Also wage increases in China are increasing at rate of around 12% per year. That means wages in China are doubling about every 6 years. They can't keep that up, eventually wages will start to stagnate. That means a double-whammy because manufacturing costs are already going up by at least 12% a year, the environmental regulations will increase that further. The environmental degradation may be soon joined by stagnant wages as a major cause of civil unrest and when that happens, it's unlikely that China will be able to crush the democracy movement as easily as it did last time.
I'm afraid it's not the regulation. After all, how would environmental regulations actually contribute to rising CEO salaries? No, it was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 that started the CEO wage spiral. You see back when a CEO paid 70% of his wages in taxes there was little reason to pay him more than the minimum to get the CEO up to that tax bracket. Paying the CEO $1 million dollars isn't much better than paying him $500,000, if he's only going to get to keep $150,000 of that extra $500,000. The lower the top income tax rate gets the more incentive there is for CEOs to demand higher salaries because they get to keep more of it. Because most boards and investors believe in the magic bullet, the CEOs tend to get huge wage increases at the expense of the rank and file employees because the CEO is perceived to have more impact on the company's bottom line. Most boards believe if they pay more for a CEO, they get a better quality CEO despite the evidence that the relationship between pay and quality rarely holds true.
The Sun's input into global climate is well studied and acknowledged by climate scientists. However, the Sun itself is not the primary driver of climate change because it has been in a solar minimum while some so-called skeptics have been claiming it's driving the temperature increase. The point is that we may start seeing additional temperature increase that is actually attributed to the sun, which will be further inflated by our CO2 emissions.
Also note it's "no warming trend between 1998 and 2008" which sounds like the author tried to incorporate a "skeptic" claim into the article, one that is quite likely not in the original scientific paper.
I don't think they signed on to Kyoto instead they have "voluntarily" adopted "intensity targets". Which, in effect, means they need to reduce the rate at which they produce pollution per some amount of economic activity rather than having to reduce the total pollution generated. As long as their economy grows quickly it won't reduce overall emissions, but will reduce the rate at which emissions grow.
In America, criticism no longer has to be based on actual reality, but instead on the pseudo-reality built by the Republican party. Things that Republicans don't like cause higher taxes, this is one of the fundamental rules of the Republican States. Things they do like cause lower taxes, again, by definition. Also, since roundabouts come from Europe they are infected with European cooties, which, as previously noted cause higher taxes. You should be warned, that questioning these pronouncements is severely disliked, and thus could cause severely higher taxes. The Republican party recommends you stop trying to think about things, and simply nod along to everything they say, that way they can go back to lowering taxes.
It's interesting that cooperation and yielding to others is considered "un-American" by at least some Americans. That simple statements speaks volumes about the dire straights that the United States is in.
Maybe these traffic circles are a good idea after all. Maybe it will teach more Americans that cooperation is not a synonym for communism. Maybe it will teach them that they can profit from cooperation. Or maybe the ones who refuse to co-operate will slowly be killed off in a never-ending stream of roundabout traffic accidents. Either way, that might be best for the country in the long run...
You forgot one thing: If you cut too many corners then you might find your passengers vote for your competitor (with their wallets).
And exactly how will anyone do that? The passengers pay the airline companies. The airline companies pay the airport. The airport pays the security company? Are you going to set up your own competing airport that hires a different security company?
The only way the passengers are going to know how bad a job the security company is doing is by how many planes explode. That's a very expensive way to determine which companies are the best. As I understand it, when it was a private marketplace security was actually worse. Many private companies made no effort at all to implement real security because it was cheaper to negotiate with hijackers than to stop them. The companies were focused entirely on appearing more secure by passing the inspections. The security companies were advised ahead of time when and where they would be tested and had to find several fake items that would be planted in carry on luggage. The testing was ineffectual and it was the only thing that really affected the companies because they would be fined if they failed to find the items.
The airports hired the lowest bidders because the government and the airlines paid the price of security failures. The market won't find an effective solution to the security problem unless regulation is passed that ensures that the originating airport is responsible for all costs from a security lapse, even then security issues may be so rare that they will simply buy insurance against it. Of course that might be the correct response.
Either you're incredibly naive or you're deliberately ignoring the fact that cost often includes more than money.
Facebook's customers are advertisers they sell them your eyes and your personal information. There is a cost to their service, the fact that you do not value your time or information does not change the fact that it is still a cost. It's up to each person to decide whether the service outweighs the cost. You are free to say "it's worth it", but you should not engage in boorish behavior by declaring the cost doesn't exist.
To be fair: If these are office computers, most people don't have a say in which O/S it is running. It's also not very productive to expect people to be experts on topics which they are not (computer security).
So the real issue is the company's IT department has prioritized the status quo over security. So to camouflage their failure to actually deploy secure systems, they're blaming the users for accidentally exploiting a weakness that IT already knows about. Bruce is right, USB sticks are made to be plugged into a computer. If simply plugging the stick in defeats your security, then your security is poor. Looking at the contents of the stick should not be the same as running whatever is on it.
I'm not really a big fan of the new release number schedule, but frankly, from reading your description of how stuff works at your corporation, it sounds like your IT department is run by idiots. It takes IT a week to write scripts to release one new piece of software? No wonder you can't get anything done, you need to invest heavily in modernizing your IT practices. It should take minutes not weeks to script a release. If you can't do it in minutes, either you're using the wrong tools or you're doing it wrong.
To be fair, it may not be that Cognos is poorly written, it might just be that the people running the company are the worst kind of money grubbing leeches imaginable and have built in the browser version requirements to ensure a steady stream of revenue from their customers.
Of course there's that old saying "Never attribute to malice what can be reasonably explained by incompetence", so you're probably right.
Not quite he's saying many Christians say they are being attacked all the time because they are all alone and outnumbered while sitting in a tax-exempt mega-church surrounded by thousands of other Christians. Of course, the attacks are such acts of terror as being wished "Happy Holidays" in the month of December, or having science taught, instead of religion, in science class. In fact, most people taking a clear look at the so-called attacks on Christianity might think that these "attacks" are nothing of the sort.
The point being that it's awfully strange for the supposed majority of people to also be a constantly persecuted minority. One would think you'd have to acknowledge that one or the other is the truth. Given that the vast majority of Congress professes to be Christian with a few Jewish or Muslim representatives, it becomes even more peculiar. The group which appears to have all of the power is constantly claiming that the people with none of the power are oppressing them. It's very strange, indeed.
You're probably thinking of William Randolph Hearst and the disinformation campaign that used racist (particularly anti-Mexican and anti-Black) rhetoric. A number of Christian groups jumped on the bandwagon to justify their prejudices as a moral issue rather than a racial issue. According to this account there were many different motives and little fair play involved.
Are you so sure? When cars first came out they were expensive, slower than horses, you had to buy fuel for them, and you couldn't take them off road. They had significant drawbacks when compared to the existing product (horses). Existing players tried to prevent the adoption of cars (for example the buggy whip manufacturers). It sounds exactly like what's going on today with energy generation.
You have an interesting view of "green" products. But really, products are called green because the company labelling it green thinks you're more likely to buy it. As far as I know, there's no regulations on whether something can be called "green", so marketing departments are free to label something green for any reason they want. Products that are all around better than their competitors tend to be rare, for the simple reason that their competitors tend to catch up or die off. So most real green products will tend to have a larger upfront cost but be more economical in the long run. Kind of like how a 99c incandescent light bulb uses about 10 times as much electricity and may only last 1/10th as long as the equivalent LED bulb. The LED bulb might cost $20 up front, but in heavy usage you might end up saving $100 over the lifetime of the bulb.
I don't find this at all surprising. With the growing convergence between consoles, portable gamin, and cell phones it seems inevitable that Google will have to get in on the action. I'm not sure where they're going to go from this, but I could easily see a Google console eventually. It could be used to drive GoogleTV adoption and could be a hub for gaming on Android devices, thus working to promote Android as well . They are also likely to be looking at first party games for Android as killer apps to drive market share.
It's a pretty obvious next step, really. I don't know if it will succeed, games and game consoles are a very different business, and unless they are looking at producing an open gaming platform (Chrome Console?) it'll be very different from almost everything Google has done up until now.
Oh I see. The sign on the wall overrules the $25 fee to see the doctor to arrange to have a colonoscopy and the requirement for the insurance company to approve it in advance (plus the deductible to get it done, plus however many additional $25 additional visits are required), and the threat that your coverage might be dropped because it looks like you might think something is wrong. Yeah, a sign will totally fix all of that. I always do everything I see on signs, no matter the actual costs.
Every industry has staff that handles paperwork, but I've heard from people who aught to know that the American medical field is one of the worst for it. You need to remember that the lower the ratio of doctors to paperwork pushers, the more expensive the medical system is. If an individual doctor needs to have a paperwork drone, then he has to change his clients more to cover the cost of the drone and, of course, the office space for the drone and the filling system to handle the claims and the claim forms.
The median household income was $50,233.00 in 2006. That means 50% of people would be paying more than 15% of their household income to cover one adult, for the whole family, I'd estimate that amount would at least double. I'm not sure how many of the people in the bottom half of incomes could justify spending at least 30% of their household income on just health insurance. After all they also have to pay income tax, rent or mortgage, transportation, food and other expenses (like clothes, repairs, etc). Most people also like to spend at least a little bit on entertainment.
Income tax, rent, transportation, and food are all going to be more important to the average family than health insurance that they might need. Gambling on not needing health insurance is a better bet than gambling that you won't need to eat, sleep, go to work, or pay income taxes for a full year.
In no small part, American health care is too expensive because of how it's paid for. Estimates consistently show about 30% of all health care spending goes into the billing system. I've heard horror stories about how the average doctor may have to deal with over 100 different insurance companies each of which has it's own long forms that need to be filled out exactly correctly. Most apparently have staff who's only job is filling out that billing paperwork so the doctor actually gets paid and that many insurance companies will reject claims for inconsequential errors.
That's just the direct costs for the way they do things, there's also the fact that the U.S. system encourages people to let issues fester until they become emergencies. Medical issues which could have been easily treated in their early stages can become extremely expensive to cure because the patient was encouraged not to get it looked at by high deductibles and the fear of having coverage canceled because a potentially minor issue.
"Oh I am sorry you need to leave you house now because it is too far of a commute for you, we want you to move to a crowded, noisy and full of crime city. I don't care if you own the house, that makes it worse that means you are rich and therefore must give up more, I don't care how much harder you worked to get the money you must all live like us"
That is ignorant prattle from an uninformed loon, of course, that's the point of building strawmen. The reality is more like "there will be a price of CO2 emissions, get used to it". Once we get past the idea that, horror of horrors, the markets will actually have to consider some of their externalities, it'll be a simple but still painful and drawn out change. The price placed on carbon emissions will rise over time and the costs of so-called dirty energy sources will rise until they are no longer economically more viable than so-called clean energy sources.
The plan you are making up above would be the plan of last resort, and could only occur if the more market friendly carbon tax or cap and trade systems are allowed to be indefinitely blocked. The friendly systems are designed to take years (maybe decades) to ramp up into effectiveness to minimize the pain of transition. If there's no time left, then the government may be forced to issue that kind of regulation and frankly very few people want that. What could force it? Most likely international regulation. If the United States ends up being the last country (or one of the last countries) to deal with the issue, it could find itself economically embargoed. It may end up a matter of whether the United States should tax it's own CO2 emissions or whether every other country should collect the taxes instead.
There are just so many places where you are going wrong in that post.
1) The baseline of the graph appears to be set using some measure of the average temperature over the years it shows. What you see is almost every year before 2000 below the average and almost every year after it above the average. In particular it shows 1998 and 2010 being close to equally warm, which is probably fair as there isn't a huge difference in temperature between the two, but it also shows that 2010 is much less unusually warm than 1998. 2010 is only about 0.2 degrees warmer than the average for the 2001-2010 where as 1998 is about 0.5 degrees warmer than the average for 1991-2000. The "significant cold snap in 2008" merely brought the temperature down to an above average year for the 90s.
2) I have no idea why you are "personally quite sure" of anything regarding climate change. As far as I can tell you're "quite sure" about something you have little or no knowledge of, that's a sign of the Dunning Kruger effect.
3) The cooling in the Maunder minimum was significant, however, there were also four of five very significant volcanic eruptions during the same period. Enough to cause global dimming and drop the temperature without the Maunder minimum. The minimum made the volcanic cooling worse, and we're just considering the possibility that we might have a minimum, it is in no way guaranteed. I'm not sure how probably it is, but from my understanding it's closer to "an outside chance" than "likely to occur".
4) No one is trying to throttle down technology or progress in the name of sustainability. They're actually trying to throttle up technology and progress in the name of sustainability. The way people are currently behaving human society is headed for a giant flame out. The best case estimates show us depleting oil reserves in the first half of this century. Uranium reserves won't last much longer than that. By the second half of this century we'll need to be relying on renewable energy either way. The sooner we begin shifting to renewable energy the easier the transition will be.
5) I'm not sure China is going to be such a bad actor. They're currently following the climate change play book of the pre-crazy-train Republicans. They're issuing their own internal intensity targets and trying to deal with the environmental disasters being created by their overzealous industries. Of course, China could be forced to do better than that. Once the west begins to embrace sustainability, we do have ways of forcing other countries to join us. If western countries adopted carbon taxes, those taxes could also be applied to imports. Then companies in good actor countries have an advantage over the companies of bad actor countries. Those taxes should at least cancel out any advantage the bad companies have and unlike the bad companies, the good companies keep more of the money spent on their products. It's pretty reasonable solution to the problem.
Well, it would help if you could put your thoughts down clearly and consistently, you originally claimed she was crazy, not a thief. According to the article you linked "Pelosi saw her wealth rise due to some stock gains and real estate investments made by her husband, Paul." It looks like they had a really good year, for example one of the companies he invested in quintupled in value over the year, another one he invested in released an iPhone. You may have heard of it.
As for the planes, according to a slightly more non-partisan source it's been normal for the Speaker of the House to use a government jet since 2001. It's a security requirement that was imposed by the Bush government.
According to what I've read the variance is much smaller, and the heat island effect is adjusted out of the cleaned up data sets like NASA's GISS. You might want to read up on that process.
Slashdot Mirror
Also wage increases in China are increasing at rate of around 12% per year. That means wages in China are doubling about every 6 years. They can't keep that up, eventually wages will start to stagnate. That means a double-whammy because manufacturing costs are already going up by at least 12% a year, the environmental regulations will increase that further. The environmental degradation may be soon joined by stagnant wages as a major cause of civil unrest and when that happens, it's unlikely that China will be able to crush the democracy movement as easily as it did last time.
I'm afraid it's not the regulation. After all, how would environmental regulations actually contribute to rising CEO salaries? No, it was the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981 that started the CEO wage spiral. You see back when a CEO paid 70% of his wages in taxes there was little reason to pay him more than the minimum to get the CEO up to that tax bracket. Paying the CEO $1 million dollars isn't much better than paying him $500,000, if he's only going to get to keep $150,000 of that extra $500,000. The lower the top income tax rate gets the more incentive there is for CEOs to demand higher salaries because they get to keep more of it. Because most boards and investors believe in the magic bullet, the CEOs tend to get huge wage increases at the expense of the rank and file employees because the CEO is perceived to have more impact on the company's bottom line. Most boards believe if they pay more for a CEO, they get a better quality CEO despite the evidence that the relationship between pay and quality rarely holds true.
The Sun's input into global climate is well studied and acknowledged by climate scientists. However, the Sun itself is not the primary driver of climate change because it has been in a solar minimum while some so-called skeptics have been claiming it's driving the temperature increase. The point is that we may start seeing additional temperature increase that is actually attributed to the sun, which will be further inflated by our CO2 emissions.
Also note it's "no warming trend between 1998 and 2008" which sounds like the author tried to incorporate a "skeptic" claim into the article, one that is quite likely not in the original scientific paper.
I don't think they signed on to Kyoto instead they have "voluntarily" adopted "intensity targets". Which, in effect, means they need to reduce the rate at which they produce pollution per some amount of economic activity rather than having to reduce the total pollution generated. As long as their economy grows quickly it won't reduce overall emissions, but will reduce the rate at which emissions grow.
In America, criticism no longer has to be based on actual reality, but instead on the pseudo-reality built by the Republican party. Things that Republicans don't like cause higher taxes, this is one of the fundamental rules of the Republican States. Things they do like cause lower taxes, again, by definition. Also, since roundabouts come from Europe they are infected with European cooties, which, as previously noted cause higher taxes. You should be warned, that questioning these pronouncements is severely disliked, and thus could cause severely higher taxes. The Republican party recommends you stop trying to think about things, and simply nod along to everything they say, that way they can go back to lowering taxes.
It's interesting that cooperation and yielding to others is considered "un-American" by at least some Americans. That simple statements speaks volumes about the dire straights that the United States is in.
Maybe these traffic circles are a good idea after all. Maybe it will teach more Americans that cooperation is not a synonym for communism. Maybe it will teach them that they can profit from cooperation. Or maybe the ones who refuse to co-operate will slowly be killed off in a never-ending stream of roundabout traffic accidents. Either way, that might be best for the country in the long run...
You forgot one thing: If you cut too many corners then you might find your passengers vote for your competitor (with their wallets).
And exactly how will anyone do that? The passengers pay the airline companies. The airline companies pay the airport. The airport pays the security company? Are you going to set up your own competing airport that hires a different security company?
The only way the passengers are going to know how bad a job the security company is doing is by how many planes explode. That's a very expensive way to determine which companies are the best. As I understand it, when it was a private marketplace security was actually worse. Many private companies made no effort at all to implement real security because it was cheaper to negotiate with hijackers than to stop them. The companies were focused entirely on appearing more secure by passing the inspections. The security companies were advised ahead of time when and where they would be tested and had to find several fake items that would be planted in carry on luggage. The testing was ineffectual and it was the only thing that really affected the companies because they would be fined if they failed to find the items.
The airports hired the lowest bidders because the government and the airlines paid the price of security failures. The market won't find an effective solution to the security problem unless regulation is passed that ensures that the originating airport is responsible for all costs from a security lapse, even then security issues may be so rare that they will simply buy insurance against it. Of course that might be the correct response.
Either you're incredibly naive or you're deliberately ignoring the fact that cost often includes more than money.
Facebook's customers are advertisers they sell them your eyes and your personal information. There is a cost to their service, the fact that you do not value your time or information does not change the fact that it is still a cost. It's up to each person to decide whether the service outweighs the cost. You are free to say "it's worth it", but you should not engage in boorish behavior by declaring the cost doesn't exist.
To be fair: If these are office computers, most people don't have a say in which O/S it is running. It's also not very productive to expect people to be experts on topics which they are not (computer security).
So the real issue is the company's IT department has prioritized the status quo over security. So to camouflage their failure to actually deploy secure systems, they're blaming the users for accidentally exploiting a weakness that IT already knows about. Bruce is right, USB sticks are made to be plugged into a computer. If simply plugging the stick in defeats your security, then your security is poor. Looking at the contents of the stick should not be the same as running whatever is on it.
I'm not really a big fan of the new release number schedule, but frankly, from reading your description of how stuff works at your corporation, it sounds like your IT department is run by idiots. It takes IT a week to write scripts to release one new piece of software? No wonder you can't get anything done, you need to invest heavily in modernizing your IT practices. It should take minutes not weeks to script a release. If you can't do it in minutes, either you're using the wrong tools or you're doing it wrong.
...
How does that resolve the problem at all? Isn't Chrome releasing new versions faster than Firefox?
To be fair, it may not be that Cognos is poorly written, it might just be that the people running the company are the worst kind of money grubbing leeches imaginable and have built in the browser version requirements to ensure a steady stream of revenue from their customers.
Of course there's that old saying "Never attribute to malice what can be reasonably explained by incompetence", so you're probably right.
Not quite he's saying many Christians say they are being attacked all the time because they are all alone and outnumbered while sitting in a tax-exempt mega-church surrounded by thousands of other Christians. Of course, the attacks are such acts of terror as being wished "Happy Holidays" in the month of December, or having science taught, instead of religion, in science class. In fact, most people taking a clear look at the so-called attacks on Christianity might think that these "attacks" are nothing of the sort.
The point being that it's awfully strange for the supposed majority of people to also be a constantly persecuted minority. One would think you'd have to acknowledge that one or the other is the truth. Given that the vast majority of Congress professes to be Christian with a few Jewish or Muslim representatives, it becomes even more peculiar. The group which appears to have all of the power is constantly claiming that the people with none of the power are oppressing them. It's very strange, indeed.
You're probably thinking of William Randolph Hearst and the disinformation campaign that used racist (particularly anti-Mexican and anti-Black) rhetoric. A number of Christian groups jumped on the bandwagon to justify their prejudices as a moral issue rather than a racial issue. According to this account there were many different motives and little fair play involved.
Are you so sure? When cars first came out they were expensive, slower than horses, you had to buy fuel for them, and you couldn't take them off road. They had significant drawbacks when compared to the existing product (horses). Existing players tried to prevent the adoption of cars (for example the buggy whip manufacturers). It sounds exactly like what's going on today with energy generation.
You have an interesting view of "green" products. But really, products are called green because the company labelling it green thinks you're more likely to buy it. As far as I know, there's no regulations on whether something can be called "green", so marketing departments are free to label something green for any reason they want. Products that are all around better than their competitors tend to be rare, for the simple reason that their competitors tend to catch up or die off. So most real green products will tend to have a larger upfront cost but be more economical in the long run. Kind of like how a 99c incandescent light bulb uses about 10 times as much electricity and may only last 1/10th as long as the equivalent LED bulb. The LED bulb might cost $20 up front, but in heavy usage you might end up saving $100 over the lifetime of the bulb.
I don't find this at all surprising. With the growing convergence between consoles, portable gamin, and cell phones it seems inevitable that Google will have to get in on the action. I'm not sure where they're going to go from this, but I could easily see a Google console eventually. It could be used to drive GoogleTV adoption and could be a hub for gaming on Android devices, thus working to promote Android as well . They are also likely to be looking at first party games for Android as killer apps to drive market share.
It's a pretty obvious next step, really. I don't know if it will succeed, games and game consoles are a very different business, and unless they are looking at producing an open gaming platform (Chrome Console?) it'll be very different from almost everything Google has done up until now.
Oh I see. The sign on the wall overrules the $25 fee to see the doctor to arrange to have a colonoscopy and the requirement for the insurance company to approve it in advance (plus the deductible to get it done, plus however many additional $25 additional visits are required), and the threat that your coverage might be dropped because it looks like you might think something is wrong. Yeah, a sign will totally fix all of that. I always do everything I see on signs, no matter the actual costs.
Every industry has staff that handles paperwork, but I've heard from people who aught to know that the American medical field is one of the worst for it. You need to remember that the lower the ratio of doctors to paperwork pushers, the more expensive the medical system is. If an individual doctor needs to have a paperwork drone, then he has to change his clients more to cover the cost of the drone and, of course, the office space for the drone and the filling system to handle the claims and the claim forms.
Begin with tort law reform and health care reform will not be necessary.
Yes, because a 0.5% decrease in health care costs will fix everything.
The median household income was $50,233.00 in 2006. That means 50% of people would be paying more than 15% of their household income to cover one adult, for the whole family, I'd estimate that amount would at least double. I'm not sure how many of the people in the bottom half of incomes could justify spending at least 30% of their household income on just health insurance. After all they also have to pay income tax, rent or mortgage, transportation, food and other expenses (like clothes, repairs, etc). Most people also like to spend at least a little bit on entertainment.
Income tax, rent, transportation, and food are all going to be more important to the average family than health insurance that they might need. Gambling on not needing health insurance is a better bet than gambling that you won't need to eat, sleep, go to work, or pay income taxes for a full year.
In no small part, American health care is too expensive because of how it's paid for. Estimates consistently show about 30% of all health care spending goes into the billing system. I've heard horror stories about how the average doctor may have to deal with over 100 different insurance companies each of which has it's own long forms that need to be filled out exactly correctly. Most apparently have staff who's only job is filling out that billing paperwork so the doctor actually gets paid and that many insurance companies will reject claims for inconsequential errors.
That's just the direct costs for the way they do things, there's also the fact that the U.S. system encourages people to let issues fester until they become emergencies. Medical issues which could have been easily treated in their early stages can become extremely expensive to cure because the patient was encouraged not to get it looked at by high deductibles and the fear of having coverage canceled because a potentially minor issue.
"Oh I am sorry you need to leave you house now because it is too far of a commute for you, we want you to move to a crowded, noisy and full of crime city. I don't care if you own the house, that makes it worse that means you are rich and therefore must give up more, I don't care how much harder you worked to get the money you must all live like us"
That is ignorant prattle from an uninformed loon, of course, that's the point of building strawmen. The reality is more like "there will be a price of CO2 emissions, get used to it". Once we get past the idea that, horror of horrors, the markets will actually have to consider some of their externalities, it'll be a simple but still painful and drawn out change. The price placed on carbon emissions will rise over time and the costs of so-called dirty energy sources will rise until they are no longer economically more viable than so-called clean energy sources.
The plan you are making up above would be the plan of last resort, and could only occur if the more market friendly carbon tax or cap and trade systems are allowed to be indefinitely blocked. The friendly systems are designed to take years (maybe decades) to ramp up into effectiveness to minimize the pain of transition. If there's no time left, then the government may be forced to issue that kind of regulation and frankly very few people want that. What could force it? Most likely international regulation. If the United States ends up being the last country (or one of the last countries) to deal with the issue, it could find itself economically embargoed. It may end up a matter of whether the United States should tax it's own CO2 emissions or whether every other country should collect the taxes instead.
There are just so many places where you are going wrong in that post.
1) The baseline of the graph appears to be set using some measure of the average temperature over the years it shows. What you see is almost every year before 2000 below the average and almost every year after it above the average. In particular it shows 1998 and 2010 being close to equally warm, which is probably fair as there isn't a huge difference in temperature between the two, but it also shows that 2010 is much less unusually warm than 1998. 2010 is only about 0.2 degrees warmer than the average for the 2001-2010 where as 1998 is about 0.5 degrees warmer than the average for 1991-2000. The "significant cold snap in 2008" merely brought the temperature down to an above average year for the 90s.
2) I have no idea why you are "personally quite sure" of anything regarding climate change. As far as I can tell you're "quite sure" about something you have little or no knowledge of, that's a sign of the Dunning Kruger effect.
3) The cooling in the Maunder minimum was significant, however, there were also four of five very significant volcanic eruptions during the same period. Enough to cause global dimming and drop the temperature without the Maunder minimum. The minimum made the volcanic cooling worse, and we're just considering the possibility that we might have a minimum, it is in no way guaranteed. I'm not sure how probably it is, but from my understanding it's closer to "an outside chance" than "likely to occur".
4) No one is trying to throttle down technology or progress in the name of sustainability. They're actually trying to throttle up technology and progress in the name of sustainability. The way people are currently behaving human society is headed for a giant flame out. The best case estimates show us depleting oil reserves in the first half of this century. Uranium reserves won't last much longer than that. By the second half of this century we'll need to be relying on renewable energy either way. The sooner we begin shifting to renewable energy the easier the transition will be.
5) I'm not sure China is going to be such a bad actor. They're currently following the climate change play book of the pre-crazy-train Republicans. They're issuing their own internal intensity targets and trying to deal with the environmental disasters being created by their overzealous industries. Of course, China could be forced to do better than that. Once the west begins to embrace sustainability, we do have ways of forcing other countries to join us. If western countries adopted carbon taxes, those taxes could also be applied to imports. Then companies in good actor countries have an advantage over the companies of bad actor countries. Those taxes should at least cancel out any advantage the bad companies have and unlike the bad companies, the good companies keep more of the money spent on their products. It's pretty reasonable solution to the problem.
Well, it would help if you could put your thoughts down clearly and consistently, you originally claimed she was crazy, not a thief. According to the article you linked "Pelosi saw her wealth rise due to some stock gains and real estate investments made by her husband, Paul." It looks like they had a really good year, for example one of the companies he invested in quintupled in value over the year, another one he invested in released an iPhone. You may have heard of it.
As for the planes, according to a slightly more non-partisan source it's been normal for the Speaker of the House to use a government jet since 2001. It's a security requirement that was imposed by the Bush government.
According to what I've read the variance is much smaller, and the heat island effect is adjusted out of the cleaned up data sets like NASA's GISS. You might want to read up on that process.