Yes, labels matter; so let's take a step back and ask why you're fighting this argument? Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
> Why does it matter which of the harmful emissions from a smokestack count as "pollution"?
Because society uses labels to delineate the boundaries between different legal regimes and sources of authority, and adhering to those boundaries is important. The FCC (Federal Communications Commission) can't point to the traffic on a fiber cable within a data center and say it falls within their jurisdiction because that's also "communications."
It's especially important in this context, because the half-century-old laws and regulations designed to control soot emissions from factory smokestacks is ill-suited to managing CO2 emissions. The fundamental premise of the Clean Air Act is that pollution can be controlled at the source with control technologies (RACT, BACT, etc.).
This focus on control technologies puts well-defined guardrails on the EPA. The EPA can't go around making big decisions about how factories work or what people produce. They can simply tell you to put the best reasonably available scrubbers on your factory. That approach completely breaks down when it comes to CO2, because there is no such thing as a "CO2 scrubber." Treating CO2 as a pollutant puts the EPA into a role of supervising the energy sector that the agency simply was never designed to do.
It uses the term “greenhouse gas” to refer to CO2 and uses the term “air pollution” to refer to what people traditionally think of as air pollution. For example, in one place of says: “Consequences of CO2 enrichment and climate change for natural terrestrial ecosystems could be modified by other environmental factors, both natural and man induced (e.g., by air pollution).” So that’s treating “CO2 enrichment” (emissions) as distinct from “air pollution.”
Because American lawmakers are weirdly specific brainless creatures. This is how you get all those laws named after individuals like Megan, and my other specific fave, the Video Rental Records Privacy Act.
Shall we address the general question of privacy, or just close the particular breach that affected a congressman? You know it's going to be the latter.
narrowly scoped laws limit the blast radius of a stupid law without the political price of opposing a law in the aftermath of a disaster that law would have prevented. imagine if they had banned commodities trading in general!
I would not be so quick to call people brainless. Generally speaking, I would prefer that congressmen be specific with their legislation and, like a good doctor, try to first do no harm or as little harm as possible and address the problem before them specifically without causing unintended consequences.
As I wrote in a previous comment on this thread I am sure the congressman that passed the law discussed the issue with farmers and ranchers producing all traded commodities and the ones that were not growing onions did not think there was a significant risk of a corner and they preferred to have their goods traded.
Although I do agree with you that privacy protections should be broader. As far as Megan’s law I am sure you realize that it is intended to protect everyone from sex criminals not just people named Megan.
The particular brainless lawmaker behind this act went on to become President. I think that shows Americans love and reward brainless lawmakers for creating these brainless laws.
I'm pretty sure that he was loved and rewarded for being the star football player at the University of Michigan when they were the undefeated national champions two years in a row.
No, it is because onions (and potatoes) occupy this very weird middle ground in terms of perishability, the seasonality of the harvest, and the size of the domestic production and consumption market, which makes them uniquely vulnerable to market manipulation. A commodity has to be storable enough and/or regularly harvested enough to create a predictable futures market, but when inventory is small, highly seasonal, geographically constrained, and slowly and often unpredictably non-linearly degrading, then it's pretty easy for a big player to squeeze the market.
It is a lot harder to corner the market when you have very non-perishable or very perishable goods and/or much larger domestic and global markets with harvests that vary across geography and time, like wheat and frozen orange juice concentrate. Most goods traded via futures have those properties. Onions is right on the edge of even making sense as a futures commodity, and because of that, it's a recipe for manipulation.
And there were calls to regulate potatoes the same way in the fallout of the onion market manipulation, but those didn't pass, and in 1976 the potato market was almost cornered in the same way.
What's a little permanent undermining of unknown scope across wide swaths of developed area if it means a decade or two of profitability over the working life of the well? I mean have you even considered the shareholders interests?
Yeah, recent events have clarified how much Israel and Saudi (and Bahrain, Jordan etc) are real defense priorities for the US. Expended a lot of Patriot interceptors and lost several aircraft on the ground including an incredibly expensive E-3 Sentry.
It is probably time for the Cold War relics to leave. It doesn't help their case that the US and Coalition spent much of the past 25 years since 9/11 engaged in an ultimately fruitless war in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nobody really wants to look at the Ukraine war in Western Europe. It's very apparent that the degree of caring depends on how far east a country is; Poland are talking about getting the Bomb. The UK has provided significant technical assistance and missiles but the war really is not in the public conversation, and attempts to increase military spending or even fix the Ajax have gone nowhere. Everyone is of course obsessed with refugees, but not at looking where they have come from or what they are fleeing.
The situation got even worse with the new Iran war. Is that going to be a ten or twenty year event? Is the US finally going to get the ground invasion of Iran it has wanted since the Carter administration?
We cannot build a security architecture by looking backwards. We have to look forwards. But I'd settle for looking out of the window at the world as it is today.
> UK has provided significant technical assistance and missiles but the war really is not in the public conversation
Good God! If there has been a "lack of conversation", it is simply because not sporting Ukraine would be utterly unthinkable to us. The UK support for Ukraine has been, and continues to be, one of the largest.
Indeed, under the Homes for Ukraine scheme, UK private citizens allowed 234,000 Ukrainian refugees to come and live with us in our homes and spare rooms. Ukraine flags are flying everywhere in Blighty. Slava Ukraini!
That's what I mean! The practical support has been really good. It doesn't filter back into the Discourse. There's no "having done that, what next?" It doesn't feed into discussions about military readiness or spending. The refugee success doesn't impact the endless small boats discourse.
This is rather like the Cameron administration actually being good on Net Zero.
If you look at oil prices, the Iran-US-Israel-Saudi war is now everyone's problem globally, whether they're part of the hegemon or not.
It's very difficult to disconnect from the problems of the world when your fuel is imported (+) from the middle east and your chips are imported from the Far east. Trying to be an autarky is .. well, the US might be able to do it, but it will be fearsomely expensive.
(+) US is currently a net exporter of oil/petroleum products, but that is a recent development and subject to change
The biggest to suffer after the BAM is closed is the EU. It is not an accident that the USA decided not to support Saudi when they asked for air strikes last week.
ARAMCO just told the EU there will be no oil shipments next month.
Hurting the EU is a major goal of the current US admin.
Since the days of USENET there's always been a significant cluster of that kind of views in the tech sphere. Tech does not magically make people more liberal, it's just that going to university sometimes does.
I do wonder how much of that still applies anyway, the extremely cosy/informal relationship between the five members can't really work in a world where one member is threatening to annexe the territory of one and support the annexation of another.
Trump wading into the Falklands debate was catastrophically stupid (not that I would expect otherwise) and chopped the legs out from the people who'd support him/their style of politics here.
So was threatening Canada, that's how he ended up dealing with Carney which from his PoV was the much worse outcome.
I suspect that the various staff of the permanent ("deep") state who roll their eyes at democratic accountability are just continuing to do their own thing together. Especially as they tend to have conservative politics and the same personal list of friend and enemy countries that is not easily updated.
Probably, even if the instruction comes down from on high to not co-operate so much institutional inertia (and decades of working together) will keep it going for a while, likely til the senior folks retire.
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