Australia releases 326,757 tonnes per year of CO2.
The U.S. releases 6,049,435 tonnes per year.

Originally posted by tezzajw
On one hand, sure, by burning fossil fuels, we'll kill life on Earth. But on the other hand, what right does a NASA scientist have to criticise Australia's energy problems, when his own government is doing its best to destroy life on Earth via military domination?

That NASA scientist does not encompass any significant portion of "his own government". Do you really have that big of an issue with authority? I can't imagine your psychological reasoning behind that. He is advocating what he personally believes will benefit the planet. As an advocate of a personal belief, he might have greater impact on a smaller nation, which we should assume has a much smaller central government bureaucracy. If he can get pressure on one government and that pressure carries through (he's leveraging the weight of his words as a technical expert in his field) then in his own mind he has succeeded. You must at least attempt to understand how an advocate thinks and feels. I'm fairly certain he doesn't think of himself as some elitist.

[edit on 6-1-2009 by cognoscente]

i think it would only be fair to use those stats with a "per populace %" type of comparison, watcher.

eg: USA generates 5 tonne per person, Aus 9 Tonne per person (purely off the wall figures based on nothing whatsoever but you get the point.)

Australia only has 22 million citizens total, how many does USA have?

Australia has the highest per-capita emmisions rate on the planet, due to its small population and relatively high export rate.
But those sorts of statistics are for people that like pointing fingers, not people that like to change things for the better.

Hi All

This wouldnt have anything to do with the fact we most likely will not be taking detainees from guantanamo would it?

A bit of controlled bad media to make australia not so popular for international relations and perhaps try to make aust bend to the requests of the US gov.

As we know climate change etc is a global problem for all countries and saying who is worse is a name calling game not a solution. So I think the name calling is the bit that shows they want to make us look bad.

My 2 cents.

themuse

I am sorry that this post isn't more informative than it should be but in this particular case I cannot help myself.....


HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA


HA.

This is the most ridiculous article I have ever seen. It's a blame game, politically motivated and probably caused by the fact, as was stated by another poster previously, that we refuse to take the guantanamo prisoners (or something ridiculous like that).

What about China? BEFORE the Oympics China had all there factories blowing HUGE amounts of crap into the air. And what about U.S.? Don't they have bad problems with pollution from there cars? But yeah. Kevin07, PrimeTourist of Australia does really care for the environmental. He even will NOT stop Japan from killing the whales, he will NOT stop the logging of the trees and he will NOT stop with the coal burning...And at the mean time, the world goverments is somehow raiseing taxes that do not seem to help the environment in anyway.

This is no blame game. You all want to believe that.

It is common to have some propensity to believe someone only when they themselves (or the organizations they represent) follow the same moral conduct in action as in speech. As intellectual beings, however, we have been gifted the ability to choose not to believe these so called visceral reactions and so with this objective reasoning, we become free from any reliance on choosing our conclusions based solely on intuitive conjecture. With this mind of ours, we can choose not to predicate all our own opinions on notions of an individual's ostensible character. What's even more interesting is how all of you are relating that scientist to some government inner working, as if either institution has something to benefit by providing accusations on such a controversial front as energy consumption, the burning of "dirty" fossil fuels and ultimately its impact on the environment.

So what if it is a blame game? Personally, I think you're all deluded. What evidence leads us to believe this one scientist has been assigned some deceptive task to shift the blame away from the U.S.? That you can't trust "the government"? That type of reasoning is hardly worth the time required to type out the corresponding sentence.

Of course, I could be wrong seeing as how biology will tell us that one's intuition is not a simple lack of reasoning, but a fitness oriented ability which has a firm basis in our evolutionary history. Then again, these essentially primordial psychological structures are undoubtedly losing a vast proportion of their relevance, especially in the setting of our increasingly complex world, a world which must be validated by at least some modicum of empirical analysis to be considered worthy.

We know we're taking this too far when a qualified authority can't even have his opinion tolerated because of our increasing tendency to associate him with his organization, or his organization's vested interests.

You too, I'm sure, can see where all this will only persuade the creation of an ever more unenthusiastic society, one reluctant to trust any source information for fear of how one's support might benefit the informant, or provider of said information. This type of society would naturally select for deceptiveness, which would be the only way to transmit information that might be tolerated. This will lead to a decrease in said information's value in terms of it being able to produce real benefits to society, and instead squander it upon the selected few. We will lose any standard upon which to measure the progress of our quality of information, as people begin to disregard every major publication and every source of information from any academically qualified individual or institution.

In my own "intuitive" pursuit in trusting this individual I am risking the collective well being of this little society right here on ATS. If I provide the wrong information and we all believe it, then we will all lose. So many would choose not to believe me, some would choose to argue with me. A third solution would be to call me naive! I know I might seem naive by writing this, but that is merely a product of your own evolutionary psychology at work. It is your reasoning that a negative opinion might be more responsible, as it is probabilistically more accurate. However, I am confident in my opinion, because I hope to have critically analyzed the situation, its agents and its actors, before immediately warning the world (and this board's members) that we can't trust this scientist. From this confidence I am capable of deriving such "naive" reasoning, yet still produce a more accurate predication than you could ever hope for.

[edit on 6-1-2009 by cognoscente]

Originally posted by cognoscente

That NASA scientist does not encompass any significant portion of "his own government". Do you really have that big of an issue with authority? I can't imagine your psychological reasoning behind that.

Actually, though this may be hard for you to comprehend, we don't recognize the USA or NAZA as an authority in Australia.

He is advocating what he personally believes will benefit the planet. As an advocate of a personal belief, he might have greater impact on a smaller nation, which we should assume has a much smaller central government bureaucracy.

Why not try impacting his own very ill country? Let's face it, the USA is absolutely up sh*t creek without a paddle. USA has more problems that you could poke a stick at. What a laugh!

If he can get pressure on one government and that pressure carries through (he's leveraging the weight of his words as a technical expert in his field) then in his own mind he has succeeded. You must at least attempt to understand how an advocate thinks and feels. I'm fairly certain he doesn't think of himself as some elitist.

Oh, I'm sure he does, and again let me reiterate my earlier sentiments by saying no one in Australia would give a stuff what this DH thinks or says.

IRM

Ooohh, is this the beginning of creating a pretense to invade a fellow western country?

If there were 200 million Australians instead of 20 million there might be some truth to what he says. I think China and the US contribute much more to emissions because of their large populations. Even if these countries had no industry they would propably produce more emissions then Australia from farting alone lol It kind of makes you wonder how this guy became a NASA scientist or what his agenda is.

Originally posted by cognoscente
This is no blame game. You all want to believe that.

It is common to have some propensity to believe someone only when they themselves (or the organizations they represent) follow the same moral conduct in action as in speech. As intellectual beings, however, we have been gifted the ability to choose not to believe these so called visceral reactions and so with this objective reasoning, we become free from any reliance on choosing our conclusions based solely on intuitive conjecture. With this mind of ours, we can choose not to predicate all our own opinions on notions of an individual's ostensible character. What's even more interesting is how all of you are relating that scientist to some government inner working, as if either institution has something to benefit by providing accusations on such a controversial front as energy consumption, the burning of "dirty" fossil fuels and ultimately its impact on the environment.

So what if it is a blame game? Personally, I think you're all deluded. What evidence leads us to believe this one scientist has been assigned some deceptive task to shift the blame away from the U.S.? That you can't trust "the government"? That type of reasoning is hardly worth the time required to type out the corresponding sentence.

Of course, I could be wrong seeing as how biology will tell us that one's intuition is not a simple lack of reasoning, but a fitness oriented ability which has a firm basis in our evolutionary history. Then again, these essentially primordial psychological structures are undoubtedly losing a vast proportion of their relevance, especially in the setting of our increasingly complex world, a world which must be validated by at least some modicum of empirical analysis to be considered worthy.

We know we're taking this too far when a qualified authority can't even have his opinion tolerated because of our increasing tendency to associate him with his organization, or his organization's vested interests.

You too, I'm sure, can see where all this will only persuade the creation of an ever more unenthusiastic society, one reluctant to trust any source information for fear of how one's support might benefit the informant, or provider of said information. This type of society would naturally select for deceptiveness, which would be the only way to transmit information that might be tolerated. This will lead to a decrease in said information's value in terms of it being able to produce real benefits to society, and instead squander it upon the selected few. We will lose any standard upon which to measure the progress of our quality of information, as people begin to disregard every major publication and every source of information from any academically qualified individual or institution.

In my own "intuitive" pursuit in trusting this individual I am risking the collective well being of this little society right here on ATS. If I provide the wrong information and we all believe it, then we will all lose. So many would choose not to believe me, some would choose to argue with me. A third solution would be to call me naive! I know I might seem naive by writing this, but that is merely a product of your own evolutionary psychology at work. It is your reasoning that a negative opinion might be more responsible, as it probabilistically more accurate. However, I am confident in my opinion, because I hope to have critically analyzed the situation, its agents and its actors, before immediately warning the world (and this board's members) that we can't trust this scientist. In this confidence I can derive my "naive" reasoning and still succeed.

There! I just had a conversation with myself... I'm so cool.

[edit on 6-1-2009 by cognoscente]

This is a good post. I thought it was nice of you to include that you could be wrong. there's not enough of that these days...anyways, I just have to say regarding this post that I'm beginning to realize that many answers in life are usually quite simple because of the parallels of laws. When I think of your point here (is it all in our head?), I draw a parallel in my head. Almost a metaphor. It goes something like:

"what is more likely; that I will be standing there and see something that didn't exist, or will I stand there and not see something that does? Unless someone is extremely judgemental, they don't see things that don't exist in nature (things can include motives, imaginary spaceships, or opinions...anything et al). If a conspiracy was anything, say, a truck, would it be more likely for me to miss the truck going by, or for me to imagine it went by when it didnt'? The answer is obviously the former.
Don't mistake this for evidence. The evidence is too clouded in most conspiracies to form an opinion that holds up to selfscrutiny. Well at least for me. This is just an example (and undersstand this is difficult to put on paper) of how a seemingly crazy person does indeed have his own system of checks and balances, and frankly, by the time there is empirical evidence (withing this subject anyways) it will be much too late.

Originally posted by watch_the_rocks
Australia releases 326,757 tonnes per year of CO2.
The U.S. releases 6,049,435 tonnes per year.

BUT....

U.S. population: 300,000,000

Australia population: 21,000,000

Australia has about 15% the population of the U.S. but releases about 3.5% more emissions.

Fact is....BOTH countries emit TOO much don't they?

Sounds like the pot calling the kettle black (from soot!)