From the LA Times, some “climate justice” for the poor:
…
The California lawsuit was filed by six environmental groups that represent low-income communities, including the Association of Irritated Residents, based in the San Joaquin Valley, and Communities for A Better Environment, which fights pollution around the ports of Los Angeles and Long Beach.
The groups contend that a cap-and-trade program would allow refineries, power plants and other big facilities in poor neighborhoods to avoid cutting emissions of both greenhouse gases and traditional air pollutants.
Full story here
h/t to WUWT readers Duke C. and Jeremy
My take on the decision is that an activist judge bought into the social justice argument that poor people living near carbon emitting industries must be protected by forcing big emitters to reduce emissions or close their plants. He questioned the trade part of cap and trade that he sees as allowing big emitters to maintain the status quo, or even expanding, by purchasing carbon quotas and credits from others.
This is a set back for those advocating for rational energy policies in CA no matter how you slice it.
Time to uncap all those oil wells in So Cal, fit them with human-friendly enclosures and start pumping oil out of them. Only about 35% of the estimated recoverable oil was removed when those ugly, smelly donkey pumps were removed and the wells capped, when oil from Saudi Arabia got to be a few dollars cheaper per barrel, about 1957 or so.
All of these other concepts are pie in the sky bye and bye, an d we need the oil, plus more and modern refineries . . . human-friendly ones. If more pipelines are needed, put them in place. If CA needs power, let Californians do their part.
CO2 is the most beneficial of trace gases, and more of it would increase green plant growth and hardiness of the plants.
Time do do away with the ignorant eco-whackos and get on with reality.
I will be most pleased to put a simple arithmetical forth to demonstrate exactly why the “CO2 is bad ” idiocy is idiocy.
“Atlas Shrugged” is looking prophetic.
Sectarian Greenies. Who’da thunk it?
Pollution is the contamination of something with impurities which result in the contaminated item becoming inferior to what it was before the contamination occurred.
To determine whether or not contamination has occurred, you must first determine the starting point of view. If you begin with the Earth’s earlier atmosphere, you would find that it was composed of >99 percent or 999,900 parts per million of carbon dioxide and was more than 100 times more massive than the present day atmosphere. Using that comparison, it would be an impossible task to find the addition of a few gigatons of carbon dioxide to an atmosphere having less than 1 percent carbon dioxide or only 350-380 parts per million as adulterating the condition of the earlier atmosphere.
If you change your point of view to somewhere about 2.5 billion years ago, Life began to adulterate the atmosphere with massive quantities of Oxygen while it removed nearly all of the carbon dioxidde from the atmosphere and sequestered it in the lithosphere and biosphere. Oxygen could beregarded as a genuine pollutant, because it killed off most anaerobic lifeforms. Consequently, it would be fair to say all present day aerobic lifeforms are guilty of polluting the Earth’s atmosphere and environment with a deadly contaminant in the form of Oxygen while depleting the carbon dioxide vital to anaerobic and aerobic lifeforms.
During the Phanerozoic Eon of the last ~560 million years, aerobic lifeforms, especially the Plant Kingdom, have further fluctuated polluting Oxygen while reducing atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide from about 10,000 parts per million to less than 300 parts per million. Plant life has aggresively consumed and depleted carbon dioxide to the point where it had to develop new methods of photosynthesis to survive the extremely low levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide it caused.
Now we live in a period of time where humans have joined with the other lifeforms to interact with their environment and are polluting it with their presence and activities. The question must be asked whether human caused releases of carbon dioxide are adulterating and contaminating the atmosphere with overall detrimental consequences, or is it restoring the carbon dioxide and purity of the atmosphere with overall beneficial consequences after other lifeforms had polluted it with detrimental consequences?
@harrywr2: I believe that Excelon recently sold them some. They are a merchant power company with a large nuke fleet in the midwest.
I think it’s simpler that any of the above stated theories.
I believe it to be rent seeking originations simply needing to be funded.
Where do they get their funding? From you the tax payer!
How?
Here is the PJ Media explanation.
http://tinyurl.com/27l5t4e
Here is the video.
http://www.pjtv.com/?cmd=mpg&mpid=174&load=3206
So they want a tax to protect poor folks from CO2 pollution instead of cap and trade. If they exempt poor folks from paying such a tax in California (which they will want in such a bill so they can be seen as saviors), middle and high income earners will carry that tax burden. Since these same folks are the ones that create jobs, those jobs will fly out of California faster that you can say “idiot”. So tell me again how this tax will protect the poor? Tell me again how ANY CO2 mitigation will protect the poor??????
I have the impression you are mixing up photosynthesis and Calvin cycle (C3, C4 and CAM plants). If not, I would be interested in reading what the other methods of photosynthesis are.
Isn’t that picture slick showing dihydrogen monoxide emissions?
Thought they were going to tackle that in Cancun also.
D. Patterson says:
March 22, 2011 at 12:04 pm
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I like the way you think 😉
A sensible person would be more concerned that CO2 levels are so low………………
@polistra says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:08 am
I doubt that this will help much. The decision belongs to the ‘environmental justice’ movement, which says that poor people should be surrounded by pure natural wilderness with NO JOBS. In other words, EJ’s goal is to turn Western countries into Haiti. (Detroit is already halfway there!)
REPLY: Interesting that you mentioned Detroit, I just saw in the WSJ that the latest census shows the population declined by 25%. See: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704461304576216850733151470.html
Unlike the Haitians, the Detroiters can vote with their feet and drive away. I’m sure the environment just gets better & better….
In the UK we have the climate change act – 80% reduction of CO2 by 2050..
Chris Huhne – UK energy and Climate Change – Secretary of State, is lobbying hard to increasethe target of 20% reduction by 2020 to 30% by 2020 in the EU.
I don’t see any UK judges challenging any of this craziness..
It’s the sun stupid. Wake up to the hoax of global warming, carbon tax or as the IPCC climate warming / change / oops….
http://www.corbettreport.com/episode-177-its-the-sun-stupid/
and
Peirs Corbyn
http://www.weatheraction.com/pages/pv.asp?p=wact36&fsize=0
“The California lawsuit was filed by six environmental groups that represent low-income communities, including…..”
How poor do they think those communities will be after the low cost energy producers are destroyed, the jobs are gone, and energy costs increase sharply?
I guess those poor people will be cold too, if they get rid of the power plants and all of those ‘heat trapping’ CO2 emissions! };>)
The groups contend that a cap-and-trade program would allow refineries, power plants and other big facilities in poor neighborhoods to avoid cutting emissions of both greenhouse gases and traditional air pollutants.
This is a quandry global warming will always find itself in. Cap N Trade never was about reducing emissions. But greens are thinking it is, and are looking for that in it. At some point greens will come to realize that they and global warming politicians are not after the same things.
Happy Birthday William Shatner, 80
M.A.DeLuca II says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:43 am
Carbon monoxide occurs naturally in the air, but when there’s lots of it created by vehicle emissions, we consider that “smog” and think of it as pollution, right?
I’m not claiming you’re wrong, I’m simply wrestling with this concept
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Since you are wresling with this concept, I try to use my best non-violent communication skills, although my writing is sometimes very direct. No, CO2 is not smog. “Smog” was a word invented in L.A. – a combination of smoke and fog. It came to mean the dirty brown haze that hung over LA. since the 50’s. It was more technically know as “photochemical smog” to refer to all the compounds that were created with photochemical reactions in the atmosphere. The brown part of the haze was mostly NO2 (nitrogen dioxide), which was formed from the NO (nitric oxide) from automobile exhaust (mostly) reacting with sunlight. NO however, also reacted in sunlight with the hydrocarbons (unburned or partially burned fuel), again mostly from vehicle exhaust. One of the molecules produced by this reaction was ozone, which is a known health hazzard. There are lots of other compounds produced also. However, the amount of ozone in the air became the shorthand for the amount of photochemical smog (or just smog) in the air.
Now about CO2, which is a colorless, odorless, trace gas in the atmosphere, which as has been pointed out again and again here at WUWT, is necessary for life. It is not smog, it is not a pollutant.
Automobile exhaust consists of unreacted nitrogen that goes through the engine from the air taken in by the engine, and CO2 and water vapor as the main products of combustion of the fuel with the air. A very small part of the fuel and air doesn’t burn completely and forms CO (carbon monoxide), and over 150 different hydrocarbon compounds. In the engine cylinder, under high pressure and temperture, some of the nitrogen in air reacts with the oxygen in the air to form NO. In modern vehicles these compounds are converted to CO2, water, and N2 in the vehicle exhaust catalyst.
So, short answer: CO2 is not smog and it not an air pollutant in the meaning of the U.S. Clean Air Act. I hope this has helped to reducie your wrestling, and provided some information to help you uncerstand what is admitedly complex chemistry .
Have you got a bio on the head of the Association of Irritated Residents? I guess he or she would have the official title, “AIR Head.”
Wow,
Made it through all the comments on the article from the LA times, and I was surprised they read like they were posted here. Hardly a peep from the CAGW crowd citing consensus of scientists. And anyone who dared post in support of AGW- was beaten up pretty badly by some good intelligent replies. Is this a new trend or just a local aberration?
Australia is sometimes liked to California – both in climate and in our laid back, easy going style.
Our fine PM, good Queen Green-julia is doing her best to see that we follow California forward to the middle ages or even further forward than that.
Whom am I, not to applaud?
Yes if you must:
/ Sarc off
Some folks think we rid ourselves of CO2 for the same reason we eliminate fecal matter — it is not good for us. It is a waste product. That’s actually not true of CO2. Without CO2 as a component of our bodies, we would die from suffocation.
M.A.D. & D. Patterson;
E.M. Smith, “Chiefio”, has a fine post here: http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2010/10/10/got-wood in which he explores the idea that plants tend to, and have, drive down the level of CO2 to the point of starving themselves. They then must wait for a major re-release of more from massive basalt flood volcanoes or other such events.
We are (demonstrably) helping plants thrive by bringing levels up slightly. They’d actually prefer about 2,000 ppm, but even if we burned all the fossil fuel known to exist, all at once, we wouldn’t even get back to 1,000. Too bad!
Releasing all the methane clathrates etc. would help, because they oxidize in a few years to H2O and CO2. And coking as much limestone as possible, etc., would also be good.
🙂
Brian H says:
March 22, 2011 at 10:37 pm
Yes, aerobic lifeforms and the later invasion of plants on land are often identified as the causes of major changes in the biosphere, atmosphere, and climates. There is a considerable discussion of the role of the earliest trees in creating a global environmental crisis.
Right, then. In short order of the replies:
D.Patterson @ur momisugly12:04pm — Thanks, but you spent most of your reply discussing geological periods that really don’t apply to the discussion. If I read you correctly, you’re arguing that there have been a number of alterations of the earth’s atmosphere by processes and organisms over eons, and that humans are just the latest to do so. By that argument, nothing we spew into the atmosphere, whether directly to our benefit or as the byproduct of a separate process that is to our benefit, can be considered a pollutant.
You did introduce the interesting notion that contaminants to a quantity that result in an inferior quantity are pollution, and while that seems helpful at first, it begs the question of “inferior to what according to whom?” In this instance, I’d hardly be able to get away with telling a global warming alarmist that the atmosphere after contamination with man-made CO2 isn’t inferior, now would I?
Old Engineer @ur momisugly 3:32pm — I introduced smog as an example of a legitimate pollutant, and wasn’t at all claiming that CO2 was a component in it. I mistakenly thought carbon monoxide was a component of smog, and knowing that CO is also naturally occurring, thought it’d make a good, accepted example of a naturally occurring gas that is considered a pollutant when humans make lots of it. And while I was wrong about carbon monoxide as a component of smog, it does contribute to the formation of smog, and is considered a pollutant when humans create it. (Perhaps by producing an inferior air quality as D. Patterson suggests.)
Now while you conflated CO2 with my smog example, you bring up the potentially useful suggestion that CO2 isn’t a pollutant according to the Clean Air Act. BUT! The Clean Air Act isn’t a scientific document, it’s a political one, and I suspect that the recent actions of the EPA are an attempt to amend the Clean Air Act such that CO2 is now considered a pollutant. Thank you, though.
Brian H. @ur momisugly 10:37pm — I think this is the right track, thank you! CO2 is very useful to plants at levels three times higher than today, without any strong negative consequences (assuming the alarmist models are indeed wrong). But if CO2 really does contribute to global warming, then the waters become a bit less clear. It’s beneficial to plants, and the processes that produce it are beneficial to humans, but there might be negative consequences and D.Patterson’s idea suggests that the air could then be considered inferior in some ways when we add CO2.
Folks, I suspect the problem is in the definition of the word “pollution” itself. Like pornography, it appears to be a word used less than technically to describe something a finger-waving scold knows when he or she sees it. It strikes me that refuting an environmentalist’s claim that CO2 is a pollutant isn’t as simple a thing as Karen D. originally suggested. I thank you all for your input; even though I find the matter unresolved, you’ve each pointed out interesting things to consider.