Okay, maybe the title was a little overstated. President Obama didn’t say the official EPA ruling declaring CO2 emissions are bad for the planet meant that I couldn’t breathe…he just said I couldn’t exhale. I guess this is one of the “half truths” he accuses us who have different views of propagating. And clearly, there are options if I cannot, in my selfish, capitalist body, do what’s good for the planet. I am looking into surgical procedures to implant a CO2 converter into my sinus passages, so that after taking in good oxygen, only innocuous, although odious, gases are emitted back into the air. I do, however, worry that this would make me a politician.
I am also waiting to see if this surgery is covered under Obamacare, or covered by a grant from the Cap and Trade bill. I am considering another alternative by exercising my lungs to see if I can build them up so that I can only inhale in the U.S. and exhale when I get to a country that gets paid by the global warming initiative, because it is poor and is exempted from limits on CO2 emissions. They will welcome me, I suppose, because this will increase that country’s CO2 emissions, qualifying them for more funds from the concerned global community. I’ve already heard rumors that some countries are planning special discount travel packages for “exhalers”.
There are other alternatives being proposed by the administration, to be fair, that would allow me to exhale here at home. After all, the president doesn’t really want me to leave, I pay a lot of taxes and he plans for me to pay more. Further, he loses a convenient enemy if I leave. So, the plan would allow me to have a “carbon offset” to compensate for my selfish, greedy pollution by paying China or India to plant a tree to offset their pollution. And I can feel good about that innocent tree having a better chance at survival in China, where there will be some CO2 left that it needs to survive. (China and India have asked, however, that I pay for that tree in something other than U.S. dollars).
So, maybe I overreacted a little. I think I’ll just suck it up and get on board with this great social cause
The Old Man
The recent Copenhagen Climate Change Summit, which, with delicious irony, had snow and record cold temperatures, set a cap which would regulate any entity that had annual CO2 emissions exceeding 25,000 tons.
ReplyDeleteIf we define an “entity” as any agglomeration of individuals with a common interest or purpose, then this would include a city or town whose citizens are under common governance.
Now let’s set forth a few basic facts:
An average citizen, by the simple act of breathing, emits approximately .4 tons per year of CO2.
An aerobically fit citizen emits about 10 times that amount, or about 4 tons per year of CO2.
Thus, a town of roughly 20,000, with a 25% physically fit population, exceeds the annual Copenhagen limit. By this logic, the government can exercise population control, limiting cities to 20,000 people or less, and dictating how much exercise its citizens can engage in. Alternatively, for a town to be larger than 20,000, the government can limit the amount of aerobic exercise a citizen can undertake.
Even a died-in-the-wool socialist, from a left-leaning university, can see where this logic leads us. The more sedentary our populace, the less CO2 they’ll collectively emit. This is good for ‘The Old Man’ and me, since, when we are cited for producing too much CO2, who’s going to be able to catch us? Certainly not a government official seated behind his desk consuming donuts!
It’s even conceivable some positive consequences might accrue from declaring CO2 a poisonous gas. For example, could the collective gaseous rhetoric of Congress be henceforth limited for violating the CO2 limit? Could Speaker Pelosi’s government supplied Boeing 757 be grounded? The mind fairly dances at the prospect of such opportunity!
I'm not sure all of those facts are correct. The Copenhagen Accord was a last-minute, non-binding statement drafted behind closed-doors by the U.S., India, China, Brazil, and South Africa. It excluded the other 193 nations in attendance. It was not passed by vote but only “recognized”. The statement is quite vague and does not set any caps or regulate anything. Read it here:
ReplyDeletehttp://www.denmark.dk/NR/rdonlyres/C41B62AB-4688-4ACE-BB7B-F6D2C8AAEC20/0/copenhagen_accord.pdf
I think you may have confused Copenhagen with the U.S. EPA's determination that at this time, CO2 poses "a threat to human health and welfare", a statement which is uncontroversial among physicists or on the pages of any scientific journal, such as Science or Nature.
It has been proposed that the EPA could regulate emitters of more than 25,000 tons CO2 per year. This would “cover 83% of manufacturing emissions while affecting only 1.3% of manufacturing facilities” according to this Duke University policy brief:
http://www.nicholas.duke.edu/institute/25Kton.pdf
To me, it seems reasonable that the tiny fraction of factories responsible for most of the emissions into our atmosphere should be regulated.
I'm sorry if it was intended as a joke, but the argument about CO2 production by human breathing is only funny when coming from Fox News.
It is true that on average each person emits 0.4 tons of CO2 per year. The U.S. fossil fuel industry emits 6,201,690,000 tons per year, or 21 tons per American. So we could all stop breathing, or we could cut back on fossil fuel emissions by 2%. Your call.
(Source: http://www.epa.gov/climatechange/emissions/co2_human.html )
More importantly: respiration is part of a delicate balance between plants and animals, slowly evolving over millions of years, in which oxygen is converted to CO2 and back again. That is very different from burning fossil fuels, which suddenly introduces large amounts of CO2 into the ecosystem which had been sequestered for millions of years.
So there's really no comparison between breathing and the burning of coal, gas, etc.