Interesting Take On Global Warming Debate

From the "Why China Could Blame Its CO2 on West" article in today's Wall Street Journal:

To understand the deadlock in the debate on global climate change, take a look at your iPod.

The vast marjority of the world's MP3 players are made in China, where the main power source is coal. Manufacturing a single MP3 player releases about 17 pounds of planet-warming carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

iPods, along with thousands of other goods churned out by Chinese factories, from toys to rolled steel, pose a question that is becoming an issue in the climate-change debate. If a gadget is made in China by an American company and exported and used by consumers from Stockholm to São Paulo, should the Chinese government be held responsible for the carbon released in manufacturing it?

[clip]

Advocates of the consumption-based approach argue it solves one of the key problems associated with the Kyoto Protocol, known as carbon leakage. This is the ideas that countries can reduce their own emissions by sending dirty industries abroad. The same countries may still import the finished goods from the developing world, creating a situation in which global carbon emissions rise, even as individual nations meet their targets.

I found this thought provoking.
*

Ed Weaver Is A Nitwit 2.10.07

It's been two weeks since I commented on Ed Weaver's column. Not that he hasn't written a couple of columns in that time that were totally consistent with his skewed world view.

Two weeks ago, his topics were just boring. Quite tiresome.

This past Saturday, he quoted some climatologist that said there is no global climate change. When I read it, I was all happy inside know that the ability to shred the guy's credibility was merely a google away. I set the paper aside and now it is among the missing. I've decided it just isn't worth going out into the garage in the freezing cold just to make a point.

We are expecting 2-3 feet of snow tonight and tomorrow. The anti-climate change chorus will surely sing that they are right. See, how can there be global warming if we just got a ton of snow, they'll crow.

Well, considering it is the second week of February and this is our first storm of the winter should be some indication that there's a problem. Yes we are getting snow, um, three months late. Call me when the Greenland ice shelf is restored and icebergs stop splitting off the polar ice caps in miles-long sizes with increasing frequency.

I have to ask, what is in it for anti-climate change citizens? I mean, I get it why the scientists say it. That's all about the benjamins, my friends, all about the benjamins.

---

Ed Weaver's column appears every Saturday in The Record newspaper in Troy, NY. I'd say he's a right-wing conservative, but all indications are that he's even whackier than that. His views are so skewed, and based in a reality that I don't even recognize, that I think he sees the world through fun house mirrors, only it isn't funny. He's proof of the theory that hindsight is 20/20, only his vision is 20/100...20 for those things that support his views, 100 for those that don't.

Previous Posts:

1.27.07
1.20.07 || 1.13.07 || 1.6.07 || 12.30.06 || 12.23.06 || 12.16.06
12.9.06 || 12.2.06 || 11.25.06 || 11.18.06 || 11.11.06 || 11.4.06
10.28.06 || 10.17.06 || 10.10.06 || 10.3.06 || 9.26.06 || 9.19.06
*