12 Comments

  1. From the linked article:

    “Vilsack said if the plan is followed, carbon emissions would be reduced by 120 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent by 2025. “

    Can someone explain to me what is “carbon dioxide equivalent”? Are gasses interchangeable now?

    “We’re out of oxygen, Doctor.”
    “No problem, Nurse. Just give the patient some oxygen equivalent.”
    “Oxygen equivalent, Doctor?”
    “Yeah, whatever is handy.”

  2. If I do not drive cross-country tomorrow, I will have saved the equivalent of half a goregleplex of carbon dioxide emissions. This is how politicians think. And scientists engaged in cooking the books. And especially bureaucrats justifying higher budgets.

  3. Not clear enough? See, cow feces are “renewable” and coal isn’t, which means that feces are preferable to coal in carbon cycle equivalency, according to the well known equation:

    Φ = W / Qh = 1 – (Tc / Th)

    A good example of this is food:

    “In a 2014 study by Scarborough et al., the real-life diets of British people were surveyed and their greenhouse gas footprints estimated.[33] Average greenhouse-gas emissions per day (in kilograms of carbon dioxide equivalent) were:

    7.19 for high meat-eaters
    5.63 for medium meat-eaters
    4.67 for low meat-eaters
    3.91 for fish-eaters
    3.81 for vegetarians
    2.89 for vegans”

    (emphasis: mine)

    Al Gore knows that the lower your food number, the more $$$ money he makes in selling carbon credits for “carbon dioxide equivalency.” QED.

  4. Brain hurts.

    “Carbon dioxide equivalency is a quantity that describes, for a given mixture and amount of greenhouse gas, the amount of CO2 that would have the same global warming potential (GWP), when measured over a specified timescale (generally, 100 years). Carbon dioxide equivalency thus reflects the time-integrated radiative forcing of a quantity of emissions or rate of greenhouse gas emission—a flow into the atmosphere—rather than the instantaneous value of the radiative forcing of the stock (concentration) of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere described by CO2e.

    The carbon dioxide equivalency for a gas is obtained by multiplying the mass and the GWP of the gas. The following units are commonly used:

    By the UN climate change panel IPCC: billion metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent (GtCO2eq).
    In industry: million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents (MMTCDE).
    For vehicles: g of carbon dioxide equivalents / km (gCDE/km).

    For example, the GWP for methane over 100 years is 25 and for nitrous oxide 298. This means that emissions of 1 million metric tonnes of methane and nitrous oxide respectively is equivalent to emissions of 25 and 298 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide.”

  5. I blame Google.

    All it means is that US farmers aren’t going to necessarily cut carbon emissions but will cut anything and everything else they produce to an equivalent amount of measured carbon. They have to obfuscate and use the “Buzz” words that everyone else thinks scares people instead of just saying, “We are going to have them cut their methane emissions but having them get rid of their cows.”

  6. The largest emitters of carbon dioxide are volcanic eruptions, forest and wild fires, and natural decomposition of plants and animals. This is a good thing, since there is a relatively stable and finite amount of both oxygen and carbon on this planet. If it weren’t for carbon dioxide, the earth could well be a frozen ball in space, and life, as we know it, would probably not be able to survive.

    http://www.carbonoffsetsdaily.com/news-channels/global/the-major-sources-for-carbon-dioxide-emissions-40831.htm

    Yup, it’s those damn farmers fault, they have plants AND animals!

    If only they’d do something useful like making things that absorb CO2 and produce oxygen but noooooooo, all they do is cause GLOBAL WARMING™!!!111!1!11!!1!

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