I knew from the first posting on this thread that some people were going to claim "political propaganda" or "liberal media".

I work with Chinese people, about 90% of people here are from China or Hong Kong. I know first hand that Chinese people waste a lot less and pollute less than the rest of us in the U.S. and Canada. There are no large SUVs in the parking lot, a lot of people commute with other people and share accomodations with other members of their families, even with other families and distant relatives. We could really learn "conservation" from Asian cultures.

Any effort from our part should be for the good of our global environment, not based on what other countries are doing (or not doing).

After watching the "Inconvenient Truth" most people will drive their SUVs to go back to their daily routine, eating heavily wrapped junk food and watching sports and "reality" shows that won't upset them.

Only a few natural disasters will convince our people to change their ways.

 

I saw the movie on Monday- and was impressed with Al Gore's knowledge and meticulously researched presentation. Gore claims that global warming is not a political issue, but a moral one, and after seeing the film, I believe most would agree.

In the film, he discussed China's current fuel efficiency requirements, (which require cars and trucks to achieve between 21 and 43 mpg by the year 2008. Only 19% of US made cars and 14% US made trucks will comply.) Yes, China is polluting, and coal is a problem (we see footage of Gore dicussing coal mining with Chinese businessmen.) At least the Chinese leaders are willing to listen. Our current mpg requirements are a joke. We have the knowledge and technology, but not the leadership.

Another fact that really hit me was that there is no dissent in the scientific community of the REALITY of global warming, and that human carbon emissions are causing rising temps. Over 900 scientific journals sampled concurred. The only contradictions we hear are from the "mainstream" (corporate-owned) media.

I happen to be a bit more of an optimist...I actually think people will walk away from this movie and try to make some changes in their everyday lives. The most effective change would be to elect government officials who actually care about global warming. Then come the cars, lightbulbs and alternative fuel sources. Oh yeah, and how about the population explosion... but that's a whole 'nother thread.

 

"I know that corn-based ethanol could be made in the US without raising those issues."

I have to disagree with corn-based ethanol being a good thing...if that's what was meant by the statement above.

What crop uses the most water, the most fetilizers and the most subsidies in America? Yep, it's corn. Google for the info. From all I've read it's a subsidized way to burn food. Plain and simple. Farmers LOVE this idea...so do oil companies since so much fossil fuel (fertilizers, pesticides, tractors) gets used to produce ethanol. There is more energy in cane sugar than corn, that's a big factor in Brazil's ethanol transformation.

I do hope to see Al's movie...but it still seems like banging one's head against a wall to get this message out. I salute Al for doing this movie...people NEED to understand and not become more ignorant with respect to our effects on this planet. There are choices...

 

Forgive me if this was touched earlier (in a hurry, can't read the whole thread)-

But in dealing with MPG targets, does the film mention or acknowledge and account for the different test techniques betwen the US, EU, CHina, etc? I don't know that there is a straight % deduction to apply to 'convert' to EPA test equivalent results, but one could probably get close that way. I'll need to look into the speceifics.

From what I understand, the same vehicle setup will normally get higher MPG when tested in accordance with the EU or Japanese test standard (can't speak for Chinese or Indian testing), compared to the EPA or even CAFE results.

It may be premature to do direct MPG comparisons between countries without making sure they are properly normalized to one another. But I understand the overall point of what's being said.

edit: found some info. The EU test is much shorter and slower...
Urban cycle
The urban test cycle is carried out in a laboratory at an ambient temperature of 20°C to 30°C on a rolling road from a cold start, i.e. the engine has not run for several hours. The cycle consists of a series of accelerations, steady speeds, decelerations and idling. Maximum speed is 31 mph (50 km/h), average speed 12 mph (19 km/h) and the distance covered is 2.5 miles (4 km). The cycle is shown as Part One in the diagram below.
Extra-urban cycle
This cycle is conducted immediately following the urban cycle and consists of roughly half steady-speed driving and the remainder accelerations, decelerations, and some idling. Maximum speed is 75 mph (120 km/h), average speed is 39 mph (63 km/h) and the distance covered is 4.3 miles (7 km). The cycle is shown as Part Two in the diagram below.
Combined Fuel Consumption Figure
The combined figure presented is for the urban and the extra-urban cycle together. It is therefore an average of the two parts of the test, weighted by the distances covered in each part.
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/...3L0116:EN:HTML

Versus the EPA test:


http://www.epa.gov/greenvehicles/

The entire EU test is done on a car that already has minimum 1800 miles on it (broken in a bit) and only takes 20min start-to-finish, over 6.8 miles. The EPA test is on a new vehicle, and takes almost 43min to complete, in 2 segments, over 21 miles.

It still remains to be seen, though, how the targets in each region stack up when calibrated to a single test standard. IIRC, Pew institute determined that the EU FE standards were still the strictest anywhere, even correcting for test procedures.

 

OK, this seems pretty definitive:
http://www.pewclimate.org/docUploads...5F110719%2Epdf

basically: the EU test (also adopted by China) does in fact appear to be 'tougher' than the EPA/CAFE test. The same vehicle run under the US test will get ~13% better mpg than under the EU test. The Japanese test is even more pessimistic.

Caveat- the numbers calculated in the linked paper are from a model that is claime to be well-established. I don't know the accuracy of that statement, especially since one of the authors devised the model. It appears that nobody has bothered to run a statistically significant number of vehicles under all the test regimes to get realworld comaprison factors.

So... they (EU, China, et al) do in fact appear to have tougher testing than the EPA. I haven't poured through all the weight classes, but it appears that this is compounded with higher "CAFE" targets across all categories.

 

There are far fewer drivers in China than the US, far fewer cars and fewer car sales.

8 out of 1000 Chinese owns a car compared to 600 out of 1000 Americans

There are only 10 million private vehicles in China about half the number of cars in the US ... in 1929 right before the Great Depression. I believe that there are at least 200 million cars in the US today.

5 million cars were sold in China last year compared to 17 million in the US

Keep in mind that the population of the vast rural areas of China are basically subsistence farmers who earn the equivalent of about one dollar per day. Car ownership is likely not in their future for a very long time.

I found this information and a whole bunch more in the following article from the Economist

http://www.economist.com/business/di...ory_id=4032842

 

First, VMA131Marine, you're absolutely right- my bad about the Chinese car data. I was remembering a NYTimes article about Chinese car usage compared to the US and they must have been talking about growth in the car market, not the actual number of cars, but I remembered it wrong. Thanks for setting it straight.

Second, about finman's comment:
Um, no, that is NOT what I meant. Read the entire sentence to determine what 'those issues' were:

'Those issues' were damaging the rainforest and ongoing agricultural production of sugar cane in Brazil. I think I can say with some level of certainty that those issues are NOT raised by making corn-based ethanol in the US. I just wanted to make my point without going into the rainforest and all that. Heck, yes, there can be lots of other issues with corn production, ethanol production, armadillo tap dancing or whatever you want to talk about, but please stop and think before you criticize, and try not to quote out of context.

 

"'Those issues' were damaging the rainforest and ongoing agricultural production of sugar cane in Brazil. I think I can say with some level of certainty that those issues are NOT raised by making corn-based ethanol in the US."

But similar environmental issues ARE associated with raising corn in the US just to burn it as a car fuel. LOTS of water resources are used...LOTS of petro-based fertilizers are used and run-off into drinking water supplies, LOTS of petro is used to run machinery to plant/maintain/harvest/process corn, etc.

Sorry if I mis-quoted out of context...I saw a parallel between the rainforest issue of sugar cane in Brazil and the resource usage of corn-based ethanol here in the US. My opinion on the subjects.

Cheers,

Curt.

 

You're right in a way, but it is much more complicated than that. Remember that a good deal of that pollution in China is really ours. We're the ones who are consuming the goods whose production results in a lot of China's pollutioon. Where the pollution is located and for whose benefit it is caused are not the same thing. Yes, China's laws and shoddy enforcement of those laws allow the pollution to be produced, but it is largely to meet the consumer demands of the rest of Asia and the U.S., and the pursuit of profits by mostly Asian and U.S. companies.

Our laws (and the international agreements we sign on to) contribute to this problem when they say that it is not alright to make imported goods include the costs increased pollution and lower wages due to a country's failure to enforece decent environmental standared or protect its workers' basic rights to organize. These politically created, rather than natural comparative, advantages can create cheaper goods that fuel increased consumption in the importing countries by failing to have the price of the goods signal the consumer something closer to the true cost of the good. Correcting this was one of the basic reasons for the rise of neo-classical economics over a century ago.

We need to recognize that just because the pollution is not located in our area, that doesn't mean we are not necessarily partly responsible for it. One of the big problems is that if that pollution were being delivered along with the goods, we consumer/citizens in the receiving countries would be up in arms and demand stronger laws and better enforcement to protect our health and environment. By relocating the site of production keeps it out of sight and out of mind, again, not sending the appropriate signals that might induce people to work to change policies--we tolerate our actions making more of a mess than we otherwise would. Add to that, shifting the pollution to a country where citizens have little ability to influence policy, and you exacerbate the problem.

This doesn't mean we are bad people, nor does it mean to excuse the Chinese government for its policy choices. However, China's pollution problems are, at least in substantial part, a bad international political economic set-up inducing bad behavior by many, most of whom are good, decent people.

 

dkm's point is a good one- the location of pollution is often as important in the minds of consumers as the actual amount of pollution globally. A little pollution in your own backyard may seem like a much bigger deal than rivers of sludge on the other side of the world.

This is one of the least talked-about problems behind the sudden (and pretty recent, at least on a large scale) push for 'independence from foreign sources of oil,' because if we do end up manufacturing ethanol or clean coal or whatever domestically, we're going to have the industrial wastes here in our own backyards to deal with, and we Americans don't like to have to see and smell that sort of thing.

I'm not arguing against energy independence; quite the opposite. But there are going to be local environmental consequences of whatever energy choices we make, if we move the sources of production back to the US instead of outsourcing all the mess to foreign soil. The energy development that we do in the future needs to be done in the right way, without politicians pushing to get rid of environmental safegaurds for the sake of expediency, like the Bush/Cheney administration did with the oil refineries in the south after Katrina. If we can't do it right, there will be so much resistance back on the ground that we'll never be independent, and if we push it through anyway, we'll just be borrowing trouble down the road.