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Jan 3, 2008, 3:57 GMT
California sues EPA over auto emissions
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Older Talkback
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No government entity needs to be sued here, although California or any other State in the Union should have the sole right to protect their residents and their environment with a standard that 'exceeds' any one mandated by Federal Law.
What kind of belligerent agency is uprooting our welfare?
Why should everyone else in the US be required to pay for a vehicle built to California specifications? There are 49 other states besides California. California is NOT the only state nor is it even the preeminent state in the United States so why should the State of California be allowed to dictate to the rest of us? This issue effects a great many people OUTSIDE the State of California.
Because,Noharness,your conception of the universe is obsolete,it does not account for solutions for global warming at all.By the way it is not Californai,it is 16 states against the EPA .What am I saying ,against the EPA ?Scrap that,it is only against the Bush appointed CEO of the EPA.THe EPA scientific staff and legal advisers already made sufficiently clear that they are not even involved in this matter,their opinion was never asked,but I guess you already know that,right?JUst trying to confuse the debate,are you?
RE:'Because,Noharness,your conception of the universe is obsolete,it does not account for solutions for global warming at all.'
Tonny, there is more involved here than you know about, but thanks for the excuse to air my views. First and foremost, carbon dioxide has nothing to do with global warming. Second, we are not here talking about the entire universe, but the United States and the way its political system works, which is not exactly the same thing as dealing with global warming. We have two separate issues with which we must contend.
RE:'By the way it is not Californai,it is 16 states against the EPA.'
Yes, this is true, but the principle remains the same. Why should sixteen states be allowed to dictate to the remainder? See the political principle involved? We have a federal government for a reason.
RE:'What am I saying ,against the EPA ?Scrap that,it is only against the Bush appointed CEO of the EPA.THe EPA scientific staff and legal advisers already made sufficiently clear that they are not even involved in this matter,their opinion was never asked,but I guess you already know that,right?'
Oh, you know by now that I NEVER go out of my way to defend the Bushbaby and his minions. They would have to do something spectacularly correct before I would say a word in their favor. Insofar as National Security goes, they have dropped the ball on this one. Legally, however, they have it right.
RE:'JUst trying to confuse the debate,are you?'
No, Tonny, I'm interested in accomplishing two things. First is to make sure that the truth is known and second is to make sure that there really is a debate.
As for the legislation in question, I will readily agree that it does not go nearly far enough. My carefully considered estimates are that we could and should do much better. I think Toyota, Isuzu and Nissan WILL do much better. I think what is at stake here is the physical security of the United States. First, I think it is absolutely insane for us to give money to people who have both ideological and religious reasons to do us harm. Second, I think it is damnably foolish of us to rely on petroleum for our transport energy needs. Crude oil has far too many other uses that make it far too valuable to burn as fuel.
When I try to look at this issue from your perspective, in the light of CO2 emissions and the impact on the 'poor', much of the bill is even worse. Encouraging the use of ethanol in lieu of petroleum distillates is an even more profound insanity than not conserving energy in the first place. All that will really ever do is to drive up the cost of groceries, which it is already doing and it is exacerbating the sub-prime lending crisis. Stupid is as stupid does. Fortunately, this mistake is self-correcting, rather like drug abuse. The consequences are going to be so swift and so immediate that congress will doubtlessly make changes to it in the near future.
It behooves us to remember however that transport fuels consumption is a drop in the bucket compared to the fuel we consume generating electricity. Something SP4 brings up repeatedly that is absolutely correct is that hybrid cars do little to reduce CO2 emissions. To make that work, we must do two things. We must convert to hybrid cars AND we must use nuclear power instead of coal to power our grid. If you were truly serious about protecting the environment, you would be an ardent advocate of nuclear power, just as your neighbors the French are.
But I don't think protecting the environment is your real goal nor is it the actual goal of the majority of the 'greens'. You all have this vision of a utopia you want to establish the world over while steadfastly refusing to realize that it is actually a dystopia. You want the license to dictate to everyone else and hence your favoring the idea that sixteen out of fifty states should be allowed to dictate the rules.
I don't think we Americans are going to ever comply with your wishes, Tonny. Feel free to call us bastards or arrogant berks or whatever. For my part I will readily agree with you. I AM an arrogant berk and I can be right spherical bastard whenever the mood takes me.
The EPA should sue California for over-the-limit homosexual emissions.
Noharness,at least what you say is very debatable ,which is always a pleasure ,for a well defined discussion is essential for democracy.So let us enter the arena.Carbon dioxide not a greenhouse gas?I 'm not sure I got that correct.Perhaps you meant something else,perhaps you meant that due convection heat is carried above the troposphere and dispersed into the universe.Nor so in that case,carbon dioxide absorbs and stores heat.Here is a link which states the values in degrees Kelvin,sorry for that but that is not changing the facts of course.
www.engineeringtoolbox.com/carbon-dioxide-d_974.html
A little bit of astronomical knowledge would help,check Venus and tell me why the surface temperature there is so high,you(ll figure it out .
As for the fact that hybrid cars are useless,sorry again but that is probably a misunderstanding ;fact is that braking power is transformed into electricity and stored in the batteries .Grossly stated I'd say that part of the energy used for accelerating is recuperated this way .A car based on only a combustion engine can not recuperate this energy,it is transformed in heat whilst braking.Some say that the cost of building and recycling hybrid cars is superior to the cost for recycling cars with only combustion engines and that the total energy amount during the life cycle needed for running it,maintenance and recycling is in favor of the classic combustion engine .Some say differently,no figures from reliable sources are known to me .What I know with certainty is that cars based on combustion engines will be very expensive in a year or two as energy prices continue to raise .One barrel of crude costs 4 tumes as much as two years ago,if this trend continues ,this whole debate will be obsolete,but to be wise is to be prepared,something the USA still has to discover.Expect nothing from Bush or the EPA,the standards given by the EPA for the car manufacturing industry will be useless far before 2020,the year they are to be implemented .Your free market needs some meddling to prevent global warming from turning the lives of your and my children into some kind of nightmare .
I need to add one more argument to my post.When you say my vision of the future is based on some utopia,never mind.What is required is a scientific debate (which is already over and done with in the rest of the world,you guys are just dragging your feet on account of the influence of your strong oil and automobile lobby,these two have more influence in decision making than the whole of the american people,you kow that too Noharness,you seem no fool .
Whatever the spin generated from these two,there IS a general consensus about global warming,the only problem is that the consensus is based on the lowest possible impact of climate change on humans acceptable by all the participants of the IPCC,which includes the USA .Guess how they influenced the results.Personnaly I'd feel uncomfortable living in a country where almost every administration is issuing rules and laws that were not endorsed by it's own scientific staff.The BUsh administration has already a long history of ignoring it's own staff when issuing directives that go against the findings of their own staff.Remember the CEO of NASA claiming global warming was no priority,to be repudiated by his own scientific staff.Sme in the EPA,same in the intelligence sector,same in the FDA.All administrations are distributed to cronys of the corporate world,and little do they care about you ,americans?Only their profit counts.And you are accusing me of relaying on Utopian standards?I simply relay on science,nothing else.
...notice how this is published as fact.....after all, the church needs it's false enemies...
'vehicles that cause global warming' is just as valid, purely as a statement, as 'CO2 does not cause global warming'
However, the first statement also has the backing of huge numbers of scientific experts in various fields. The second statement does not have such illustrious backers - although the anti-warmers constantly drag in spurious 'experts' in non-associated fields, various whackos trying to promote their pet theories or websites, people backed by the oil industry, or total misfits who have been thrown out of their fields and are desperately trying to gain publicity so they can gain some money
I know which group and which statement I believe
Never mind SP4 ,for him everything is a religion because science is too elusive to his poor brains,while religion religion isn't.It requires only faith.
RE:'Carbon dioxide not a greenhouse gas?I 'm not sure I got that correct.'
You got it wrong, Tonny. I said that carbon dioxide has nothing to do with global warming, that is not the same thing as claiming that it is not a 'greenhouse' gas. All gases are, to one extent or another, 'greenhouse gases.'
Perhaps you meant something else,perhaps you meant that due convection heat is carried above the troposphere and dispersed into the universe.Nor so in that case,carbon dioxide absorbs and stores heat.Here is a link which states the values in degrees Kelvin,sorry for that but that is not changing the facts of course.
www.engineeringtoolbox.com/carbon-dioxide-d_974.html'
All gases store heat to one degree or another, Tonny. Their specific heat capacity varies markedly with the amount of pressure on them. The greater the pressure on carbon dioxide, the greater it's specific heat capacity. All of them, including carbon dioxide will readily convey heat from a high energy region to a low energy region. The real champion at storing heat however, is liquid water.
RE:'A little bit of astronomical knowledge would help,check Venus and tell me why the surface temperature there is so high,you(ll figure it out .'
Yes, I did that a long time ago and posted the truth about Venus elsewhere on these forums. You must have missed it. Let's talk about Venus for a moment. It will likely prove informative for everyone taking the time to read these discussions. First, it is often by falsely claimed that Venus is the 'sister planet' of Earth. The actual semantic content of this statement is near zero, but what is meant by it is even more nonsensical. Venus could never be very much like Earth, even its atmospheric mix was close the same as Earth's. Here's why.
Venus has about 92% of the diameter of Earth and its orbital diameter is about 0.72 Astronomical Units. Taking the surface area of Venus into account along with the size of its orbit, we can see that Venus receives at least 1.74 times as much energy as Earth does. A Venusian day is retrograde and is just a hair over 243 Earth days long—that is 18 Earth days longer than the Venusian year. Were Venus to have an atmosphere similar to ours, its weather would be incredibly violent and I am not at all certain that large bodies of water could exist there for prolonged periods of time. No doubt there would be large accumulations of snow on its night side.
Venus does not, however, have an atmosphere that is anything at all like our own, nor does it have any large quantities of water on its surface. The Venusian atmosphere is about 97% carbon dioxide with something close to 3% nitrogen. The remainder of it is made up of traces of other nasty compounds. Thanks to the fact that carbon dioxide has a high molecular weight, the atmospheric pressure at the surface of Venus is something like 92 to 93 atmospheres, or about 1400 pounds per square inch. At this pressure, the specific heat capacity of carbon dioxide is quite high—a great deal higher than the carbon dioxide resident in Earth's atmosphere.
To give you an idea of how different these conditions are, the refractive index of carbon dioxide is so high that if you could stand anywhere on the planet, you would think you were standing in the middle of a bowl-shaped valley, even if you happened to be standing on the peak of a mountain. The Venusian atmosphere is so thick that if you could walking around in it, it would be like walking around in a rather viscous fluid. There is no way to make any reasonable lesson about greenhouse gases or a 'runaway greenhouse' effect by examining Venus. There is no reason to think that conditions on Venus were ever Earth-like at any time before, during or after its formation. Anyone making a claim different from this, is indulging in speculation or fantasy. I cannot recall ever hearing a reputable scientist saying anything different and I have not read the work of any reputable scientist who made such a claim. Oh, and Venus is the only planet that receives more energy as a total than Earth.
RE:'As for the fact that hybrid cars are useless,sorry again but that is probably a misunderstanding ;fact is that braking power is transformed into electricity and stored in the batteries.'
You seem to have gotten me mixed up with Jeremy Clarkson or some other lordly wit. I have never denigrated the usefulness of the hybrid car design. My only problem with the current designs are that they are not available with diesel engines. The problem is, you see EVERYTHING through a treehugger's lens. Will the hybrid car really do anything to reduce carbon dioxide emissions? No, not in a great many areas of the United States because we have too many coal-fired power plants. While the fuel efficiency of the hybrid design is better than the average gasoline powered car, it achieves that efficiency by transferring its part of the transportation energy load over to the grid. From the standpoint of weaning the United States off crude oil purchased from dangerous dictators, the hybrid car design is a great tool, but it will not do that much to help the environment if we continue to burn coal to produce electricity. The arithmetic simply doesn't work.
RE:'Some say that the cost of building and recycling hybrid cars is superior to the cost for recycling cars with only combustion engines and that the total energy amount during the life cycle needed for running it,maintenance and recycling is in favor of the classic combustion engine .Some say differently,no figures from reliable sources are known to me.'
From just looking at the design, Tonny, I would say there are more valuable materials worth recycling in the hybrid designed car. Recycling those materials will not necessarily be any better in terms of environmental footprint than recycling the materials of a conventionally designed car. The cost of building a hybrid is necessarily higher. Copper prices are quite high at the moment and the hybrid design requires a great deal of copper. If the hybrid designs come into great demand, the price of copper will rise precipitously. The other high-cost material in hybrid designs being constructed at this moment is nickel. Doubtlessly, the price of nickel will rise for a while until hybrid makers convert over to lithium batteries. This will raise another security issue. The primary source of lithium at this time is mainland China. There is one other country that is a minor source of lithium, but I cannot now recall its name. By the way, Tonny, the lithium battery was invented by a scientist working for Exxon.
RE:'What I know with certainty is that cars based on combustion engines will be very expensive in a year or two as energy prices continue to raise .One barrel of crude costs 4 tumes as much as two years ago,if this trend continues ,this whole debate will be obsolete,but to be wise is to be prepared,something the USA still has to discover.'
Well, let's see. The US was the first country to stop using leaded gasoline, the first to mandate the installation of stack scrubbers on its power plants, the first to mandate the wearing of seat belts while driving, the first to make ...How much of a list to you want, Tonny? I'll make you a deal. You lay off insulting the US and making generalities about the US and I will keep right on not badmouthing Belgium. I expect see the price of oil to reach something like $125/bbl or more by the first of this coming summer in 2008. That will basically throttle the US economy and everyone else's with it as usual. Then the price of crude will come down and we will not be having these kinds of discussions for a little while because news organizations will not be flapping about the need for conserving transport fuel. It's the whole world that is silly in this way, Tonny, not just the United States.
RE:'Expect nothing from Bush or the EPA,the standards given by the EPA for the car manufacturing industry will be useless far before 2020,the year they are to be implemented .Your free market needs some meddling to prevent global warming from turning the lives of your and my children into some kind of nightmare .'
Tonny, you still have not figured it out, have you? Transport fuels are NOT the major contributor to carbon dioxide emissions, so even by your badly mislead and mislaid beliefs in global warming, you are wrong. The overwhelming majority of CO2 emissions comes from power plants and other operations using coal as a fuel. On top of that, I expect all three of the major US Automakers to go belly up inside the next five years. Will you then start gritching about the German car-makers?
RE;'I need to add one more argument to my post.When you say my vision of the future is based on some utopia,never mind.What is required is a scientific debate (which is already over and done with in the rest of the world,you guys are just dragging your feet on account of the influence of your strong oil and automobile lobby,these two have more influence in decision making than the whole of the american people,you kow that too Noharness,you seem no fool .'
By now, Tonny, you must surely realize that there isn't a trace of sheeple in me. I make up my own mind about everything I read and I say what I mean and I let the chips fall as they may. Spin is useless on me. I see right through it ninety-plus percent of the time and that which does turn me around doesn't fool me for very long. I think what you are upset about is that your particular spin doesn't effect me any more than Exxon's. Oh, did I tell you that Exxon hates my guts? I made them spend a tone of money that they did not want to spend one time. I ain't a bit welcome their Baytwon Olephins Unit. I am officially 'persona non-grata' there.
I don't really care what the sheeple of Europe uncritically accept without question. I never accept anything without question, I herd by myself and I for damned sure never goose-step or march to anyone else's tune. This is true of most Americans, Tonny. If you want our help with what you claim to sincerely believe to be true about global warming, you will have to make a good case without calling us names or accusing us of being cave-men lead around by the nose by large corporations. That is getting you nowhere right now and it will get you nowhere in the future. I don't know who taught you the art of persuasion, but whoever it was sucked.
Oh, and just an open note to Toyota. If you want to double or even triple your hybrid car sales in the US, make the damned things look sleek, mean and aggressive. The catch-me-cornhole-me designs you are trying to peddle in the States right now are self-defeating in the extreme.
RE: Why should sixteen states be allowed to dictate to the remainder? See the political principle involved? We have a federal government for a reason.
* * *
Just because we have a Federal Government, it does not mean states cannot enact some of their own wise decisions. Simply said: Why should the Federal Government dictate to these 16,'Rogue States,' without the will of the people having more of a say? These are the democratic principles we have lived by and have died for.
Those states have no intent to harm or to dictate to any of their neighbors what they themselves have put into action based on scientific analysis and concern for their residents, et al.
If the Federal Government was stepping in to halt some terrible thing that they were doing, then, dictate and protect when necessary.
RE: You want the license to dictate to everyone else and hence your favoring the idea that sixteen out of fifty states should be allowed to dictate the rules.
* * *
There comes a time when states must act independently of an overbearing government that intrudes on their right to breathe freely. United in a just cause is one thing, suffocating under the yoke of a tyrannical ruling only creates discontent and the fight for just redress. This is where more states have an inherent role to play in the resulting outcome.
'You want the license to dictate to everyone else and hence your favoring the idea that sixteen out of fifty states should be allowed to dictate the rules.'
Could be changed to -
You want the license to dictate to everyone else and hence your favoring the idea that ONE out of 194 countries should be allowed to dictate the rules. That sounds just like America trying to dictate to the rest of the World
RE:'Those states have no intent to harm or to dictate to any of their neighbors what they themselves have put into action based on scientific analysis and concern for their residents, et al.'
What their intentions are is not the issue. It is the outcome of their actions that matter. In this case, car manufacturers, many of whom are already in financial trouble, would be obliged to meet the specifications set by the nut-cases in San Francisco. This would have an impact on the price of automobiles for everyone else in every other state.
Personally, I would not allow any vehicle with an engine greater than 25 BHP to run on gasoline. Anything over 25 BHP should run on diesel. That would add somewhere between $1,500 and $4,000 to the price of every car. Not everyone is particularly enthused by this idea, even though it makes very good sense with today's oil prices. So, I don't get my way, even though I am right. That is the way democracy works.
RE:'There comes a time when states must act independently of an overbearing government that intrudes on their right to breathe freely. United in a just cause is one thing, suffocating under the yoke of a tyrannical ruling only creates discontent and the fight for just redress. This is where more states have an inherent role to play in the resulting outcome.'
Presumably, this is the argument the State of California and its fifteen allied states will make to the Supreme Court. I would not hold my breath waiting on a favorable ruling.
RE:'Could be changed to -
You want the license to dictate to everyone else and hence your favoring the idea that ONE out of 194 countries should be allowed to dictate the rules. That sounds just like America trying to dictate to the rest of the World'
Uh-huh, right.
RE: Presumably, this is the argument the State of California and its fifteen allied states will make to the Supreme Court. I would not hold my breath waiting on a favorable ruling.
_______________________________________________________________________ ______
Hopefully, you and a number of other states will someday breathe fresher air. I am holding my breath.
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