There is nothing like spending three 10 hour days doing the first pass at preparing a rice field for this years crop.
Everyone should try spending a few days jumping last falls combine ruts and discing them and the remains of the rice levees down. Then they will understand why tractors have seat belts and why all that padding in the tractor cab isn't about comfort.
/QUOTE/
Just out of curiosity, if you think Kyoto is inadequate, what would you propose? A stricter version of Kyoto? Do nothing until any climate changes that may happen are irreversible?
/ENDQUOTE/
I'm not sure what to propose, but the Kyoto accords is trying to offset at least 150 years of heavy industrial activity and yet it gives a "free pass" to almost half the world.
I'm an engineer by training so most of the things I thought of are specific relatively small scale reductions instead of sweeping international laws.
I'll start on the personal level and talk about our Berm house. We built it 25 years ago and thanks to the rigidity of state taxes and the insurance companies a significant amount of the saving on heating and cooling went to deal with them "punishing" us for having a house that fell outside the statistical charts.
Berm and underground homes are among the most energy efficent around and not to mention the safest for tornado alley, but why bother building them if both the state governments and insurance companies punish the home owner for doing it.
Instead of international Kyoto accords I'd start looking at federal, state and county laws that discourage or prevent the use of new technologies or non-traditional energy saving designs.
Now for a pet peeve.
Current designs of home electronics are a energy waster, thanks to the remote control and the cheap clock circuit and the makers use of memory circuit designs that save the manufacturer a few pennies, but requires constant power to remember setting.
The Remote control circuit requires constant power, but most of the current home electronic designs "punish" the owner for unplugging or switching the power strip switch off when they go to work for the day.
The instruction manuals often self rightously tell you to unplug or in some other way cut power to the device when it's not going to be used for a long period to save energy. When they knowingly have picked the slightly cheaper memory chips and clock circuits that require the user to spend several minutes each time the power is returned just to reprogramm the device.
In terms of Global warming a atomic power plant would be a good idea I'd like to see more of them built especially with the new designs that are far less likely to have a melt down.
We also really need to build at least one Breeder reactor to reprocess all those spent fuel rods into useful fuel instead of burying them.
Right now it's cheaper to pump oil out of the ground and use it as the carbon source for much of our plastic .
It would be a double hit if we could convert over to using such things as waste wood and purposely grown crops to produce plastic.
Not only would the source crop directly pull carbon out of the air, but it would "hold" much of the carbon out of the air through recycling of the plastic and it's storage in relatively long term plastic parts like chairs, VCRs and DVDs players.
One BIG problem is that most methods that uses crops or wood to produce plastic require more energy than using already "cooked" organic material pumped from the ground.
Unless your using atomic power there in the processing to plastic your not getting a large net carbon savings by using "bio-plastics".
Something I've been thinking about ever since they built the local coal fired powerplant is adding a very large adjoining greenhouse to make use of it's CO2 emissions and waste heat.
Many plants grow faster in higher concentrations of CO2 and I'd like to see the results of a few experiments where the waste gases and waste heat from a coal fired powerplant are piped to a multiple acre green houses holding crops.
Just being able to selectively ramp up the CO2 levels within a greenhouse until the insect and rodent pest are killed has a big appeal and better yet it can be quickly dropped back to safe levels for the introduction of workers and beneficial insects and animals.
Admittedly experiments might show that the impurities found in coal could make food crops grown under concentrated Greenhouse "fumes" unsafe, but for non-food crops such as pine trees, Flowers or bamboo it should work well.
I doubt seriously that our biosphere is so unstable that a point of no return can be easily reached by man. If it was as unstable as the current biosphere models predict we wouldn't be here today because some super volcano like the one under Yellowstone would have tipped Earth's Biosphere into failure long ago.
I'd like to see a reduction of green house gases emitted by man, but truefully the punishment method probably won't work, especially when the punishment isn't globally applied.
I think the best methods is research to try and find money making technologies and procedures that have a side effect of removing greenhouse gases and/or reducing greenhouse emissions.
The Koyoto accords are fundamentally flawed in giving special passes to nations like China and Russia. (They had to do this to keep them from Vetoing them out of hand.)
Many modern corperations are global in nature and instead of cuting green house gas emission these corperations will simply move thier emissions to the the nations with the free passes.
For this reason I don't think "Global" laws are going to be useful in cutting Greenhouse gases. Nations like the USA, India, China and Russia will simply Veto them making all such accords useless.
howard melton
God bless
Everyone should try spending a few days jumping last falls combine ruts and discing them and the remains of the rice levees down. Then they will understand why tractors have seat belts and why all that padding in the tractor cab isn't about comfort.
/QUOTE/
Just out of curiosity, if you think Kyoto is inadequate, what would you propose? A stricter version of Kyoto? Do nothing until any climate changes that may happen are irreversible?
/ENDQUOTE/
I'm not sure what to propose, but the Kyoto accords is trying to offset at least 150 years of heavy industrial activity and yet it gives a "free pass" to almost half the world.
I'm an engineer by training so most of the things I thought of are specific relatively small scale reductions instead of sweeping international laws.
I'll start on the personal level and talk about our Berm house. We built it 25 years ago and thanks to the rigidity of state taxes and the insurance companies a significant amount of the saving on heating and cooling went to deal with them "punishing" us for having a house that fell outside the statistical charts.
Berm and underground homes are among the most energy efficent around and not to mention the safest for tornado alley, but why bother building them if both the state governments and insurance companies punish the home owner for doing it.
Instead of international Kyoto accords I'd start looking at federal, state and county laws that discourage or prevent the use of new technologies or non-traditional energy saving designs.
Now for a pet peeve.
Current designs of home electronics are a energy waster, thanks to the remote control and the cheap clock circuit and the makers use of memory circuit designs that save the manufacturer a few pennies, but requires constant power to remember setting.
The Remote control circuit requires constant power, but most of the current home electronic designs "punish" the owner for unplugging or switching the power strip switch off when they go to work for the day.
The instruction manuals often self rightously tell you to unplug or in some other way cut power to the device when it's not going to be used for a long period to save energy. When they knowingly have picked the slightly cheaper memory chips and clock circuits that require the user to spend several minutes each time the power is returned just to reprogramm the device.
In terms of Global warming a atomic power plant would be a good idea I'd like to see more of them built especially with the new designs that are far less likely to have a melt down.
We also really need to build at least one Breeder reactor to reprocess all those spent fuel rods into useful fuel instead of burying them.
Right now it's cheaper to pump oil out of the ground and use it as the carbon source for much of our plastic .
It would be a double hit if we could convert over to using such things as waste wood and purposely grown crops to produce plastic.
Not only would the source crop directly pull carbon out of the air, but it would "hold" much of the carbon out of the air through recycling of the plastic and it's storage in relatively long term plastic parts like chairs, VCRs and DVDs players.
One BIG problem is that most methods that uses crops or wood to produce plastic require more energy than using already "cooked" organic material pumped from the ground.
Unless your using atomic power there in the processing to plastic your not getting a large net carbon savings by using "bio-plastics".
Something I've been thinking about ever since they built the local coal fired powerplant is adding a very large adjoining greenhouse to make use of it's CO2 emissions and waste heat.
Many plants grow faster in higher concentrations of CO2 and I'd like to see the results of a few experiments where the waste gases and waste heat from a coal fired powerplant are piped to a multiple acre green houses holding crops.
Just being able to selectively ramp up the CO2 levels within a greenhouse until the insect and rodent pest are killed has a big appeal and better yet it can be quickly dropped back to safe levels for the introduction of workers and beneficial insects and animals.
Admittedly experiments might show that the impurities found in coal could make food crops grown under concentrated Greenhouse "fumes" unsafe, but for non-food crops such as pine trees, Flowers or bamboo it should work well.
I doubt seriously that our biosphere is so unstable that a point of no return can be easily reached by man. If it was as unstable as the current biosphere models predict we wouldn't be here today because some super volcano like the one under Yellowstone would have tipped Earth's Biosphere into failure long ago.
I'd like to see a reduction of green house gases emitted by man, but truefully the punishment method probably won't work, especially when the punishment isn't globally applied.
I think the best methods is research to try and find money making technologies and procedures that have a side effect of removing greenhouse gases and/or reducing greenhouse emissions.
The Koyoto accords are fundamentally flawed in giving special passes to nations like China and Russia. (They had to do this to keep them from Vetoing them out of hand.)
Many modern corperations are global in nature and instead of cuting green house gas emission these corperations will simply move thier emissions to the the nations with the free passes.
For this reason I don't think "Global" laws are going to be useful in cutting Greenhouse gases. Nations like the USA, India, China and Russia will simply Veto them making all such accords useless.
howard melton
God bless