OK, I'm going to quote this out of sequence, so be aware of that.
oldsalt1 wrote:crfriend wrote:
Please, please, stop quoting party-line propaganda.
How can you say please stop quoting party-line propaganda in the same post that you use carbon emissions and climate change. [...]
Coal can be burned in a much more efficient and less polluting manner than in the past.
Coal cannot be burned "more efficiently" than we were capable of doing in the 19th century, and that's down to basic chemistry. To "burn" means, fundamentally, to "oxidise", and that means to chemically combine carbon with oxygen. The most efficient way to do this is to fully combust the carbon into carbon dioxide using the oxygen present in the atmosphere. Inefficient burning results in carbon monoxide, which, interestingly yields more heat when re-combusted than partial combustion. So, no matter how you cut it, coal, which is fundamentally carbon, can, at best, only produce carbon dioxide and heat (which is what we use).
Oil and gas, which are
hydrocarbons, burn differently and with differing amounts of heat release based on the number of hydrogen atoms present versus the number of carbon atoms present. Thermal release of oxidising hydrogen is much higher than that of oxidising carbon, so the overall thermal release from hydrocarbon combustion is higher than that of straight carbon (coal). This is a fundamental law and cannot be tampered with. CO2 "sequestration" has been toyed with, but presents problems of its own.
China may not particularly care (nor may India), but neither do Ford, GM, Big Oil, or Big Coal. That's down to money, and the environment be damned. The latter bunch are who's calling the shots here.
In any event, I suspect that ship has sailed and we need to figure out now not how to slow the problem but how to survive the end result.
Romney care. The most effective tool in the democratic platform is when you can't solve a problem blame it on the other guy. No matter where it came from it doesn't work and clinton has no plan to fix it.
Note where I live. I pay attention. It was rammed in here by a Republican long before it got rammed home nationally. Clinton won't fix it because there's too much money involved. (See earlier commentary on the matter.)
And what is wrong with having the countries we protect cover some of the costs.
Not a whit, and that's why I'd zero-fund foreign military aid. Save that that'd get nowhere because, as I pointed out earlier, running guns is very profitable.
I am a little confused by what you are trying to say in the first part of the last comment on terrorism could you please elaborate
If we look at terrorism from a critical perspective, we'll see that random violence on its own has little effect on a population save to steel said population against the perceived aggressor. This was well pointed up by civil behaviour in the UK during The Blitz, and also in Germany, both in the second world war -- and both instances were largely state sponsored terrorism. For terrorism to actually work, it requires the active collaboration (whether tacit or not) of the government of the locality that's being "terrorised" -- hence Al Queda's entirely successful campaign in the early 2000s in the US when the local government immediately clamped down on its own citizens instead of focussing its efforts outwards.
Random violence against random people serves no purpose, and anybody who believes that it does is deluding himself. All it does is p!ss people off. Save for 2001-09-11, the US has only seen random outbursts of asinine behaviour that can serve no real purpose. Making matters worse, as the economy for the majority of the population in the US continues its implosion, this sort or random crap will only increase in intensity simply as folks who once had a part in things see that slip away and don't know where, or how, to hit back.
Killing ten people at once in a bombing is nothing; we kill that many in police shootings in two or three days (save that most of those never get mentioned). But, it gains attention, which yields another crackdown and erosion of personal liberty. Lambs to the slaughter.
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