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The Green Revolution Backfires: Sweden’s Lesson for Real Sustainability
What if electric cars made pollution worse, not better? What if they increased greenhouse gas emissions instead of decreasing them? Preposterous you say? Well, consider what’s happened in Sweden.
Through generous subsidies, Sweden aggressively pushed its citizens to trade in their cars for energy efficient replacements (hybrids, clean diesel vehicles, cars that run on ethanol). Sweden has been so successful in this initiative that it leads the world in per capita sales of ‘green cars.’ To everyone’s surprise, however, greenhouse gas emissions from Sweden’s transportation sector are up.
Or perhaps we should not be so surprised after all. What do you expect when you put people in cars they feel good about driving (or at least less guilty), which are also cheap to buy and run? Naturally, they drive them more. So much more, in fact, that they obliterate energy gains made by increased fuel efficiency.
We need to pay attention to this as GM and Nissan roll out their new green cars to great fanfare. The Chevy Volt, a hybrid with a lithium-ion battery, can go 35 miles on electric power alone (after charging over night, for example), and GM brags on its website that if you limit your daily driving to that distance, you can “commute gas-free for an average of $1.50 a day.” The Volt’s price is listed at a very reasonable $33K (if you qualify for the maximum $7500 in tax credits). The fully electric Nissan Leaf is advertized for an even more reasonable $26K (with qualifying tax credits, naturally). What a deal—and it’s good for you, too, the carmakers want you to know. As GM helpfully points out on its website, “Electricity is a cleaner source of power.”
Sweden is a model of sustainability innovation, while the US is the most voracious consumer on the planet. Based on Sweden’s experience with green cars, it’s daunting to imagine their possible impact here. Who can doubt that they’ll likely inspire Americans to make longer commutes to work, live even further out in the exurbs, bringing development, blacktop and increased emissions with them?
In its current state, the green revolution is largely devoted to the effort to provide consumers with the products they have always loved, but now in affordable energy efficient versions. The thinking seems to be that through this gradual exchange, we can reduce our collective carbon footprint. Clearly, however, this approach is doomed if we don’t reform our absurd consumption habits, which are so out-of-whack that they risk undoing any environmental gains we might make. Indeed, we are such ardent, addicted consumers that we take efficiency gains as license to consumer even more!
We need to address consumption fast because—news alert—the current consumer class on earth barely amounts to 1 billion people (if that), but 2 billion and counting eagerly wait in the wings.
American industry hungrily targets the rising Chinese consumer class. For the sake of the planet, we better hope it doesn’t get its way. Consider: China currently has a car ownership rate approximately one-sixth that of the US. If China achieves car ownership rates comparable to the US, that would put an additional 800 million cars on the road. And that’s just China. Even if we somehow succeeded in making China’s fleet super efficient, it would still be more than the planet can handle.
Of course, cars are only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to Chinese consumer dreams. They will also want more electronics, clothes, meat, processed foods—bigger houses. In short, we can bet that the rising Chinese middle class will want something close to what we have. And why shouldn’t they? We have been showcasing our middle class comfort worldwide for years through our vast media exports. Everyone is betting, hoping—assuming?—that technology will eventually help us deliver the American dream worldwide with no environmental impact. But clearly, we may run out of planet by the time that day comes. Even the American dream in an ‘energy efficient format’ is likely too much for the earth to handle.
If this is chilling—and it should be—you might wonder, what are our options? Justice demands that we cannot prevent, much less discourage the growing global consumer class from having the consumer goods we currently enjoy. Real change starts with us then, and I’m afraid to say, radical change is in order. We must figure out a way to consume less, which means driving less, shopping less, eating less meat (which the UN estimates is responsible for a fifth of all greenhouse gases), and conserving food and energy. This means essentially rethinking our suburban-sprawling, fast-food-gorging, shopaholic society. We must model for the world the changes we hope everyone will make to ensure a sustainable future.
It’s time to be courageous and think big about altering our lifestyle, values and future. The powers that be are reluctant to rock the boat with consumers, and have decided that leaving consumption habits intact as much as possible is the preferable option. They’d rather get us into electric cars, rather than out of our cars altogether. Well, we need more than half measures at this point. As Sweden proves, unless other more fundamental changes are made to our engrained consumption habits, half measures only dig us deeper in the hole.
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137 Comments so far
Show AllWhat? You mean the capitalist dogs and cornucopian technophiles can't buy their way to cleaner air, water and land? Whoda thunk it?
Overpopulation is the really big issue. The decision to have an additional child has 20 times more negative impact on the environment than can be compensated for with a lifetime of energy efficient consumer choices. And the impact of an additional child can increase exponentially with each successive generation.
Producing many children is one of the greediest most socially irresponsible choices a person can make in this extremely overpopulated world.
"Overpopulation is the really big issue. The decision to have an additional child has 20 times more negative impact on the environment than can be compensated for with a lifetime of energy efficient consumer choices."
This is true in the West - in America and Europe and Japan. The rest of the world, not so much.
"Producing many children is one of the greediest most socially irresponsible choices a person can make in this extremely overpopulated world."
If you think of the world as a set of choices produced by individuals, and ignore society as a whole, and believe that everyone wastes as much as Westerners, so in a word: if you want to oversimplify the problems the world faces into something that absolves you from responsibility (if only you don't have a child) and ignore reality, you are right. But in reality, this is just offensive bullshit.
I was thinking the same thing. Decent article but saying electric cars then listing non-electric cars is stupid.
Yes, but Jevons Paradox remains - incresing the efficiency of a resource consuming good, absent other measures, only leads to increased usage of the good, nullifying any reductions in resource usage.
Of course, in the case of elctric vehicles, a decline in resource usage can be realized but not becasue electric motors and batteries are much more energy efficent than the dreadfully inefficient IC engine, but because a battery-electric vehicle IS inferior (in range between "refuelings" and time to refuel) to an IC or hybrid vehicle - and will continue to be so for any concievable future technology. But who is going to buy an "inferior product"?
I have been involved in experimenting with and promoting electric motor scooters for a while, and have seen plenty of small startup businesses making the things (antually importing them or assembling them from components imported from China - the one exception being the Vectrix debacle) go out of business. Who would buy a scooter that costs much more, goes only 50 miles between refuelings, and takes 4 hours to refuel (albeit with far more refueling points) when they can get one cheaper from a prestigious manufacturer (Vespa, Aprilla, Honda) goes 150 miles between refueling and refuel in one minute? Only us tiny minority of hyper-green fanatics that's who. Getting USAns, especially in the suburbs, to think of small, two wheeled vehicles as a practical day-to-day form of transportation is another matter too.
I personally think the only solution is a complete re-make of our infrastructure that eliminated the need, and more importantly the desire, to have a car for day-to-day use at all. Indeed, my interest in scooters only arose when my job compelled me to move out of the walkable, well transit-served (until the service cuts), culturally far cooler and even quieter city to a suburban area.
Thank you for naming the thing!
Got a bit annoyed that the author was preaching Jevon's Paradox to us but didn't even seem to know the term.
I'd bet that electric vehicles will only overcome those two killers -distance between charges, and charge times- when oil is scarce enough that liquid fuels for IC engines become much more expensive than today.
When acres of plants have to be grown to distil their oils to fill the fuel tank on one's auto, then that overnight charge and short drive distance won't seem so bad.
But, as the man wrote, "greener" autos is a mistake, much less autos -of whatever kind!- are what we need. And that's going to require just the kind of infrastructure rebuild you mention.
Someday, the People are going to get it through their thick skulls that using the immense resources we have now at the Peak to build a world that will be as comfortable as possible running on much less energy, AND that such a rebuild/build is just the ticket for a Green Economic Recovery.
-matti.
I felt the same way this morning when I read the first paragraph - welcome to Jevon's Paradox.
Chemical batteries will always be limited by electrochemical considerations and there really aren't any combinations of known metals that will produce batteries within carrying weight that will economically yield hundred mile ranges and recharge in a few minutes - for one, the faster recharge rate means more energy wasted as heat as a matter of physics. The main physics of electrochemical cells was figured out 150 years ago. If there were such a thing, we'd have them by now. It is really counterintuitive just how much energy is in a gallon of gasoline, especially compared to an electrochemical cell of the same weight.
Personally, I want to safely live (i.e. be able to survive reasonably well) in walkable, bicycleable, and scooterable communities with decent public transportation.
There is no panacea for massive wastefulness that we refer to as the American Way of Life. Americans waste more resources and generate more pollution than any other country. At least in Sweden and the other Scandinavian countries, there is a much higher level of ecoliteracy. The citizens are more aware of the impacts of their way of life on the environment. Compared to Americans, the Europeans are eco-Einsteins.
Even this article refuses to address the fundamental problem, population. We could consume almost as much as we liked if the earth only had 2 billion people rather than looking at 10 billion (now).
Free birth control for all people should be the consistent mantra from now on.
physicscitizen,
The climate crisis and the world's overpopulation are different problems because they have different causes, because they are occurring in different places, and because the solutions are different.
The climate crisis is caused by resource consumption, release of carbon dioxide, and so forth. It is the developed countries, particularly the US, which are responsible (On average, one American contributes more to the climate crisis than 30 people in a so-called underdeveloped country). The solution is for the people of the developed countries to live more responsibly - to realize that we have the technology to destroy life as we know it - to abandon the idea that technology can solve a problem caused by technology - to reconnect with the earth which sustains us.
The increase in the world's population is caused by an increase in life expectancy. It is occurring in the so-called underdeveloped countries. The solution is very easy to identify, and has been well-documented. Populations will decrease or stabilize if two things are present: (1) The empowerment of women, which means control over their bodies. (2) A reliable social security system. There is no need to argue as to why this solution works, we only need to know that it does.
Both problems are related because they involve the application of technology in the absence of an awareness of the consequences.
Both problems are also related because the people of the so-called underdeveloped nations know how to solve them but the solutions are vigorously opposed by the plutocracy (and the US Empire is the leader in this regard).
My only concern when white folks start talking about "population control" (and I'm sorry but, it's usually white folks) is that, we need to take into account energy and resource use. I've heard statistics saying that westerners use the equivalent of 100 energy 'slaves' for every person; the equivalent of us being a nation of population of 30 billion people. Population control needs to start here at home, not trying to reduce the amount of people who live in the equivalent of the late Bronze Age - late Iron Age. Until we reduce our footprint here, we don't get to bitch at the wooden plowed farmer who has 10 kids to help grow enough food to eat. My two cents.
Exactly. I have no clue whether the people who are making this argument are honest or not, but one has to be a complete fucking idiot not to notice the order of magnitude difference in resource usage between Westerners and others. Either that, or they're just dumbass hypocritical twats, for whom this "overpopulation" argument is just a scientific and objective-sounding pretext for not considering the real arguments.
Actually, the population limit is about 1/2 billion. The neocons didn't pull that number off a dart board.
As someone I can't recall once said: It doesn't matter WHY you calculate the acceleration due to gravity, it's still 32.2ft/sec^2.
300'000'000 Americans could waste the planet. 1'000'000'000 Westerners can do it much quicker. And it's us doing it. Anyone parroting the overpopulation argument and these ass-sourced "hard limits" should probably start with themselves, if they're not a complete hypocrite.
That's because the world's fundamental problem is absolutely not overpopulation. It is overconsumption by rich Westerners, who consume one to two orders of magnitude more resources on average than the rest of the people of the Earth.
"We could consume almost as much as we liked if the earth only had 2 billion people rather than looking at 10 billion (now)."
And I guess the worthy 2 billion would be the Europeans and Americans, while the rest of the worthless scum should just die off.
Seriously. Fuck. Off. I'm not saying there's nothing possible wrong with overpopulation - for example, it could become a problem in a traditional socialist utopia, where everyone's getting their equal share of material riches. But right now, it's the few: most importantly Americans, Western Europeans and Japanese who overconsume and waste, not the billions and billions of "excess people" living off $3 a day. So no. What you're saying is bullshit. Retarded, offensive, self-centred, thoughtless bullshit.
Most of the world's population will not come even close to the waste of, say, a single year of American commuting, not to mention industrial agriculture or military investment. No sir, it's the awesome number of OTHER PEOPLE of whom there are too much. If only there were only Americans on the planet, life could be so much better!
Simply put: as long as distribution of material wealth is not equal, rich assholes should just shut the fuck up with the overpopulation bullshit. It's a cynical, dumb, hypocritical argument that immediately and automatically turns you into a fuckwit when you make it. Unless you also live off $2 a day.
The problem is our society is based on a non-renewable resource and it doesn't matter what your end rate of resource use is (Western or developing) our population is such that that use, and its population increase, is consuming that resource 1,00,000 times faster than it is being replenished.
If we all limited ourselves to the resource use rate of the developing nations, and didn't develop further, we'd still be out of oil in about 100 years. Right now agriculture turns oil into food into people. Without oil we aren't feeding 10 billion people no matter what their material rate of consumption is.
Abarring exotic zero-point energy or other such quantum phenomenon, which wouldn't be sustainable anyway, the Earth can only absorb so much entropy - there is only ONE sustainable energy source; that is the sun. It's rate of energy flux limits sustainable human populations, at an agrarian level, of under 1 billion people. Any technological shunting of energy out of the biosphere reduces that number or renders even solar unsustainable in the long run.
One must realize that entropy is the limiting factor and the rate of entropy increase is proportional to the rate of energy use.
dE=TdS. There's nothing in that equation concerning how the energy is produced, just the rate it is used and the temperature of the system.
As for the pseudo-racist slant, I doubt the factor of who survives the die off will be race, it will be net assets. The rich Nigerians will do just as well as the rich Californians and the poor New Yorkers will be just as dead as the poor Bangladeshis.
"The problem is our society is based on a non-renewable resource and it doesn't matter what your end rate of resource use is (Western or developing) our population is such that that use, and its population increase, is consuming that resource 1,00,000 times faster than it is being replenished."
This would be true ONLY if you left out "or developing". This is not some general human trait (at least not in any practical sense). It is the trait of OUR civilisation, of which WE, Westerners (or people like me, living relatively privileged lives in wannabe-Western countries) have profited by by far the most so far. Western civilisation has increased rate of resource consumption and is constantly increasing that rate too.
"If we all limited ourselves to the resource use rate of the developing nations, and didn't develop further, we'd still be out of oil in about 100 years. Right now agriculture turns oil into food into people. Without oil we aren't feeding 10 billion people no matter what their material rate of consumption is."
Not true at all: it's only *our* agriculture that turns oil into food, the Western type. I'm absolutely not against using non-human energy or maybe even chemicals to make hard agricultural labour easier and more bearable, to increase yields or to help maintain the quality of the soil etc, but our agriculture is not exactly the only way it can be done. Certainly, destroying sustainable agriculture to replace it with inefficient (or rather, efficient only in terms of saving human labour, not in any meaningful sense) industrial agriculture has nothing whatsoever to do with "overpopulation". Industrial agriculture is actually doing much worse things than this "overpopulation" crap, as it destroys farmland, permanently (or semi-permanently) decreasing its quality and yield - along with destroying, it appears to me, all the other self-regulating systems that make up nature.
As for the concrete numbers: if developing nations use an order of magnitude less resources than us, which in some cases is a pretty big understatement, this means we will be "out of oil" in 10 years. If this isn't an argument for what I'm saying and absolutely NOT an argument for the "overpopulation" issue, I don't know what is. And of course it works awfully nice in reverse too: if only 300'000'000 Americans would live on the planet, they'd still fuck it up in a few decades, because of expanding waste and consumption.
"One must realize that entropy is the limiting factor and the rate of entropy increase is proportional to the rate of energy use. "
Errr...what? Why? How? If I must "realise" this than please, first "explain" it. It's certainly far from obvious.
"dE=TdS. There's nothing in that equation concerning how the energy is produced, just the rate it is used and the temperature of the system."
Oh, a formula! I am totally DAZZLED by what must be SCIENCE! No other argument is needed. No idea how the first law of thermodynamics, which says that in all processes involving work, some energy is wasted and becomes entropy (unusable energy), is, in itself, an argument that proves that the world biggest problem is overpopulation, but whatever. It's a formula used by scientists so it's irrelevance is irrelevant.
I have a suggestion: instead of this pseudo science that can prove anything and its opposite, look at what's REALLY happening. Look at where energy goes IN REALITY. Look at where stuff is wasted IN REALITY. Look at how much people consume and how resource use scales with population IN REALITY. Do not base your judgment on a single scientific formula - or rather the "philosophy" of that formula.
"As for the pseudo-racist slant, I doubt the factor of who survives the die off will be race, it will be net assets. The rich Nigerians will do just as well as the rich Californians and the poor New Yorkers will be just as dead as the poor Bangladeshis."
Are you seriously saying that a poor Nigerian or a poor Latin American and a poor American person are the same? You are pretty fucking clueless if you think that. There is incredible assymetry of hunger and need now, and it will remain in the foreseeable future. Westerners still have substantial material privilege compared to most of the rest of the world. And yes, Westerners, even poor ones, are in a privileged position compared to the rest of the world; and Western whites, even poor ones, are in a privileged position compared to the rest of the people.
A few numbers (from http://www.eia.gov/emeu/international/energyconsumption.html)
The top 20 energy consumers, in absolute terms were (2006):
United States 99.856
China 73.808
Russia 30.386
Japan 22.786
India 17.677
Germany 14.629
Canada 13.950
France 11.445
United Kingdom 9.802
Brazil 9.635
Korea, South 9.447
Italy 8.069
Iran 7.686
Mexico 7.357
Saudi Arabia 6.891
Spain 6.510
Ukraine 5.871
Australia 5.611
South Africa 5.177
Taiwan 4.569
Look at India. Look at China, a significant part of whose energy consumption is actually our exported energy consumption (because they're making stuff we'll ultimately use). The rest of the world,the remaining countries, are about equal to the USA. China and India, 7-8 times as big in terms of population as the US, and who actually use a lot of energy to create exports to the West, consume less than the US (or Europe, they're about the same).
Overpopulation, simply put, is not in any way a cause of the energy and environmental crises. It will, however, present a problem of control in the mid term, if masses of poor people rise because of hunger. This is why technocrats and fuckwits like Bill Gates are so concerned and this is why this issue is talked so much about.
And finally: overpopulation is not the "fundamental" problem because it can not destroy the world. If there are too many people, they will eventually die off. Tragic and cruel, but humans, especially poor ones, are still a part of the biosphere. What can destroy the world is the clamoring for resources and polluting the world to shit BY US RICH FOLKS. Nuclear war, global warming, destruction of the biosphere - these are the issues that are global and irreversible and thus a "fundamental" problem. Not overpopulation.
Nicely argued, Atomsk. One would have thought that this should have been obvious that wasteful consumption and inequalities are the bigger problems that must be addressed urgently and from general experience, that should lead to addressing the problem of overpopulation at a more fundamental level and in a more humane manner.
>>"And of course it works awfully nice in reverse too: if only 300'000'000 Americans would live on the planet, they'd still fuck it up in a few decades, because of expanding waste and consumption."<<
Well said. I think human overpopulation as an issue can be raised, but in the proper context. I fail to see how it can be put at the top of everything else when there is an order of magnitude difference in per capita consumption levels.
People who live in unsustainable environments and use less resources can populate out the ying yang cause they consume less even if their children starve? Real smart!
0
It's over population AND over consumption. I don't think you mean it's ok to have 8 kids in a desolate part of the world where there is no food and water. Or is that OK cause there are no stores to provide for overconsumption?
Think of it this way. If an American citizen consumes 10 times as much energy per capita as a person of the poorest fifth of humanity, a billion and a half people, then that means the US is the energy equivalent of 3 billion of the worlds poorest citizens.
We use twice the energy per capita as a EU person or a Japanese person.
So population in itself is not the whole story.
Your are only considering carbon emissions. There is something else to consider: the degradation of forests, oceans, and other world ecosystems which act as carbon sinks. Population IS the problem when forests are cut down in highly populated countries for fuel and lumber. Population IS a problem when people shit in the water, destroying natural ecosystems. Population IS a problem when millions of farmers withdraw water from aquifers, far exceeding their ability to restore themselves. Population IS a problem where forests are cut down to make room for more corn fields--carbon is not stored in herbaceous corn for any period of time but in the wood of trees. Population IS a problem with hundreds of millions if not billions of cattle are kept to feed hungry populations from the North or South. Their carbon emissions are significant in promoting climate change. It is easy to blame Western civilization for the end of the world--especially when it fits in with your world view of noble peasants and evil capitalists--but you leave out important facts in doing so.
This would make sense if most of the destruction that could directly be linked to overpopulation was not indirectly (but still pretty obviously) initiated by our overconsumption. If we were doing everything to, for example, not evict farmers from their lands to be able to do inefficient industrial agriculture. If global warming was not driven primarily by our emissions. If destruction of nature all over the world wasn't driven by our hunger for resources.
"Population IS a problem where forests are cut down to make room for more corn fields--carbon is not stored in herbaceous corn for any period of time but in the wood of trees."
Thing is, the ultimate reason behind that is the destruction of traditional more sustainable and independent forms of agriculture, which wasn't an organic process but was started by us. Now, having destroyed the structures that worked, and depending on something that clearly doesn't, we try to blame the consequences of our actions and pretend they just happened by themselves.
Exactly! And that's why America, especially, needs to practice some form of birth control. Mindless procreation on any level should not be acceptable.
That is the heart of the problem and we are contributing massively to it. 107,000,000 Mexicans live in Mexico, 55,000,000 live here and they account for 42% of our new births. Mindless procreation needs to be corrected. But they're cutting education and family planning.
The 300'000'000 Americans and 400'000'000 Western Europeans have done way more harm than the rest of the world combined. And of course Mexicans are going to the US because the US has fucked up Mexico's economy. Arrogant know-nothing hypocrites.
The wealth and good life that Americans and Europeans have used to have gone to their heads. They think it's somehow natural and that they "deserve" it, that it comes from their "hard work" and nothing else. Fucking idiots.
I was talking about POPULATION CONTROL as a form of conservation. According to you we should import all of Mexico, Haiti and Lybia to atone for our greed, missplaced superiority, and general fuckedupedness. The richest man in the world is from and lives in Mexico. (search top ten richest). In America we died for the right to have a 7 day work week. We fought and died for the right to have have time and a half for overtime. We fought and died for the right to unionize, we fought and died for minimum wage. Non of this is tought in our schools - the birth of Unions. If Mexico wants these rights, let them fight and die for them not come here and squander them. How can we send them aid if we're not employed.
Population control is not a form of conservation.
It is just a form for racists types, like you, to pretend to care about conservation.
It's only racisit if you apply it to one race. If you have less children you have less pollution. Mexicans are caucasion - like me. We are of the same race. I got my tubes tied after one child. I applied my belief to myself first. If you have less people you have less consumption of natural resources. I'm sorry your little mind can't get around that.
There are types who see population reduction as planned genocide. They see all advocates as having that one same motivation. They will resist, assuring specicide. It is like a Greek tragedy.
"If you have less children you have less pollution."
First, if you have a child in America or Europe, you create more pollution than if you have ten or so in India.
Second, these people do not export their pollution and waste, will not depend on non-sustainable technology to live on to anywhere close to the extent we do. They will die young and consume little. I mean, it's certainly tragic, and of course we should do everything we can to avoid it, but it is a problem that will solve itself anyway. Since consumption and waste does NOT simply scale with number of humans consuming, it is not one of the problems that threatens the whole planet, by far.
"I applied my belief to myself"
Or rather, you decided to not do something so that you yourself and your one child can have a life that's still an order of magnitude or two more wasteful than that of the vast majority of the Earth's population. This only serves to soothe your conscience with minimum action.
Seriously. Look at, you know, facts, not these fucking idiotic theories of what might be - that would only make sense if *everyone was equal*. Which is far, far from true.
It's still a dumb dumb fact - if you have less children you have less pollution in America or not in America. It's simple logic Dumb Dumb. Every time you have a baby, you have to think of thousands of #s of poop. When they're little it's plastic covered poop (in America). When they are older it's septic tanks and waste treatment centers (in America). Aren't you glad I only had one child? And he lives in Hawaii - raises chickens, mangos and bees. Lives on and off the land. I taught him how to live on this great mother earth. And I say overpopulation or mindless propagation is uncivilized.
"First, if you have a child in America or Europe, you create more pollution than if you have ten or so in India." That's what I'm saying. And their still having 10 in India. America was close to "0" population about 8 years ago. NOW, In this country 16% of the population is responsible for 42% of new births. There is a group of the population that is engaged in mindless propagation.
SIMPLE! You have less kids, you have less pollution, you have less consumption. And having less children in America is even MORE essential. Look who's stupid!
Oh I see. You don't like the Hispanics (sorry of you meant some other group, I'm not up to date on which groups are considered the biggest "problem" in your circles) and don't want them to overrun what you consider your country, so you want to manage their population. You want the US to stay white, basically. I have not seen this standard racist bullshit dressed up as an environmental issue yet.
"SIMPLE! You have less kids, you have less pollution, you have less consumption. And having less children in America is even MORE essential. Look who's stupid!"
You clearly mean "Hispanics" or maybe "blacks" whith "you", not rich whites, and you dress this up as conservation. You gave up on having more children not because of some bigger concern, but for your own selfishness, and use this shit to support your racism.
This has nothing to do with racism. YOU should be ashamed for making it a racist issue.
Hispanics ARE caucasian. I'm saying anyone. It's just that Hispanics have more of a propensity for mindless propagation. It's not racial. It's either cultural or religious. What does a women think about when she's changing a diaper? How can I pay for my 4 kids education, how am I going to feed them, how will I pay for their health care, who's going to pay for my next pregnancy? Is she worried about where she's going to throw all those poop filled diapers - hell NO! that's the government's problem.
I only had one child. I am not holding anyone to a standard that I wouldn't impose on myself. EVERYONE SHOULD HAVE LESS CHILDREN. I'm not making a law, it's a suggestion. GET IT?
Electric cars (not hybrids) will pollute if the electricity is made burning coal or diesel. It has been a general rule that whenever some resource becomes available at improved efficiency use goes up. Just put on a tax to keep the cost up and people will keep their useage down.
If they displace internal combustion engines, without increasing miles driven, then the excess electric power, no matter how supplied, should be less than the equivalent fuel burned in individual vehicles. This is because the power plant can be more efficient and more reliably maintained than all the equivalent individual vehicles.
Increasing miles driven, however, renders this calculus moot.
It is a well known paradox in energy conservation. Increasing efficiency. leading to lower operating costs, actually leads to more consumption, negating the savings from increased efficiency. It is known as Jevon's Paradox.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
And the efficiency does make EV's less polluting - even if half the generating mix is from coal. For example assuming the typical eastern US electric generating mix, my small electric scooter gets the the carbon-equivalent of about 220 miles per gallon, compared to 80 mpg for a small gas scooter. And unlike petroleum fuel, electricity can come from nearly carbon-free sources - I buy Community Energy wind offsets myself.
BTW, I mentioned Jevons Paradox earlier. The etiquette I follow myself is to set the comments to "oldest first" and read earlier posts first. often I can avoid having to post at all that way, or if I do, I can put it in the appropriate thread.
I think, as I read through early this morning, that Jevon was not yet mentioned because I had to actually look for the name of the guy. Google is great, type in "energy paradox" and Jevon's Paradox comes right to the top.
Remeber that you have to log in to see all comments. A non-loggged in person will only see the comments that are released from the "moderation buffer".
Yeah, I've been noticing the comment count is different lately between the two states.
Electric is more versitile, more maleable. You can generate electicity in a hundred different ways and feed it all into the same system.
If there is a large enough fleet of electric cars there becomes a market for a system to efficiantly power them. With that fleet we get an army of entrepreneurs wracking their brains to come up with the system to power those cars, the cheapest way to generate electricity for those cars, the lightest, cleanest, cheapest, longest range battery.
Speaking of range: What's the biggest factor in the range of a power supply? Weight! So you want to increase the finite range of you automobile? Reduce the weight. Sudenly small is the goal. And smaller cars means more efficiant cars. Smaller means less materials in the cars. Less resources invested. Less wear on roads.
Meanwhile solar panels on roofs, wind generators on hills (I can see seven of them from my windows here in Sweden) are replacing all those dirty coal and nuke plants.
Is all this a day late and a dollar short? Sure. But maybe we will survive long enough to see it happen and even if you know the tiger chasing you is faster than you are you still run while you pull out your pocket knife.
The population numbers might look better in a few years if what I recently read actually proves to be scientifically valid. There seems to be a problem that GMO foods cause birth defects and sterility.
You don't think the neocons don't have methods to reduce us superfluous humans, do you?
I'd say look for oddly toxic "designer" pharmaceuticals to be produced more and more in the coming few years,. too.
The point isn't to "green" human consumption, it's for humans to wake up and stop being Takers (to use Daniel Quinn's construct) and to return to where we once were, being Leavers.
Where should we go when we Leave?
About time someone pointed this out. Instead of talking using adjectives, if people would bother to do just a little bit of homework involving numbers, it should have been evident BEFORE implementing any of these misguided policies. Same with the EU's mandate on biofuels. The ways to estimate the total GHG emissions are already in place, based on overall efficiencies and life-cycle assessments. So they clearly did not have to implement a certain policy to find out later that it was not working as intended.
Switching to all-electric vehicles, instead of hybrids, will help only if the electricity itself is from renewable energy sources. As of now, the US gets close to 45% of its electricity from coal power plants and another close to 20% from nuclear power. So, while shutting down coal and nuclear power plants and setting renewable power systems, "getting out of our cars altogether" or for the most part, is really the saner option.
Almost no one here is talking about budgeting and rationing of energy and an upper limit on GHG emissions. It shows that people do not want to deal with numbers, and instead just throw around adjectives and feel-good proposals. It also shows that even those who post in CD are not very different from the average American with a sense of entitlement to consume whatever they feel like.
If they truly want to make a difference, people would be insisting on upper limits on emissions from each country, starting with the rich countries due to the historically high level of emissions from these countries. Putting an upper limit on emissions from each country would impose some kind of budgeting and rationing of energy for individuals and businesses. Without such upper limits - which is what the current dangerous situation really demands - people will continue with their hand-waving while failing to deal with the numbers that matter.
This is a great article, because it makes the important point that reducing energy demand is more important than trying out various "greener" alternatives without regard to the net effect of these alternatives. No matter what alternatives are implemented, the numbers that matter are the total GHG emissions from each country. It also makes the point that change SHOULD start with the rich countries - those with the highest per capita consumption of energy and the highest GHG emissions per capita. It mentions meat consumption as well. And the warning that there are other countries embarked on achieving the "American dream" - which WILL produce a nightmare. So it's time to redefine this "dream" as one based on sustainability and respect for nature.
As a naturalized American, I wonder why did you guys allow the meaning of "American dream" sintagma to be so irrevocably changed. Do I have to remind you of its original meaning *and* significance: it was about social mobility, introduced after WWII (GI Bill), not about consumerism. It was a dream by far bigger than all the dreams of two-garage houses piled up together in these "United States of Amnesia" (Gore Vidal).