|
Post by fauxmaha on Aug 22, 2016 11:36:46 GMT -5
I seem to recall reading once somewhere that the greatest source of air pollution on the planet are all the lawnmowers, trimmers, chainsaws, etc., that get to have no burdens placed on them. No way. Consider how many gallons of gas you run through your car each year. An average would be around 500 to 600, more or less. (13k miles per year / 25mpg) Consider how many gallons you run through your lawn mower. Two? Maybe three? No matter how well controlled for emissions, your car is going to put more pollutants in the air than your lawn mower. In fact, it isn't even going to be close. Particularly if we are talking about carbon emissions, for which there are no controls. The best your car can do is use a catalytic converter to convert CO into CO2, but in the end, the total amount of "C" going in is exactly equal to the total amount of "C" coming out. Not to mention all the emissions from your electric consumption, home heating consumption, etc.
|
|
|
Post by theevan on Aug 22, 2016 11:50:04 GMT -5
For an example of how all this nonsense translates into actual human cost, consider the poor, beleaguered gas can. Back in 2000, California decided that spills from gas cans were a real problem, so spill-proof cans were mandated. The EPA thought that was a really great idea, so they got in on the action. Next thing you know, those ridiculous, "spill proof" spouts were mandated nationwide. Brilliant. Naturally, the new "spill proof" spouts proved anything but, and people were getting burned left and right. And naturally they sued the manufacturer, because the guys making gas cans are responsible when you burn your dumb ass spilling gasoline. And certainly the EPA is could never be held responsible when the ridiculous spout they mandated causes people to spill more gas. Now the Blitz company, once the largest maker of gas cans in America, is out of business, and 100+ employees are out of a job. Because science. A Blitz was never a real gas can. This is a gas can, and fortunately still available.
|
|
|
Post by millring on Aug 22, 2016 13:02:21 GMT -5
And now that you're down to maybe one gas can supplier in the U.S., what's the hardest thing to find in an emergency like a hurricane or a flood? A gas can. Floods? No floods here. Floods only happen when a Republican is in office. No. They are only blamed on Republicans who are in office.
|
|
|
Post by millring on Aug 22, 2016 13:07:08 GMT -5
My brother the dentist just told me that his business has recently been handed a buttload of new regulations to comply with (complete with reams of paper work for his company of himself and four employees) ...for civil rights compliance.
|
|
|
Post by james on Aug 22, 2016 13:10:58 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Aug 22, 2016 13:25:02 GMT -5
My brother the dentist just told me that his business has recently been handed a buttload of new regulations to comply with (complete with reams of paper work for his company of himself and four employees) ...for civil rights compliance. Tying the threads together, the Obama administration, far from being AWOL on the flooding in Louisiana, has issued a stern, 16 page warning to local officials that "care must be taken to assure that actions, both intentional and unintentional, do not exclude groups of people based on race, color, national origin (including limited English proficiency), religion, sex or disability" in regards to disaster assistance. No doubt those effected by the floods are breathing a deep sigh of relief.
|
|
|
Post by aquaduct on Aug 22, 2016 13:35:48 GMT -5
My brother the dentist just told me that his business has recently been handed a buttload of new regulations to comply with (complete with reams of paper work for his company of himself and four employees) ...for civil rights compliance. Tying the threads together, the Obama administration, far from being AWOL on the flooding in Louisiana, has issued a stern, 16 page warning to local officials that "care must be taken to assure that actions, both intentional and unintentional, do not exclude groups of people based on race, color, national origin (including limited English proficiency), religion, sex or disability" in regards to disaster assistance. No doubt those effected by the floods are breathing a deep sigh of relief. That's the kind of leadership that makes you glad Barry got his full vacation in. He needs it. Or at least he will when he gets around to it.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Aug 22, 2016 13:39:30 GMT -5
Tying the threads together, the Obama administration, far from being AWOL on the flooding in Louisiana, has issued a stern, 16 page warning to local officials that "care must be taken to assure that actions, both intentional and unintentional, do not exclude groups of people based on race, color, national origin (including limited English proficiency), religion, sex or disability" in regards to disaster assistance. No doubt those effected by the floods are breathing a deep sigh of relief. That's the kind of leadership that makes you glad Barry got his full vacation in. He needs it. Or at least he will when he gets around to it. When you've lost everything, nothing says "I feel your pain" like having your president presume you are a racist.
|
|
|
Post by aquaduct on Aug 22, 2016 13:42:03 GMT -5
That's the kind of leadership that makes you glad Barry got his full vacation in. He needs it. Or at least he will when he gets around to it. When you've lost everything, nothing says "I feel your pain" like having your president presume you are a racist. While he's golfing in Martha's Vineyard.
|
|
|
Post by james on Aug 22, 2016 14:28:43 GMT -5
I skim-read the document on compliance with title VI of the Civil Rights Act in the wake of the Louisiana floods. There is a section called "Need For This Guidance" which explains, with reference to shortcomings in the responses to Katrina and Rita and elsewhere, why it has been issued. It seems reasonable to me.
|
|
|
Post by billhammond on Aug 22, 2016 15:02:26 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Doug on Aug 22, 2016 15:16:25 GMT -5
Everyone knows that.
|
|
|
Post by fauxmaha on Aug 22, 2016 15:18:33 GMT -5
Surprisingly efficient and sensible!
|
|
|
Post by Doug on Aug 22, 2016 15:22:15 GMT -5
Surprisingly efficient and sensible! When you are without power for 2wks Waffle House is a life saver.
|
|
|
Post by james on Aug 22, 2016 20:21:42 GMT -5
Here's what the PDF Fauxmaha posted says.
Need for this Guidance
"On August 29, 2005, Hurricane Katrina made landfall in Louisiana, ravaging its coastal communities, as well as Mississippi, Alabama, and much of the Southeastern United States. Only a few weeks later, Hurricane Rita hit the Texas shoreline before striking many of the same communities still grappling with the damage left in Katrina’s wake. Combined, these storms left over 1,800 people dead. Thousands more lost their homes and the communities they had developed over generations. While emergencies and disasters affect all people, the ability of communities of color to access critical recovery programs, activities, and services often has been hampered.
For example, in the days after Hurricane Katrina made landfall, numerous media reports showed images of African Americans stranded on roofs in New Orleans. These images exposed significant inequalities in access to emergency response and recovery efforts. More than onethird of New Orleans’s African American population did not own cars and over 15% of the city’s residents relied on public transportation. Yet, those planning for Katrina appeared to assume most people could rely on personal vehicles to evacuate and failed to consider the transportation needs of all segments of the population. Identifying the needs of the transit-dependent community and then addressing those needs in emergency planning can reduce or eliminate racial and ethnic, as well as economic, disparities in emergency response and recovery activities.
Nondiscriminatory access to housing and shelters in the aftermath of Katrina also posed a major challenge for diverse racial and ethnic communities. Many seeking temporary housing immediately encountered discriminatory rental advertisements that explicitly refused to rent to African Americans.For example, an advertisement on a website designed to reach Katrina evacuees read: “Provider will provide room and board for $400 but prefers two white females.” Evidence collected by fair housing testers found that in 66% of all tests, White persons were favored over African American persons seeking housing using contacts available to Katrina evacuees. A federal court found evidence of intentional discrimination in actions by St. Bernard Parish, which neighbors New Orleans, when the parish sought to restrict rental housing opportunities, including actions to halt the development of rental housing and enacting a permit requirement for single-family rentals that exempted renters who were “related by blood” to the homeowners. Additionally, the parish changed zoning rules to reduce the availability of rental housing, which was widely perceived in the parish as being planned to house African Americans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Because of these actions, the parish faced a HUDinitiated investigation, a DOJ lawsuit, and several private lawsuits alleging violations of the Fair Housing Act and it ultimately paid more than $5 million in damages and attorneys’ fees to settle the cases.
These types of problems were not limited to Hurricane Katrina: subsequent disasters in other parts of the country have revealed additional examples of how communities of color and other populations have been denied vital services and programs in disaster recovery efforts. When wildfires ravaged Southern California in 2007, there were widespread reports of discrimination against Latinos during emergency response and recovery efforts. At sheltering sites, public employees reportedly required Latino evacuees to produce proof of identity and residence before allowing them access to the shelters. Additionally, although the area affected by the California wildfires included a large LEP population, reports indicated that vital information regarding evacuation was disseminated only in English, was not distributed at all in areas populated by migrant farmworkers, and interpreters were generally unavailable. As a result, not only were these individuals denied critical information needed to safely respond to the emergency, but first responders also faced heightened risks because they were required to provide assistance to those who could have evacuated on their own had they been informed.
In 2014, HUD received a complaint and ultimately reached an agreement with the State of New Jersey after an investigation of the Hurricane Sandy recovery efforts concluded that African Americans and Latinos were disproportionately denied recovery and rebuilding assistance and that insufficient outreach efforts to minority, low-income, and LEP communities were a factor in the low application rates for assistance from these groups. The settlement provided for $240 million in direct housing assistance to low-income households, reevaluation of all denied applications, reopening programs for homeowners and renters who suffered losses due to the storm, adoption of a comprehensive language access plan, and enhanced outreach to the LEP population in multiple HUD-funded recovery-related programs.
Recipients of federal financial assistance can play a pivotal role in making sure that these inequities do not reoccur in future emergencies and disasters. Many state or local government agencies and law enforcement agencies are on the front lines of responding to emergencies and coordinating preparedness and recovery efforts. In addition, non-governmental recipients often are integrally involved in emergency management. Many of the services they provide – including emergency housing and shelter, access to transportation, food banks, child care services, and public health programs, as well as long term housing and support – are not only essential during emergency situations, but also in the preparedness, response, mitigation, and recovery stages."
There is more.
I do not think that
"When you've lost everything, nothing says "I feel your pain" like having your president presume you are a racist."
is an especially informative summary. YMMV.
|
|
|
Post by lar on Aug 22, 2016 22:41:13 GMT -5
What I find interesting about this thread is that the text of the pdf, provide by James, shouldn't be required under any circumstances. Why? Because the federal government has oversight on all of this. If there are violations, they are violations approved by the federal government.
Some years ago I worked for a meat processing company. A large part of their building was refrigerated and the commercial refrigeration system used a highly toxic material. Not long after I began my employment I found out that the company was required to formulate and publish an emergency plan for dealing with the accidental release of the refrigerant into the atmosphere. I was tasked with formulating the plan and assuring our compliance.
As I got more involved in the planning I discovered that there was a county department responsible for emergency response planning. That's who I reported to. As it turned out our emergency plan was a small part of a county emergency preparedness plan that covered every kind of contingency imaginable. The county people I reported to, in turn, reported to a regional group who reported to the state. Up and up the chain it went until the ultimate responsibility was a department of the federal government.
I submitted our plan to the county people who approved it and bucked it up the line. Each agency had to approve it until it got to the federal agency for final approval. Whatever plan exists for the current emergencies has been approved by the federal government. One can only imagine the amount of local, state, and federal resources that have been allocated to this project. Ultimately, if the plan is deficient in providing for the poor, the indigent, people of color, and those who don't speak English it's because the Feds have approved it.
If the feds have approved a deficient plan, where does the buck stop? I can only think that the notice in question is a form of "butt covering" with foreknowledge that the emergency plan that's in place isn't worth a damn and an acknowledgement that the Feds have dropped the ball. When it doesn't work people are going to start pointing fingers. Obama doesn't want to be in the same position that Bush was after Katrina. The fact is, that if the Federally approve plan turns out to be a bust, it's something that will have happened on his watch and he's where the responsibility ought to lie.
One thing I've noticed about politicians in general. There are some who will acknowledge their responsibility. But that's all that ever happens. "I'm responsible" seems to get them off the hook. You murder someone and the law says it's your responsibility to go to jail. You steal from your employer, you lose your job and maybe go to jail. But if you are a politician who is big enough and important enough, "I'm responsible" is all that ever happens.
|
|
|
Post by brucemacneill on Aug 23, 2016 5:03:20 GMT -5
The first part is interesting since it points to a failure of public transportation and says the people should have had personal cars so they could evacuate themselves. Who wrote this, a conservative?
|
|
|
Post by millring on Aug 23, 2016 6:35:56 GMT -5
Hey, I guess I'm wrong. I just found this link to an article that says:
Of the 97% scientific consensus on global warming, 63% of scientists are pointing out the boon to agriculture as a positive aspect to our future
|
|
|
Post by james on Aug 23, 2016 11:09:58 GMT -5
It is, when explored in depth, as you might imagine, a complex issue.
Edit - I googled the headline. It leads to the Watts Up With That site. The site is run by another Heartland Institute guy. It is perhaps the leading climate change denialism site. Unsurprisingly perhaps,I have issues with it.
www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anthony_Watts
|
|
|
Post by epaul on Aug 23, 2016 12:32:48 GMT -5
I don't think the repetition of "97% of all scientists believe (blah, blah, blah)..." does the climate/CO2 disscussion any favors. It reinforces the sloppy use of suspect data and studies, and the unjustified certainty by some in the same, that plagues the climate debate.
It is fair and justified to say that the great majority of climate scientists (who are scientists, many of them "real" scientists) believe that the data accumulated to date does support anthropogenic climate change, with atmospheric CO2 being a significant, and partially human generated, factor in the warming of the planet. And there is reasonable and legitimate debate about what exactly this data represents to the planet's present and future climate... and over what can be done, should be done, and is reasonable or feasible to do.
It is very fair to say that there is a pervasive and troubled concern that is shared by those who are familiar with and understand the accumulated climate data. And it is also fair to say that when scientists leave the boundaries of science and enter policy debates, they have left their field of expertise and risk becoming "locked" defensively into a public policy debate which can compromise their objectivity and may limit their receptivity to new information that may be at odds with their public posture. (such isn't unknown of in the history of science and scientists)
In short (ha!) the scope and consequence of the Greenhouse Effect is subject to scientific debate and inquiry. But, there is no serious scientific doubt that there is such a thing as the Greenhouse Effect and that human-released CO2 is part of the phenomenon... and that the effect is a warming one. The debate lies elsewhere (scope and consequence).
(btw, the work that first hypothesized and then measured the Greenhouse Effect was done by top notch and very real chemists and physicists, not greenie graduate students on a mission from God and Greenpeace (though such are over-represented and far too busy).
But, to claim 97% of all scientists believe blah, blah, blah? No. 97% of nobody believes in anything. Most scientists work in areas other than climate and are trained in fields that don't qualify them to address the climate issue as a scientist. And if you ask one or more of these "other field" scientists (and I have, you can to) they will say it isn't their field and they aren't conversant with the relevant data (if they are responsible and serious). They may say that they think the work is generally good or bad and that there should be more solar panels and fewer coal plants or more coal plants and fewer environmentalists. They may say anything. But their opinions at this point aren't really of much greater weight or worth than yours or mine.
But, with all qualifiers in place, and with full knowledge that as a general group, all scientists have never been reliably queried about anything, it is a fair bet that a fat majority of those who work in a science-related field and who by training and education can be called a scientist do believe that the observed climate change data is a worthy concern and human-released CO2 does appear to play a role in this observed warming. But once you enter into "scope and consequence", that shared agreement fractures into a bunch of opinions that can't be neatly categorized nor shoe-horned into specific policy.
97% of scientist believe blah, blah, blah is not a convincing or useful argument for any climate policy. It has no meaning as regards policy. On the other hand, the statement "a whole bunch of scientists are kind of worried about this climate stuff that is going on" can be put in the books and underlined.
|
|