Another Tar Sands "Black eye"!

Have you been to china? There are big black clouds from burning high sulfer coal without scrubbers. The chinese oil companies have been buying up canadian oil sands and low quality high sulfur saudi oil that no one else wants. There foreign policy goes so far to get oil that they mortgage any semblance of decency to regularly defend the the genocidal regime in sudan to have access to its oil fields.

If you note the great leap forward destroyed agriculture in china to an extent that for over a generation a typical greating was "have you eaten today". It makes to failed policies that lead to the dust bowl look positively benign.

So what are you suggesting to replace capitalism. The more power government leaders seem to have the more damage to the economy and the environment. I don't see repealing capitalism without an uglier government face. The eco problems in alberta are about how that government operatates, there can be small government looking out for public good without owning the means of production. MMS/BP disaster included not only serial environmental risk taker BP, but the active interest of MMS whose employees profited from oil revenue and don't get hurt by environmental disaster.

 

first of all; let me correct some misconceptions you have over my post. i am not saying that china is a wonderful place to live or that they had not made many mistakes in the past, etc.

i only stated that they will accomplish much much more in the effort to clean up their act than we will, will do it in much less time, spend much less money, etc.

and ya, i saw the Olympics and sure they made mistakes in the past and they are working to correct them.

what i dont understand is your implication that we are any better environmentally because we are not. we are much much worse. if we had the population that China had we most likely would have already gone past the point of no return.

sure China made mistakes when providing energy but that is because they came into the game very late and had to do massive buildups of any available energy source and that was coal. it was mismanaged and the sheer volume of people and demand aggravated the situation quite a bit.

but not only are we no better, we were actually much worse and we have no excuses. we have known for years we could not do what we were doing. China made a decision to build an infrastructure to provide a basic needs to its people.

we have destroyed our environment over the need to pamper ourselves in an attempt to drown the citzenery in opulence and excess.

once again, dont knock China until you take a real good look around this country

 

Beijing was sanitized for the olympics. It is much worse on the ground. I've done work on some joint ventures in mainland china and have sold to taiwan. The only way I think for China to not greatly increase polution as the population gets wealthier is for Foreign companies to give them pollution control technology.

I'm not sure how you get there? China is a beautiful country with resourceful people. The government really is interested in expanding the economy without much concern for the environment. The reason per capita energy use is much lower than in a capitalist country like singapore or malaysia is people have less money to buy polluting things, that has been changing rapidly.

What figures are you using for comparison. Seriously if you have a chance go there and see things on the ground. Polution/kwh or any meaningful measure is much higher than in the United states. The europeans have basically exported all their poluting industries to countries like china so you need to allocate some of those sources to them and also the united states that buys a great deal of products that china polutes and makes. Mining techniques in Canada or china are no longer tolerated in the united states, so mined products like rare earth metals have entirely moved over, though might move back.

I have been around the country, well I've missed two states. The biggest knock on china is it is supporting genocide in its allies that supply it with oil. The Chinese, like the US governement should be held accountable for human rights violations. To be fair the europeans and japanese taught the chinese government. I was still shocked to see all of the air pollution on my first trip to china. I've been told before the clean air act, cities like Pittsburgh looked as polluted. Mexico city in all the dirt and smog looks relatively clean.

 

It was because our citizens have some kind of voice that we don't have shitholes like the Pittsburg pre-1970 anymore (though Commerce City, CO is close). Without that, nothing would have changed. Gov't is the balance to business, not the replacement for it. If you go too far to the gov't side you get communism, go too far the other way you get fascism. Both are bad and really quite similar to each other.

 

Yeah I think you soun silly but I dont know what a flame suit is for? :cheer2:

What are you saying? :blah:

 

I suggest socialism, which is NOT Soviet-style state capitalism, and is NOT government ownership. The government has an important role in regulation (something recent governments have abandoned at the behest of their corporate owners). But socialism, as I said before, is when the workers own the factories. Not when party or government apparatchiks run everything and pretend to be acting on behalf of the workers, but when the workers themselves own and run their factories

You say that you do not see "repealing" capitalism without an uglier government face. Well, I see moving from capitalism to socialism precisely by making government less ugly.

 

I no who you are you made fun of my mistake on that other thred about UCLA. yopu know what I mean there so lets get that strate.

You want hard work to not be rewarded and give to those that dont work hard with your socilisit crap. You even use big rusky sounding word like apparatichuks with this commy stuff longign for the day of the bolshevix. :welcome:

God will not let this hapen thank you very much. If a fellow works hard he can get ahead cause we have ben gifted with the tool to accel and be sucessful. I and other hard workers need no help form the goverment taking my money and givin it to deadbeats like soros or watever his name is. :cheer2:

 

Hey Jocko - helpful tip - you might want to at least run your posts through a spell-checker so you at least look like you got through grade school... Because as it is now - you have no credibility with spelling like that.

 

Yes Im not as smart as you so I dont matter. Tipical arrognat condesing lib know it all trying to tell us what to do. :cheer2:

How do you do a spell check? :welcome:

 

i was living in Riverside, CA in the early 80's before CARB and yes it was pretty bad. on stage 3 alerts, being outside was the same as smoking a ½ pack of cigarettes.

now we have made progress but its simply too slow. our investment into renewables is just to paltry and we are running out of time. the benefits of solar, EV tech, etc. all of it would be homegrown, all of it would reduce our foreign debt, reduce the strength of our enemies, etc. but its also a major disruption of a huge cash flow and that is the reason we have literally gone nowhere in decades.

what business is fully aware of and what they currently are trying to prevent is that new technology only gets better as people use it and that will happen when EVs are widely available. right now they have drawbacks that will disappear when enough people are exposed to the technology and people figure out a better way.

the Prius is a perfect microcosm of that idea. no one, especially Toyota, built the car thinking that people would regularly get 50% greater than the stated EPA figures. it has almost created a new segment of society and maybe that is overstating it a bit and i am blinded by my involvement here (as if there is something better to do!!)

the same thing will happen with EVs. when there are a few hundred thousand Leafs out there, someone will figure out a way to get 200 miles on a charge by getting better batteries, better motor, better charge management, better something and big business knows that.

problem is when there is a half trillion on the table annually, its hard to not rely on at least part of that gravy train in one way or another. so besides technological hurdles that are real that EVs face, we also have political and sociological hurdles that are in many cases manufactured to be much more than they really are all because of the way money runs this country. lets face it, one of the easiest jobs on the planet is creating doubt out of nothing at all.

now, i dont believe China is a great place to live nor do they have a wonderful ideology. my one and only chance to visit China back in the 80's i nixed because of the fact that we would have to be escorted the entire time we would have been there. since i was active duty military at the time, we were not really welcome to wander around.

they still dont treat their people well and i fully believe that we would be horrified if we truly knew everything that went on within their borders, but i cant find fault with the amount of effort they are putting into EV technology.

granted one right does not correct a thousand wrongs but the past is done. we can only condemn history so much. what is happening today? what is the plans for the future. as far as China's civil rights goes, they are probably still in the 19th century.

 

Hey, don't be picking on Jocko, he da man! He rejects authority. Who's Noah Webster to be telling us Americans how to spell anyway? Webster was probably a pinko, right Jocko? I like this guy!

 

The Queen's English was good enough for Jesus Christ, and it's good enough for me!

 

You tell 'em, Tripp! :rockon:

 

we Americans quite literally spell as we do because we could not spell it right or simply made mistakes writing words down. the mistake eventually became commonly used and from that erroneous source, our dictionary was created

 

Danial, first, why would the workers not pollute even more than the system we have now? It just doesn't make any sense. How do they get the means of production. If they give up wages for some equity then it is capitalism. If they take if from the current owners this removal of property rights can only be accomplished by a strong government, and in all cases such governments take a chunk of control of the means of production. So the government must take property rights away from its citizens including those very same workers. None of these systems have reduced polution, in fact in the capitalist world the government has the responsability to protect citizens rights of clean air and clean water from those trying to take these rights. The problem is the governments often overstep these bonds and try to create "jobs" by favoring large polluters right to pollute over those other citizens. These favors, for example in america, MMS abridging environmental laws to miners and drillers, often have the negative environmental consequences and additional government losses as the government ends up cleaning the polluted sight.

 

There have been huge energy investments in the united states, these have been countered by bad regulation so these do not produce the clean energy we want or need. Instead of making it easy to put up wind turbines, most of the country makes it difficult. Texas with small investments and good renewable regulation is transforming its energy mix. Heavily regulated big government california seems to be concentrating on getting bigger power for carb and step out on regulation instead of building the clean power that state needs.

Giving false ideas that a large government solution like chinas can do it better requires that we ignore most of the data and fake other things. A large government solution can pump money to a solution, and I like china's investment in EV technology, it is even helping some American companies. This is not the best system for us. The big government solution from carb was to throw a lot of government money down the drain to support big auto with hydrogen. Other big government solutions are great coal gasification plans and devoting large tracks of land to growing corn then subsidizing and mandating a ridiculously large and inefficient ethanol policy. Of course before that was widespread carb forced mbte in all of california gasoline that leached into the water supply. Its not a lack of cash, it is cash in the wrong direction. CARB has made it four or five times more expensive to do an EV conversion. In 2006 the federal government started better incentives for EV, and private companies like Nissan and JCI-saft and GE are running with it. It takes time, but incentives and some changing regulations are what are needed, not a huge government controlled operation. There is a great deal of strength in the individual.

The rape of canadian lands to exploit the oil sands started in the 60s, and if the government believed in the rights to clean water, then most of the problems would go away. Oil sands pollution is a governmnt program, not a libertarian warped policy.

 

I don't knowabout noah. Get it knowa-bout noah? :cheer2:

:focus:

I have only one athority thank you very much and that is the Lord and he made tarsand for us to use in our dully trucks. That is until our dauthers get our of college when we use the hybrid cars like the prius.

We use to put sand sugar and such in the gas tank of the nerdy fellows when I was in hig school back in the day. It would surely do a wiked number on an engine yessirreee hahaaha. Not sure hwo this tarzan stuff will not muck up teh engine but I'm all for burning stuff with oil in it for sure. I hope we dont have ot bomb Canada to get it like the others because those canadins look like us. :flypig:

 

Tell it, Jocko!

 

1. Maybe the workers would do no better. But the capitalists have made a royal muck of it, so I say give someone else a try.

2. How do they get control? They take it! Just as the capitalists have been stealing a percentage of their labor since the rise of industry, they take back what was stolen from them. Because, make no bones about it, the great fortunes were not made by "hard work." They were made by thievery and corruption. Or inherited from the criminals who accumulated them.

I have not raised this point recently since I've mostly kept out of the politics forum, but I am a firm believer in the idea of a nonviolent revolution.