Global warming?

[dar512]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Presented without bias

http://people-press.org/report/556/global-warming

Science by counting noses?

[Undertoad]

Presented without bias, here's what it looks like in some parts of China. Now that is unsustainable.

http://www.chinahush.com/2009/10/21/...tion-in-china/

[xoxoxoBruce]

Sure helps with the population problem.

[Undertoad]

I can't stop thinking about it. I went into Google Maps satellite view and looked at the Yangtze River at the location where one of the pictures is. When the resolution of the satellite imagery is good, you can see what's going on. It's anything goes.

You zoom in and massive sections here are bathed in smoke. The left part of this link is low resolution; it's only the high resolution bits that show what's going on.

To give you an idea of scale, here's the center of London at the same zoom.

You zoom in more and it becomes an industrial horror scene. Huge industrial canals help get the pollution to the main river. There are piles of different-colored resources being managed by huge cranes that run on rails.

There is no part of the river not coated in shipping barges, and you realize... aw crap, this is where all our shit is being made.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

and you realize... aw crap, this is where all our shit is being made.

If you go up to my son's Schwinn bike that we bought him two years ago and sniff the tires, they still smell like China. The offgassing from the cheap rubber has gotten better in those two years. It doesn't fill the entire basement any more, but you can still smell it if you get close enough.

The latest is drywall. Make sure you don't buy drywall made in China. They are putting the waste into the drywall and selling it to us.

[tw]

Originally Posted by glatt

The latest is drywall. Make sure you don't buy drywall made in China. They are putting the waste into the drywall and selling it to us.

Because they discovered a market where business school graduates buy and resell only based upon price. Could not bother to learn what was in that drywall. Did not care about the product or the customer. Did exactly what business schools teach: the purpose of a company is profits.

Same problem exists in so many products. For example, the computer assembler is responsible for meeting American standards. Asian exporters discovered that many (if not a majority) of American computer assemblers and A+ Certified Computer techs do not even know how electricity works. So they dump power supplies into the market sometimes missing functions even required before 1970. The computer boots; so the technically naive computer assmebler declares it OK.

Then when a computer has problems, a naive consumer is told to spend $100 for a UPS to fix that $20 discount - missing functions inside that supply.

Political extremists, business school perverts, unscrupulous exporters - in every case they get away with it because so many Americans just blindly believe what they are told to believe - fail to learn or remember even science taught in school.

Some retailers are more responsible. However the food industry has quietly conceded they cannot guarantee the quality of their products. Food industry had no program to learn what is put inside their products. One major offender was Beechnut who even knew they were selling tainted baby food - and continued to do so because it increased profit margins.

You have stack of drywall in the warehouse awaiting shipment. How could you not know how bad it smelled? They knew enough to at least ask some simply and damning questions. Instead, they did exactly what is taught in business schools.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

There is no part of the river not coated in shipping barges, and you realize... aw crap, this is where all our shit is being made.

There's been tons of pictures on the net, and shows on TV, showing the pollution and it's effects on the people. Thank walmart.

[spudcon]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

There's been tons of pictures on the net, and shows on TV, showing the pollution and it's effects on the people. Thank walmart.

No, thank every politician since the 60's who voted to do business with a totalitarian government that only wants to spread their philosophy worldwide.

[classicman]

I'd guess there are some pics just like them somewhere from the U.S.

China is slowly coming around:

At a gleaming new research center outside Beijing, about 250 engineers and researchers from the ENN Group are trying to figure out how to make energy use less damaging to the world's climate....

...The private company is part of a growing drive by China to work out a way to check the rapid growth of its massive emissions of greenhouse gases. Seeking to transform an economy heavily dependent upon coal for electric power and industrial production, the government has closed down old cement and coal plants, subsidized row upon row of new wind turbines and taken other measures...


Among members of the U.S. Congress and negotiators preparing for a December climate summit in Copenhagen, China is often considered an obstacle because it has not committed to imposing a ceiling on its emissions of the gases that most scientists blame for climate change. China produces the most carbon emissions in the world, and the output is likely to continue growing for two decades. When President Hu Jintao pledged at the United Nations last month to lower the country's carbon intensity "by a notable margin," that was regarded as a step forward.

Yet, in visible and less visible ways, China has begun to address its emissions problem. The steps are driven in part by the parochial concern that climate change could worsen the flooding that plagues the country's low-lying coastal regions, including Shanghai, and cause water shortages in western areas as glaciers in the Himalayas melt away.

But China has also begun to see energy efficiency and renewable energy as ingredients for the type of modern economy it wants to build, in part because it would make the nation's energy sources more secure...

...Still, China has taken significant steps in the past five years. It removed subsidies for motor fuel, which now costs more than it does in the United States; its fuel-efficiency standard for new urban vehicles is 36.7 miles per gallon, a level the United States will not reach for seven years. It has set high efficiency standards for new coal plants; the United States has none. It has set new energy-efficiency standards for buildings. It has targeted its 1,000 top emitters of greenhouse gases to boost energy efficiency by 20 percent. And it has shut down many older, inefficient industrial boilers and power plants...

...Nonetheless, the government has set ambitious targets for renewable energy, which is supposed to account for 15 percent of the country's fuel mix by 2020, and for tree planting, to boost forest cover to 20 percent of China's land mass by the end of next year. China plans to quadruple its nuclear power; by the end of next year, it may have 18 nuclear energy plants under construction, half of the world's total under construction....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...102304075.html

China has a long way to go...but so does the US.

And, IMO, we should lead by example.

Or we can continue to pass the buck to China, and perhaps, over the longer term, let China becoming more of an innovator of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies and reap the benefits worldwide.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by classicman

I'd guess there are some pics just like them somewhere from the U.S.

Can you suggest where I would look to find it? So far I've tried some notorious industrial shitholes: Gary, IN, Newark, NJ, and East Houston to Galveston TX, and there is nothing resembling Ma'anshan.

Another thing I notice in the satellite images is the color of the water. The satellites aren't picking up a true color, I think. But everywhere there's water, and humans, the water becomes discolored with algae and runoff and sewage discharge and stuff.

Eastern China:



Eastern US at the same zoom:



You can find the discoloration if you zoom in (but that's the point, Eastern CN is actually polluting a large section of the Pacific Ocean, while Boston can only manage to pollute the bay):



The worst I can find is Lake Erie, where the color seems to match the eastern CN a bit, around Toledo. Here it is at the same zoom as the Eastern CN:

Originally Posted by Redux

And, IMO, we should lead by example.

We are.

Or we can continue to pass the buck to China, and perhaps, over the longer term, let China becoming more of an innovator of cleaner, more efficient energy technologies and reap the benefits worldwide.

Funny thing about innovation... the Chinese will soon have the safest, most innovative nuclear power facilities in the world.

But the two major players building them are the US company Westinghouse and the French company Areva. Due to regulations the US hasn't built a plant in 30 years, but GE and Westinghouse are still major players.

(The economy for nuclear changed slightly under the B*sh administration when the B*sh DOE offered grants to recover high initial costs to build a nuke plant. They threw money at the problem, and several new plants will be built soon. But that's a temporary and expensive fix.)

Originally Posted by Undertoad

We are.


Funny thing about innovation... the Chinese will soon have the safest, most innovative nuclear power facilities in the world.

But the two major players building them are the US company Westinghouse and the French company Areva. Due to regulations the US hasn't built a plant in 30 years, but GE and Westinghouse are still major players.

(The economy for nuclear changed slightly under the B*sh administration when the B*sh DOE offered grants to recover high initial costs to build a nuke plant. They threw money at the problem, and several new plants will be built soon. But that's a temporary and expensive fix.)

We are?

Then why arent our auto emissions standards as tough as China's? or our regulations for new coal-fired power plants?

I'm not suggesting that China is doing a better job than the US. Rather, than China is beginning to act in a reasonable manner and that it is a convenient political cop out when some of those opposed to a comprehensive, yet reasonable, US emission control regulatory program take the position that the US should not act because China is the major polluter.

I also think nuclear power should be in the mix but not at the expense of developing cleaner and renewable energy resources. And it should also regulated more than the Bush admin proposed.

BTW, it was a Bush OMB study in 2003 that found that the benefits of environmental (and other) regulations were 5 to 7 times greater than costs.:

OMB reviewed 107 major Federal rulemakings finalized over the previous ten years (October 1, 1992 to September 30, 2002). The estimated total annual quantified benefits of these rules range from $146 billion to $230 billion, while the estimated total annual quantified costs range from $36 billion to $42 billion. The majority of the quantified benefits are attributable to a handful of clean-air rules issued by EPA pursuant to the 1990 amendments to the Clean Air Act. (Chapter I)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/omb/infore..._final_rpt.pdf

But of course, the Bush EPA, DOE......ignored this OMB study in pursuit of a policy of voluntary industry self-regulation.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

But the two major players building them are the US company Westinghouse and the French company Areva.

The people that ran Westinghouse decided the real money was in broadcasting/entertainment, so they merged Group W with CBS, then merged with Viacom.
But first they sold the appliance line to White, the Steam Turbine and Generator Divisions to Siemens AG, and the Nuclear Division to Toshiba Corporation.

But yes it's here, an American product, using American developed technology. It's just greedy American management was more interested in chasing the glamor and bucks.

[morethanpretty]

UT - try looking for superfund sites. Here is a link from EPA
http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by morethanpretty

UT - try looking for superfund sites. Here is a link from EPA

Remarkably uninteresting when it comes to looking at industrial stuff. I looked for the sites nearest me to start. One is a very old landfill that was re-lined and capped in the eighties. The other was a professor at a nearby college who had too much radium in his desk drawer.