What is the Impact of Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

What is the Impact of Carbon Dioxide Emissions? Alvena Nance Abstract Are we paying attention to the effects of carbon dioxide emissions and doing everything we can eliminate the negative effect it has on our overall air quality, our agriculture, and the environment? In the world the United States stands second to China among the ranks of other countries that utilizes carbon dioxide as the primary source of emissions. Energy Choices We count on the common forms of energy that are known as fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, that when combined we breathe them. It is vital that this out pouring of energy or emission into our environment is processed and monitored with the greatest accuracy so it does not negatively affect us, our country, our climate, and our agriculture. In 2016 China with 28.21 percent and the United States with 15.99 percent were the largest producers of carbon dioxide emission worldwide. World carbon dioxide emissions are one way of measuring a countrys economic growth too. The latest figures published by the respected Energy Information Administration show CO2 emissions consumption the vast majority of carbon dioxide produced. On pure emissions alone, the key points are: China emits more than CO2 than the United States and Canada put together up by 171% since 2000 The United States has had declining CO2 for two years running, the last time the United States had declining CO2 for 3 years running was in the 1980s The United States is expected to decrease their carbon dioxide emissions by 46 percent by 2040. Looking at the two leading countries agriculture growth China is the leader in gross value of agriculture outpour is rice, wheat, potatoes, corn, peanuts, tea, millet, barley, apples, cotton, oilseed, pork and fish. The United States ranks high in wheat, corn, other grains, fruit, vegetable, cotton, beef, pork, poultry, poultry, dairy products, fish and forest products. The comparison between China and Americas materials and energy production and consumption in the early 2000s with those of today. China now produces, and consumes approximately 60% of the worlds cement and second to that on the planet is India. As far as cement goes, China produces thirty times more cement each year then America. Chinas cement industry is the significant contributor to global carbon dioxide emissions.ÂÂ   Interestingly that in a single decade China went from producing 20% of the worlds steel to producing half of it. The comparison with America is equally striking. Given that almost 7% of global carbon dioxide emissions come from iron and steel making, this has both obvious and important consequences. (Wilson,2017) The production of aluminum was ten time more for China than America. China produced 60 % more than America, however Americas production declined by 25%, while Chinas increased by nearly 400%. Electricity generation is important and China has total electricity capacity increased from 344 to 1,100 gigawatts between 2001 and 2011. While Chinas primary energy consumption increased by 150% in a single decade, Americas decreased by 4%. (Wilson,2017) Coal is used a lot by China, today it consumes half of the worlds coal about four billion tons. America however is now using much less, with a decline of 20% between 2002 and 2012. (Wilson,2017) Looking at carbon dioxide emissions Americas is 50% higher than those in China, and a decade later China produced almost twice that of America and now produces more than America and the European Union put together and likely a decade from now China will emit at least three times more carbon dioxide than America. (Wilson, 2017) According to this source (Wilson, 2017) forecasting is futile however an illustrative statistical comparison to put possible energy futures of both America and China in context. Climate change is a shared challenge. The EPA collaborates with Chinas Ministry of Science and Technology on research to better assess emissions and their impacts, improve mitigation practice and technologies, and enhance sustainability. Areas of shared research include emissions that impact air and climate, water sustainability, computational toxicology, soil remediation, and toxic air pollutants. Also participating in government -wide EPA initiatives with China, is the United States. (EPA and OITA, 2017) Culture and the expectations within cultures affect all business transactions and it is important that all involved understand one another. (Pitts et al).ÂÂ   The US standard of ethics may have the potential for conflict, therefore an understanding of knowledge, of culture ethics, set expectations, and guidelines will play a role in these countrys success in working together. In conclusion it is clear that understandings of the energies and how they are studied, processed and utilized are important because they affect every human being and space around the globe and should be treated as a safety issue to mankind and the environment in which we live.

He’s A Live Wire, Metaphor and Poetry Essay

The use of metaphor in poetry is one of the most important aspects of poetic style that must be mastered. Metaphor can be described as figure of speech in which a thing is referred to as being something that it resembles. From the perspectives of construction, poetic and cognitive function and working mechanism, where metaphor is constructed from human perceptual experience and is extended through imaginative processes. An important feature of cognitive stylistics has been its interest in the way we transfer mental constructs, and especially in the way we chart one mental representation onto another when we read texts. Cognitive linguists have consistently drawn attention to this system of conceptual transfer in both literary and in everyday discourse, and have identified important figures of speech, through which this conceptual transfer is carried out. Conceptual Metaphor, also called Cognitive Metaphor, was developed by researchers within the field of cognitive linguists. It became widely known with the publication of Metaphors We Live By, by Lakoff and Johnson, in 1980. Conceptual metaphor theory has since been developed and elaborated. Definition and Construction of Metaphor as we know, metaphor is a type of figurative language in which one thing is described in terms of some other thing. The word metaphor comes from Greek ‘metapherein’ which means carry over. Another translation is transference, a term more familiar to us from psychoanalytic theory (dictionary. com). In a metaphor, one of the basic senses of a form, the source domain, is used to grasp or explain a sense in a different domain, called target domain. The idea that we take attitudes from one area of experience and use them to approach and understand another is fundamental to human interactions with the world. In cognitive linguistics, conceptual metaphor, or cognitive metaphor, refers to the understanding of one idea, or conceptual domain, in terms of another, for example, understanding quantity in terms of directionality. â€Å"She eats like a bird†. A conceptual domain can be any coherent organization of human experience. The regularity with which different languages employ the same metaphors, which often appear to be perceptually based, has led to the hypothesis that the mapping between conceptual domains corresponds to neural mappings in the brain. Some theorists have suggested that metaphors are not merely stylistic, but that they are cognitively important as well. In â€Å"Metaphors We Live by† by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphors are pervasive in everyday life, not just in language, but also in thought and action. A common definition of a metaphor can be described as a comparison that shows how two things that are not alike in most ways are similar in another important way. They explain how a metaphor is simply for understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another. The authors call this concept a ‘conduit metaphor. ’ By this, they meant that a speaker can put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and makes meaning of it. In other words, communication is something that ideas go into. The container is separate from the ideas themselves. Lakoff and Johnson give several examples of daily metaphors we use, such as â€Å"argument is war† and â€Å"time is money. † Metaphors are widely used in context to describe personal meaning. The authors also suggest that communication can be viewed as a machine: â€Å"Communication is not what one does with the machine, but is the machine itself. † (Johnson, Lakoff, 19) Concerned with its construction, metaphor is made up of three elements: Tenor- the subject under discussion, Vehicle –what the subject is compared to, Ground- what the poet believes the tenor and vehicle have in common. For instance, the metaphor â€Å" he’s a live wire†, â€Å"he† is the tenor, â€Å" live wire† is the vehicle and â€Å"is full of energy / is very lively/is potentially dangerous† is the ground. So far, many linguists have been attempting to elucidate the ways in which language reflects the manner in which human beings perceive, categorize and conceptualize the world. The result is like this: the more accurate, objective and literal the description is, the more elusive it may be. According to the linguist George Lakoff (Johnson, Lakoff,38), we use our basic bodily understanding of places, movements, forces, paths, objects and containers as sources of information about life, love, mathematics and all other abstract concepts. Cognitive linguists suggest that we use metaphor intuitively and unconsciously to understand the mind, emotions and all other abstract concepts. Such metaphors enable us, as embodied beings, to make sense of a concept such as mind, which we cannot see with our eyes or grasp with our hands. It allows us to take a view on the debate and to get to grips with the subject. Cognitive linguists suggest that, without such conventional metaphors, there would be no abstract thought. It also suggests that metaphors may privilege some understandings exclude others. Through field research, Lakoff has collected large numbers of metaphorical expressions. It is believed that these are derived from a smaller number of conceptual metaphors. Both creative, novel metaphors and dead, conventional metaphors are derived from conceptual metaphors. For Lakoff, the locus of metaphor is not in language at all, but in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another. For example: 1) Love is a journey. (This marriage is bad. ) The idiomatic expressions above, exemplifying two conceptual metaphors, are commonplace, non poetic and do not, perhaps, strike us as particularly metaphorical. We can say this marriage is in a rut and this statement is taken at literal value. If someone were to say, â€Å"Even a Massey Ferguson wouldn‘t have salvaged my marriage†, we hear the statement as something new. Metaphorically, an impediment to the continuation of a marriage is an impediment to a journey continuing, such as a rut. On a real journey, we might ask the local farmer to haul our car out of a rut with a tractor. To create a novel metaphor, essential for poetry and humor, the speaker has taken an aspect of the source of the conceptual metaphor that is not usually associated with the target. In doing so, the speaker has made the metaphor explicit and brought it back to life. In other words, metaphor is describing one thing in terms of some other. Its tenor and vehicle have similarities as well as difference. The most significant difference is that the two belong to different domains: tenor belongs to the source domain while vehicle belongs to the target domain. 2) The encyclopedia is a Gold mine. Here the encyclopedia and Gold mine are totally different, but they have similarity in a certain aspect. To say the encyclopedia is a gold mine is because both of them deserve hard digging thus forming a metaphor. Such kind of similarity should be limited to certain aspects otherwise; it cannot form a metaphor, 3) The encyclopedia is a dictionary. In this sentence, the encyclopedia and dictionary belong to the same category. Actually, the former is a subcategory of dictionary; therefore, it is not a metaphor. Theoretically speaking, the possibility of forming a metaphor depends on the difference between the two things. The more different they are, the more possible a metaphor they can be form. However, the extent of difference should also be restricted by its similarity. The more different they are, the more difficult it will be for people to understand the metaphor. Because of this, a ground is needed to offer necessary explanations. Generally speaking, vehicles’ characteristics are more specific and familiar to people, for example: 4) Architecture is solid music. As we know, music cannot be seen or touched but people still can understand it. By employing an abstract and invisible thing to define a concrete and specific object, this sentence gives the readers a sense of distance as well as a poetic conception. Therefore, a metaphor is a process of mapping between two different conceptual domains. The different domains are known as the target domain and the source domain. The target domain is the topic or concept that you want to describe through the metaphor while the source domain refers to the concept that you draw upon in order to create the metaphorical construction. In his influential study of the poetic structure of the human mind, Gibbs highlights the important part metaphor plays in our everyday conceptual thought. Metaphors are not some kind of distorted literal thought, but rather are basic schemes by which people conceptualize their experience and their external world. Figurative language generally, which also includes irony, is found throughout speech and writing; moreover, it does not require for its use any special intellectual talent or any special rhetorical situation (Gibbs, 21). Indeed, the fact that many metaphors pass us by in everyday social interaction is well illustrated by this unwitting slip by a venerable British sports commentator: We didn’t have metaphors in my day. We didn’t beat about the bush. Metaphor is simply a natural part of conceptual thought and although undoubtedly an important feature of creativity, it should not be seen as a special or exclusive feature of literary discourse. In other words, metaphors are a cognitive process being seen in language in our everyday lives; metaphors shape not just our communication, but also shape the way we think and act. Conceptual metaphors are used very often to understand theories and models. A conceptual metaphor uses one idea and links it to another to better understand something. For example, the conceptual metaphor of viewing communication as a conduit is one large theory explained with a metaphor. So not only is our everyday communication shaped by the language of conceptual metaphors, but so is the very way we understand scholarly theories. These metaphors are prevalent in communication and we do not just use them in language; we actually perceive and act in accordance with the metaphors. A metaphor is simply for understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another, and the speaker could put ideas or objects into words or containers, and then send them along a channel, or conduit, to a listener who takes that idea or object out of the container and makes meaning of it. In other words, communication is something that ideas go into. The container is separate from the ideas themselves. Therefore, metaphors are matter of thought and not merely of language: hence, the term conceptual metaphor. The metaphor may seem to consist of words or other linguistic expressions that come from the terminology of the more concrete conceptual domain, but conceptual metaphors underlie a system of related metaphorical expressions that appear on the linguistic surface. Similarly, the mappings of a conceptual metaphor are themselves motivated by image schemas which pre-linguistic schemas are concerning space, time, moving, controlling, and other core elements of embodied human experience. Conceptual metaphors typically employ a more abstract concept as target and a more concrete or physical concept as their source. For instance, metaphors such as ‘the days [the more abstract or target concept] ahead’ or ‘giving my time’ rely on more concrete concepts, thus expressing time as a path into physical space, or as a substance that can be handled and offered as a gift. Different conceptual metaphors tend to be invoked when the speaker is trying to make a case for a certain point of view or course of action. For instance, one might associate â€Å"the days ahead† with leadership, whereas the phrase â€Å"giving my time† carries stronger connotations of bargaining. Selection of such metaphors tends to be directed by a subconscious or implicit habit in the mind of the person employing them.

Enron Weather Derivatives Case Summary Essay

Pacific Northwest Electric was a significant producer of electric power. Seasons are a big deal to electricity companies: the colder the weather, the more electricity consumers use to power their heating. Looking back the last few years, CFO Mary Watts (an incredible electricity pun!) noticed a trend of relatively warm winters which in turn resulted in less-than-optimal financial results. Though the 1990’s are remembered as a time of a healthy economy, PNW suffered from a stagnant earnings-per-share growth during this period. After receiving a report of yet another warmer winter coming, Watts turned to a product offered by Enron Corporation that claimed to minimize weather-related volume risk. There are many reasons derivatives could help PNW’s exposure to weather risk. For example, on a much smaller scale ice cream stores often go out of business because though summer sales are great, managers do not know how to take out loans and insurance to keep paying employees and other expenses during the off-season. PNW works the opposite way, with less demand in the summer, but the loss of demand in the winter months could be compensated for by using the derivatives product and smoothing revenue. The risk of stock-outs and lost-opportunity costs could be hedged. The derivatives could also help stimulate sales and overall diversify investment portfolios with correlation between weather and return, whereas futures were only being used to hedge against price risk by agreeing to deliver or accept a commodity at a certain time and price. The way the product worked is that PNW would be able to determine how much margin it would lose if the weather, measured by temperature, differed from the average readings in their geographic location. How much risk tolerance as far as planned income loss from weather could be set up by the company. In the end, the company would receive a payment to offset lost income from reduced demand if the result was below the original threshold. This would be called a floor, because the variable fell below the threshold though upper potential was still available. Other structures could be a ceiling cap that compensates if variable goes above or a collar which combines attributes of both the floor and ceiling cap and can be great when it essentially. funds the purchase of insurance. A swap can produce similar results, except for its actions are triggered singularly whereas the collar relies on two separate tools. It is important to note that weather derivatives would not be included under an accounting rule that pertained to hedges under a market index rather than customized contracts. Watts took into consideration correlation and geographic differences to realize that PNW needed protection from weather risk. Contracts she would approve to enter into with Enron would require an initial payment for entry, but would mean the company would receive a one-time payment at the end that adjusted to weather results and agreed tolerance levels. Whether or not the premium is worth it depends on the weather which has experienced a bad historical trend but in the end is quite unpredictable. The decision for a conservative company to enter this kind of contract is one that requires thought, but the largest focus should be setting threshold levels.

The Crisis in Darfur, Sudan Essay - 832 Words

The Crisis in Darfur, Sudan Genocide, the attempt to destroy a people because of their presumed race or ethnicity, remains alive and well. The definition of genocide as given in the Websters Dictionary is The deliberate and systematic extermination of a national, racial, political, or cultural group. This definition depicts the situation in 1994 of Rwanda, a small and poor central African country. What makes this crisis particularly shocking is the structural character of the violence: villages have been torched, and civilians have been deliberately targeted by bombing, summary executions, massacres and systematic rape as part of a strategy of fear instigated by the Sudanese military and the so-called Janjaweed, armed and†¦show more content†¦The front lines between Sudanese government and rebel forces, humanitarian presence has brought stability and tranquility as long as it has coincided with the disengagement of the warring parties. In Jebel Marra, for instance, the deployment of aid agencies was connected to guarantees from rebel forces to stay away from IDP locations and access roads, to avoid potential counter-attacks from government troops (ironically, but unintentionally, also serving the interests of government forces). To understand what is happening here let?s go back to the history of Hutu and Tutsi in Rawanda and how the dominant group wants to control the minority groups. In the early 1900?s, the Tutsi were placed in positions of power by Belgium, because they looked ?whiter?. Governed by Belgium?s racist way of thought, ethnic identity cards were introduced. The Catholic Church supported the Tutsi and the new social order and educated the Tutsi and imposed their religion on them. Though the population of Rwanda was ninety percent Hutu, they were denied land ownership, education, and positions of power. In the 1950?s, the end of the colonial period, the Hutu overthrew the Tutsi government. 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