Well, that's one way to handle it.

Now how about thinking a little harder? Notice: I never once talked of leaving environmental protection in the hands of a quasi-legislative, quasi-judicial agency of the executive, that would therefore be legislator, judge and executive all rolled into one.

I propose legislating what "being left alone" means, what nuisances one ought not have to put up with from others' activities, and how to proceed to get redress. Such redress would be up to a court to decide. I'd rather have more courts than a tyrannical, self-accountable (meaning unaccountable) agency.

Indeed. I remember the smog problem of some of our major cities and the pollution of the Great Lakes and other water ways that have largely been remedied. It is the excesses of governmental agencies like the EPA that they embark upon once they fear the lack of necessity for them to grow their ranks and power...

The two left coasts... :)

An excellent summary of the problems. One must start somewhere. But how to solve the problem?

I suggest a code of civil tort law setting forth all the things neighbor has the right to expect from neighbor--like not pouring paint thnner down the storm drain, for example. Then set up rules-of-court outlining who, as an individual or as a class, has standing to sue someone who willfully pollutes the air, land or water.

Too bad Ayn Rand never treated the subject of pollution. But we can.

Hiraghm;

Few drilling rigs, some big pumps and I could fix that. Just a matter of money.

BTW, why are your comments hidden? Have you broken Gulch rules or offended the powers that be?

Warming or cooling is not the debate. Of course the Earth Warms and Cools. The question is...:

Are the changes caused by human action? To this the answer is, based on REAL evidence, NO!

I would like to add, that pollution is not good to the health of living creatures, i.e. cyanide gasses being released, or toxic chemical gasses, but Co2, BAH, I challenge anyone calming the thing I exhale that all plants use, is a pollutant.

Taking on pollution is one thing, but the entire premise of Man Caused Climate change is a false premise.

Temlakos

Well, lets see. Break this down quite simply. You and everyone on this thread has electricity. YOU consume the product of the enterprise that produces. Be it polluting wildly, or not at all. Who should pay...simple the people who are consuming. Don't want cars polluting, stop buying cars and driving them. Don't want hydro-fluorocarbons, stop buying hairspray. When YOU stop consuming the producers will stop producing and the problem goes away.

Again capitalism works if the Government and those who want to try and legislate morality get out of the way.

AO;

I agree re pollution. I remember going to a drive in movie in LA (I know, it was awhile ago) and after the movie thinking, as I dusted the atmospheric soot off the car, this is what we're breathing? Those who say they'd get rid of the EPA forget: along with the outrageous encroachments on private property and mission creep, the EPA has done good things.

Incidentally, seawater reinjection is a viable means of protecting the Gulf Coast lowlands from encroaching seawater. We could raise the level of Louisiana's disappearing marshland, although the reason it's disappearing is because the Corps of Engineers diverted the Mississippi River. Whether we could elevate Miami, I'm not sure, I don't know the geology. I don't know whether we could elevate New York or California and I'm not really interested in trying.

I don't think humanity or wildlife for that matter will be as threatened as scientist say, I think global warming is real, but I don't think it's the apocalypse. Like I said elsewhere, I think it is a threat from the change in resource distribution and ultimately the balance of power. If you look at the amount of freshwater, farmland, pipeline transit, petroleum reserves (undeveloped), and access to warm-water ports that the Ukraine has, versus Russia, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that Putin doesn't give a hoot about the Ukrainian people.. this is about resources. They have also already started staking claims in the arctic in areas that are now accessible with the ice receding, and we'll certainly be squaring off with them over the Alaskan offshore oil reserves.

The same climate deniers also tend to use that as a link to how petroleum is endless... it's not... the US passed peak oil production in about 1979, as much of the world did. You used to be able to pump it out of your backyard, now you have to go to the ends of the earth and its a hell of a lot harder to extract. When I started driving my first car, gas (premium) was 81 cents a gallon. Inflation may be some of that, but the minimum wage was $3.35 / hr... now its around $9.00, but gas is $4.29'ish in my area (for cheap stuff), a 525% increase, versus around a 270% inflationary adjustment.

We have an EV in the family (a Volt) not so much because I am some Prius-type creep, but because it is cool looking and its a lot more efficient to do the grocery getting than to drive my Nissan Armada's 5.6L down the street (which gets like, 14 mpg on a good day). We drive the Volt around 12,000 miles a year and our electric bill maybe went up $6 / month. (and before I hear it about the power-plants, 70% of my house power comes from solar), so in the most expensive electric market in the country, we spend like $1 to drive 170 miles.... versus about $52.93 for the Armada to do the same... so its about efficiency and doing things a better way that is incidentally better for the US to not buy as much oil from people that don't like us.

I'm not a big lover of fracture drilling... I know its important to our security, but I'm expecting the other shoe to drop on that stuff, and it's not "doable" at less than about $3.50 a gallon at the pump anyway.

Can I tow a boat or anything with the Volt? No, and I probably wouldn't take it on a 700 mile road trip either, but for 80% of the driving needed, it works fine. I'm a strong advocate for conservation more than anything else I suppose, It's not realistic to think otherwise.

So SolarCity put solar panels on my house for $0. I buy the power from them for half what the going rate is on the PG&E bill, and that turns into fuel for the car in the garage, which will only need a couple of oil changes in its life, the battery is completely recyclable, and the only reason we use premium in the thing is because the generator runs so little that the 8-gallon fill up tends to last 6 to 8 months in it. I don't miss going to the gas station & dealing with that.

Oil doesn't move society forward in terms of space exploration, we need post-petroleum forms of energy for that. For pretty much everything beyond planes & cars, we need a post-petroleum fuel source... I see it as the right thing to do, that is also economically more attractive.

I've actually had the same process, there will be winners & losers... but we (the US) will probably be on the losing side of it for the most part. I think we're going to be a dust bowl with 300 million people clamoring for water.

As Mark Twain famously said... whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting over. My worry isn't really the loss of coastline or whatever, I'm looking at it from the dramatic human events that will occur as we fight over resources during the shifts that take place. As the US, we will be front & center to every conflict. Most of it will be over water.

More proof that the 100,000, 10,000, 1,000, 100 and 10 year cycles are all part of Earth's natural course and humans have no impact on that. All this talk of Climate change due to Man, is even more ridiculous when you realize that the peak of the industrial revolution was the mid 1900's, and has been declining ever since..

I lived in Pittsburgh, and vividly remember the smog in the early 1970's.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/05...

Now look at the skyline.
http://pittsburghskyline.com/

This had NONTHING to do with the crackpots trying to redistribute wealth under the auspice of "Climate Protection."

In my experience (as a business owner for a long time), 50% or so of business owners generally do the right thing. 50% don't give a sh*t and will dump paint thinner into the storm drain by the train load rather than pay to have it removed or disposed of properly. I've always thought that if government got out of the business of regulating everyone and everything, and maybe spent all of its environmental time & resources on simply running low-cost / not-for-profit recycling & disposal centers, we wouldn't have much of a waste problem because it would be easier to do that than to bother with anything else. Most small & medium sized businesses are running on 6-9% margins, and if its less than that... in the 2s & 3s, a lot of people will do the "wrong thing" for free or cheap when no one is looking. It's not climate related, but it's the same issue, just recently here in Northern California the USDA shut down a cattle slaughterhouse for packing & shipping 9 million pounds of cancer and virus-infected cattle (they were obviously sick)... trimmed around the tumors, etc.. and shipped it to grocery stores on days the USDA inspectors were not on-site. This stuff was bad... black cancerous tumors in the meat, glaucoma, etc. Much of that is transmittable through body fluids... granted you cook it... but yuck.

They are claiming "oops"... but you don't knowingly order specifically-diseased cattle that no one else will buy, slaughter it and get it on the truck quick on a Saturday or Sunday when the inspectors are off. Then file for bankruptcy when the billions in lawsuits come in.

Back when I was in investment banking... some of the product literature we developed... "mortgage approvals 1 day after foreclosure or bankruptcy!"... "520 Fico / 100% financing OK to $1 million"... "Stated Income / Stated Asset with a 620 Fico score to $1 million"... Does that really make any sense? You have to really try to get a 620 FICO... I mean.. it takes talent to beat it down that low and it's a consistent effort to not pay any bills on time. a 520? That's a couple of BK's in a 3 year period.

So, my point is, in a perfect world, people do the right thing, but in the real world they don't. Greed takes over, if there is no accountability to where you know the penalty is higher than the potential profit, and it is certain... then about half of people will do the wrong thing.

We know some things cause more pollution than others, I've heard the "clean coal" BS about as long as I can remember, and it still looks like tar coming out of a smoke stack. Natural gas burns clean, but its not as cheap... Nukes are no problem at all, but we're the Saudi Arabia of coal, so we keep trying to justify it to ourselves. China doesn't care.. heck they probably bathe newborns in the slag to toughen up the immune system for the beetles & live turtles they will eat for dinner.

Hello Hiraghm,
Fascinating. I have often wondered what the mass of plant life on earth is and how it could effect CO2 Levels... I once asked an online site where you could pose your science questions for an approx. measurement of plant life on earth expecting to receive a value quoted in _ _ _ _metric tons, but the reply I got was snarky and treated me as an idiot ... it was something like... That is a ridiculous question. You might as well ask how many blades of grass bla bla bla. Needless to say I never revisited that site.
Respectfully,
O.A.

scojohnson,
I appreciate what you are saying regarding pollution in another comment of yours and also the problem of brackish water and shoreline changes, but haven't these occurrences happened many time in the geologic record before the industrial age?

Certainly the fish and wildlife, (man included), can adapt. If these events occurred without human intervention in the past yet these animals still exist , is not the proof prima facie?

I am not disputing the wisdom of reducing harmful pollutants as we have done here, only the absolutist position on CO2 emissions that evidence shows have been at greater levels in the past both during warmer and colder periods.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/05/14/c...

http://www.stanford.edu/~moore/Boon_To_M...


Respectfully,
O.A.

Hello scojohnson,
What do you make of the geologic record of Greenland being much greener and less glaciated in the past?http://www.natureworldnews.com/articles/6653/20140418/icy-greenland-was-once-pretty-green-study-finds.htm

I understand it was so even as recently as the days of its discovery and purported settling of Vikings. http://www2.sunysuffolk.edu/mandias/lia/...

Respectfully,
O.A.

Hello Wanderer,
Excellent info. and confirmation of some of what I suspected. I find it quite interesting and indisputable that the geologic record shows such extreme differences in sea levels and changing shorelines prior to the industrial age or possible impact of man. How much of these shore line changes are due to advancing and retreating of past ice ages and how much is due to other factors like land mass changes since the time of Pangaea and before? The answers to these questions must also be weighed in the balance. Our planet has always had climate change. It is anthropogenic climate change (our ability to destroy or repair) that I question, particularly when it comes to CO2 emissions.

Now, pollution is another matter. I would not wish to live in Bejing from what we have witnessed. If America's major cities were all polluting like that I have no doubt we could be harming humanities ability to thrive, but Earth will be here long after humanity.

It has been demonstrated that richer industrial nations can and will clean their environment and reduce emissions. I find regulation that would inhibit growth then to be counterproductive.
Respectfully,
O.A.

Please also take note: Humans have only been recording temperatures for about 100 years. Core samples of the earth dating back over 800,000 years indicate that:
1) We are at the peak of a 100,000 year warming cycle
2) You cannot make any "reasonable" calculations, claim proof, or even forecast anything, when your sample quantity of data is on the verge of a mathematical zero.

3) 190 years / 800,000 is 0.000165

Refer to Core samples, here are some interesting scientific links to chew on. Again this is not opinion or "belief." and please note this data comes from NOAA.
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/paleo/icecore/antarctica/

BTW I am 50 also turned that in February. I, however, read and educate myself on "facts" not opinion and fads. I am not easily sucked into the latest "kewl" trend, and I also do not cave in out of fear when the majority think one way.

Doctors had to be pulled kicking and screaming to wash their hands before surgery after germs were discovered. This only meant the majority of people were wrong. Academia said the Earth was flat, and executed people who thought differently. Guess what. All the fools were the majority.

Global Warming, Climate change whatever want to call it are based on Bayesian analysis.

"The Bayesian analyses can be “cooked” to produce results consistent with any point of view, because Bayesian analyses quantify prior personal beliefs and mix them with the data." Dennis, B. (n.d.). [Abstract]. STATISTICS and the SCIENTIFIC METHOD IN ECOLOGY,

California has fire issues in part because controlled deforestation is so highly regulated the BLM has created a massive fire hazard. Government is the problem...

http://news.discovery.com/earth/india-is...

Ever think maybe the oceans are not really rising but the coast line is sinking?

Look up and read about Mantle Convection.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hqp_TbIZ...

So if you jump off a building are you falling? or is the earth rising to meet you? Depends on who you want to blame for your death. My bet is Alaska coast is slipping down due to mantle convection, not the rise of the oceans

True. Now regarding the Arctic Pack Ice, something that is not well known is that such is
being heated from the bottom. The three oceans
are also, but they are huge and deep compared to the much shallower and smaller Arctic Sea. There is an active mid-Arctic seafloor ridge, with hydrothermal vents lava/volcanic activity. This
will result in some degree of ice melt, depending on the flux of this activity. Richard, geologist.

NASA-JPL recently stated that the water under this particular section of ice is warming, hence the melting. What warms the ocean water is the constant eruption of volcanoes on the floor of the oceans. Science tells us that at any given time 200+/- volcanoes are erupting. A lot of heat and 2/3rds of the earth's co2.

simply put the earth is not warming, but cooling.
that said, it is all about MONEY. All governments want some all of the universities want some and of course the "un" wants some. you can stand on mount Everest with a bull horn telling all of the warming people that it is time to wake up and you will have wasted your breath.
read "the cooling" by Lowell Ponte, published in 1976 and you will read about all of what the earth has experienced since then. it is to the weather what atlas is to our society.

This would be a good thread to discuss ethical and political theory for environmental protection. What exactly does an individual or company owe his/their immediate neighbors, the larger society of which he/they is/are a part, and all the rest of humanity, when it comes to keeping the air/land/water clean? Who collects that debt, and how?