Global Warming and what you can do to against it

Dear All,
As you know global warming is endangering the future of life on the
planet. It will also affect us;
rising sea levels, dwindling water supplies, mass deaths due to heat
waves, stoppage of the gulfstream, which
brings milder climate to north of Europe, super hurricanes, less food
due to droughts are some of the effects.
As you also know global warming is produced due to CO2 emissions
coming from burning of fossil fuels. So what
can every single person do to reduce global warming ?


1) Insulation: Do you know that you can save 50% of heating energy
(and money) by insulation ? Especially in
the times the financial crisis, you can make the insulation cheaper
and save the money when oil, natural gas and
coal prices are higher due to higher demand. What needs to be
insulated ? Firstly the Roof, since warmer air
goes up, then the windows (tripple glass or at least dual glass and
shutters for additional insulation at night,
and in summer time), then the outer walls. Also small cracks, leaks in
weatherstrips etc should be eliminated.
An infrared inspection of your house for heat losses would be the best
way to find out what else can be done.
A wintergarden will help heating your house additionally in winter
time.

2) Using rechargable batteries instead of alkaline batteries, and
charge them during less demand ours like at night
will also save a lot of energy and money.

3) Lightning; the use of Compact fluorescent lamps instead of
traditioanl light bulbs will save 80% of energy, the
use of very new LED lamps will save even more.

4) Buying local. Most of the energy is spent for transportation of
imported goods, especially food. By buying local
made food you not only save a lot of energy, but also create more jobs
at home.

5) Heating; there are several way to save energy and money by changing
the heating method; you can use the free heat
of the nature by adding a solar thermal equipment to heat the water
for taking showers and also to heat your home.
Additionally you can use a heating pump, which funtions like a reverse
fridge; it takes the heat of the outside and
transfers it to your home. You use much much less energy to do this
(electricity to pump a liquid).

6) Your car; by buying a hybrid car you save 30% of fuel, by
converting your car to CNG (compressed natural gas) you
can save a lot of CO2, since CNG has much less carbon but more
hydrogen, which will result in water (CH4 instead of
C8H18). CNG will also result in much more energy output per mass. The
conversion is not very expensive. It is totally
save, since the storage has to resist a certain pressure.
Of course there are also other smaller things you have to consider:
- Each 60 pounds increases fuel consumption by 10%.
- Aggressive driving (speeding, rapid acceleration, and hard braking)
wastes gas. It can lower your highway gas mileage
33% and city mileage 5%.
- Drive at lowest and constant rpms; 2000 rpm are enough; you can save
up to 30%. Even a Porsche can be driven at the
4th gear at 20 mph and at the 6th gear at 50 mph with 2.5 times less
fuel consumption.
- Avoid high speeds. Driving 75 mph, rather than 65 mph, could cut
your fuel economy by 15%.
- Use air conditioning only when necessary
- Keep tires properly inflated and aligned to improve your gasoline
mileage by around 3.3%.
- Replace clogged air filters to improve gas mileage by as much as 10%
and protect your engine
- Combine errands into one trip. Several short trips, each one taken
from a cold start, can use twice as much fuel as
one trip covering the same distance when the engine is warm. Do not
forget that in the first mile your car uses 8
times more fuel, in the second mile 4 times and only after the
fourth mile it becomes normal

7) Buying A++ or A+++ equipments. The extra money you pay for this
will be back in 1-2 years. It will save a lot of CO2.

8) Try to save also energy at your job; you can do it by insulation,
more efficient processes, heat recovery, more
efficient pumps/engines, low temperature processses, material
saving, water savings, optimization, automatic turning
off of unnecessary energy using processes, control if some
processes are really necessary (the change of some
processes makes other processes sometimes unnecesarry on which
nobody has thought about).

9) Solar cells for your own home; at the moment solar cells are very
cheap since there is an overproduction. These cells
can operate a fridge for example.

Regards.

 

Given the recent revelations concerning the integrity and efficacy of the
whole global warming mess, I would say that to ignore the entire "big lie"
would be the first and most germane action to take.

DaveD

 

AGW/climate change is the latest method of the Marxists grab for power.
It's all about "redistribution of wealth".
In Copenhagen,they're squabbling about who gets how much of the "wealthy
nations"(the US) money.

--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

 

Here all this time I thought China already had all the US' money...

 

Note Hillary is already talking about $100 billion USD for the -first- year
of the "progressives" world redistribution of (US)wealth.(just a start...)
That money has to come from *us*.
Through more taxes on energy.
Obama has already said he'd like to see gas prices go to $10/gal,....but
slowly.(So the frog doesn't jump out of the pot.)
That cuts your freedom to travel,and seriously affects your lifestyle.
He's said he wants to bankrupt the coal industry. 50% of US electric is
generated by coal.Obama has also said that he would not permit new nuclear
plants "without a safe storage site",and defunded Yucca Mountain,the only
such site in the near future.(and nothing else in the works...)
Wind and solar is not able to make up the difference,so there's your
reduction in standard of living coming at ya.
The US then becomes a Third World nation.



--
Jim Yanik
jyanik
at
localnet
dot com

 

No no no.

It will become a "developing" nation.

You can't say "third world" anymore because it's too close to the truth.
Euphemisms are the way of the future.

 

We're almost there, (third world status), and are broke to boot.

I so glad that I'm not one day younger than I am so that all you young
squirts will hafta deal with the mess...

JT

(Learning Chinese Just In case..)

 

Heh heh... "The Mouse That Roared."

Collect that foreign aid I say!

JT

 

As we know? Not really.

As we also don't know. That includes you, Cool Aid drinker.

Not much really, except adapt to it if and when it really comes. Just as
our predecessors did way before the Industrial Revolution.

Regardless.

 

The reason neither party ever stops foreign aid is because it has
always been a transfer of wealth from working people to corporations.
Foreign aid always requires the receiver to purchase goods from US
based corporations. So the taxpayer dollars go directly to the already
wealthy. Plus, of course, it sometimes does help some folks on the
other side.

 

The people see virtually /nothing/ of /any/ foreign aid.

Foreign aid goes the foreign /governments/. That's why foreign governments
clamor so loudly for it, especially the corrupt governments that run all
third-world countries. The more corrupt and bad they are, the more they
scream for aid dollars.

That the money eventually goes to "corporations" is meaningless. Corporate
bodies (such as the one you work for) produce just about everything the
world has that's of any value.

We're rich partly because of the concept of the limited-liability corporate
entity.

You want an excellent illustration of why third-world countries are poor?
Cameroon provides it.
<http://reason.com/archives/2006/03/01/why-poor-countries-are-poor>

Read the whole thing, all 4 pages. It's real eye-opener. And Cameroon is
the norm, not the excption.

 

While that may be more or less true, it's even more common that the
foreign aid $s are also used to repay loans to western banks that
gambled wrong on some foreign projects. I recall one particularly big
international loan crisis at around 1990 when some major banks were
heavily exposed to loans that should have been written off as bad ones
but the bnks kept them on their books so as not to scare their
investors. Eventually the government came to the rescue with major
donation to the World Bank and IMF, plus debt forgiveness (Poland got
two of those) which is just another term for our government paying off
those bad loans to the banks.

 

Everything is a corporation but actually I work for a non-profit. I
could make more money working for a big bank but I don't want to.

So Tegger, how come no one stops foreign aid? Republicans should be
screaming to stop giving our hard earned money to those losers. But it
never happens, does it? Because the wealthy in this countrly make
money from it. That's also why we have wars. We aren't fighting over
WMDs or "freedom" or "democracy". Read up on a true American hero -
Marine Corps Major General Smedley Butler. He won the Medal of Honor
twice, in two different wars. He fought in many wars. You won't see
any monuments for him though.

I'll summerize his beliefs: The wealthy in America realize they can
get a larger return on their investment abroad than they can at home.
The soldiers go over to protect the investments.

He was right.

And the next time you hear right wingers talking about "strict
contructionist judges", just think about how corporations twisted the
14 amendment to be about freedom for corporations:

http://www.reclaimdemocracy.org/personhood/

The Reason article was interesting but I have to wonder who supplies
the arms that keep the President in power. I can guess who's making
money there.

Here, one of my favoirte sites:

http://www.truthout.org/

 

Most governments are corporations too.

Ever heard of"rent seeking"? Combine that with governmental inertia and you
have an unstoppable machine.

It's the exact same thing that makes /any/ government program so hard to
kill once established.

/Everybody involved/ makes money from it, from the lowliest receptionist or
warehouse worker to the president of the NGO or government department.

It's the exact same thing that makes /any/ government program so hard to
kill once established.

 

wow, go to the top of the class!!!

You'll enjoy this:
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/113092ee-ce2f-11de-a1ea-00144feabdc0.html

 

I think that it can be safely stated that no government has ever created
wealth but corporations certainly have. That "wealth" then filters on
down in many different directions only to be diluted by a tax system
operated by the government.

And yes, create a program, DEA for example and try to kill the beast...
Never happen!

JT

 

Good read.

I have often wondered just what it takes to penetrate the barrier that
separates the super powerful and the rest of us...

JT

 

Interesting article, and I largely agree with it, except for John Kay's
final conclusions.

Nobody can practice "rent seeking" unless government employees help them
do it. "Rent seeking" is by definition a manipulation of state power.
Specifically, it's the manipulation of the state's power to control the
economy, its participants and its financial output.

The other day in the Wall Street Journal, there was a very interesting
article having to with, of all things, catfish.
<http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126144983541901133.html>

It seems that in 2002 American catfish producers were upset at the fact
that importers were bringing in Vietnamese catfish at a lower price than
domestic catfish sold for. So they successfully lobbied the federal
government to change the law so that Vietnemese catfish could no longer
be labelled as "catfish".

This failed to have an impact on sales, so in 2003 they lobbied
(successfully again) to have a high tariff imposed on the Vietnamese
product. That didn't help either.

Their next step was to play the "safety" card, but when the FDA ruled
that there was no evidence that Vietnamese catfish posed any risk to the
public, the US catfish lobby got legislators to put an amendment into to
the 2008 Farm Bill that transferred jurisdiction over catfish from the
FDA (the seafood regulator) to the USDA (which normally has nothing to
do with seafood), in the hopes that they might find more sympathetic
regulators in the USDA.

What's happening right now is that the industry lobby is trying to get
the USDA to REDEFINE Vietnamese catfish to be a CATFISH again (reversing
its 2002 efforts). Why? I'm not sure. But what /is/ certain is that the
lobby is /still/ trying to get government workers to ban foreign catfish
for "safety" reasons, thus providing the government-enforced subsidy
that US catfish producers lust for.

The important point here is simply that unless you have government
employees willing and able to use their power to control the economy,
"rent seeking" is /impossible/ no matter how big and rich a private
company is.

 

It's simple (and at the same time nearly impossible): Remove power from
the people who work for the state.

"Rent seeking" is quite simply impossible without a state power
apparatus to carry it out under force of arms. And that apparatus means
people no smarter or more knowledgeable than you or me, only wielding
power that you and I do not.

See this book for an excellent and eye-opening read:
<http://www.amazon.com/Myth-Robber-Barons-Burton-Folsom/dp/0963020315>

And if you truly care about this matter, you'll go through the many
cases of iniquity and rent-seeking outlined on the Institute for
Justice's Website:
<http://www.ij.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=552&Itemid=281>

 

one of the ones i like is mercury in tuna. usda acceptable mercury
content keeps being raised as these fish become more and more polluted,
and yet, the same tuna in the came cans, if opened in a fda lab, because
of it's mercury content, would be classified as toxic waste. why the
disparity? so that it doesn't "kill the industry"!

there's no disputing mercury toxicity. it's simply "**** the consumer"
- just as long as the few people that own the multi-million dollar tuna
industry keep coughing up their campaign contributions!