Climate Change: What's your take?

[Groundking]

0815user said:

burn less coal/oil and plant more trees and we're good in about 20 years. low oil price is a sign for a less oil based future economy which is good. also, stop wasting plastic products because most of them tend to end up in the ocean.

As has already been explained, low oil prices are great for the continued use of such fuel souces, but planting more trees aint going to do shit with such rampant logging in the tropical rainforests. I agree with wasting plastics in general, but a quick way to improve the situation would be to deregulate parts of the incineration and reprossessing parts of recycling. Part of the big reason we don't do more recycling is due to regulation that means you can't reprosses (and re-make) plastics that are mixed food and non food sourced plastics, plus ALL food plastic packaging has to be virgin plastic, I.E. can't be an recycled plastic, and just think of the kinda proportion of uses for plastic that food plastic has? On a brighter note, there are a lot of promising enterprises in the earliest stages of development in regards to cleaning up the ocean plasic, so things might improve quite a bit over the next dacade in regards to this, especially if oil prices increase in the future, making recycled plastic more economical.

0815user said:

thranx said:

 

A low price in oil ensures that oil and coal will remain our ources for energy. the only hope for renewable energy is a high oil price. that makes renewable nergy not so expensive in comparison to oil. So if you want less oil and coal burned you should hope for a high price. I wouldn't count on that as we are continually increasing the amount of viable oil for drilling through new technology. With China and India only growing I wouldn't count on the world using less fossil fuels any time soon. There is no benifit to China or India trying to cut emissions, nor should they be forced too by the world and the rest of the world doesnt have the  uscle to enforce it any ways. Slowing down consumption in the western world may help, but as China and India gain ground any cutbacks from the west are sure to be matched or surpassed by increases in just china and india

oh, i can see the benefits.

It depends on if the economic negatives outweigh the economic possitives.