NEWS: Kyoto Treaty Leaves the US Behind

Your dubious assertion that these countries are "dirtier" than the US, based on some trash you saw in the street or whatever, is immaterial to the fact that the US puts far more pollutants into the air than they do.

Cue the banjoes, Cleatus...

Hope thereis enough time.
That's a cop out for me. Now would be the time to design the infrastucture and put it in place while the city is still developing. It's only going to be more expensive to implement the latter it's left. The core of the city isn't going anywhere, why not ensure there is a functioning transit system now. Newly developed outlying regions can be connected as they are built.

That is unrealistic to assume that the city centers will not change as the city expands. In the US, as the city expands, the land in the center of a city becomes more valuable and the smaller cheaper buildings are torn down and even taller buildings erected. Taller buildings need larger swaths of connected land, and even deeper foundations, making early permanent public transportation either above or below ground a hindrance to growth, or a huge city expense to change constantly.
Once the city reaches critical mass, and auto travel and parking lose viability a mass transit system is either installed or the city strangles itself to death.
My state is littered with cities that did not adapt correctly and floundered, they look like the discarded remnants of a war zone.

Ok, maybe there is some joke that's going over my head, but how come whenever someone challenges a decision of the Americans, they are automatically labelled a "communist"????

Anyway, I make no claims to know facts or figures concerning this whole treaty business and economy and such, I'm just happy to sit back and watch this whole farce play out.

I was just trying to be funny. I'd like to think it's a McCarthy relic, but sadly there are probably more recent examples.

I understand what you are saying but not quite sure there is a point when one can say a city has reached critical mass and now would be a good time to build mass public transit. I'm pretty sure that the people living in New York city at the turn of the 20th century never expected buildings to be as high as they are now yet they still had a transit system both above and below ground.
I don't know how a city is going to turn out, but it's a safe bet that at some point mass transit is going to be needed. What I'm getting at is that this need can be anticipated with some certainty and the plans can be put in place, even if they aren't used, to make sure the land is set aside. This way buildings don't have to be torn down to make way for a subway or that buses have to detour all over the place to go around buildings. I'd rather see this stuff being taken care of now rather than dumping it on another generation.

hmm you might want to take a look at this

india and china have both ratified the kyoto treaty. in case you were wondering shanghai, beijing, dehli and bombay are in those countries. and as hong kong returned to chinese rule a few years back i believe they'll be covered too. but never mind, you make a good point.

oh, and, although i thank russia for ratifying this and tiping the scales to mae it law, don't think that russia actually cares about the environment. putin's scientific advisors dn't seem to believe in global wrming, they're just trying to take advantage of the financial benefits. countries that exceed their emmisions targets are allowed to sell emmissions 'credits' to other countries. so if russia beat it's target by 2% but china was 2% behind it could buy the 2% allowance from russia for a shitload of money in order to avoid sanctions for not meeting it's target. russia is rather lucky as it's so fucking big and most of it fell apart a few years back, so it already meets emmission targets apparetnly. so by making the treaty law it automatically gave itself a market to sell an imaginary commodity it already owned.

edit - i can't be arsed to fix all those spelling mistakes, i'm just going to point out it's 4am and i'm really drunk.

[Edited on Nov 24, 2004 by almostfamous]

exactly right. the idea behind international treaties like this is to get states to focus on a very specific problem and address it. the process is often very slow, and the UN gets a lot of flack for not moving fast enough on certain issues like, civil and political rights, and economic and social rights, but it is a body comprised of 191 sovereign states and the process is often muddy. however, with a treaty comes great transparency and public scrutiny. the idea is that states will be "shamed" into compliance with changing norms. once states become signatories there is great political and economic pressure on them to become more "friendly" world actors. the most important thing here is scrutiny and pressure. given time, international law and the UN tend to actually work out the problems addressed in specific treaties like this one. the U.S. has been less and less willing to subject itself to international scrutiny recently and any suggestion of such an idea is attacked (famously in the "global test" rhetoric we heard during the campaign). but the U.S. has always been subject to scrutiny in its affairs - mostly silently. it's just that recently this scrutiny has been made such a point of controversy. it's too bad becuase we were on a pretty good track. for example, the U.S. is no longer on the commission for human rights for the very first time in 50 years. i think we need to seriously examine the path we have gotten ourselves on a we need to realize that we are not the only people on the planet. my 2 cents.

The same way that every public works project gets decided in a democratic society. Enough people complain, and enough people realize the need for it, that they will elect a representative who promises to spend huge amounts of long term resources and citizen tax money to invest in and build a public asset.

NYC was one of the first large cities in the US and it grew to "critical mass" before the invention of the automobile. Manhattan is the de facto "city center" of NYC and it is an island. This means that even before the advent of the automobile people from neighborhoods farther away from the city center (due to housing costs) still had to travel to Manhattan Island to work, creating the need for a mass transit system for those who lived outside walking distance via bridges.
Also, as you stated, NYC has some of the oldest public transportation infrastructure in the world, and the citizens of NYC have paid through the nose to fix it time and time again to bypass structures, or build buildings with mass transit running through the basement.
The WTC when it was standing housed an entire mass transit station with several tunnels running through the basement, and 10 floors of basement below the station.

i will disagree slightly, in that i would argue that it was the invention of the automobile and the facilitating of automobile traffic in the city that caused it to reach its critical mass. robert moses created a network of travel that failed to take into account the actual needs of people living in the 5 boroughs and long island. when he built the tunnels, bridges, and highways in the area to ease the perceived congestion, he actually caused more congestion in the process. i think the mass transit system we all know and love (and bitch about) was in place prior to the city's critical mass and if not for it, men like moses would have burried the island in a sea of buicks and oldsmobiles. it is hard to say though, because the city has always been a hyper developing urban area. gerald frug wrote some excellent stuff about this phenomenon.

This is essentially the reason I am opposed to the plan. I know very well that pressure put on the pocketbook of the US Government (the revenue of which is increasingly being generated by wage earners instead of corporations) will never translate into increased pressure on industry to meet certain emission standards. In the US, what would happen is the congress would just add pollution credits to the long list of issues we throw tax dollars at hoping it will go away.
Unless I understand the Kyoto treaty wrong, and it somehow targets specific companies with compliance. Although that would be rather invasive as far as treaties go, and I don't understand how the treaty would be enforced.

That and the belief that the whole concept of "forced massive global wealth redistribution" as a means to solve a global problem linked to economic power, is both juvenile and an overly simplistic utopian solution.

I agree, it wasn't really the critical mass that facilitated the need for an early public transportation system, but more of a lack of automobiles.

do i detect sarcasm in your tone, sir? [insert good natured emoticon here].

The irish guy must've gone back to looking at naked girls.

Nope I was being serious, dead_ringer.

I debated whether or not to explain it that way, it just seemed easier to understand in context.
Especially when explaining to a canadian. <---- (THIS is Sarcasm)

[Edited on Nov 23, 2004 by SirPsychoSexy]

So he really did go to the Stockula School of Debate.

Well, perhaps my thinking is clouded by the fact that I live in San Diego, which has a terrible mass transit system, and near LA whose Transit system does not seem to be significantly better. Tracking city expansion is harder than you might think, also. While it's true that the "core" of a city won't move, a cities core areas (party central, business areas, condos, new baseball parks in the freaking middle of downtown, etc) will frequently move as what the function of areas change around. Unless the transit system is being constantly adaped and upgraded it will fall hopelessely behind (as it has here in San Diego). To keep it up the city has to spend money on it, and the city will ONLY spend money on it if a large number of it's voters are dependent on it. As long as freeways are relatively clear, that won't be true.

Instituting effective transit systems would be easy (relatively) if I were Emperor of America, but alas I am not. People, any people, don't like paying for things they don't see as personally useful. You call this a cop out, and maybe it is on the part of the system, but I'm not trying to justify the lack of a transit system, I'm trying to explain it. I have only been able to vote in this most recent election (I was too Canadian and not enough American before), but I intend to vote to give as much money as I am allowed to public transit in San Diego or California, that is the best I can currently do (too poor to buy a brand spanking new Hybrid, but I think my Saab gets decent mileage).

Oh, and as for hoping there is enough time...plant some trees, they eat Carbon Dioxide like you wouldn't believe . That might buy us some time.

[Edited on Nov 23, 2004 10:31PM]

^^^^
Fair enough. I guess I'm looking at the issue from the POV of where I live. Our city can't expand anymore as it's bordered on 3 sides by water and the other side by protected land. The transit sysytem sucks here too and yet there is more than enough people to justify upgrading it. The problem is that no forward planning has meant that public transit corridor's will be impossible to put in place unless the city starts expropriating private land.