>> Other than some cosmetic and minor feature issues, the only real limitation is that Apple limits data file size to 2GB, so there is an obvious limit as to how much can go into the file.
From the interview, Apple can't actually handle anything even close to the 2GB stated limit. The app itself is a stub, and downloads the data from elsewhere.
Seriously though, it's a really useful meme to tap in the middle of a debate. It's a reminder that those who seek to convince must bring evidence, and that anyone can post anything they like. When used to tag a claim that a) is very unexpected or counterintuitive, b) should be citable, and c) is central to the opponent's argument, then demand the citation. If it's tangential or a matter of opinion, then yeah, it's bastardish.
I fail to see where I was twisting your words... could you give me an example so I don't do it again?
Here are the examples I had in mind:
What I'm getting a lot of is "we don't know". By your own admission we don't know if it will be a disaster, and we don't know the right way to fix it if it is a disaster. You're proving my point.
You started by laying out an impossible standard of proof (absolute certainty, epic disaster, etc.), a standard higher than anyone who is seriously trying to estimate risks should demand. I used a bit of verbiage that reflected the not-100%ness of our current understanding, and you respond as though I said, "It'll most likely amount to nothing." I didn't care for that.:)
Then you added:
Why spend untold billions on something that might be the wrong way to fix a possible non-problem?
Again, that twisty feeling. "We don't know the right way" was rejecting the idea that we would find the least-cost path to lower emissions by guessing at a mix of specific policy steps. For example, a "plan" might say "50MPG by 2020, no new coal, and let's make buildings 25% more energy efficient." That plan may or may not work to lower emissions to a certain target. What I think Waxman/Markey does is take the "carbon blinders" off the economy. Once carbon has a price, and carbon-intensive activities start paying a premium that reflects the damage, the economy should start shedding the high-carbon, low-value activities first.
I've argued elsewhere that building efficiency is such a rich mine for carbon efficiency, that Waxman/Markey cannot have more than $61B worth of impact its first decade or so. If we changed nothing about our economy between now and 2020, but invested $61B in building efficiency, total emissions in 2020 would be well below the Waxman/Markey cap. What's the auction price for a ton of carbon, when there are more permits than people want to burn? Around $0.
[source: a report called "the Gigaton Throwdown", which estimates the cost of various paths to eliminating a billion tons of annual emissions. By comparison, a windpower-only route would -- in their estimation -- cost $1.3T, or about 20x more.]
Last (and current) example of twistiness:
Based on your statements, it seems you don't care about the truth.
If you truly believed that, there isn't much point arguing with me. Trust me, at this point nobody else is reading the conversation.
I said that I don't have time to hunt down the absolute truth of every statement that is presented to me, and neither do you. This is not a statement of indifference to the truth; just a simple statement of fact. In real life, people have to take shortcuts. Astronomers don't spend their days double-checking the Michelson Morley experiment, biologists no longer second-guess Watson and Crick's work, and people wake up in the morning not worrying about whether the sun is coming up today.
In a hypothetically perfect argument, where time and effort are no object, it's acceptable to recheck your premises over and over for as long as any doubt remains in anybody's mind. People cannot derail arguments by asking for reassessments of fundamental premises, because it won't change the end result and we don't care how much effort is expended getting there. In the real world, though, allowing a party to demand that no action be taken until we're "100% certain" is akin to giving any politician the right to demand an infinite number of recounts. A malicious opponent can use your desire for intellectual rigor not to help you seek the truth, but to lure you away from it.
So you should also take it as a statement of outrage toward those who, whether through intent or incompetence, muddy the waters about important scientific questions
It is possible that the final bill will have a "border adjustment clause." Essentially that means that, if a country we're trading with doesn't have significant emissions regulation, we add a tariff to try and adjust the prices to where they would have been had they had such a regimen.
Obama is against such an addition, but Paul Krugman is for it.
Your argument also discounts the fact that Waxman/Markey will fund R&D that will make green tech cheaper and more scalable. That will be a huge incentive for China and India to adopt such technology, and give us a chance to sell something other than IOUs back to them.
>>>> You're so insistent on taking me out of context, I'm not sure it's even worth responding.
>> Ad Hominem.
Congratulations on your first foray into Latin. But ad hominem is only a sure-fire response if the argument is a syllogistic one (as in, "because X is a bad bad man, his argument Y must be wrong.") My ad hominem argument -- such as it was -- was just a response to your own bad behavior.
The fact remains that you were twisting my words around, you continue to do so, and I urge you to stop.
>>>> Even among climate skeptics (at least, the subset of skeptics with scientific credentials in relevant fields), only a handful will go so far as to claim that the warming is imaginary.
>> Maybe you just don't hear them because they're being suppressed. example A example B And have you seen this?
That's not what I'm talking about. Even if climate skeptics are shut out of the relevant peer-reviewed journals, they still have other ways to get their ideas out. What I'm saying (and please pay close attention here) is that, even among outspoken critics of global warming with scientific backgrounds large majorities believe that global warming is happening. Far more dispute the mechanisms of warming, the accuracy of future predictions, and appropriate responses. Virtually nobody with decent scientific credentials is coming out in favor of the idea that the globe isn't warming.
As a side note, the WSJ's report of the "collapsing consensus" is overblown, bordering on fraudulent. Inhofe compiled a list of 700 naysayers, out of hundreds of thousands of working scientists. I stand unimpressed. Skeptics may be shut out of the peer review circuit -- arguably due to their own scientific incompetence -- but Exxon and other energy interests makes sure their concerns are widely circulated in the media, and the media frequently reports "both sides."
I read the Newsweek article. The plan to cover the poles in ash is mentioned, but it's pretty clear that it never made it beyond the "drunk scientists at the pub" phase of planning. Yes, let's not repeat the horrible, horrible mistakes of the 1970s, where scientists around the globe noticed an interesting trend, argued about what might happen, and came up with some rough, impractical ideas about how to stop it.
What the scientists -- that is to say, the few scientists who felt certain enough to actually make policy proposals -- were suggesting were pretty non-controversial actions. Creating some food reserves, for example. That wasn't a bad idea even if cooling wasn't happening.
>>>> the number of peer reviewed papers predicting warming outnumbered the number that predicted cooling by about 6 to 1.
>> Your link does not support this, but suppose I take that as fact. I for one do not care how many people say something is true. In 1300 everyone knew the Earth was flat and everything revolved around it. Just because there is some kind of "consensus" either then or now, doesn't mean it's true.
The 6 to 1 statistic comes from elsewhere. But that's tangential. The real point is, skeptics argue that "global cooling" was once a consensus, which was then overturned, and that we should therefore be skeptical of this consensus as well. No such broad agreement ever existed, and global warming is a completely different animal.
Sure, consensuses can be wrong. But when basically all the peer-reviewed research favors the idea of anthropogenic global warming, it's hubris for laypeople to dismiss it all as a vast academic conspiracy to get grant money.
>>>> It seems that, in your mind, no disaster is truly epic so long as there are survivors, and that it wouldn't be worthwhile to you to take a $1500 pay cut to avert any di
Citing WorldNetDaily is a crime against discourse. Citing Jerome Corsi (a 9/11 truther, Obama birth certificate conspiracist who also claims that oil is a self-replenishing resource that doesn't originate from fossilized organic matter) is doubly so. Not surprisingly, he's presenting yet another conspiracy theory, this one about the inflation rate.
Not that he doesn't raise some interesting points, but given the source, I can't accept those points until I see them seconded by someone who actually knows things about stuff.
The problem I have with the cap and trade is that it is necessarily harsh and indifferent on the people least likely to pay their existing bills. And no, getting a refund a year out is not a viable solution.
1) I don't see why it isn't a viable solution.
2) If the tax rebate were given in the form of reduced withholdings, the money would be available sooner.
You a fool if you think they were helpless bitches on capitol hill being slapped around by the republicans.
Not a fool. Just a cynical observer of what actually happened over the last decade. You're still pushing the idea that, hey, the Democrats had eighteen whole months to undo the litany of damage of the previous six years of Republican misrule, so the economic collapse is their fault. But now you're simultaneously arguing that nobody really has any power in Congress, cuz "power" is just an artificial construct.
What is real? Dude, you just blew my mind.
All the Democrats have been able to do these last eight years is slow and temper the hard rightward push driven by the Bush administration. I challenge you again to name one piece of remotely liberal/progressive legislation that was signed into law during George Bush's tenure.
In Waxman-Markey, most of the money collected from the auctions does go back to households in one way or another. When you say that the money is going into "government coffers", you're showing a lack of familiarity with the bill. The bill is chock full of things like energy tax rebates, assistance to businesses that would be hit hard by energy cost increases, R&D assistance, job retraining and unemployment benefits for people who lose their jobs in emissions-cutting moves, etc.
It seems you're not totally understanding the trade idea either. If a company moves its manufacturing offshore, why would we continue to give them permits? Plus, not everything is easy to outsource. You can't generate power in Jakarta and ship it to Duluth.
Again you're pushing your specific plan as somehow superior to whatever an economy equipped with carbonvision would come up with, without explaining why. The only evidence you seem to offer is that it would phase in gradually, which the cap and trade plan does, in a variety of ways. Your plan also insists on treating CO2 solely as a power generation problem.
Waxman-Markey is proposing a hard cap with great flexibility in how industry meets the cap. Arguably, there is no cap in your plan at all, but you're specifying how emissions will be reduced in great detail. I like Waxman-Markey better, because if your plan is the cheapest path to carbon reduction, under Waxman-Markey, industry will take essentially that path.
It seems that you need a refresher course in history. The republicans did not own the house or senate. All but a few of those years was a marginal lead with the better half of 2000 and on being only by a few if not one senator. Remember, it took a gang of 14- 7 republicans and 7 democrats to bust a philobuster threat. That's not owning anything. The dems had a larger lead in 2006 then the republicans did since 1998.
Aside from being historically inaccurate and grammatically incoherent, it misses the larger point: The Democrats had no power to pass legislation. You're blaming them for standing at the helm for 18 months, even though they couldn't turn the wheel.
While most bills do receive at least token bipartisan support, pre-2006 the Republicans not only had the numbers needed to get things passed (50% plus one. bills can survive filibusters, and no you don't need 60 votes to get a bill out of the Senate), they also had a president willing to sign right-wing legislation. I would argue that the moderate wing of the Republican party had far more power to soften legislation than the Democrats did.
One short point about energy prices: as I said earlier, inflation was never above 4% at any point since the early 80s, and never above 3% in the 2000s. You're claiming that consumers woke up one day and discovered that everything was 30 or 40% more expensive, but that's just your imagination. The only people that happened to were the ones with subprime ARMs.
You're so insistent on taking me out of context, I'm not sure it's even worth responding.
Even among climate skeptics (at least, the subset of skeptics with scientific credentials in relevant fields), only a handful will go so far as to claim that the warming is imaginary. They'll dispute things like how much is attributable to humankind, or whether it's worth trying to avert it. But only a very few try to dismiss the warming trend itself.
Who is this "we" who wanted to cover the polar ice caps in tar 30 or 40 years ago? Can you show me anything that actually claims this? Or are you just extrapolating from the old "scientists predicted global cooling" canard? The one that has been refuted every which way, but keeps rising like a zombie to feast on people's brains?
The fact is, at the height of the "global cooling scare", the number of peer reviewed papers predicting warming outnumbered the number that predicted cooling by about 6 to 1. more
Nor can anyone claim that we are "rushing" to implement this carbon cap. Had we passed this in the 1970's, we would have been "rushing". By 1988, we would have been "proactive". By 1998, we would have been "responsive". 2009? I think "slug-like" is a good description for our pace.
Remember, the cap doesn't even kick in until 2012, and the industries that are most affected will continue to receive a sizeable number of free carbon permits for at least a decade after that. Now we're in "hesitant, indecisive slug with arthritis" territory.
When I said "let the market find a way", that's not at all what I meant. Sure, if somebody burns down your house, it's suddenly "more economical" to live under a bridge than in the middle of a field. But it would have been more economical still to keep the house intact. The market can only exist as an embedded subsystem within the ecosystem. The ecosystem keeps us alive and healthy and breathing, and trashing it to save $1500/year* is the height of stupidity.
Frankly, I'm stunned that someone can simultaneously believe that "the market" is capable of uprooting thousands of coastal cities, and yet is so fragile that it will fall over the moment CO2 pollution gets a price. Adaptation has its limits. We can't have nine or ten billion happy, healthy people on a planet with a wrecked ecosystem, and make no mistake, fossil fuels are wrecking it.
You started this discussion by asking whether global warming would be "a disaster of epic proportions." Then you counter by saying that 7C worth of warming is fine, because we can all move to Antarctica. It seems that, in your mind, no disaster is truly epic so long as there are survivors, and that it wouldn't be worthwhile to you to take a $1500 pay cut to avert any disaster that leaves a handful of humans behind. Can you explain what's going on in your head here? Because it bears no resemblance to the sort of risk evaluation human beings do every day.
* A made-up number from Heritage, an right-wing propaganda mill built from the ground up to oppose any and all regulation. The CBO weighs in at about 1/10th that number, and their mission is actually a non-partisan one. They have a good track record of releasing reports that tell us things we don't want to hear.
Fine. I'll start. I'm reading the page six of the report, where this oh-so-vital, must-not-be-suppressed, dare-we-proceed-before-we've-fully-worked-out-the-implications-of-this study. He's leading off with the claim that we've had an eleven year cooling trend. This is such a dishonest, basic fallacy, that there hardly seems to be any point in going further.
I mean, for a regular Internet nobody, it would be worth correcting. But coming from this guy, who seems to think that the entire national debate should stop and pay attention to his report, it's a slap in the face to anyone who wants an honest discussion.
Next he claims that the "consensus" on hurricanes has changed, and that now scientists are predicting no change in hurricane behavior due to warming. He's wrong to say that any consensus exists on hurricanes, and he's doubly wrong because the current expectation is that hurricanes will increase in intensity, migrate further north (to areas that are generally unprepared for them) and remain about the same in frequency.
>>>> So, what you're saying is that you'd be happy to support cap and trade, if only some of the money collected were refunded to the working poor?
>> No, I'm saying I would support it if it didn't negatively effect the poor and middle class people period. That's pretty hard to do with the trade part because all costs of passed down to the consumer.
I'm really not seeing your counterpoint. If the government charges an oil company $30 for the right to put a ton of CO2 in the air, which cost is passed down to the consumer, and then gives said consumer $30, how is the consumer negatively affected? If he pays all that $30 back to the oil company, then nothing has really changed. If the consumer finds a way to cut his oil use, so that he can spend $20 on other things, then he's made $20 better off.
"The trade part" doesn't have much to do with this part of the discussion. Really, "the trade part" (the ability to sell permits purchased from the government) has nothing but upside, because it reduces the amount that needs to be passed on to the consumer. If you get rid of "the trade part", all that's left is "cap". You buy the permit from the government at a set price, and then you use the permit. You can't sell the permit to a third party if you've found a cheap way to curb your emissions, or buy a permit at a lower price if it's too expensive to do so. There is one price, and that price is the government's wild-assed guess.
>>>> I'd say, "Right there with you, buddy," except I've learned from time-worn experience that any time a conservative talks about the effects of a policy on the working poor, they're invariably working to protect the interests of the rich.
>> You know, we didn't have massive defaults on loans and people loosing their jobs left and right until around 2006 when the democrats took congress. The interesting part here is that gas prices didn't go above $2.50 until them. Maybe you should rethink this conservative verses liberal thing because I don't think it's panning out the way your seeing it.
You need a brief refresher on the difference between correlation and causation. The Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006. But it is either naive or dishonest to attribute the housing bust, the economic downturn, or the energy price spike to Congressional Democrats. The Republicans had owned the House since 1994, the Senate since 1996, the Presidency since 2000, and arguably the Supreme Court early in 2006. Once the Democrats did obtain control of Congress, they were basically ineffectual, both because they tended towards spinelessness, and because they didn't have the numbers to override a presidential veto.
I would argue that, any time the Republican party has effective control over the House, Senate, or Presidency, the government is essentially a Republican one. The reason is simple: in order for the Democrats to further their political philosophy, they have to actually pass legislation. The Republican political philosophy is such that they can simply win with a tie. They can keep the government from raising taxes or increasing human services, and they can simply wait for old legislation to collapse under the weight of its own unforseen consequences.
But you don't need to buy that argument to see why your claims are foolish. Instead, I challenge you to name one single law passed between the time Democrats took control of Congress and the time Bush left the White House with the smoldering wreckage of the economy in his rear view mirror, which significantly promoted the Democratic agenda.
Quibbling over exactly what percentage of the family budget was accounted for by energy costs is pointless. You're guessing 8-10%, I'm saying closer to 6%. But what really put the screws to middle class families, what drove their family budget off the rails, and caused them to lose their homes and jobs? It was the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry, the wave of foreclosures, the end of
Heritage's decision to factor in a big hit to the GDP is a mere assumption on their part, one whose justification relies on other studies from similarly-minded propaganda tanks.
Your guy from Mises (and honestly, that fact alone is enough to dismiss him as an idiot) spent half his article talking about a CBO adjustment that amounted to a tiny fraction of the overall effect of the bill (8.7B). He spent the rest incoherently arguing that when an oil company has to pay for a CO2 permit, that's money taken away from millions of its customers, but when it gets the credit for free, the entire benefit accrues to the shareholders of the oil company. I'd like that fifteen minutes of my life back.
Your plan for reducing CO2 isn't very well thought through. First, it relies on exactly the sort of ham-fisted government micromanaging that cap-and-trade regimes are designed to avoid. In your plan, the government determines how long plants should be operating, what models of plants can and can't be built, and what sort of cars can be built. Now, I think the government should have some say in those things, but cap and trade can avoid a lot of unintended consequences.
The worst part of your plan is that it treats CO2 pollution entirely as a power generation problem. That's shortsighted, because right now energy efficiency is where you can get the biggest bang for the buck. According to a new report from Gigaton Throwdown, the cheapest single way to remove one gigaton of annual emissions by 2020 (a feat way, way more ambitious than the Waxman-Markey bill envisions) is to invest about $60B in making buildings energy efficient.
Think hard about what I'm showing you here. Here is something:
* we could start doing, right now * that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs * that would result in energy cost savings that dwarf the initial investment * that would probably make the bottom fall out of the carbon permit market, rendering the effect of cap-and-trade on the overall economy negligible * whose total cost (even ignoring the savings from lower energy bills) is about 1/3 of the "GDP hit" that Heritage is predicting * whose effects your supply-side plan doesn't even begin to encompass
This should tell you why I'm really skeptical of the doomsaying from rightwing "think" tanks. If everything other than building efficiency remained business-as-usual, and the Waxman-Markey bill passed, by 2020 the cost of a 1 ton CO2 permit would be about one cent, because there would be more permits on the market than industry planned on using anyways. So how could it destroy the economy?
If it were up to me, the bill would be amended so that, if there were ever a year when the permits auctioned off for less than some price floor -- say $5/ton -- the reductions schedule would be accelerated for the next year, just enough so that next year the price floor would be met.
That's the genius of cap-and-trade: rather than legislating our best guess as to the cheapest way to achieve CO2 reductions (as your plan, and so many others, try to do with little success), we legislate the goal, and create a market that lets industry discover the best ways to meet it.
The only real feature of your plan is its hypergradualism. Sure, it will likely do little damage to the economy (despite forcing industry to adhere to forecasts generated decades ago) but it does so at the cost of not cutting emissions on a timescale that matters. It has zero guts, and therefore is awarded zero glory.
Say that I invented a device that could remove CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently sequester it at the cost of $1/ton. Since the current price for this service, sans government intervention, is $0/ton, how is the free market going to get me the funding to scale up this service?
It seems to me that, without government providing incentives to make CO2 production expensive, low-CO2 technologies cannot be successful.
If you say otherwise, you're pitting yourself against the majority even of climate skeptics.
* Is it a disaster of epic proportions?
The answer is, we don't know. How safe do you feel placing your money on, "Nah, everything will be peachy!"
* Is it man-made?
Yes. The simple answer is, yes. We know that the Earth is warming, we know that it started warming when we started burning fossil fuel with abandon, we know that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere is from said fossil fuel, we know that CO2 traps heat. What more evidence are you looking for?
* Can we stop it?
The simple answer: no. No matter what we do, a certain amount of heating is unavoidable. But your question lacks a certain subtlety; either the Earth warms, or it doesn't. In reality, the Earth could warm 2 or 3 degrees (difficult to deal with), or it could warm 7 degrees (absolute disaster for all living things bigger than a cockroach). We need to do as much as we can to minimize the amount of warming, and adapt to the rest.
* Is this the right way to stop it?
No. Cap-and-trade is not a "way to stop it". It's more akin to an admission that we don't know the right way. So instead, we're going to add a broad rule to the marketplace, one that makes CO2 visible to market decisions, and let the market find a way. Unless you think that the risks of CO2 buildup is zero, and that therefore the externalities posed by CO2 pollution are also zero, this is the plan to throw your support behind.
Do you have another alternative? Or are you going to demand that we do nothing until the "perfect" plan comes along?
The climate is always changing! Wow, what a comprehensive grasp you have of the vast sweep of geological history!
It's been cooler, tens of thousands of years ago. It's been warmer, millions of years ago. But the last time the climate changed this much this fast, the Earth got smacked in the Yucatan by a six mile wide asteroid. We are the primary driver of the sixth great extinction event.
But since you're willing to believe that a reduction in demand for oil and coal will lead to an overall increase in their use, I wonder why I'm bothering to try and tell you anything. That's compelling proof that your mind is made up, and you're willing to accept an obviously fallacious argument if it supports your conclusion.
So, you'd be perfectly okay with the plan, so long as, say, the EITC were expanded to negate any burden on the poor?
Somehow, I doubt your sincerity. Coming from you, this argument sounds like just one more way that conservatives exploit the poor. You're against unions who fight to give them better wages, you're against minimum wage laws, you're against welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, job training, and any other thing that would blunt the effects of poverty. You like low wages -- for others -- because they make the goods and services you buy cheaper.
But the moment a policy looks like it might raise your taxes, you trot out the working poor. You say that they would be hurt, that their lives are cruel, and how dare we add to their burden?
I say, we pass cap and trade, and make it up to the working poor by passing universal health care.
So, what you're saying is that you'd be happy to support cap and trade, if only some of the money collected were refunded to the working poor?
I'd say, "Right there with you, buddy," except I've learned from time-worn experience that any time a conservative talks about the effects of a policy on the working poor, they're invariably working to protect the interests of the rich.
Energy prices were only a small contributor to this recession. In Feb. 2008, when oil was near its peak, energy accounted for about 6% of the family budget (up from 4% in the 1990s) [src]. The real causes of the bust are the ones that have been widely reported, and your attempt to scare us with the specter of rising energy costs is more than a little bastardesque.
I didn't seriously engage him, because he's clearly a bloody loon. I base this conclusion solely on his bizarre use of CAPITALIZED WORDS. The fact that he can't keep a coherent train of thought, uses several arguments that need to be banned from any serious discussion, and thinks he knows more about the carbon cycle than the experts in the field... all that is just icing on the cake.
I'm sorry, but none of the things I pointed out require corroboration. Do you consider all natural substances completely harmless, or not see the difference between a climate model and a weather model? Do you stand against even the global warming skeptics, and claim that warming isn't even happening (as "alleged global warming" implies)?
If so, it's hardly worth correcting you. The evidence is readily available, and it's not worth my time to rehash the arguments poorly. Comments as bad as the OPs don't deserve refutation; they deserve mockery.
Thanks! I just used some abstract rules in my efficiency, and cut my heating bills by 27%!
Your quoted costs are from The Heritage Foundation. Frankly, I trust the CBO numbers to be closer to reality. To get where the Heritage Foundation wants you to go, the permits have to auction at around $50/ton, and the money has to simply disappear from the economy.
The $1300 figure comes from the Britain Taxpayer Alliance. Since their numbers are exactly the sort an anti-tax group could use as the basis of a splashy, self-promoting report, I refuse to accept the figure without outside verification. They have an agenda, The Heritage Foundation has an agenda. The CBO at least has a mission of non-partisanship.
Finally, since you've said you're not against caps in general, how would you construct a cap so that it caused no undue hardship to anybody? What is your path to reducing emissions by 80% by 2050, and why is it superior to what is now before Congress?
Point of fact: the "cap" in the cap and trade bill does not take effect until 2012, so I can't envision the Republicans' doomsday scenarios happening soon enough to alter the 2010 elections.
Quick and to-the-point. Much better than what I was going to concoct, and a huge time saver. How would you like me to spend the twenty minutes you saved me?
It's more complicated than that. The cap on energy usage is a soft one. For example, the average coal plant is about 30-40% efficient. They could find ways to increase that efficiency, leading to more energy production from the same amount of CO2 pollution. Some coal plants are already saving 10% of their fuel by preheating water with a solar thermal system.
It's also better than you're claiming in that the cap is initially being set above the amount we're already emitting. It will be a few years before alternative energy sources need to be able to take up the slack, and decades before they need to make up the bulk of our energy production.
Where will solar be in ten years? If trends hold, probably 1/3rd its current cost.
And technically, it only takes solar energy to grow food, which can be grown locally to minimize distribution costs. You're pretending that we have to drop the current, energy-intensive agricultural system the minute the bill is signed into law, when in fact we'll have decades to make the transition, incorporate new technologies, rediscover old techniques, and make other needed course corrections.
No, it really won't. Most of what we call food aid is really just an opportunity for American farmers to dump their surplus on third world markets, taking a living away from local farmers. If we really wanted to do right by the third world, we'd buy the food from less troubled developing regions.
Solar... well, the Bureau of Land Management has basically said "forget it" to building solar thermal in the desert southwest, for instance, so it's another case of environmentalists not liking ANY energy source.
Yeah, cuz there is no bigger haven for dirty hippie environmentalists than the BLM. When I think of the BLM, I don't think of mining and cattle ranching, I think of the Rainbow Gathering.
End sarcasm.
The BLM only has say over what happens on federal lands. There have to be a handful of other options. Looking at this list, there are five projects announced in Arizona, one each in New Mexico and Nevada, and a slew of them in California. So I'm skeptical of this de facto ban.
Proposition 13 keeps the taxable value of a property at or near its value at the time of sale. An older couple who bought their house in the 1960s for $20K pays very little in property taxes, even as its value goes up to the $400K range.
This means that the last people to buy into the real estate market (read: young people) shoulder the bulk of property taxes.
It also pushes the tax burden away from businesses, who are more likely to hold on to properties for several decades. Also, if a company wants to get rid of a property, they can deed the property instead, retaining technical ownership without triggering the re-evaluation.
It also pushes the tax burden away from the rich (who are far more likely to own property) and towards sales taxes which hit the poor harder. Since younger generally equals poorer, that also hurts young people.
Slashdot Mirror
>> Other than some cosmetic and minor feature issues, the only real limitation is that Apple limits data file size to 2GB, so there is an obvious limit as to how much can go into the file.
From the interview, Apple can't actually handle anything even close to the 2GB stated limit. The app itself is a stub, and downloads the data from elsewhere.
[citation needed]
Seriously though, it's a really useful meme to tap in the middle of a debate. It's a reminder that those who seek to convince must bring evidence, and that anyone can post anything they like. When used to tag a claim that a) is very unexpected or counterintuitive, b) should be citable, and c) is central to the opponent's argument, then demand the citation. If it's tangential or a matter of opinion, then yeah, it's bastardish.
Here are the examples I had in mind:
You started by laying out an impossible standard of proof (absolute certainty, epic disaster, etc.), a standard higher than anyone who is seriously trying to estimate risks should demand. I used a bit of verbiage that reflected the not-100%ness of our current understanding, and you respond as though I said, "It'll most likely amount to nothing." I didn't care for that. :)
Then you added:
Again, that twisty feeling. "We don't know the right way" was rejecting the idea that we would find the least-cost path to lower emissions by guessing at a mix of specific policy steps. For example, a "plan" might say "50MPG by 2020, no new coal, and let's make buildings 25% more energy efficient." That plan may or may not work to lower emissions to a certain target. What I think Waxman/Markey does is take the "carbon blinders" off the economy. Once carbon has a price, and carbon-intensive activities start paying a premium that reflects the damage, the economy should start shedding the high-carbon, low-value activities first.
I've argued elsewhere that building efficiency is such a rich mine for carbon efficiency, that Waxman/Markey cannot have more than $61B worth of impact its first decade or so. If we changed nothing about our economy between now and 2020, but invested $61B in building efficiency, total emissions in 2020 would be well below the Waxman/Markey cap. What's the auction price for a ton of carbon, when there are more permits than people want to burn? Around $0.
[source: a report called "the Gigaton Throwdown", which estimates the cost of various paths to eliminating a billion tons of annual emissions. By comparison, a windpower-only route would -- in their estimation -- cost $1.3T, or about 20x more.]
Last (and current) example of twistiness:
If you truly believed that, there isn't much point arguing with me. Trust me, at this point nobody else is reading the conversation.
I said that I don't have time to hunt down the absolute truth of every statement that is presented to me, and neither do you. This is not a statement of indifference to the truth; just a simple statement of fact. In real life, people have to take shortcuts. Astronomers don't spend their days double-checking the Michelson Morley experiment, biologists no longer second-guess Watson and Crick's work, and people wake up in the morning not worrying about whether the sun is coming up today.
In a hypothetically perfect argument, where time and effort are no object, it's acceptable to recheck your premises over and over for as long as any doubt remains in anybody's mind. People cannot derail arguments by asking for reassessments of fundamental premises, because it won't change the end result and we don't care how much effort is expended getting there. In the real world, though, allowing a party to demand that no action be taken until we're "100% certain" is akin to giving any politician the right to demand an infinite number of recounts. A malicious opponent can use your desire for intellectual rigor not to help you seek the truth, but to lure you away from it.
So you should also take it as a statement of outrage toward those who, whether through intent or incompetence, muddy the waters about important scientific questions
It is possible that the final bill will have a "border adjustment clause." Essentially that means that, if a country we're trading with doesn't have significant emissions regulation, we add a tariff to try and adjust the prices to where they would have been had they had such a regimen.
Obama is against such an addition, but Paul Krugman is for it.
Your argument also discounts the fact that Waxman/Markey will fund R&D that will make green tech cheaper and more scalable. That will be a huge incentive for China and India to adopt such technology, and give us a chance to sell something other than IOUs back to them.
>>>> You're so insistent on taking me out of context, I'm not sure it's even worth responding.
>> Ad Hominem.
Congratulations on your first foray into Latin. But ad hominem is only a sure-fire response if the argument is a syllogistic one (as in, "because X is a bad bad man, his argument Y must be wrong.") My ad hominem argument -- such as it was -- was just a response to your own bad behavior.
The fact remains that you were twisting my words around, you continue to do so, and I urge you to stop.
>>>> Even among climate skeptics (at least, the subset of skeptics with scientific credentials in relevant fields), only a handful will go so far as to claim that the warming is imaginary.
>> Maybe you just don't hear them because they're being suppressed. example A example B And have you seen this?
That's not what I'm talking about. Even if climate skeptics are shut out of the relevant peer-reviewed journals, they still have other ways to get their ideas out. What I'm saying (and please pay close attention here) is that, even among outspoken critics of global warming with scientific backgrounds large majorities believe that global warming is happening. Far more dispute the mechanisms of warming, the accuracy of future predictions, and appropriate responses. Virtually nobody with decent scientific credentials is coming out in favor of the idea that the globe isn't warming.
As a side note, the WSJ's report of the "collapsing consensus" is overblown, bordering on fraudulent. Inhofe compiled a list of 700 naysayers, out of hundreds of thousands of working scientists. I stand unimpressed. Skeptics may be shut out of the peer review circuit -- arguably due to their own scientific incompetence -- but Exxon and other energy interests makes sure their concerns are widely circulated in the media, and the media frequently reports "both sides."
I read the Newsweek article. The plan to cover the poles in ash is mentioned, but it's pretty clear that it never made it beyond the "drunk scientists at the pub" phase of planning. Yes, let's not repeat the horrible, horrible mistakes of the 1970s, where scientists around the globe noticed an interesting trend, argued about what might happen, and came up with some rough, impractical ideas about how to stop it.
What the scientists -- that is to say, the few scientists who felt certain enough to actually make policy proposals -- were suggesting were pretty non-controversial actions. Creating some food reserves, for example. That wasn't a bad idea even if cooling wasn't happening.
>>>> the number of peer reviewed papers predicting warming outnumbered the number that predicted cooling by about 6 to 1.
>> Your link does not support this, but suppose I take that as fact. I for one do not care how many people say something is true. In 1300 everyone knew the Earth was flat and everything revolved around it. Just because there is some kind of "consensus" either then or now, doesn't mean it's true.
The 6 to 1 statistic comes from elsewhere. But that's tangential. The real point is, skeptics argue that "global cooling" was once a consensus, which was then overturned, and that we should therefore be skeptical of this consensus as well. No such broad agreement ever existed, and global warming is a completely different animal.
Sure, consensuses can be wrong. But when basically all the peer-reviewed research favors the idea of anthropogenic global warming, it's hubris for laypeople to dismiss it all as a vast academic conspiracy to get grant money.
>>>> It seems that, in your mind, no disaster is truly epic so long as there are survivors, and that it wouldn't be worthwhile to you to take a $1500 pay cut to avert any di
Citing WorldNetDaily is a crime against discourse. Citing Jerome Corsi (a 9/11 truther, Obama birth certificate conspiracist who also claims that oil is a self-replenishing resource that doesn't originate from fossilized organic matter) is doubly so. Not surprisingly, he's presenting yet another conspiracy theory, this one about the inflation rate.
Not that he doesn't raise some interesting points, but given the source, I can't accept those points until I see them seconded by someone who actually knows things about stuff.
1) I don't see why it isn't a viable solution.
2) If the tax rebate were given in the form of reduced withholdings, the money would be available sooner.
Not a fool. Just a cynical observer of what actually happened over the last decade. You're still pushing the idea that, hey, the Democrats had eighteen whole months to undo the litany of damage of the previous six years of Republican misrule, so the economic collapse is their fault. But now you're simultaneously arguing that nobody really has any power in Congress, cuz "power" is just an artificial construct.
What is real? Dude, you just blew my mind.
All the Democrats have been able to do these last eight years is slow and temper the hard rightward push driven by the Bush administration. I challenge you again to name one piece of remotely liberal/progressive legislation that was signed into law during George Bush's tenure.
In Waxman-Markey, most of the money collected from the auctions does go back to households in one way or another. When you say that the money is going into "government coffers", you're showing a lack of familiarity with the bill. The bill is chock full of things like energy tax rebates, assistance to businesses that would be hit hard by energy cost increases, R&D assistance, job retraining and unemployment benefits for people who lose their jobs in emissions-cutting moves, etc.
It seems you're not totally understanding the trade idea either. If a company moves its manufacturing offshore, why would we continue to give them permits? Plus, not everything is easy to outsource. You can't generate power in Jakarta and ship it to Duluth.
Again you're pushing your specific plan as somehow superior to whatever an economy equipped with carbonvision would come up with, without explaining why. The only evidence you seem to offer is that it would phase in gradually, which the cap and trade plan does, in a variety of ways. Your plan also insists on treating CO2 solely as a power generation problem.
Waxman-Markey is proposing a hard cap with great flexibility in how industry meets the cap. Arguably, there is no cap in your plan at all, but you're specifying how emissions will be reduced in great detail. I like Waxman-Markey better, because if your plan is the cheapest path to carbon reduction, under Waxman-Markey, industry will take essentially that path.
Aside from being historically inaccurate and grammatically incoherent, it misses the larger point: The Democrats had no power to pass legislation. You're blaming them for standing at the helm for 18 months, even though they couldn't turn the wheel.
While most bills do receive at least token bipartisan support, pre-2006 the Republicans not only had the numbers needed to get things passed (50% plus one. bills can survive filibusters, and no you don't need 60 votes to get a bill out of the Senate), they also had a president willing to sign right-wing legislation. I would argue that the moderate wing of the Republican party had far more power to soften legislation than the Democrats did.
One short point about energy prices: as I said earlier, inflation was never above 4% at any point since the early 80s, and never above 3% in the 2000s. You're claiming that consumers woke up one day and discovered that everything was 30 or 40% more expensive, but that's just your imagination. The only people that happened to were the ones with subprime ARMs.
You're so insistent on taking me out of context, I'm not sure it's even worth responding.
Even among climate skeptics (at least, the subset of skeptics with scientific credentials in relevant fields), only a handful will go so far as to claim that the warming is imaginary. They'll dispute things like how much is attributable to humankind, or whether it's worth trying to avert it. But only a very few try to dismiss the warming trend itself.
Who is this "we" who wanted to cover the polar ice caps in tar 30 or 40 years ago? Can you show me anything that actually claims this? Or are you just extrapolating from the old "scientists predicted global cooling" canard? The one that has been refuted every which way, but keeps rising like a zombie to feast on people's brains?
The fact is, at the height of the "global cooling scare", the number of peer reviewed papers predicting warming outnumbered the number that predicted cooling by about 6 to 1. more
Nor can anyone claim that we are "rushing" to implement this carbon cap. Had we passed this in the 1970's, we would have been "rushing". By 1988, we would have been "proactive". By 1998, we would have been "responsive". 2009? I think "slug-like" is a good description for our pace.
Remember, the cap doesn't even kick in until 2012, and the industries that are most affected will continue to receive a sizeable number of free carbon permits for at least a decade after that. Now we're in "hesitant, indecisive slug with arthritis" territory.
When I said "let the market find a way", that's not at all what I meant. Sure, if somebody burns down your house, it's suddenly "more economical" to live under a bridge than in the middle of a field. But it would have been more economical still to keep the house intact. The market can only exist as an embedded subsystem within the ecosystem. The ecosystem keeps us alive and healthy and breathing, and trashing it to save $1500/year* is the height of stupidity.
Frankly, I'm stunned that someone can simultaneously believe that "the market" is capable of uprooting thousands of coastal cities, and yet is so fragile that it will fall over the moment CO2 pollution gets a price. Adaptation has its limits. We can't have nine or ten billion happy, healthy people on a planet with a wrecked ecosystem, and make no mistake, fossil fuels are wrecking it.
You started this discussion by asking whether global warming would be "a disaster of epic proportions." Then you counter by saying that 7C worth of warming is fine, because we can all move to Antarctica. It seems that, in your mind, no disaster is truly epic so long as there are survivors, and that it wouldn't be worthwhile to you to take a $1500 pay cut to avert any disaster that leaves a handful of humans behind. Can you explain what's going on in your head here? Because it bears no resemblance to the sort of risk evaluation human beings do every day.
* A made-up number from Heritage, an right-wing propaganda mill built from the ground up to oppose any and all regulation. The CBO weighs in at about 1/10th that number, and their mission is actually a non-partisan one. They have a good track record of releasing reports that tell us things we don't want to hear.
Fine. I'll start. I'm reading the page six of the report, where this oh-so-vital, must-not-be-suppressed, dare-we-proceed-before-we've-fully-worked-out-the-implications-of-this study. He's leading off with the claim that we've had an eleven year cooling trend. This is such a dishonest, basic fallacy, that there hardly seems to be any point in going further.
I mean, for a regular Internet nobody, it would be worth correcting. But coming from this guy, who seems to think that the entire national debate should stop and pay attention to his report, it's a slap in the face to anyone who wants an honest discussion.
Next he claims that the "consensus" on hurricanes has changed, and that now scientists are predicting no change in hurricane behavior due to warming. He's wrong to say that any consensus exists on hurricanes, and he's doubly wrong because the current expectation is that hurricanes will increase in intensity, migrate further north (to areas that are generally unprepared for them) and remain about the same in frequency.
I'd continue, but the guys over at RealClimate have already written the substantiative critique you're demanding.
>>>> So, what you're saying is that you'd be happy to support cap and trade, if only some of the money collected were refunded to the working poor?
>> No, I'm saying I would support it if it didn't negatively effect the poor and middle class people period. That's pretty hard to do with the trade part because all costs of passed down to the consumer.
I'm really not seeing your counterpoint. If the government charges an oil company $30 for the right to put a ton of CO2 in the air, which cost is passed down to the consumer, and then gives said consumer $30, how is the consumer negatively affected? If he pays all that $30 back to the oil company, then nothing has really changed. If the consumer finds a way to cut his oil use, so that he can spend $20 on other things, then he's made $20 better off.
"The trade part" doesn't have much to do with this part of the discussion. Really, "the trade part" (the ability to sell permits purchased from the government) has nothing but upside, because it reduces the amount that needs to be passed on to the consumer. If you get rid of "the trade part", all that's left is "cap". You buy the permit from the government at a set price, and then you use the permit. You can't sell the permit to a third party if you've found a cheap way to curb your emissions, or buy a permit at a lower price if it's too expensive to do so. There is one price, and that price is the government's wild-assed guess.
>>>> I'd say, "Right there with you, buddy," except I've learned from time-worn experience that any time a conservative talks about the effects of a policy on the working poor, they're invariably working to protect the interests of the rich.
>> You know, we didn't have massive defaults on loans and people loosing their jobs left and right until around 2006 when the democrats took congress. The interesting part here is that gas prices didn't go above $2.50 until them. Maybe you should rethink this conservative verses liberal thing because I don't think it's panning out the way your seeing it.
You need a brief refresher on the difference between correlation and causation. The Democrats took control of the House and Senate in 2006. But it is either naive or dishonest to attribute the housing bust, the economic downturn, or the energy price spike to Congressional Democrats. The Republicans had owned the House since 1994, the Senate since 1996, the Presidency since 2000, and arguably the Supreme Court early in 2006. Once the Democrats did obtain control of Congress, they were basically ineffectual, both because they tended towards spinelessness, and because they didn't have the numbers to override a presidential veto.
I would argue that, any time the Republican party has effective control over the House, Senate, or Presidency, the government is essentially a Republican one. The reason is simple: in order for the Democrats to further their political philosophy, they have to actually pass legislation. The Republican political philosophy is such that they can simply win with a tie. They can keep the government from raising taxes or increasing human services, and they can simply wait for old legislation to collapse under the weight of its own unforseen consequences.
But you don't need to buy that argument to see why your claims are foolish. Instead, I challenge you to name one single law passed between the time Democrats took control of Congress and the time Bush left the White House with the smoldering wreckage of the economy in his rear view mirror, which significantly promoted the Democratic agenda.
Quibbling over exactly what percentage of the family budget was accounted for by energy costs is pointless. You're guessing 8-10%, I'm saying closer to 6%. But what really put the screws to middle class families, what drove their family budget off the rails, and caused them to lose their homes and jobs? It was the collapse of the subprime mortgage industry, the wave of foreclosures, the end of
Heritage's decision to factor in a big hit to the GDP is a mere assumption on their part, one whose justification relies on other studies from similarly-minded propaganda tanks.
Your guy from Mises (and honestly, that fact alone is enough to dismiss him as an idiot) spent half his article talking about a CBO adjustment that amounted to a tiny fraction of the overall effect of the bill (8.7B). He spent the rest incoherently arguing that when an oil company has to pay for a CO2 permit, that's money taken away from millions of its customers, but when it gets the credit for free, the entire benefit accrues to the shareholders of the oil company. I'd like that fifteen minutes of my life back.
Your plan for reducing CO2 isn't very well thought through. First, it relies on exactly the sort of ham-fisted government micromanaging that cap-and-trade regimes are designed to avoid. In your plan, the government determines how long plants should be operating, what models of plants can and can't be built, and what sort of cars can be built. Now, I think the government should have some say in those things, but cap and trade can avoid a lot of unintended consequences.
The worst part of your plan is that it treats CO2 pollution entirely as a power generation problem. That's shortsighted, because right now energy efficiency is where you can get the biggest bang for the buck. According to a new report from Gigaton Throwdown, the cheapest single way to remove one gigaton of annual emissions by 2020 (a feat way, way more ambitious than the Waxman-Markey bill envisions) is to invest about $60B in making buildings energy efficient.
Think hard about what I'm showing you here. Here is something:
* we could start doing, right now
* that would create hundreds of thousands of jobs
* that would result in energy cost savings that dwarf the initial investment
* that would probably make the bottom fall out of the carbon permit market, rendering the effect of cap-and-trade on the overall economy negligible
* whose total cost (even ignoring the savings from lower energy bills) is about 1/3 of the "GDP hit" that Heritage is predicting
* whose effects your supply-side plan doesn't even begin to encompass
This should tell you why I'm really skeptical of the doomsaying from rightwing "think" tanks. If everything other than building efficiency remained business-as-usual, and the Waxman-Markey bill passed, by 2020 the cost of a 1 ton CO2 permit would be about one cent, because there would be more permits on the market than industry planned on using anyways. So how could it destroy the economy?
If it were up to me, the bill would be amended so that, if there were ever a year when the permits auctioned off for less than some price floor -- say $5/ton -- the reductions schedule would be accelerated for the next year, just enough so that next year the price floor would be met.
That's the genius of cap-and-trade: rather than legislating our best guess as to the cheapest way to achieve CO2 reductions (as your plan, and so many others, try to do with little success), we legislate the goal, and create a market that lets industry discover the best ways to meet it.
The only real feature of your plan is its hypergradualism. Sure, it will likely do little damage to the economy (despite forcing industry to adhere to forecasts generated decades ago) but it does so at the cost of not cutting emissions on a timescale that matters. It has zero guts, and therefore is awarded zero glory.
Mister Economist Person,
Say that I invented a device that could remove CO2 from the atmosphere and permanently sequester it at the cost of $1/ton. Since the current price for this service, sans government intervention, is $0/ton, how is the free market going to get me the funding to scale up this service?
It seems to me that, without government providing incentives to make CO2 production expensive, low-CO2 technologies cannot be successful.
* Is global warming actually happening?
If you say otherwise, you're pitting yourself against the majority even of climate skeptics.
* Is it a disaster of epic proportions?
The answer is, we don't know. How safe do you feel placing your money on, "Nah, everything will be peachy!"
* Is it man-made?
Yes. The simple answer is, yes. We know that the Earth is warming, we know that it started warming when we started burning fossil fuel with abandon, we know that the extra CO2 in the atmosphere is from said fossil fuel, we know that CO2 traps heat. What more evidence are you looking for?
* Can we stop it?
The simple answer: no. No matter what we do, a certain amount of heating is unavoidable. But your question lacks a certain subtlety; either the Earth warms, or it doesn't. In reality, the Earth could warm 2 or 3 degrees (difficult to deal with), or it could warm 7 degrees (absolute disaster for all living things bigger than a cockroach). We need to do as much as we can to minimize the amount of warming, and adapt to the rest.
* Is this the right way to stop it?
No. Cap-and-trade is not a "way to stop it". It's more akin to an admission that we don't know the right way. So instead, we're going to add a broad rule to the marketplace, one that makes CO2 visible to market decisions, and let the market find a way. Unless you think that the risks of CO2 buildup is zero, and that therefore the externalities posed by CO2 pollution are also zero, this is the plan to throw your support behind.
Do you have another alternative? Or are you going to demand that we do nothing until the "perfect" plan comes along?
The climate is always changing! Wow, what a comprehensive grasp you have of the vast sweep of geological history!
It's been cooler, tens of thousands of years ago. It's been warmer, millions of years ago. But the last time the climate changed this much this fast, the Earth got smacked in the Yucatan by a six mile wide asteroid. We are the primary driver of the sixth great extinction event.
But since you're willing to believe that a reduction in demand for oil and coal will lead to an overall increase in their use, I wonder why I'm bothering to try and tell you anything. That's compelling proof that your mind is made up, and you're willing to accept an obviously fallacious argument if it supports your conclusion.
So, you'd be perfectly okay with the plan, so long as, say, the EITC were expanded to negate any burden on the poor?
Somehow, I doubt your sincerity. Coming from you, this argument sounds like just one more way that conservatives exploit the poor. You're against unions who fight to give them better wages, you're against minimum wage laws, you're against welfare, Medicaid, food stamps, job training, and any other thing that would blunt the effects of poverty. You like low wages -- for others -- because they make the goods and services you buy cheaper.
But the moment a policy looks like it might raise your taxes, you trot out the working poor. You say that they would be hurt, that their lives are cruel, and how dare we add to their burden?
I say, we pass cap and trade, and make it up to the working poor by passing universal health care.
So, what you're saying is that you'd be happy to support cap and trade, if only some of the money collected were refunded to the working poor?
I'd say, "Right there with you, buddy," except I've learned from time-worn experience that any time a conservative talks about the effects of a policy on the working poor, they're invariably working to protect the interests of the rich.
Energy prices were only a small contributor to this recession. In Feb. 2008, when oil was near its peak, energy accounted for about 6% of the family budget (up from 4% in the 1990s) [src]. The real causes of the bust are the ones that have been widely reported, and your attempt to scare us with the specter of rising energy costs is more than a little bastardesque.
I didn't seriously engage him, because he's clearly a bloody loon. I base this conclusion solely on his bizarre use of CAPITALIZED WORDS. The fact that he can't keep a coherent train of thought, uses several arguments that need to be banned from any serious discussion, and thinks he knows more about the carbon cycle than the experts in the field... all that is just icing on the cake.
I'm sorry, but none of the things I pointed out require corroboration. Do you consider all natural substances completely harmless, or not see the difference between a climate model and a weather model? Do you stand against even the global warming skeptics, and claim that warming isn't even happening (as "alleged global warming" implies)?
If so, it's hardly worth correcting you. The evidence is readily available, and it's not worth my time to rehash the arguments poorly. Comments as bad as the OPs don't deserve refutation; they deserve mockery.
Thanks! I just used some abstract rules in my efficiency, and cut my heating bills by 27%!
Your quoted costs are from The Heritage Foundation. Frankly, I trust the CBO numbers to be closer to reality. To get where the Heritage Foundation wants you to go, the permits have to auction at around $50/ton, and the money has to simply disappear from the economy.
The $1300 figure comes from the Britain Taxpayer Alliance. Since their numbers are exactly the sort an anti-tax group could use as the basis of a splashy, self-promoting report, I refuse to accept the figure without outside verification. They have an agenda, The Heritage Foundation has an agenda. The CBO at least has a mission of non-partisanship.
Finally, since you've said you're not against caps in general, how would you construct a cap so that it caused no undue hardship to anybody? What is your path to reducing emissions by 80% by 2050, and why is it superior to what is now before Congress?
Point of fact: the "cap" in the cap and trade bill does not take effect until 2012, so I can't envision the Republicans' doomsday scenarios happening soon enough to alter the 2010 elections.
Quick and to-the-point. Much better than what I was going to concoct, and a huge time saver. How would you like me to spend the twenty minutes you saved me?
It's more complicated than that. The cap on energy usage is a soft one. For example, the average coal plant is about 30-40% efficient. They could find ways to increase that efficiency, leading to more energy production from the same amount of CO2 pollution. Some coal plants are already saving 10% of their fuel by preheating water with a solar thermal system.
It's also better than you're claiming in that the cap is initially being set above the amount we're already emitting. It will be a few years before alternative energy sources need to be able to take up the slack, and decades before they need to make up the bulk of our energy production.
Where will solar be in ten years? If trends hold, probably 1/3rd its current cost.
And technically, it only takes solar energy to grow food, which can be grown locally to minimize distribution costs. You're pretending that we have to drop the current, energy-intensive agricultural system the minute the bill is signed into law, when in fact we'll have decades to make the transition, incorporate new technologies, rediscover old techniques, and make other needed course corrections.
While I admire your can't-do spirit,
No, it really won't. Most of what we call food aid is really just an opportunity for American farmers to dump their surplus on third world markets, taking a living away from local farmers. If we really wanted to do right by the third world, we'd buy the food from less troubled developing regions.
Yeah, cuz there is no bigger haven for dirty hippie environmentalists than the BLM. When I think of the BLM, I don't think of mining and cattle ranching, I think of the Rainbow Gathering.
End sarcasm.
The BLM only has say over what happens on federal lands. There have to be a handful of other options. Looking at this list, there are five projects announced in Arizona, one each in New Mexico and Nevada, and a slew of them in California. So I'm skeptical of this de facto ban.
"Alleged global warming" : fail!
Equating climate models to weather models: fail!
CO2 can't be harmful because it's "natural": fail!
Claiming expertise for "having studied chemistry": fail!
Getting modded +5, Insightful: epic fail!
Proposition 13 keeps the taxable value of a property at or near its value at the time of sale. An older couple who bought their house in the 1960s for $20K pays very little in property taxes, even as its value goes up to the $400K range.
This means that the last people to buy into the real estate market (read: young people) shoulder the bulk of property taxes.
It also pushes the tax burden away from businesses, who are more likely to hold on to properties for several decades. Also, if a company wants to get rid of a property, they can deed the property instead, retaining technical ownership without triggering the re-evaluation.
It also pushes the tax burden away from the rich (who are far more likely to own property) and towards sales taxes which hit the poor harder. Since younger generally equals poorer, that also hurts young people.