sinking ships are sometimes known to have leaks...,
2009-03-12 23:49:41
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The Pre-Copernican Republic...,
2009-03-13 13:15:31
huh:
For some reason I've never bothered to look at the numbers:
Humanity apparently pumps 27 billion metric tons of CO2 into the atmosphere every year, world population 6.7 billion, per-capita emissions for everybody then is about 4 tons CO2 a year.
Note - as the jibbering idiotic fascists on the teevee and the paper of record scream about China's rising greenhouse gas production without ever mentioning this really rather relevant factoid - that China's per-capita emissions are 3.8 tons/year, while Americans are farting out about 5 times that much. And at that, a lot of China's emissions are really "ours" in the sense that these people mean it, since a large portion of China's polluting capacity is utilized as an offshore industrial platform for the OECD.
The IPCC figures humanity needs a 50-80% cut in emissions by 2050 to avoid risking catastrophe. Taking it as given, I surmise that to live with myself on some abstract individual moral plane - lacking the disturbing sense of god-granted entitlement of said NYT scribblers etc. to pollute others' air five times more than the Chinese just because we were born in a country that got rich polluting it first - I'll have to cut my emissions down to at most 2 tons a year, and that would have to be assuming that the population spontaneously stops growing.
These footprint calculators are telling me I'm at around 12 (hard to say, some of my numbers are wild ass guesses). I.O.U >10 fewer average tons of CO2 a year by 2050. Fair enough, should be easy.
