Climate change - the big problem jobs today or a planet tommorow ?

Question

I have read a nuber of reports that say if we shut down every last gadget right now it would make no difference as to the impact of greenhouse gases for another 5 - 10 years and by then most of the damage will have been done

Ok

That said the truth is for us to cut emmisions - we seem to have to choose Job / planet

How are we going to get past this

No one I know of is going to say oh no cut the gas to the point we can't sustain our massive oil dependant populations

Prior to the industrial revolution London England was one of the most over populated place on the planet at 50,000 people

Today a small city is 4 million plus

How are we going to manage this

Answer 1

This is why we need realistic sulutions. The largest industrial polluter of greenhouse gasses on the planet are coal fired power plants. The ONLY realistic alturnative is nuclear, period. It's cheaper the coal and it's clean. Also there is encouraging reseach in what is called pyrometalurgical reprossesing, which would alow us to burn spent fuel (nuclear waste) in fast nutron reactor power plants. A fast nutron reactor only produces about one one-hundreth the waste as the old thermal nuclear power plants.

Then there is basic transportation, the next largest producer. Technology is soon going to provide us with plug-in hybreds. The batteries in these vehicles have been to expensive for a production version thus far but I believe Toyota is coming out with one that you can buy soon. With a plug-in hybred you could power your car off the grid if you chose to, which would be very effective for compating greenhouse gases if your buying your power from a green source like wind or nucular.

The government has permanent subsidies that they give to the oil industry. It stands to reason that a greener source of energy would be worth more to this country. In my opinion we should give permanent and better subsidies to green sources of energy and perhaps drop the oil subsidies. We could use the money saved by dropping the oil subsidies to give tax relief to industries that depend on oil the most, such as trucking.

There are alot of good answers, we just need to agree on something and do it.

Answer 2

""" I have read a nuber of reports that say if we shut down every last gadget right now it would make no difference as to the impact of greenhouse gases for another 5 - 10 years and by then most of the damage will have been done ""

Actually David Suzuki ( look him up he is one of the expert scientists ) says that it will be more like hundreds of years before there the impact of greenhouse gases is undone.

Now I dont know what I think, but this guy is one of the 'concensus' guys. So If we are to take GW at face value of the concensus, then well the concensus is also telling us that for many many generations no matter what we do we wont see a difference.

Answer 3

The first problems will be with the unnatural change of seasons.
This will affect our food supply and raise prices in the US

Answer 4

Al Gore said the same thing 15 years ago. I don't see any coastal cities under water yet.

Answer 5

Let's do nothing today about global warming and have both a planet and our jobs tomorrow?

Sounds like a winner to me!

Answer 6

I don't think were the cause of climate change,and this is why.


http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=2332531355859226455&q=global+warming&hl=en