06-06-2017, 10:00 AM
(06-05-2017, 02:38 PM)X_4AD_84 Wrote: Whenever I've been to China, one thing that struck me was the constant smell of coal being burned. Americans, even ones near coal fired power plants, largely do not know this smell. In China, the reminders of how much CO2 they are emitting are constant. The Paris Accord would have given them a pass meanwhile we Americans would have been making sacrifices ala colonial guilt. Except, neither China nor India were ever our colonies. And there is no reason to feel colonial guilt any more toward such major important great powers.
My sojourns outside the United States are limited to short passes through the southern tier of Ontario, so all that I can know about the 'rest of the world' is clearly second-hand.
I cannot imagine being in a place with smog from coal smoke and not thinking "how do people here live with the dread of getting lung cancer or emphysema from this stuff? I really can't tolerate cancerweed smoke -- or even smog, Los Angeles style (sunset at noon, in view of the reddish-brown pigmentation that nitrogen dioxide gives to air)? Nitrogen dioxide reacts with water to form nitric acid, which is even worse. The Chinese are beginning to recognize that early deaths from cancer are no longer worthy sacrifices for some quick gain.
I have heard much the same of the dirty-industry area from Ostrava in the Czech Republic to Krakow in Poland. Coal is king around there, but that area is a poor one in which to live if one has respiratory problems of any king. Indeed, live there and you will get respiratory distress. Such is a consequence of the Communist (and Gilded Age -- face it, even Marx could not escape all the assumptions of the Gilded Age) belief that the environment is a free good to be ravaged at will.
The environment is not a free good. We cannot selectively reject the particulates in the air, even if those particulates contain the nasty acids (including sulfuric acid and nitric acid) of acid rain -- or such other toxic substances as benzene.
With Trump and the environment, I have gone far beyond the question "What is he thinking?"
The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the dedicated Communist but instead the people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction, true and false, no longer exists -- Hannah Arendt.