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Please don't get me wrong: I'm not against efficiency per se. Most of the light bulbs in my house are CFL's, except for where light bulbs do double duty as heaters. I have even replaced the bulb in the refrigerator with a rather expensive LED light, out of consideration for preventing food spoilage, which is probably a far greater source of waste (even in terms of carbon foot print) than all the other bulbs vs. CFL's in the house combined. It just seems to me that the obsession with high EPA highway rating is really doodling around the edges while ignoring the 800lb gorilla in the room: commute during rush hour consumes far more fuel than EPA highway ratings would imply. I have moved and switched to telecommute, reducing my annual mileage from 18,000 miles to under 5,000. Even a 15mpg car driven only 5000 miles a year consumes less gas than a 37mpg light weight car driven 15,000 miles a year . . . and the latter would be lucky to get 20mpg in heavy rush hour traffic in real life, despite its EPA 37mpg highway rating.
As for global temperature continue to increase, we can only hope humanity would be so lucky. Warming temperature brings higher farm yield and lower fuel (and food) needs, leaving room to accommodate the ever growing self-aggrandizement of overlords/bureaucracy, which tend to operate with rear-view mirrors and tax based on previous year's productivity, in effect resulting in a lower tax rate during warming and yield rise. That's what historians call the expansion phase of civilization. When the climate trends reverse itself, society becomes unable to support the overhead freeloaders, who try to collect their pound of flesh at the previous year's rate despite shrinking productivity in the current year; then people fight over table scraps. It's no co-incidence that all three of the major invaders of Russia since Sweden's Karl XII found themselves in the coldest Russian winter in memory. Warming weather brings cooperation prosperity, whereas cooling climate brings mutual predation and massive catastrophy.
posted by 76.118.39...
, Fri, 4 Feb 2011 17:11:03, Sat, 5 Feb 2011 07:10:28, Sat, 5 Feb 2011 11:50:28
, Thu, 3 Feb 2011 18:27:38
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