An Inconvenient Truth

[ska invita]

A special report about the melting of Kilimajaro ice caps (as feature in inconvenient truth) can be watched here:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/nolavconsole/ukfs_news/hi/newsid_6140000/newsid_6142300/bb_rm_6142344.stm

 

[Kid_Eternity]

It slipped rather quietly onto DVD...

 

[Jonti]

alleviating (the problem) inevitably means conflict

I'm afraid I agree. The fact that I do not own a 4x4 only reduces the demand for such vehicles (thereby causing the price to drop to make them more attractive, so increasing the demand). The fact I cycle or walk makes more room on the roads, and that makes the roads more attractive, so more people use their cars.

Everyone accepts this kind of logic when applied to roadbuilding. More room on the roads means more traffic takes to the roads. In a nutshell, removing one's own snout from the trough just makes more room for the greedy, so they will take more. Removing one's own snout from the trough is still the right thing to do, but one is being naive to think that coercive action is not going to be needed.

 

[Jonti]

Cars today produce something like 1% of the emissions produced by cars in the late seventies and early eighties. That change was carried out without major impact on our lives.

The amount of CO2 produced by burning 1 litre of petrol has not changed. And no, fuel efficiency in cars has not improved by a factor of 100 in the last thrity years.

If that were true, one would now be getting thousands of miles to the gallon.

 

[Wookey]

Removing one's own snout from the trough is still the right thing to do, but one is being naive to think that coercive action is not going to be needed.

Interesting point - it's the one thing I don't see i2i with Gore over.

 

[Jonti]

Well, coercive action means just that appropriate laws will need to be passed and enforced. That is something that happens all the time.

My feeling is that appropriate measures are unlikely to be enforceable unless society becomes a lot more equitable. It is not fashionable to be a low consumption individual. Conspicuous consumption, owning lots of stuff, foreign holidays, bling in general is what is rewarded and admired.

To counter this, we'd need a far "flatter" society, more equitable even than that of fifty years ago (yes folks, the rich are far more wealthy and out of touch with ordinary folk than they were even in the fifties and sixties).

I don't see that happening, not without some serious struggle.

 

[Jonti]

Vast ice shelf collapses in the Arctic

A vast ice shelf in the Canadian Arctic has broken up, a further sign of the astonishing rate at which polar ice is now melting because of global warming.

The Ayles ice shelf, more than 40 square miles in extent - over five times the size of central London - has broken clear from the coast of Ellesmere Island, about 500 miles south of the North Pole in the Canadian Arctic, it emerged yesterday.

Quote is from this article in today's Independent.

 

[Illyrian]

I think more people will end up referring back to this video once 'spring' gets here. Thumbs up to Al Gore!!!

 

[ska invita]

Good article here:

"You'd think watching the film that Gore is just some concerned professor who never had access to power or held hundreds of thousands of dollars of stock in Occidental Petroleum, let alone was the Number Two man actually running the U.S. government!"

http://www.palestinechronicle.com/story-020207134545.htm

Gore never critiques the system causing the global ecological crisis. At one point, he even mourns the negative impact of global warming on U.S. oil pipelines. Oh, the horror! What it all comes down to, for Gore and the Democrats, is that we need to shift away from reliance on fossil fuels and tweak existing consumption patterns.

Even there, Gore and Clinton did nothing to improve fuel efficiency in the U.S. -- a topic which Gore talks about in the movie without any hint that he'd once actually been in a position to do something about it. The question Gore poses is who can best manage the relatively minor solutions he recommends, the Democrats or Republicans? For Gore, it's sort of "trust US, not THEM, to deal with this situation because they are liars and we're not."