YOu gotta love Obama...

[Evermore]

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29490531/wid=18298287


I love that he is undoing the damage that turd Dubya did....

[ClakarEQ]

/agree

[Gaazy]

I think theres more important things for him to worry about right now, but whatever lol



edit: ps no, you dont have to love him More than anything really, its just the fact that he is the president in general, not because of who he is in particular. Just a matter of time before he gets caught in some crooked scam to line his pockets. thats what that position revolves around, who gets the money

[Lueyen]

The Bush-era rule reduces the mandatory, independent reviews government scientists have performed for 35 years.

That part I have very little issue with, if any at all and it would likely be on a case by case basis.

It also prohibits federal agencies from assessing a project's contribution to global warming when they evaluate its effect on species.

Reversing that I do take issue with, it would basically give federal agencies the ability to deny any project they felt like with a blanket excuse, because it can not be definitely calculated and proven. Just imagine being the guy in the Arizona desert being told by the federal government that you can't do xyz because it will kill polar bears. If you don't find that concept laughably absurd then I submit to you that you view environmentalism from more of a perspective of something akin to religious faith then you do actual fact.

[Drem]

Why do you just assume people will abuse everything? It's your type of negative attitude that holds people back from making real progress toward real issues. Like, uh, the fucking planet dying because Americans and Chinese wanna make money with huge, world-ruining industry

And so you don't care about actual scientific appraisal (pretty much as close to fact as you could even get) because you'd rather let random idiot in Arizona do xyz just so he can make money.

You have to be joking

[Evermore]

It also prohibits federal agencies from assessing a project's contribution to global warming when they evaluate its effect on species.

Reversing that I do take issue with, it would basically give federal agencies the ability to deny any project they felt like with a blanket excuse, because it can not be definitely calculated and proven. Just imagine being the guy in the Arizona desert being told by the federal government that you can't do xyz because it will kill polar bears. If you don't find that concept laughably absurd then I submit to you that you view environmentalism from more of a perspective of something akin to religious faith then you do actual fact.[/quote]


So it is ok with you that habitat of endangered species is compremised?

[Griever]

Why do you just assume people will abuse everything? It's your type of negative attitude that holds people back from making real progress toward real issues. Like, uh, the fucking planet dying because Americans and Chinese wanna make money with huge, world-ruining industry

And so you don't care about actual scientific appraisal (pretty much as close to fact as you could even get) because you'd rather let random idiot in Arizona do xyz just so he can make money.

You have to be joking

Shouldn't laws and policies be created with the fact in mind that people will abuse them? If you don't to that, then no law or policy will be able to regulate anything.

Evermore, did you just see that Lueyen posted, assumed it opposed your view, and stop reading? That was a stupid question.

[Arlos]

The problem with what Leuyen said is that global warming generated in Arizona DOES effect the polar bears, among a great many other things, and as such needs to be just as regulated as if it were located in the high arctic.

-Arlos

[Drem]

Why do you just assume people will abuse everything? It's your type of negative attitude that holds people back from making real progress toward real issues. Like, uh, the fucking planet dying because Americans and Chinese wanna make money with huge, world-ruining industry

And so you don't care about actual scientific appraisal (pretty much as close to fact as you could even get) because you'd rather let random idiot in Arizona do xyz just so he can make money.

You have to be joking

Shouldn't laws and policies be created with the fact in mind that people will abuse them? If you don't to that, then no law or policy will be able to regulate anything.

Yes. And they are. That's not what I really meant, sorry. In this particular issue, I feel like Lueyen's more concerned with someone being able to make a living (by any means, apparently) than saving the ecosystems of this planet's slowly-dwindling wildlife. It's not going to come back. We aren't going to wake up one day and discover 50 new species, or however many we've made extinct since humans started running the show

[Lueyen]

Drem - Are you really that naive, that you believe just because a law is well intentioned that it can be broadly written with a huge potential for abuse and some people won't take advantage of it? By the way, laws regulating what the United States Federal government can use in it's approval or not of a project do not regulate China who by the way isn't even in the same ball park when it comes to environmental consciousness, I'm not sure where that factored in, but I suspect it's just the hysterical ranting of someone who's had their faith challenged much like the following:

Like, uh, the fucking planet dying

The planet is not a living organism, therefore it can not die.

since humans started running the show

We aren't running anything. We are a part of a very complex system, but we don't by any stretch of the imagination control it. If tomorrow monitoring in California indicated a major earthquake was about to occur, what would we do to prevent it? Why haven't we stopped hurricanes from hitting the south eastern US year after year? Running the show my ass. This complex system is also not as fragile as the global warming charlatans would have you believe. The very first assumption you have to make to believe that this complex system is in any danger of being disrupted by us is that it operates around a condition that is most conducive to survival of current life on the planet. I mean really if the planet as a whole is supposed to maintain a relatively steady current temperature average for all time, and we are somehow throwing that off balance, what caused these types of temperature variations before we arrived on the scene?

And yet you would still have our federal government making policy decisions based on the fantasy that we somehow have the ability to calculate a projects impact on the world climate... Even meteorologists can not predict with any accuracy what a regional temperature will be a year from now, often times they aren't even accurate at a week. Honestly do you really believe we have managed to accurately determine the global affect if any, that any project will have when we don't even understand the complexity of our weather system on a regional level (even from a global stand point) to the point we can determine what the temperature will be in every city in the US on this day next month with precision accuracy?

Now you have Arlos asserting that all of this in the context of polar bears is perfectly sensible. I used polar bears specifically, because they are yet another tool in the arsenal of the global warming hype mongers. The reality of the situation is that Polar bears are not listed as endangered. They are listed as threatened.. I know Bush's fault :P. Really the problem is that no global census data on polar bear populations exists, only regional. In some regions polar bear populations have increased in others they have decreased. In short we don't know, but concerns about the loss of their habitat earned them a listing of threatened.

So you want to base policy and project affirmation on a subjective guess about how it might affect a population of animals that we think maybe might be in trouble somewhere else on the globe?

[brinstar]

The planet is not a living organism, therefore it can not die.

wrong

haven't you ever played final fantasy games

[Lueyen]

The planet is not a living organism, therefore it can not die.

wrong

haven't you ever played final fantasy games

How the hell did I get on Gaia?

[Drem]

Drem - Are you really that naive, that you believe just because a law is well intentioned that it can be broadly written with a huge potential for abuse and some people won't take advantage of it? By the way, laws regulating what the United States Federal government can use in it's approval or not of a project do not regulate China who by the way isn't even in the same ball park when it comes to environmental consciousness, I'm not sure where that factored in, but I suspect it's just the hysterical ranting of someone who's had their faith challenged much like the following:

Like, uh, the fucking planet dying

The planet is not a living organism, therefore it can not die.

since humans started running the show

We aren't running anything. We are a part of a very complex system, but we don't by any stretch of the imagination control it. If tomorrow monitoring in California indicated a major earthquake was about to occur, what would we do to prevent it? Why haven't we stopped hurricanes from hitting the south eastern US year after year? Running the show my ass. This complex system is also not as fragile as the global warming charlatans would have you believe. The very first assumption you have to make to believe that this complex system is in any danger of being disrupted by us is that it operates around a condition that is most conducive to survival of current life on the planet. I mean really if the planet as a whole is supposed to maintain a relatively steady current temperature average for all time, and we are somehow throwing that off balance, what caused these types of temperature variations before we arrived on the scene?

And yet you would still have our federal government making policy decisions based on the fantasy that we somehow have the ability to calculate a projects impact on the world climate... Even meteorologists can not predict with any accuracy what a regional temperature will be a year from now, often times they aren't even accurate at a week. Honestly do you really believe we have managed to accurately determine the global affect if any, that any project will have when we don't even understand the complexity of our weather system on a regional level (even from a global stand point) to the point we can determine what the temperature will be in every city in the US on this day next month with precision accuracy?

Now you have Arlos asserting that all of this in the context of polar bears is perfectly sensible. I used polar bears specifically, because they are yet another tool in the arsenal of the global warming hype mongers. The reality of the situation is that Polar bears are not listed as endangered. They are listed as threatened.. I know Bush's fault :P. Really the problem is that no global census data on polar bear populations exists, only regional. In some regions polar bear populations have increased in others they have decreased. In short we don't know, but concerns about the loss of their habitat earned them a listing of threatened.

So you want to base policy and project affirmation on a subjective guess about how it might affect a population of animals that we think maybe might be in trouble somewhere else on the globe?

Wow congrats you just misinterpreted every single thing I wrote and took it about as literally as any republican idiot that can't see the truth would. You are part of the problem. I rest my case.

How come we can't stop hurricanes? Because we're too fuckin busy CREATING them. Don't you get it? Everything we do has an affect on something in the world. Nothing goes "unchecked". So instead of fucking it up with chemicals, oil spills, new malls, the disappearance of the night time sky due to big cities (i'll explain this since someone's bound to go "hahaha what the FUCK are you talking about?!". big cities have ruined bat and bird populations. think birds migrating toward a city at night because they thought it was the sun rising. then they're off course and sometimes the whole flock'll die), and whatever else we do to ruin ecosystems and animal habitats, maybe we should be paying attention to things we could do to make it all better. But, like I said, people like you think it's a waste of time. Who really is being naive? I think you're disappointingly misguided about this issue and you need to read between the lines and stop taking everything literally when it's obviously not. It doesn't make you cool, it makes you look like an anal prick

oh PS: like America's vast amount of atmosphere-ruining industry, China's pretty damn close. I have no clue why you brought up governing policies or whatever stupid bullshit you were trying to one-up me about. I mentioned China for one simple reason and that's the fact that they pollute the world almost as much as we do.

All people like you do is sit there and try as hard as you can to argue against it when there are mountains and mountains of evidence that all we do is essentially bad for the world. Someone wrote a book on what would happen if we suddenly disappeared and the bottom line is that nothing ont he entire world would miss us. Everything would return to a much healthier state and the only things that would miss mankind would be things we created, like the AIDs epidemic, e. coli, chicken pox, etc.

I know you're trying to tap your vast wealth of useless trivia but it's totally pointless. Careless people like you are the reason that all these problems are starting to pop up in the first place. And we've only had industry for what.... a century and a half? Can you imagine how fucked-up everything'll be for our great grandchildren? The river next to my parents' house was pretty blue 20 years ago and now it's a beautiful dull green. Yum. The evidence of us ruining EVERYTHING is all around you. I'm sorry you refuse to accept it

It's not a faith, it's reality

[Arlos]

If you want to, Lueyen, treat it as a case of Pascal's wager.

If humans can't effect the world climate, yet we act as if we can and clean up the environment, what happens? We end up with better air, water, soil, and perhaps keep some animal species alive that would otherwise have died out. (though not necessarily through a fault of ours).

If humans CAN effect the world climate, and we act, then wow, we just saved our asses from famine, coastal flooding from rising sea levels, etc. etc. etc.

On the other hand, if humans CAN effect the climate, and we don't act, we're fucked.

4 possible pairings of causality and response. In both cases where we respond as if we can effect the outcome, we end up with an improvement to our condition here on the planet. On the other hand, NOT acting has a 50% chance of wreaking massive harm upon our species.

Just by logic here, it would seem to be to our benefit to act, regardless of whether or not you accept the basic premise or not.

-Arlos

[Reynaldo]

If humans CAN effect the world climate, and we act, then wow, we just saved our asses from famine, coastal flooding from rising sea levels, etc. etc. etc.

On the other hand, if humans CAN effect the climate, and we don't act, we're fucked.

-Arlos

What's funny is that's pretty much the layman's outline for the roots of religion and faith.

[Arlos]

As I said, it's Pascal's wager re-worded, which is what you're referring to. (just google it, if you're not familiar with the exact term.)

-Arlos

[Harrison]

I'm half with Lueyen on this one.

I don't give two shits about birds flying towards cities at night because they think it's the rising sun and they die.

Evolution at work as far as I'm concerned. The more intelligent of the species, if there are any, will survive and spread their genetic material onto the next generation, etc.

What are we supposed to do? Shut our lights off at night so stupid animals can migrate?

Just because we are self-aware that doesn't remove us from the "natural order" of things.

This doesn't mean I support massive industrial pollution. I just don't give two shits about tertiary effects on animals from legitimate societal growth. Limits are necessary but if whiny hippies had their way we'd be fucking swamped with so much red tape we'd just end up falling behind as a result.

[Arlos]

The problem is, Harrison, is that the more we learn, the more we find out how interconnected the biosphere is. Bird dies out could easily mean, for example, that a particular insect now has far fewer natural predators, and you get a population explosion, which ruins crops and destroys harvests, or has to be put down with harsh pesticides which are cancer-causing to us in the long run.

Look at what the destruction of all the marshlands at the end of the Mississippi caused: New Orleans going swimming. Hundreds of years ago, there were huge amounts of marshlands and barrier islands down there, so the force of the hurricanes and the storm surge would get absorbed and wouldn't reach the city anywhere near as strongly. Now, almost all those areas are gone, and the force of Katrina smacked into the city and the lake next to it unabated. The loss of those marshlands and barrier islands are the "tertiary result" of societal growth, using more land for housing, and deliberate clearing of "useless" land so people could have beachfront homes, etc.

As for your birds and lights question, no, obviously we can't have our cities go dark, but maybe we can work up street lighting that doesn't look like sunlight to birds, hm?

In any case, you can't just ignore those "tertiary effects", because they stand very real chances of turning around to bite us in the ass, in ways we may not have any idea about until years later when it is too late.

-Arlos

[Drem]

I'm half with Lueyen on this one.

I don't give two shits about birds flying towards cities at night because they think it's the rising sun and they die.

Evolution at work as far as I'm concerned. The more intelligent of the species, if there are any, will survive and spread their genetic material onto the next generation, etc.

What are we supposed to do? Shut our lights off at night so stupid animals can migrate?

Just because we are self-aware that doesn't remove us from the "natural order" of things.

This doesn't mean I support massive industrial pollution. I just don't give two shits about tertiary effects on animals from legitimate societal growth. Limits are necessary but if whiny hippies had their way we'd be fucking swamped with so much red tape we'd just end up falling behind as a result.

I think you're taking it way out of proportion. Why can't we just put covers on the top of all our street lights? OMFG that's so hard. I don't understand being concerned about one thing (gas pollution) but not another topic in the same vein (light pollution). They both have negative effects. We don't need billions of fuckin lights without covers shining up into the sky. National Geographic did a fantastic article about it. Right around the same time a coallition of scientists lobbied to pass new laws about night-time lighting issues. Putting covers over the top of the lights to direct light down in a few cities, since, let's face it, we don't really need to light above us anyways. If you look into light pollution at all you'll find that something like 2/3 of Americans and Europeans can't even see the Milky Way anymore because nighttime isn't even dark anymore unless you're out in the countryside

And keep in mind that most people lobbying against light pollution think it's okay in places of excess, like Las Vegas, where you can see the light beam from the Luxor's pyramid tip from outer space

It's not like "holy shit we need to stop EVERYTHING and live in little huts without electricity and have donkeys with pots clinging on their side".... it's just like.... i think it's a good thing that we're starting to realise the size of the footprint we've left on the world as a species and that we're trying to change things now. The "green" movement used to be a niche thing that probably everyone (including myself) could've cared less about a few years ago. But now it's huge....

[Tossica]

Just because we are self-aware that doesn't remove us from the "natural order" of things.

That's exactly what it does, dumbass.

[Lueyen]

Actually Harrison it's not that I don't give a shit, Drem characterized my position as such because I don't blindly accept what he does. I do however believe in an intelligent approach to environmentalism, vs knee jerk reactions based on what some people think maybe might be a problem (Very few who frequent this board are old enough to remember the concerns in the 70's over global cooling). If we are going to start citing global warming as an environmental impact reason to prohibit certain activities, then I would demand we understand our impact to a rational degree. What is not rational is to start ranting about how we are "killing the planet" or how we are causing weather events (who made the hurricanes, before we arrived on the scene?). Yea Drem I only addressed them as literal because you were exaggerating to the extreme. One area where I might find more agreement with Drem as to causes would be in disease. As our world shrinks due to modern travel, people are more often exposed to bacteria and viruses from around the globe to a degree that they would not have been a century ago. I also believe that advances in medicine are met with newly evolved viruses and diseases. The answer however is not to stop making advances in medicine to avoid more resilient and more dangerous strains.

It's almost a pessimistic vs an optimistic view in some cases. I believe that we have one vast, barely tapped inexhaustible natural resource, which is the human mind. We can meet environmental concerns with solutions that do not require huge sacrifice from living standards, economic growth, and peoples livelihood. CFL's are an awesome example. I however don't like government mandate curtailing the use of old fashioned light bulbs. First of all the benefits are so attractive that you don't need laws to usher in their main stream usage, their longevity, and cost savings on the electric bill is far more then enough to do that. I also personally prefer the light they generate in comparison to old bulbs.. but that is a preference. People have raised some valid concerns, but really just because some people might feel better about using regular old light bulbs in the lamp on their child's night stand, still using CFL's throughout the rest of their home, do we really need government telling them they can't have that peace of mind? Organizing disposal so the mercury doesn't end up in landfills, sure legislate something to take care of that, even a core charge if you want, but mandating their supply as the only supply is a little nutsy and something that would eventually happen on it's own for all intensive purposes. Slight sidetrack there, but seriously I don't believe there is a problem we can not eventually come up with a good solution(and by that I mean a win/win) for, as long as we understand completely the problem (and of course that the problem is real).

[Harrison]

Just because we are self-aware that doesn't remove us from the "natural order" of things.

That's exactly what it does, dumbass.

You're a moron.

[Tossica]

Just because we are self-aware that doesn't remove us from the "natural order" of things.

That's exactly what it does, dumbass.

You're a moron.

Ok, dumbass.

[Eziekial]

There is a campaign to prevent people from feeding marine mammals (it's apparently against the law) due to the dependence they form from the handouts. As I was listening to this voice talk about how terrible it was for animals to learn to rely on man for their survival I was thinking... aren't we doing just that with all the free stuff we give to the poor, homeless, banks, etc? So having fellow humans learn to live on handouts is ok, but don't you dare drop some lettuce near that manatee!

[KaiineTN]

Isn't it in the Government's best interest to have people depend on them? To have people think that it can solve all our problems? If people believe that, they'll gladly hand more and more power and money to it. When things go bad? Oh, let's give the government more power and money so they can fix it! They must not have had enough, that's why it happened!

When the government runs things, it becomes monopolistic and cuts off competition, and when there's no competition, it's pretty much inevitable that the quality will end up being far lower than it would be if there was competition.

They want you to have faith in government, not faith in liberty, or freedom, or free markets, or yourself, etc. They want you to concede that they know what is best for all and that you should just smile and nod while offering your wallet.