Sad both my aunt and cousin that died of ovarian cancer and they lived nearby. Not able to say it is connected, my uncle died early also, cancer, I cannot say it is connected, but them dying at 60 and 45 while very one else in the family as far as sisters and mother and great aunt lived 93 to 103 makes one wonder.
Well, my wife is a nurse and she has had 4 classmates die of cancer before their time. In our family, we have had frequent cancer from my mother’s side, none from my dad’s side of the family. Yet we have had 4 family members contract cancer and three deaths, My sister died of brain cancer; she was a farmer’s wife and lived a healthy rural life.
None of these family members lived anywhere near a nuclear power plant.
There are numerous causes of cancer; it is a most perplexing disease! All my wife’s classmates were healthy women. None were smokers!
Lung cancer is n ow well understood; any undesirable contaminants can cause cancer, although some individuals are more prone than others.
Cars. OK, cars. Let’s not forget that cars is the subject, but cars are also the object. The object of our interest and affection, but also the object that seems to be a clear source of problems in our world. For the past 125 years we have used cars as a tool to get around, and enjoyed it greatly, but as it turns out we have replaced the prior animal powered, manure creating power source with a new and similarly dangerous source of waste. In the process we have completely changed the way we like to live, moving our homes farther apart and spreading out from villages to people living out in suburbs, on range land and deep in forests. Lots of issues with that, but the use of energy to get around has increased because sharing rides becomes more and more difficult. And we built a complex infrastructure to suit cars and trucks alone, abandoning train tracks, waterways and dirt trails along the way.
So the energy issue is a car issue. Focusing on how to repair and maintain cars is fine, but this is “Car Talk”, not Repair Talk. It’s not as if Ray and Tom never digressed from fixing cars. Maybe we need a separate category to house our policy conversations.
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There’s a whole section on repair and maintenance.
Mike, I try to separate “non-car” issues but with all the talk about climate change and the United Nations trying to shut down the oil industry (indirectly), it’s hard to keep the politics out of it.
The subject of the day is now our generation of Carbon per capita and the national “carbon budgets”…
Developed countries are all made to feel guilty because of our consumption levels, while developing countries are advancing at breakneck speed to be like us with fast rising car sales the best indicators.
Since “man made” carbon is supposedly causing the majority of climate change it seems to contradict that the Canadian Arctic, where hardly anybody lives, is now called the fastest heating up area on earth. This is also true of Northern Siberia, but Russia does not bother reporting this.
Electric cars now outsell regular ones in Norway, an oil rich country that tries is atone its “guilt” by subsidizing electric cars. The import duty on regular cars is nearly 100% (Norway does not have a car industry) and by having no duty on Teslas and other such cars, it becomes an instant bargain. Norway has lots of cheap hydro electric power, so charging up is very cheap.
So, Eco-hypocracy is rampant and if Ronald Reagan was alive today he would sound like a genteel version of Trump in assessing the UN climate Programs.
Countries should be judged on the Carbon generated per square mile rather than per capita. Canada and Australia would come out a real winners instead of being treated like villains. Even Russia would look good.
I’m still waiting for a scientifically accurate report showing how much global warming is due to human activity. In the Arctic it has to be mostly the sun.
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I dunno Doc, it was printed in a story in the Washington Post in 1922 so it must be true.
Sorry back to cars but yeah it is hard not to get side tracked in these days of inability to have rational discussions on anything. Even on Car Talk, some of our contributors can’t wait until cars are no longer on the street or for sure don’t have to be driven by anyone. Hard to not get side tracked.
Only if you ignore what science has already figured out.
Put two glasses of soda next to each other. One is full of ice. The other is at room temperature. Now heat the room up by a couple of degrees. Which drink will warm up faster?
Same mechanism is happening as sea ice melts and the arctic loses its cooling effects.
Bing:
There was also an alarming article in the New York Times around 1900. A clever reporter saw the growth of New York and all those horses and the stuff they left behind on the streets.
He calculated that soon the city would be buried in horse manure and the State would run out of grassland to feed all those horses.
Luckily, electric trams and those pesky automobiles and trucks gradually got rid of the scare and saved New York…
As someone once said: “forecasting is difficult, especially the future”. Projecting trends, a favorite with politicians, has its own hazards. I once had lunch with the chief forecaster of a major electric utility. He talked about the massive Input/output computer model they used which forecast a 7.2% growth each year resulting in a doubling every 10 years.
The inputs were family formation, new home construction, income rise, new industries, etc. What was missing was improvement in energy utilization. At that time the biggest fridge in the Sears catalogue consumed 2400 Kilowatt Hours per year.
That same fridge today with ice maker consumes only just 0ver 600 kwhrs per year.
In the 70s, the prestigious “Club of Rome”, an elite think tank, published “Limits to Growth”, stating that we would soon run out of resources of all kinds, based on projections of consumption. They even advocated population control to avoid “Calamitous Futures”.
Since their dire predictions, nearly every energy source and basic raw materials supply has increased well beyond our needs.
Credit engineers, scientists and geologists to come up with solutions.
The amount of steel in a car has steadily declined and costs about the same as the Blue Cross programs divided per car.
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If we went back to horse and buggy, I’m sure we’d be worried about the affects of horse farts on the ozone, and the affects of horse poop in the streets on the water quality (which admittedly the latter might be a viable concern!).
Choosing green suppliers for our energy needs (on our electric bills) promotes adoption of greener technologies. I’m planning to go electric soon with PV panels to power the car (indirectly). Won’t go the battery route for cost/inefficiency reasons, but will at least feed green juice back into the grid.
That’s not contradicting at all. If fact it validates it.
It’s called Arctic Amplification. As global warming heats the earths temperatures overall, this melts the snow and ice and exposes dark spots on land that heat up and amplify the effect of global warming. Without global warming happening in the first place, this amplification effect would never happen.
My daughter actually did a lot of research on this her last 2 years at MIT for her senior project in Chemical engineering. She worked with an MIT professor who’s one of the leading climatologists in the world.
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Thanks Mike! I deliberately put this statement out to get panelists to come up with a rational explanation. You did better than Al Gore would have.
My son is a senior manager for our government’s low carbon business innovation program. He has to endorse and help finance companies that have viable innovations to reduce energy intensity and launch non-carbon ventures.
At the same time the Antarctic is not showing the same levels of melting. The area covered in ice is very thick remains fairly constant by comparison, whereas the Arctic ice is not very thick and any hole in it amplifies more melting.
I’m not a Texas style “Denier”, but the UN does not spend enough time researching what non-human activity is causing.
I have several shelves of books on the subject and about half are written in a me-too style to support the UN programs. Half are professors who need to publish to assure their tenure. One is a professor who went into politics and wants to shut down the entire oil industry. This guy is currently politically blocking any oil pipelines to Pacific ports.
Even the famous Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale) wrote a book parroting everything published on the subject.
At the same time, the current US energy Csar appointment (a coal lobbyist) is probably not the right choice.
We have an unfortunate polarization (no pun intended) of views in North America which prevents a sane middle ground to be agreed on.
As I mentioned our family has already reduced its carbon footprint to 10% BELOW the UN goal for 2030. All without any solar panels or wind turbines. And with no change in lifestyle.
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They don’t, but a lot of other countries do independently. Chile, India, Japan all spend millions every year on research because they are greatly effected by climate changes.
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Just to make the science versus political interests tug of war more interesting, here’s another factor that makes this problem more difficult.
For the past 100 to 150 years industrialized nations have created an economy based on the massive consumption of energy, whether it’s electricity or petroleum fuels. And we’ve romanticized it in many ways, deliberately, because it’s good for business. All sorts of electric conveniences at home, central heat and air cooling, clothing made from petroleum products, and automobiles, trucks, farm equipment, airplanes, rapid transit to move goods. These are things that most of us agree are good, and we do love to indulge in them. But we are beginning to understand that our choices have consequences and those consequences may be very important, with things like climate change and illnesses we never expected.
After telling the whole world how wonderful our stuff is, and devoting a lot of energy to encouraging everyone else to want to live like we do, when others do start to get a piece of the same delicious pie, we start to tell them all that they really shouldn’t have any, because it’s bad for everyone. China has jumped into the industrial world very quickly, and the 1.2 billion people living there are embracing cars and individual homes, etc., and just in time we in the West are trying to tell them that they are making bad choices.
It’s like the bourbon sipping plantation owner telling the slaves alcohol is bad for them, immoral and unhealthy.
Well that’s one way to look at life. I got my first power drill about 1959. Made drilling holes a lot easier. I don’t see anything wrong with using resources provided to us to provide a better life, and climate change has been happening for a long time, it just happens to be chick thing to worry about now. Not everyone sees living in grass huts, getting water from streams, eating creepy crawly things, communicating with smoke signals or drums, as a good thing. But then in this great land, you are free to live as you would like. Off the grid or on-up to you, just not for me.
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Yeah, I personally don’t want to do without electricity. Or a way to get to work.
Agree that the climate change thing is “in fashion”. I personally think it’s more media and socially driven than scientifically proven and 50 years from now we won’t be talking about it whether we make any changes or not. I’m sure that’ll upset some and I’ll be labeled a “denier” or “ignorant”, etc. It is what it is. Climate change could well be natural. There was once an ice age. We have dry lake beds where lakes once were. Things change. Humans probably have an affect. But some of the “greatest threat facing us today” claims made by some of the proponents of the theory…yeah, they lost me there.
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I guess the statistic that bothers me the most is that, when I was a kid in grade school, maybe 1956, I remember learning that the population of the US was 160,000,000. Today its somewhere around 320,000,000. That’s double. Twice as many people using the same air, water, etc. That’s a big jump in one lifetime, and I think it supports paying attention to how we consume things and toss things aside.
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No argument there. Completely agree that we need to be more responsible, do more recycling, and be less of a “disposable” society.
I think climate change has been happening for a long time. It has happened before, many times so some of it is natural. Around a thousand yearts ago , it was what allowed the Vikings to settle Greenland and parts of North America, and then it got colder and wiped them out.
I think this time it is different because of the worlds population and increasing energy use. In the year 2000 I was in Glacier National Park and took a boat tour of a lake with a park Ranger that had been working at Glacier for 50 years. He said that half the glaciers in the park had disappeared and the half that are left are only half the size they were.
Millionaires mansions in Palm Beach are losing their lawns to rising seas, Farmers in the Carolinas are getting salt water in their irrigation wells, 30 miles from the ocean.
I think we are well past the tipping point and are powerless to change it. I se no political force to impose the draconian measures that would be necessary to really reduce our energy use. Give up our cars and A/C- never!
I read a write up a few year’s back that said if every one would recyll & compost it would reduce landfill’s by 75%.