Huge study about safety can be misinterpreted by SUV drivers

OK, I forgot about yeast/alcohol. Not a big player in the intestinal
flora of the cow. God save us all from auto-inebriated bulls.

 

You are getting kind of circular here, or something:
Kyoto is bad because it will force jobs overseas.
No, jobs are going overseas already for myriad other reasons, and
constraints on CO2 production aren't going to be a significant factor
compared to them.
Well, that's because we are better and Kyoto will punish us/

 

Adding to the imbalance will not help matters. Moving production to
china and other nations lacking in environmental protection for
*ANY REASON* does not help the environment.

Environmentalists should be the ones *AGAINST* factories being closed
in developed countries and built in third world countries. They should
know that the environment is better off if production stays in the US,
Japan, Germany, etc where the environment is protected due to results
of their efforts. Instead, they favor policies that only further
encourage companies to side step environmental protections by going
to developing nations. This makes no sense when only the environment
is considered. It does make sense when politics are first and the
environment is second.

 

Well, Hillary's solution would have fixed that; any doctor caught
giving care outside the approved system would be liable to legal
prosecution, with penalties including fines, jail time & loss of
license.
A true utopia.

 

There's no shortage of things to criticize about health care in the US.
But, with the right perspective, it can be judged a very good system. I
remember getting my first job and insurance was completely paid for by the
company and there were no co-pays and only a small deductible. The problem
with that is that it's so inflationary; patients didn't care what the cost
was. Over the last 15 years the cost burden is being "shared" more and more
with the patients. The cost of care is not distributed evenly. Those who
pay, pay a lot. The cost of developing drugs and procedures is very
expensive. You're right about the cost of providing free care to the poor
and paying for malpractice litigation. Managed care puts the brakes on
demand making it frustrating for patients whose health is at stake.

With managed care, when you do your homework as a "consumer" of medical care
and understand how the HMO system works, you CAN get what you need. As
consumers, we have to do our part and understand what you're paying for and
what the contract says. Then work with it. Unfortunately, it's complex and
not real easy since there's three parties... you, the provider and the
insurer. But it is possible.

I think a National Health Care system sounds very scary. If we want an
abundant supply of medical care in this country you can't take the supply
and demand components out of the system. The minute you do, there won't be
enough care and it will be substandard. There will be a constant struggle
to keep the system from bankrupting the national treasury. I think it will
just become a giant sized version of an HMO run by the government with no
competitors.

 

Yeah, the old rightwing fantasy factory rides again. Do you recall the
Clean Air Act? Do you recall that the power companies piteously pled
for and were granted an exemption for their old coal and oil fuelled
plants, since the power companies promised that they were going to be
all mothballed soon anyway and it would be purely wasteful to upgrade
them for the short time they will be in operation? Well, it's thirty
years later now, and here in CT, half the electricity is still being
produced by those old 'soon to be mothballed' plants, known locally as
the Filthy Five. This is not because the utility companies are just
dying to build some expensive clean new plants and the
environmentalists just won't let them. It's purely because it's much
cheaper to run these monstrosities unmodified than it is to build new
plants, despite the environmentalists screaming to trade them for
clean new plants or else update them. The Reagan and Bush I
administrations refused to enforce the part of the Clean Air Act that
requires the companies to install upgraded pollution controls if they
were doing significant expansions to the plants, in contrast to
routine maintenance, allowing the Filthy Five to actually expand their
filthy emissions. The Clinton administration finally starts to enforce
this provision, and what happens? The Bush junta reverses the
enforcement decision. And in response to this boondoggle, the
utilities raise their rates 10%.

According to the utility companies' own reports, the Filthy Five
generate over 66% of the sulfur dioxide and 11% of the nitrogen oxide
produced annually in Connecticut from all sources, including cars. And
in case you have the wrong impression about CT, the EPA rates the air
as "seriously unhealthful" in 97% of CT for at least part of the year.
This is quite literally life and death for people who breathe the air,
as most of us do, versus fattening the bank accounts of those few
lucky enough to be in a position to get an executive bonus for
deciding to harm other people's health.

But it's not the factories that make products that are burning coal,
it's the power plants that you say aren't feasible to relocate. So how
exactly is Kyoto going to move the CO2 production in your mental
picture?

And since it isn't, it won't.

The ones that involve burning coal and oil to produce electricity, for
one.

And this all hinges on the right to produce energy in a
fuel-inefficient fashion in the US? Gee.

 

If "efficiency" were the goal of the regulations, that might be so.
But it isn't, is it?
It just never seems that the pollution regulations result in a more
streamlined energy production, but rather result in expensive add-ons.
Only during upgrades of major plants does the streamlining occur, and
that's strictly on an 'as needed' basis, not by regulation.
And there are precious few new major generating plants being built,
because (surprise!) regulations make them too expensive.

IOW, Yes, new regulations here will indeed speed up the movement of
manufacturing to other countries, where the costs are lower.

And, yes, making energy production more efficient lowers the cost of
power; but governmental regulations are about pollution, not
efficiency.

 

Yes, that makes great sense from the rightwingnut position that
science is that which fights Socialism, Communism, and gay marriage,
all as defined by the rightwingnuts. It all started with that
sonofabitch Galileo and his immoral socialist assertion that the sun
did not revolve around the earth, as the bible clearly states.

 

Something that's really interesting is that one of the reasons those
car makers are moving production here is because it's cheaper to hire
US workers than it is to hire the workers in their own countries.

 

Reminds me of how it was in Cambodia as shown in "The Killing Fields". If
you planted a tomato plant in your (well, the governments) yard to feed
yourself and got caught, you'd be punished for enriching yourself.

 

Ane yet, even here in the frigid northlands of CT, many people find it
economically feasible to heat some or even most of their hot water by
rooftop solar collectors, and in some cases even use solar collection
to supplement their boilers for hot water home heating, even with the
government subsidies for such systems long gone.

 

30 years ago eh? 30 years ago everything was going to be replaced
by nuclear plants. Remember? No more smoke stacks. But no, nukes
couldn't be allowed. Now people are trying to make wind power work,
but environmentalists have stepped in again, this time they don't
like the way they *LOOK*, and are worried about birds flying into
the blades.

What exactly are these non-opposed power plants that the utility
companies can just go out and build? How do they generate power?
Since new plants of any kind are opposed, the old ones just continue
on.

Or is your goal to simply shut down the old plants without any
replacements so people end up just going without electricity?

Back in the day they were to be replaced with nuclear facilities.
But that never happened. Now there are attempts to gain extra capacity
with wind power, but that too is opposed. WHAT KIND OF POWER PLANT COULD
THEY BUILD WITHOUT OBJECTIONS THAT WOULD STIFLE THE PROJECT AND DRIVE THE
COSTS SKY HIGH? Until you can answer that question, your point is invalid.

Still cleaner than plants in china.

Sounds like you should have nukes built. Oh that's right they are opposed
on environmental grounds. Oh and then there is that wind farm out in that
part of the country that somebody wants to build... damn, all the rich
liberals don't want to look at the turbines, that one goes down the tubes
too. What's your magic alternative to generate electric power?

Power plant -> factory.
Each time you move a factory to china, china's power grid has to supply
it. They burn more coal to generate electricity for that factory. So
you've just moved the source of the CO2 from the USA to China. It's that
simple. And on top of it, no matter how dirty you think US coal fired
power plants are, they are damn near totally clean compared to those
in china.

So by elimination you admit that your bringing it up was nothing more than a
diversionary debate tatic.

How do you think power is generated in china? How do you think those
factories get their electricity? That's right coal.

Name one kind of power plant that can be built without opposition.
When new technology is strongly opposed, then the status quo remains.
You want to know why we still have coal plants, look at what happens
when a company tries to build something else.

With wind power becoming a reality, environmentalists are coming out
of the woodwork to oppose it. It was fine for them so long as it wasn't
technologically and economically feasiable to use as a counterpoint
against existing generation methods, but now that the problems are being
worked out and turbines are going up around the nation they've suddenly
found objections to it.

It leaves but one conclusion, the noble cause of protecting the
environment is not the goal. The goal is to further political and
social agendas using protection of the environment as the *MEANS*
to sell it. Nothing makes it more obvious that the opposition to
wind power and the way the kyoto treaty was crafted.

 

Yes that too. But all things considered, the developed western countries
are more or less equal when it comes to labor and environmental protections.
6 of one, half a dozen of the other when everything and all industries
are considered IMO. I worked for a US company that has a plant in
Germany, it made sense at the time to locate one there. The US might
have an advantage for a factory that makes widgets while Germany has the
advantage for the one that makes gizmos.

 

That's not true at all. First of all, the Bush I administration SIGNED the Clean Air Act
amendments in 1990 into law, which strenghthened, not weakened the Clean Air Act. Secondly, the
act was and is being enforced. The act was designed to require NEW PLANTS (new sources) to have
much more stringent controls with updated technology. Older plants would be initially exempted
because of common sense economics. However pollution from these older palnts would then be capped
and traded, so plants pay for their negative externalities (pollution) and production is shifted to
the most efficient (by this I mean less polluting) plants because they are cheaper to operate due
to the cost of pollution credits. In this way all plants use the most advanced pollution controls
available to them. Eventually the older plants are shut down or upgraded (when they WOULD be
subject to New Source controls) because they are too expensive to operate or they get too old to
operate anyway.

The problem is that the Clinton administration started treating routine maintenance on plants as
"new source" creation, which was contrary to the actual written law. Treating it this way
subjected the plants specifically exempted from the statue to the requirements of new plants. This
had the perverse incentive of indicating to plant owners that routine maintenance is a BAD IDEA to
do, because the Government will come after you for doing it. Better to defer maintenance and not
keep plants in the most effiicent manner they can be reasonably operated in. But the effect of
this is that when routine maintenance and minor upgrades become to expensive because of overzealous
regulation, the effect is that nothing is done and instead the most polluting plants are left in
operation as is, with no improvements all. The WSJ has reported extensively on this, and
specifically about how the Clinton EPA chief was upset that plants were TOO CLEAN because they
needed something to rail against to publicity. This was all recorded in memos.

The Bush plan restores the EPA's mandated New Source Review. But it's easier for people to make
silly attacks on Bush, because they cannot comprehend the actual laws, the reason why they were
written, the actual effects that they have, the effect of enforcing non-laws, or what is going on
in general.

------
"In one famous case, DTE Energy Corp., parent of Detroit Edison Co., tried to replace older, less
efficient propeller blades in several steam turbines at its biggest coal-fired plant. The new
blades were 15% more efficient than the old, meaning they could generate 15% more power using the
same amount of energy--more power, less pollution. But the Clinton EPA threatened to invoke New
Source Review anyway, so the plan was scrapped.

Not that Detroit Edison and others are avoiding heavy pollution-fighting expenses. At the very same
plant, Detroit Edison is spending $650 million to meet new nitrogen oxide standards--an expense
that won't generate a single new kilowatt of electricity.

Bureaucrats, of course, interpret such a rational response to perverse rules as a sign of corporate
greed. So when the Clinton administration found that at least 80% of the nation's utilities were
violating its New Source Review guidelines, it didn't bother to ask whether something might be
wrong with its policies. It simply filed an avalanche of lawsuits demanding huge fines.

Yet EPA data clearly show that emissions of nitrogen oxide and sulfur dioxide, the two main
industrial pollutants, have declined substantially despite a tripling of coal usage. Future Clean
Air targets will reduce emissions a further 50%." -WSJ 11/26/02

 

How would we spend "less on health care" ? Instead of paying for health
insurance we would pay *AT LEAST* that much in additional taxes.

 

Now you're going over the edge. Extreme environmentalists have written a
check against science that has insufficient funds to cash. A true scientist
would not entangle himself with left wing politics and recognize the
limitations of the current state of science. There's a nexus between
extreme environmentalism and anti-capitalist/anti-corporate politics. You
can see it in the anti-corporate, anti-global trade demonstrations. You can
see it in the Kyoto protocol. You can see it in the Green party platform.

Lefties have been waving around the terms "moral" and "science" in a whole
new way, redefined to fit their points of view and replace traditional
definitions. The argument on global warming and what to do about it would
be more productive if it only were just a scientific discussion.

 

Yeah, that's a requirement for a grant, like your predecessors here

Who? Me? I don't buy into "Creation Science". But the lefts redefinition
of "morality" and "science" is no different than what Creationists do to
force fit science into Genesis. Only it's force fit of science (and
religion) into anti-capitalism.

Not at all. When you see who shows up to those anti-globalist
(anti-corporate) demonstrations you see Socialist signs and booths all over
the place. No "name" calling was intended. And if you're looking for nasty
names to fit conservatives, you're really missing the mark with Fascist and
Nazi. Those are on the opposite side of the political spectrum, away from
limited government.

 

Hardly the only choices facing the uninsured and non-rich. Maybe you wish
that was really the case to give more weight to the feds taking over medical
care.

 

Again Lloyd, not true, except perhaps in your alternate reality, where (unnamed)
people in this group are Taliban that stone women for learning to read and shoot
as US troops . Hospitals may not turn people away for care by law.

 

So what was put together was an all-or-nothing policy. Either the power
companies did everything or nothing. When they did some modernization
they were to be penalized. This sounds like a government power trip
more than sensible regulation to protect the environment the way you
describe it, parker.

1) Old plant, old tech = bad for the environment.
2) old plant, slowly moderized = better for the environment.
3) old plant, totally redone at one time = same as 3) with faster results.
4) New plant = best option for the environment.

Interesting how the regulation by your interpetation punishes a company for
doing 2) but not for doing 1). Was this supposed to be about the
environment or politics?