Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

To George and Thomas, I'll rethink my position on that. But I really don't mind the CAFE standards personally. I think most Americans don't. But a whole lot of us resent paying more taxes.

And neither one of you have addressed the inflationary pressures created by higher fuel costs. Is that not a factor in the equation as you see it?

And as for public transit we are doing more of that in the cities, but how does that help the small town rural folks? How does that work in Europe or doesn't half the population live outside the metropolitan areas there as it does here?

0 Replies

Foxfyre wrote:

And neither one of you have addressed the inflationary pressures created by higher fuel costs. Is that not a factor in the equation as you see it?

I think I did address it. I said that if you cut the payroll- or income tax by the same amount as you raise the gasoline tax, the overall impact on the rest of the economy cancels out. This means no inflationary pressures.

0 Replies

Thomas wrote:

Foxfyre wrote:
And neither one of you have addressed the inflationary pressures created by higher fuel costs. Is that not a factor in the equation as you see it?

I think I did address it. I said that if you cut the payroll- or income tax by the same amount as you raise the gasoline tax, the overall impact on the rest of the economy cancels out. This means no inflationary pressures.

Maybe. I'll have to research (sometime--not today) the affect of wages on the cost of goods and services versus the affect of fuel/transportation costs on the cost of good and services.

At first look, I think that only the self employed and those earning wages pay payroll taxes and only the top 60% of wage earners are paying much in the way of income taxes if any at all. A big percentage of the population is retired or not working for other reasons. But EVERYBODY who goes anywhere they can't walk or bicycle or ride horseback has to pay fuel costs and that is most of us. So those who can least afford to pay more in fuel/transportation costs do have to pay more while they are helped not at all by a decrease in payroll/income taxes.

And in your original argument you suggested a higher gasoline tax would keep people from driving as much. I see that as a disadvantage and reduction in quality of life.

No doubt I'm missing something here though and I will think on it further.

0 Replies

It's simply called the lack of public transportation.

0 Replies

I believe Thomas' views & arguments on the economics of the issue (gasoline taxes and managememnt of energy use, as well as compensatory reductions in other taxes) are compelling.

The problem here is that in politics the temptation to cherry pick elements of coordinated solutions for the sake of short term political gain by advocates, and the temptation of the political opposition to exploit public fears of the consequences even of balanced programs in the rare instances in which they are offered, are both almost always much too great. If we were to make the moderate increase in the gasoline tax and, at the same time, propose a compensatory reduction in the employee payroll tax, I suspect the Republicans wouold howl about the looming collapse of the pension system. We are left with the problem of Aesop's mice and the bell they decided to put around the cat's neck.

The examples of nations around the world, from the United States, to China, India, Russia and Europe, as well as many others, all show us that it will take a serious scarcity or a visible disaster to seriously alter the situation. The best we can expect from governments are pious promises (and treaties) with no serious intention of living up to them. The governments are, of course, merely a reflection of the people -- with all their confusion over competing issues, ignorance, selfishness, and short-sightedness.

However in some things the people are very wise. They generally don't trust authoritarian bodies that propose to know what is good for them (and impose it on them), even if it is done in the name of science. History shows this leads to far worse outcomes. Freedom is better.

0 Replies

cicerone imposter wrote:

It's simply called the lack of public transportation.

Can you cite evidence showing public transportation is always an energy saving feature for cities, towns, etc.

0 Replies

Here's Ezra Klein's (American Prospect, LA Times, et al) commentary on the gas tax vs CAFE standards that agrees with all of us. Smile

August 29, 2005
Gas Tax vs. Cafe Standards
There's been a lot of CAFE bashing lately, and much of it, I fear, is a bit misguided. Brad Plumer (who I don't mean to single out, he's just the most recent) joins in with a post blasting CAFE in favor of a gas tax, maybe with some means-tested rebates to ease up on the regressivity of it. A few things:

First, gas taxes are a very direct way of influencing fuel consumption, but it's not clear that, at attainable rates, they actually do influence fuel consumption. Raising the tax by the small, incremental amounts that could (and by could, I mean in a hypothetical world where this was somehow a viable policy option) pass would likely do little to stem consumption. That's because, as it turns out, gas hasn't even been near the top price folks are willing to pay. Most simply bear the burden, preferring to pay more rather than disrupt their lifestyle. The place gas taxes make a difference is, in the end, among the poor, but if we put in rebates like Brad is suggesting, it won't affect them all. I'd like to have a gas tax because I'm all for the added revenue, but it's not going to do much against consumption. If you can afford an Expedition, you can nearly always afford more at the pump.

Gas taxes, unlike CAFE increases, are basically impossible to pass. Particularly now. It's one thing to sneak in a gas tax when fuel is cheap, but convincing Americans of it when they're demanding a drop in gas prices is not, I think, a sound recipe for political survival. It just won't happen.

On the other hand, 93% of Americans support an increase in CAFE standards. That doesn't make it easy -- the auto industry is a powerful lobby. But they're going to fight a gas tax too, so I'd rather our politicians be battling back with an overwhelmingly popular proposal rather than running into industry opposition while carrying a bill Americans will stone them for passing.

The beauty of CAFE increases is that they're an action-neutral fix. Gas taxes requires a high enough price that Americans start driving less in order to conserve. So you need to jack up the price till filling up becomes so economically painful it actually changes the behavior of Americans. Demand an increase in CAFE standards and, no matter what happens, the country will use less gas. It's highly unlikely that everyone will decide their newer, more efficient car requires them to take a road trip.And it's not as if this is a serious hardship on the auto industry -- the technology is there, they've just been pushing it into more powerful cares rather than more efficient ones. We can change that, and it's be good for the country if we did.

Brad uses an analogy to make his point: the Smiths have a little, efficient wiener car they drive everywhere and the Browns have a wasteful SUV but they conserve fuel and bike to work. Brad argues that we want to penalize the Smiths, not the Browns. Why? Why should we penalize anyone? If we force a serious increase in CAFE standards, neither the Smiths nor the Browns feel the hurt, but both end up using less gas. And if, later, peak oil comes quick enough that we need a gas tax, we can implement one. But for now, why not achieve the goal -- lower total oil consumption -- through a non-punitive, broadly popular measure? Why isn't this a no-brainer?
SOURCE

0 Replies

http://www.cas.usf.edu/philosophy/mass/Stephanie.html

0 Replies

I asked for evidence to support your assertion, cicerone, but your link doesn't seem to help your faith in mass transit. The following quotes are from your link:

"A car occupied by one person produces on average 2.06 grams/passenger-mile (g/pm) of nitrogen oxides for work trips. A fully occupied transit bus, on the other hand, would produce 1.54 g/pm, while a fully occupied rail transit system would produce only .47 g/pm for the same distance. Similarly, the car occupied by one person would produce 15.06 g/pm of carbon monoxide and 2.09 g/pm of hydrocarbons. The bus would produce 3.05 g/pm and .2 g/pm of the same pollutants, respectively. From an environmental point of view, trains are the best form of transportation: a full passenger train produces only .02 g/pm pf carbon monoxide and .01 g/pm of hydrocarbons.

A bus with as few as seven passengers is more fuel efficient than the average automobile used for commuting. The fuel efficiency of a fully-occupied bus is six times greater than that of the average commuter's automobile, while the fuel efficiency of a fully-occupied rail car is fifteen times greater than that of the average commuter's automobile. A single person who commutes via a transit system instead of driving alone will save 200 gallons of gasoline per year. A 10% nationwide increase in transit ridership would save 135 million gallons of gasoline per year. This fuel efficiency results in personal savings and in a cleaner environment for all. "

A fully occupied bus is hardly the average for a bus system, so if you assume buses were half full all the time, the figure quoted shows buses emit about 50% more nitrogen oxides pollution into the atmosphere per passenger mile. This does not strike me as something to brag about, cicerone, and in fact makes mass transit bus systems worse than cars. For carbon monoxide, a bus with 1/5 capacity produces as much as if those passengers all drove cars.

In regard to fuel efficiency, it takes 7 bus passengers to equal the efficiency of an average automobile with 1 passenger. Your article brags about full buses being several times more efficient, but this ignores several factors, one being buses do not average anywhere near capacity, buses do not go directly to a destination as cars do, and cars average more than 1 passenger per vehicle. If you figure all of this out, buses do not represent much of a solution whatsoever in solving anything. It is a convenience for some people, and thats about all you can claim.

Rail systems are a different story, I think. I think they are more efficient than cars, but they are only practical for certain heavily traveled corridors, and therefore in the grand scheme of things can make little impact on the situation.

I hope I did the math correctly.

0 Replies

What do you mean by "rail?" Most underground systems ae "rail" systems. They're used in most great cities of the world, and there's a very good reason for it. We're talking about public transportation vs cars. If you can't figure it out, try harder.

0 Replies

What do I mean by "rail?" Rails are the long narrow metal objects on which the train wheels run, cicerone. Do you need to know anything else? By the way, you can have all the great cities, with their wonderful rail systems. I prefer to live outside of those congested, nightmarish concentrations of humankind.

0 Replies

But 50% of our population do not live in the great cities of the world. They live in places like Perryton TX, 7500 people if you count all the dogs and chickens, and two hours from the nearest airport of any size and a half day's drive or more to an airport where you can get decent fares to fly someplace. No cross country bus system has served that area for decades.

Or some live in places like Datil or Reserve or Clayton NM, two or more hours from ANYWHERE and even further from a bus station or an airport.

And large numbers of the people who DO live in the cities are on schedules incompatible with the bus service or work in a plant that it would take a dozen transfers to get to if the bus lines go there at all or are in towns like Albuquerque or Oklahoma City so spread out that a rail system serving most of the population would drain the state budget. The population is too sparse to afford to run the trains every 15 or 20 minutes as they can in the big cities. (What rail service we have here requires two or more hours wait between trains which makes it tough if you work odd schedules.)

There are always better ways to do just about anything, but to assume that everybody is in the same boat as those who live near mass transit systems or that mass transit is practical for everybody just doesn't mesh with the reality of the situation.

0 Replies

okie, We all have choices. Many prefer to live in cities like NYC, Chicago, London, Paris, Barcelona, Moscow, Tokyo, San Francisco and Washington DC. Your preference isn't everybody elses preference.

0 Replies

Walter Hinteler wrote:

Mine is totally different - especially here: the privatisation of railways has a significant social and ecoconomic side effect: ask those - private persons as well as businesses in e.g. Germany or (even better) the UK, who were/are affected by that.

I agree that, in comparison to most of Western Europe, the UK's railways are in relatively poor condition. I believe they are a partly private, partly government operation, both subject to intense regulation. If I am not mistaken, they turned over ownership (or control) of the rail network to private operators as a means to get an infusion of private capital for upgrades. However the government still kept a degree of control over the rates they charge the operators, this eliminating any real incentive for investment. Perhaps some of our British posters can tell this story better.

Capitalism works well: hermaphrodites usually don't.

0 Replies

goddamn NASA commies...

Quote:

By 2040: an Arctic with no ice?
Lewis Smith

Ice is melting so fast in the Arctic that the North Pole will be in the open sea in 30 years, according to leading climatologists.

Ships will be able to sail over the top of the world and tourists will be able visit what was, until climate change, one of planet's most inaccessible landscapes.

American researchers, assessing the impact of carbon emissions on world climate have calculated that late summer in the Arctic will be ice-free by 2040 or earlier, well within a lifetime.

Some ice would still be found on coastlines, notably Greenland and Ellesmere Island, but the rest of the Arctic Ocean, including the pole, would be open water.

The researchers, who were funded by Nasa, said that the ice retreat is likely to remain fairly constant until 2024 when there will be a sudden speeding up of the process.

In 30 to 50 years, they concluded, summer sea ice will have vanished from almost the entire Arctic region.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2500054,00.html

0 Replies

cicerone imposter wrote:

What do you mean by "rail?" Most underground systems ae "rail" systems. They're used in most great cities of the world, and there's a very good reason for it. We're talking about public transportation vs cars. If you can't figure it out, try harder.

Public transportation may be is viable in densely populated areas like in Europe, but not everywhere.
Even here in France, the tendency is to live, work and shop more and more in suburbs because you can have cheaper and bigger houses in a greener environment. So the trend is not favorable to public transportation and any grand scale public meddling in the way people move is not desirable.

Up to now I see many side-effects of rail prioritization (in France anyway):
- It costs the taxpayers a fortune. The national rail needs more the 10 billions Euros/year in direct aid. The municipalities tramways are as costly: a town like Bordeaux spends more than 300 M euros (1/3 of its budget) annually in subsidizing its tramway, not counting the huge debts it must pay back, if ever, for investing in its costly toy. With the billions $ money spent in this transportation scheme which is used for not even 5% of all individual moves, the town could have offered to every citizen more than 10 bikes.
- It sucks up so much money that nothing is left for bus transportation which would have been much more useful to isolated villages and the elderly. So what the governement does it to forbid any private company from setting up transportation services which would kill the nationalized regional railway system ! Yes you heard well: in France, we are regulated by a 1927 law which prevents, with some rare exceptions, private bus companies to establish where they want, even if there is a real need of public service, all to protect the inefficient public sector.
- It doesn't encourage individual vehicules such as bikes or motorcycles. France has the lowest rate of bike users compared to its northern neighbours (Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands). As a bike lover, I can tell you that the infrastructure is simply not here and it's far too dangerous to ride by bike in towns.
- The users of public transportation are taken hostage several times every years by the rail workers and their communist unions. Each time, it costs the nation a fortune in lost labour time, anxiety, missed business opportunity.

So public transportation, yes, but not everywhere and not at all costs.

0 Replies

blatham wrote:

goddamn NASA commies...

Quote:
The researchers, who were funded by Nasa, said that the ice retreat is likely to remain fairly constant until 2024 when there will be a sudden speeding up of the process.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,3-2500054,00.html

After 2024, a "sudden speeding up". Wow, admire the date precision. Maybe that's when the study's author will retire. :wink:

But hey, wait a minute, we are saved. The article concludes by"
Dr Jeff Ridley, a climate scientist at the Met Office's Hadley Centre, was cautious about the results of the study and pointed to previous research which has suggested it will be 65-75 years before the summer ice vanishes. "All our models and the other global models in the IPCC report indicate that the ice won't disappear until 2070-80," he said."

BTW, do you know that Artic temperature is not higher now than in the 30s ?

0 Replies

miniTAX wrote:

- It sucks up so much money that nothing is left for bus transportation which would have been much more useful to isolated villages and the elderly. So what the governement does it to forbid any private company from setting up transportation services which would kill the nationalized regional railway system ! Yes you heard well: in France, we are regulated by a 1927 law which prevents, with some rare exceptions, private bus companies to establish where they want, even if there is a real need of public service, all to protect the inefficient public sector.

I would really like to see links for that, recent, not some old ones.
(Because in that case, I have to through away my collection of actual French laws Crying or Very sad

)

miniTAX wrote:

- It doesn't encourage individual vehicules such as bikes or motorcycles. France has the lowest rate of bike users compared to its northern neighbours (Germany, Scandinavia, the Netherlands). As a bike lover, I can tell you that the infrastructure is simply not here and it's far too dangerous to ride by bike in towns.

Certainly it's the best to compare oneself to most developped countries - but did you ever look at bicycling in the UK ..... or even in the USA?
(Besides that, having travelled some 10,000 miles in France, I think, you see cyclists there more frequently than in Germany (some 100,000s miles) or Scandinavia (some 1,000s miles).
But that is only personal. anecdotical knowledge.

miniTAX wrote:

- The users of public transportation are taken hostage several times every years by the rail workers and their communist unions. Each time, it costs the nation a fortune in lost labour time, anxiety, missed business opportunity.

So public transportation, yes, but not everywhere and not at all costs.

And you are sure, such changes after privatisation? Ever compared it to the UK (or ever read a comparison pre- and after the privatisation in the UK, to ask differently)?

0 Replies

Quote:

BTW, do you know that Artic temperature is not higher now than in the 30s ?

My god, man! You must rush that data off to NASA immediately. Imagine them omitting thermometers from their toolkit.

0 Replies

Walter writes

Quote:

Certainly it's the best to compare oneself to most developped countries - but did you ever look at bicycling in the UK ..... or even in the USA?
(Besides that, having travelled some 10,000 miles in France, I think, you see cyclists there more frequently than in Germany (some 100,000s miles) or Scandinavia (some 1,000s miles).
But that is only personal. anecdotical knowledge.

A few people here ride bicycles to work but they are extremely rare mostly due to the hazards of negotiating rush hour traffic and the distances/time involved. Also there is the problem of what do they do with the bicycle once they get to work. A lot of people cycle nevertheless and you find bike lanes all over town. But people are cycling for recreation and exercise and/or competition, not for transportation.

0 Replies

Global Warming...New Report...and it ain't happy news

Related Topics

Quick Links

My Account

able2know