``..about 75-80% of the stock of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere already came from you, me, and the rest of us in the handful of rich countries, and we're responsible for the majority of new flows of GHGs as well. (China will surpass the US in the next year or so, but we have more than a century's head start on them.) Therefore the burden of adjustment should be on us..'' Doug
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I have to say there is something extraordinarily sad about this thread. I think with some hacking out of detail, we all know what has to be done. It really isn't a mystery. It hasn't been a mystery since the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1969? Gee only about forty years, and here we are. See? Forty years is not a trivial length of time for people embedded in their own living processes. It's a lifetime.
In all that time, I have never heard any serious proposal from the establishment, except some loosely enforced air quality control standards. Growing up in LA, then the smog capital of the world, of course I started thinking about this issue while driving back from dates on the Hollywood and Ventura freeways in my East German Borgward, Goliath (two cylinder, two cycle engine). You could buy these beauties for 75 to about 120 dollars after Kennedy and Kruschev created The Wall.
http://smithies.co.nz/borgward/photo.htm
Go down to the little black Goliath coupe, that's the one I had. Later I got the station wagon version. I went from the eleventh grade through my first class in Heidegger at Northridge, driving these wonders of German technology. Crazy, mad, bizzarre. It's the one thing that my righwing John Birch Society stepfather gave me---a love for engineering. I could afford to run, gas, and pay insurance for this car on a part-time pizza job in high school. I put on my best Euro-wool black sweater, jeans, tennis shoes, dreamed I was in Paris, and smoked Camels or Gauloises when I could get them--fully believing I was peer to Picasso, Orwell, and sundry others of similiar elk. So Mallarme, the McIntyre translation, because another errant stepfather knew Mac and Mac and his exotic Latin American parrots lived with us once upon a time when I was eleven. He used to wear the same black heavy wool sweaters, smoked Galouses and drank Bourbon, pouring the toxic fluid down his turkey gullet, old man neck. Considering Mac's smoking habits, I would say he had the carbon footprint of SOCAL when Los Angeles was covered in oil wells.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlyle_Ferren_MacIntyre
The photo protrait is extremely flattering. He looked much worse in the 1954 when he was staying at our place. Giant black nostrils, coated in cigerette tars, with errant grey hairs growing out his nose, ears, and eyebrows. Something out of Joyce or Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Illych.
Later in Berkeley, I got the Borgward Isabella used of course for about the same price as the Goliath, 125 dollars. Hey, too cool or what? And I got to meet people who knew who Mallarme, Verlane and Rilke were. When we actually read Mac's translations of Goethe's Faust in Bluma Goldstein's course and some of his Rilke, I couldn't believe he was the same man whose half moon parrots shit on our curtains, while he dosed in the doorway, propted up in a wooden backed chair, passed out in mid afternoon when I came back from Union Avenue Elementary off Beverely, walking down the ancient sidewalks next to Belmont High School where the Mexican girls fought with razor blades.
Tripping on carbon footprints in old Los Angeles.
CG