. Personally I'm not so sure. It depends on how much value you place on the extent of the chemical waste dumped into the river, which is somewhat subjective.

Of course if we can devise a process that makes half as much waste while only costing the same amount, thats a definate improvement and we should switch to it immediately. But its very rare to find a new process so obviously superior -- usually the benefits are balanced against some other drawback. Even the new CFL lights aren't strictly superior to the old Incandescent Lightbulbs. CFLs last longer, sure, but they also cost substantially more. They provide a different quality of light, don't provide the side-benefit* of heat production, and introduce hazardous materials into your household. If you take all that into consideration and decide you want to outfit every light socket in your house with CFLs, more power to you. Go right ahead. But that shouldn't give you the right to order me to do the same, under the guise of "saving me some power". What if I want the Incandescent color light? What if I want the extra heat output?


*Yes, I know the heat output is usually considered an unwanted side effect, but occasionally it can be beneficial.

[leejo]

Kero you're getting it. Furthermore, if a third company made batteries and didn't dump the chemicals in the river, but instead used a new process that used the waste to create enough power to offset 25% of their non-discretionary spending, that company would gain a huge competitive advantage because their expenses would be lower. Couple that with a branding campaign that shows the beautiful park downstream from their facility, and they have a decent shot at dominating their market. They could probably even charge more than the companies who still dump waste.

This is an example of how the market solves a problem.

With regard to "the environment" maybe I'm hung up on semantics again, hence my focus on it. I find a lot of the time misunderstandings occur because people use different words to mean the same thing or they use the wrong word to say what they really mean. When I threw out "some terms" I didn't intend to be patronizing. My intent was to lay down some baseline assumptions. I come from a "let x=x" world, though.

An environment is not something that can be harmed. It can only be changed. The organisms in an ecology can be harmed by a changing environment, but I think then you have to be careful to look out for organisms in other ecologies that may have benefited from the changing environment.

Anyway, to my mind we are a part of the environment and therefor it makes no sense to talk about us "harming the environment". This is why I don't think it's good thinking to throw up hypothetical fences around "the environment", even if what you mean is "the ecology". Everyone seems to talk about how we're "hurting the environment" here without talking about how much nicer the environment is there.

If a beaver builds a dam that kills a bunch of trees, nobody says "OMG that beaver has harmed the environment!", but if I build the same dam and kill the same trees to have a pond to grow some fish to feed my family, I'm having a harmful impact on my environment. The beaver gets to feed his family but I can't feed mine?

ANY business process is basically feeding someone's family. If you give humans any rights at all, you must give us the right to *try* to feed our families. At least as much right as a beaver has. So if you accept that a business process that creates waste has a business PURPOSE, that is it supports the delivery of a good or service for which people will pay, and if you accept that people have as much rights as beavers, then you have to consider the perceived positive change to the consumer's environment just as much as you consider the perceived negative change to the environment downstream from our factory in toto (see, I used a latin phrase. e.g., I'm smart)*

Anyway, this has nothing to do with global warming. One can support the development of "clean" technologies or not without taking a position on whether or not global warming exists, whether or not humans are causing it if it does exist, or whether or not we can do anything about it.

* before you get exited about exposing my ignance, google "get shortly e.g."

[CingularDuality]

Originally Posted by USN_Squid

Nothing non-offensive left to say and yet you find a way....good riddance. Personally I think your behavior in this thread is grounds for removing your posting rights but then again I'm not an admin.

My apologies for not being here earlier. I was going to simply close this thread, but it seems to have gotten back on track.

I can't imagine any of you need me to tell you that this thread is right on the edge. Consider this an official warning to everyone.

<dum dum dummmmm> (that's the ominous music, in case you were wondering...)

[Guardianx11x]

Now you guys are getting into my kind of argument. Like I said before, there is very little economic advantage for companies to "clean up their act". In reality the market would take care of your problem with priceing. New methods wont be adopted that can't compete. This is why the Fed. needs to step in. If benifits are given that outweigh the disadvantage of using new filters for waste and simple things like that...it has been shown (often in the power industry) that heavy positive reforms can occur.

Leejo's market example seems pretty logical. Unfortunatly, this hasn't been happening. Why? The primary reason is that the vast majority of companies out there are not high risk, they don't pour massive amounds of money into R&D over long periods of time with potentially zero results. While in theory it should work as you suggested, the plain and simple reality is that it doesnt.

[leejo]

The market is working just fine, it just isn't working as fast as you'd like. You need to work on your delivery if you want to sell more. Either that, or shove your ideas down our throats using the force of government to compel us to behave the way you'd like but have so far been unable to convince us to do voluntarily. Which sounds nicer?

[GhostintheShell]

"So basically, we should be doing many of the things we'd do if GW were proven beyond a shadow of a doubt. If you feel like we shouldn't try to do this...that's another argument all in itself."

This thread is moving so fast today even I can't keep up...lol.

The problem with the above statement is that we have a finite amount of resources to throw at all the problems in the world. Yes, this deserves an entirely separate thread on its own.

I'll give you the short version. Kyoto as s "feel good" program example will do very little in terms of stopping greenhouse gas emissions. If our goal here is to save "lives" per dollar of spending, Kyoto fails miserably. Even if it was implemented fully (which is never going to happen) the cost would be somewhere around $150billion dollars globally per year. The Kyoto cost in terms of saving human lives is also a net loss. We can do nothing, and it would save more lives. Every action we take has very human casualties associated with it, so we have to chose those actions that would save the most lives IMO.

The spread of malaria is attributed to the increased range of the mosquito's habitat due to rising global temperatures. Malaria for example could be eradicated in as short as one or two years, would cost ~$3billion per year and stop ~28 billion infections over the next century. (Kyoto period)

Essentially by fully funding Kyoto, you are pulling funding away that could potentially solve the problem of malaria on a global scale. Don't underestimate the problem of malaria most people don't realise that malaria was prevalent in the southeastern states until it was all but eradicated in the late 1940's.

"According to the World Health Organization there are 300 to 500 million clinical cases of malaria each year resulting in 1.5 to 2.7 million deaths."

"The disease kills more than one million children - 2,800 per day - each year in Africa alone."

So, in short I agree that we can make the easy choices of compact fluorescents (which I already have in all my fixtures), driving a hybrid (which I already do), buying more energy efficient products and appliances (surprise, I've done that too). I don't think anyone would argue against making healthier and "lower impact on the environment" choices whenever those choices make sense functionally and financially. This is how the "private sector" balances its way out of these problems, while at the same time maintaining a strong economy. A strong economy is the only way for us to solve any issues on a global scale.

No one had to legislate away the horse and carriage, as a matter of fact you can still drive a horse and buggy to work today if you can afford it. As gas gets more expensive people will drive less if possible, and seek out alternatives that are cheaper when it isn't possible, like hybrids and electrics.

The market will soon be ready for the manufacturers to provide us with the "next big thing". If they don't have it ready for us then some other enterprising company will come along and obsolete them just as the blacksmiths disappeared when horses fell out of favor.

[USN_Squid]

Another factor that hasn't been brought up is the courts. A nice multi-million dollar lawsuit from parents of cancer stricken children has given many an executive concern for the environment. I suppose that's a market force as well...in a way.