Pollution and witlessness
It is perhaps trite to say that the young today don’t know what it was like in the old days, and how far we’ve come. But what they don’t know can cost us money, since they tend to favor trendy and expensive environmental policy foolishness. This group apparently includes the current President. Here are some excerpts from a wonderfully entertaining piece by Jack Dini in the American Thinker — it notes, for example, that pollution levels in China’s major cities are up to 50 times higher than in LA:
No American city is among the top 50 cities in the world for air pollution according to the World Bank…seven of the world’s ten most polluted cities are in China. Of the ten cities in the world with the highest levels of air pollution, three are in India…
China has some of the worst pollution problems in the world. Nearly two-thirds of China’s 343 major cities currently fail to meet the nation’s air quality standards. Pollution levels in China’s major cities are 10 to 50 times higher than the worst smoggy day in Los Angeles. The twenty fastest growing cities in the world are all in China…
The combined carbon dioxide emissions from the 850 new coal-fired power plants that China and India are building between now and 2012 are five times the total savings of the Kyoto accords. So you can put in all those curly light bulbs and drive all the Priuses you want: India just ate that for breakfast and China will eat the next round of conservation for lunch…
India is also growing rapidly, and its major cities experience particulate levels often eight to ten times higher than the worst American cities. India is the fourth-most coal dependent country in the world and has enough reserves to last for the next 100 years. Carbon emissions in India are rising faster than nearly every other country on the planet. Between 1980 and 2006, India’s carbon output increased by 341%, compared to 321% for China, 103% for Brazil 238% for Indonesia and 272% for Pakistan…
rich people can’t stop the world’s 5 billion poor people from burning the couple of trillion tons of cheap carbon that they have within easy reach. We can’t even make any durable dent in global emissions-because emissions from the developing world are growing too fast, because the other 80 percent of humanity desperately needs cheap energy, and because we and they are now part of the same global economy. What we can do, if we’re foolish enough, is let carbon worries send our jobs and industries to their shores, making them grow even faster, and their carbon emissions faster still…
You recall then-Senator Obama’s clueless statements about China last summer: “Everybody’s watching what’s going on in Beijing right now with the Olympics. Think about the amount of money that China has spent on infrastructure…vastly the superior to us now.” (Apparently their infrastructure spending excluded pollution control equipment.) This is the genius behind the absurdity of cap and trade. Yikes!
May 26th, 2009 at 5:40 am
The Democrats are not interested in cap and trade to reduce pollution/global warming emissions.. They know the statistics that you state very well. Cap and trade/global warming legislation is a ploy to raise more money for the Democrats to spend.