For a Climate in Crisis?
(from msn link Screamname posted above)
Posted on 04/21/2007 10:49:33 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
For most of us facing gridlocked roads and packed trains, the Monday morning commute is a more pressing concern than climate change.
Staggering rush hours could tackle climate change
But there may be a single solution to both, according to business leaders.
The Institute of Directors is calling for flexible hours and more home working to help tackle global warming.
Miles Templeman, the institute's director-general, said offering employees greater flexibility would ease pressure on transport networks and cut rush-hour power demand - thereby reducing emissions. Mr Templeman urged ministers not to rush into policies that risked harming the economy, such as caps on emissions and carbon taxes.
Speaking ahead of the institute's annual convention later this week, he criticised the Government over its "ideological" approach to climate change.
"The politicians are still hooked up on this global leadership on climate change, which has become a political bandwagon," he said. "You can see all the politicians trying to out-green each other. There is a danger they will damage competitiveness and companies will move jobs to other countries."
His comments come weeks after Chris Gibson Smith, the chairman of the London Stock Exchange, said the Government's policies on climate change risked damaging British business.
He said Britain could not tackle climate change on its own and carbon emission penalties put the country's competitive edge at risk.
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "The UK environmental industry is already a success story and worth some £25 billion annually.
"Boosting energy efficiency makes good financial sense for business and also helps cut carbon emissions."
A-freaking-men. The DC metro is a first-rate mass transit system, but the area highways are a grade-A Charlie Foxtrot for about half the day. If government employees could telecommute, or even commute a short distance to satellite offices in the 'burbs, it would save a lot of time, money and pollution.
I know the article isn't about the US federal government, but that's the one with which I'm most familiar. I'm gonna guess the London bureaucracy isn't a lot better, and I know -- not from experience, but from reading -- that London traffic, despite an excellent mass-transit system, is hellish.
Sure. If your job requires talking a lot of meetings, or serving people face to face, you can't do that from an armchair in the spare bedroom. You can't unclog a toilet or rebuild a carburetor over the Internet. But wouldn't it be nicer to get to those jobs without all those folks in your way who don't have to be?
Most people who work in cubicles have three essential tools in that cubicle -- the computer, the network and the telephone. Guess what? I have all of those at home. In a far more comfortable and peaceful environment.
For a Climate in Crisis?
(from msn link Screamname posted above)
Best solution of all.... stay home and don’t exhale.Happy Bettie Page birthday..I mean...Earth Day.
Better solution. If you are truly worried about man’s impact on the planet and global warming remove yourself by any means possible..
That's been the general trend whenever new oppressive government policies are instituted. Look at what extreme environazism, OSHA, and forced unionism (in some states) has done to much of our manufacturing capability.
Certain civil service jobs are doing that now. I commute with two people in the IT section and they work from home about 1/3 of the time. The bad part of that is they often get calls at any hour and have to log onto the network. My job is almost impossible to work from home. I can't turn wrenches through the wires.
A tiny amount of common sense, albeit within the faulty paradigm of human-caused global warming... Are you listening, legislators in Sacto?
I too think telecommuting, for those of us who can, is a great idea but not because of bogus global warming claims. Although I would think that less folks on the roads does have a positive effect on the traffic and on the environment and on my wallet.
Traffic in the Baltimore area is getting ridiculous, almost as bad as DC and I live in an area that will be greatly impacted by BRAC (Base Realignment and Closure) with literally thousands and thousands of new folks moving into the area over the next few years. Right now I can drive to my office in thirty minutes, off rush hour, but my daily commute typically takes at least an hour each way and often more if there’s an accident on I-95 or the Beltway and a major widening of I-95 from where I live all the way to the Beltway is now underway - probably another impact of BRAC. Gasoline prices are on the rise and thanks to the MD legislature, this June my gas and electric rates are going to soar.
My employer provides some of us with a VPN. I mostly use it when I’m home sick and don’t want to spread germs around the office but I’m not really too sick to work, in times of bad weather, or when I have my car in for maintenance or work done on my house. It’s a win-win for me and my employer – I don’t have to use up all my PTO (personal time off) and my employer doesn’t miss out on my productivity and I can still participate in meetings via a phone conference bridge.
It’s also a great option for times when my work load is high and I need to put in extra time on evenings and weekends. Working from home saves me the hassle of staying late or driving in to the office on a Saturday. I’m much more motivated to work extra when I can do it from home.
And I find I’m more productive working from home, I can start work earlier; no need to get dressed up and put on the “face spackle” – I just get up, take a quick shower, throw on some comfy clothes, brew a pot of coffee and get to work and you are right, there are less interruptions – you know the co-worker who feels it’s necessary to stop by and chat for 30 minutes about last night’s American Idol results and the person in the cube or office next door that doesn’t understand the concept of “inside voice” or that it is not necessary to “yell” into a speaker phone.
As a manager, I can’t do this everyday and I need to put in “face time” but I’m thinking of asking if I and some of the people in my department can telecommute one or two days a week. I’ve done the math and I’m willing to forgo this year’s raise or part of it in lieu of working from home one or two days a week.
LOL! I never noticed that. “Crisis”..Holy cripes.
Isn`t is amazing that they are holding this huge concert(s) on 7 continents in protest of a non permanent, totally necessary gas (CO2) that makes up 0.04% (which you can literally read as ZERO POINT ZERO) of the earths atmosphere, but a bunch of Islamic wackos who have been mass murdering innocent civilians for the past umpteen years, who wouldn`t hesitate for a second to bring upon the earth absolute armageddon if they ever got their hands on nukes, are completely supported? Says alot about their priorities.
Like my brother says, the CO2 percentage in the atmosphere is 0.04%...If it drops to 0.02%, photosynthesis in plants all but stops. Weren`t these same people recently complaining about trees “dying” by being cut down in the rain forest? Now they want CO2 reduced? We could no more reduce it than we could increase it anyway, we just do not have the size or numbers to compete with plants.
For example if you took everyone who lives on earth and crammed them together like trees, they would take up no more than 800 square miles. The same with all the cars and industrial plants, it wouldn`t even be a blip on the map.
Then you look at plant ecosystems like the South American rainforest. It is so huge, it is about the same size as the entire United States! And that is just ONE ecosystem. This is why the earth is composed of 21% Oxegen and CO2. It`s ridiculous to think we could even begin to make any kind of a dent in the atmosphere.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e9/South_America_satellite_orthographic.jpg
“Happy Bettie Page birthday”
LOL - Now there is a day worth recognizing.
I watched The Apartment last night (1959) and the plot centers about a big insurance company located in a 27 story office building in New York; with somewhere around 49,000 employees, the managers had shifted work schedules around so that employees on different floors arrived and left ten minutes apart to accomodate the elevator capacity.
Nothing changes, it just gets renamed.
The air is cleaner now than at any time on record; yet, the doomsayers would have us believe that the air is so polluted as to not even allow an extra drop of vapor or a molecule of plant food (CO2).
The temperature rise is one degree, less if you believe some studies.
So far there are no documented ill effects, all is placed on the future, the distant future as far as our lifespans are concerned.
Too much hype, not enough hard fact.
My wife’s cat just went through the smog station - 2PPM HC; 0.00PPM CO.
The standard is 220PPM.
The car is a 94 Park Avenue that gets 30MPG at 70MPH on the Interstate with the A/C on.
It also means I don't have to worry about my very expensive computer books being stolen from my office. I can have my whole library available. That's a big time saver. Much better productivity for me and my customer.
My wife has a 1 mile commute to work. We do our local shopping in her vehicle most of the time. All the important stores are within 2.5 miles of the house. I actually had to purchase a battery charger to recover the battery on my car. It has only been driven about 1,000 miles since 2002.
I like it! We all stay home and do our work! Yep, that really is a solution! Oh, except that the work that some of do can’t be done even if we are cubically bound.
I have a simpler solution. Everyone stop, uh hum, how shall I put this diplomatically...passing gas. Or for you Rednecks...farting. If we could get everyone to just stop, think of the benefitS! So for Gore’s sake, STOP FARTING!
“There is a danger they will damage competitiveness and companies will move jobs to other countries.”
So the “greening” competition is driving companies to other countries? Uh, yeah right. And here I thought it was cheap labor. Mexicans and other south of the border types are sneaking into the US to grab the jobs, while Europe has the Muslims. I’ll take the Mexicans, because at least they don’t torch the cars when they get upset. They just stay home from work and watch novelas, while their activist friends are marching with their Che Gueverra t-shirts and signs.
I'd like to know which crisis center a "climate" goes to.
You don't even have to consider "global warming" to conclude that cutting down on traffic is a good idea.
The air may be cleaner averaged across places and times, but in growing cities, smog is definitely worse and continuing to worsen. When I was a kid, LA's smog made it the butt of jukes -- fast-growing cities like Houston and Atlanta have caught up with and surpassed LA. It's not good for anyone, and it's really rough on old folks and asthmatics.
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