There would be no progressiveness there. And if everyone got a rebate, then costs getting passed on to the consumer would just negate any potential influences the tax would have because the consumer is compensated for the increased costs.
Not at all. Consumers can allocate their dollars in many different ways, and "passing through to the consumer" means that the energy sector is going to be demanding a greater chunk of the consumer's income stream. Thus, any consumer that can reduce usage will actually be saving money. Similarly, any corporation that can reduce their costs (e.g., by improving efficiency, say) will be more competitive than their less efficient competitors. And away we go.
Anyway, I linked to the CBO report. To make a long story short, costs will go up, but they will go up slightly less for the poorer members of society than for the extremely wealthy. In some cases the costs will remain neutral.
You probably should pay attention to the things you are attempting to speak about. The republicans have offered their own solutions and they are not apposed to "anything".
I apologize. I've read quite a bit about the subject it and haven't seen any Republican-offered proposal that's likely to be effective and likely to draw real support from the Republicans in Congress. But I'm willing to be educated if you really think I've missed something.
Well, I think that's exactly what I meant when I said: "'Unilateral disarmament' is symbolic at best."
I would even disagree there. I think that there are huge technological developments (and efficiency improvements) to be discovered, but only if the richest nations incentivize their discovery. If the first world can bring alternative energy technologies to maturity, it will be a whole lot easier for, say, China to sign on.
But it's not even necessary to play a game of "you go first"; so long as there's international enforcement, everyone can start at the same time.
Unfortunately there's no international enforcement other than maybe Mother Nature. First you'd have to get people to sign on to creating such enforcement, but that's a catch 22.
This particular regulatory scheme employs a market mechanism. That's not the same as The Market.
What is this "The Market" that you refer to with such reverent caps? Are you perhaps referring to the global energy market--- which is distorted by subsidies, national security spending, and a lack of pricing on externalities such as pollution?
In the short run, even local carbon taxes will drive substantial technological development, and more efficient processes. These benefits will be exported, and there will be network effects by which they improve efficiency worldwide. I suspect it will also make us a bunch of money.
In the long run, we will probably need some way to prevent the exportation of emissions. It might require modifications to the WTO framework, or a whole bunch of carrots and sticks. Perhaps domestic corporations can be taxed for moving manufacturing operations (note that many of the "imports" are from US firms that have simply operations abroad.) But this may not need to happen for a decade or two, and we'll have a much better handle on the problem then (both in terms of the economics and the climate science).
Any plan for such a global problem MUST take into account the actions of such "defecting" countries, or you might as well not bother.
Absolutely you might as well bother. Do you really think that we're ever going to convince any of the BRIC countries to volunteer for this, if the richest developed nations won't?
Basically if you only support a cap provided that everyone signs on now, then you don't support a cap.
The best strategy right now is for us, richest developed nations, to implement a cap now. Work the bugs out of it. And --- most importantly it to incentivize technological innovation that will ultimately make compliance affordable to developing nations down the road. It might also make us a lot of money.
You're not counting coal reserves, which will eventually tail off as well, but could probably see considerable increase in production (particularly as China continues to develop).
In any case, "solving the problem" --- by burning through so much of our reserves that other technologies become cost-effective --- may not be the safest strategy.
...is that it's not progressive. So Joe Sixpack bears a much higher load in proportion to, say, Al Gore
Whether a Cap & Trade scheme is progressive depends entirely on how you give out the emissions permits. Auction them off and rebate the proceeds to the taxpayer (even if it's a flat check to every American), you have an enormously progressive plan.** Give them away and you have a regressive plan.
Now if you want a progressive version, contact your member of Congress and tell them to support that. Unfortunately, the regressive version seems to be what the most conservative members of Congress want, and since the Republicans are opposing anything, then that's probably what we'll get. It's still better than nothing, and if you want better, then stop concern trolling about it and start voting for more progressive Congresspeople.
As this article points out (with a nice graph), the market has recovered from its initial missteps. Carbon emissions have been trending down (even before the mega-recession began), and Europe is on track to meet the Kyoto requirements (8+% below 1990 levels) by 2011. The major problems had to do with a lack of data about how much carbon the European countries were emitting. Therefore the cap was set too high. There have been several adjustments since then, and the results have become much better.
One hopes that we'll be able to avoid this, since we have much better emissions data. To my mind, the most important finding of the post above is that corporations are finding massive improvements in efficiency, since the cap has essentially set a price on emitting carbon. This, plus technological development, is going to make the problem a lot less scary than conservative estimates would have you believe.
(Now there are various caveats. The really big one being the ability of nations to "outsource" their emissions by importing from nations with no such caps. But I don't think this is an argument for removing the caps --- rather, we should be finding ways to integrate the trading schemes of those nations with caps, and recover some of the carbon cost on imports from the other nations.)
Thats where your wrong. For one, all this hype by the media has made a lot of people go out of their way to buy things that are "green", this creates a market for things such as home solar panels, etc. Eventually with this niche market it will become cheaper to produce giving the rise of cheap high capacity solar panels. For another this could lead to cheaper energy costs which would allow for a thriving consumer market for these things. Computers used to be a niche item too, then they got smaller and cheaper to where everything now uses a computer. They went from being only in a few science labs to being in just about every home in a few short years.
"Green" products have overwhelmingly been a disappointment. Either they're not as green as they report to be, or the damage is just shifted to another area of the production chain. And that's the problem here --- the end consumer only sees a product and a price. They don't have any incentive to minimize GHG output and waste during the production of the product. And with incomplete information, the free market cannot produce an optimal outcome.
Adding a cost to carbon would provide the right incentives all the way up and down the chain. The manufacturer can pass some of this along to the consumer in the form of a more environmentally friendly product. As you point out consumers are already willing to make sacrifices (less material, higher price) if the manufacturer can convince them that there's an environmental benefit. Everyone wins --- that is, actually wins, rather than simply getting the appearance of winning.
Cap and trade fails for the simple thing that why should I be penalized for being productive in 2009? There is no power source that has the safety, reliability, and price of fossil fuels.
You should be slightly penalized so that we can develop those replacement power sources and so that you can enjoy a high standard of living in 20-30 years, rather than the rapid decline in standards of living that will accompany a belated, last-minute push to deal with the problem. Think of it as a retirement strategy.
One way or another we're going to see massive reductions in our use of fossil fuels (at very least, petroleum) in the next 20-30 years. Remember after Katrina, when a supply shock doubled the price of gasoline? Even without the inevitable supply shocks, a growing world economy will drive the cost of oil far above where it is now. We could replace some of that with coal, but the infrastructure changes there are nearly as massive. Worse, if the effects of global warming do become impossible to ignore, you can bet that we'll be forced into a major last-ditch reduction, plus we'll be dealing with the loss of our coastal infrastructure.
The cost of not preparing now is to see huge reductions in our standard of living, probably starting within the next two decades and getting much worse from there. If you plan to be dead by 2030, I suppose you could live it up now. But I'm very much hoping to be alive then. And personally I like central heating, modern transporation, etc. I don't want to watch all that GDP growth we "protected" in 2009 slip away because we didn't plan.
In a nutshell, we're wealthy now and we have the energy resources to build an infrastructure that's resilient to a reduction in fossil-fuel consumption, and we can do it in a way that doesn't seriously impact our standard of living. There are no technical problems in the way, just a willingness to invest a small fraction of our GDP to protect ourselves. And technology, as you say, will come to our aid -- you can assume that the costs will be significantly lower than the pessimistic projections made today.
Scan it at high resolution, OCR what you can, and load it into Distributed Proofreaders. Or if the material is too technical for the layperson, ask for a copy of the web-based software and set up your own private site. Let bored grad students work on it in exchange for some kind of minor credit on the final digitized work. (I believe that the bored grad students phenomenon produces half of the highly-technical articles on Wikipedia.)
1. I'm a reasonable person. I think massive increases in the earth's Methane/CO2 levels are probably-to-possibly going to induce massive changes in the biosphere, thus placing large numbers of human beings (including myself and my offspring) in harm's way.
2. But here's a personal anecdote about some crunchy tree-huggers I hung out with.
Ergo,
3. On balance, I think it would be valuable to take an unsubstantiated swipe at the scientists who are qualified to researching this incredibly complicated subject. And even though I haven't read his report, I place more faith in this guy's undergrad BS degree than in real scientists in the area.
If you really want to stand by this guy's BS in physics, I urge you to read this comment --- from someone who actually read his report (or better, read the report). Post back to me if you still think the guy is making a strong, scientific argument.
I agree that there could be global warming. However government restrictions on the economy are not the answer. The free market will always have a solution to the problem.
I guess it's good that you wrote this, and someone modded it up to 5 --- at least it gives a chance to address some of the fallacies in your post.
First, The free market will (sometimes) optimize to maximize profits (though not necessarily over the long term --- see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009"). It will only "find a solution" if carbon emissions/global warming decreases profits, or if there's a clear case that developing a solution will lead to new profits. And even then, it may not actually succeed in producing an optimal outcome (see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009" for a handy set of examples.)
Finding a solution either involves a massive change to our energy infrastructure, or some random-chance brilliant invention (try as it might, even the free market can't do more that set the right conditions for this --- it's largely blind luck and human intuition).
At present, there is minimal incentive for the market to restructure our energy (consumption/transmission/generation) infrastructure. So outside of a few edge cases, all the brilliance of the free market is doing nothing at all to solve the problem. It will probably continue to fail to solve the problem until global warming starts to become a serious threat to industry profits (i.e., customers vanishing beneath the waves). Unfortunately, the best science on this issue indicates that there'll be very little we can do about it then. Even cold fusion won't reduce the CO2 levels, and all but the most radical technological breakthroughs will be inadequate to the problem.
What the US government is trying to do with Cap & Trade is use the power of the free market to achieve a valuable goal now. Specifically, the purpose is to avoid radical solutions and central planning, and to simply place a price on carbon emissions. The free market, in all of its brilliance, should then adjust to those price changes and find technological alternatives that achieve the same purposes but without emitting as much carbon. In other words, the purpose of the law is simply to price the emissions and let the free market optimize them down.
We've done similar (and even heavier-handed things) before, and we've found that it's been enormously successful without destroying our economy (see "The Clean Air Act" and the existing emissions markets). Industry might have eventually found an incentive to make these changes --- or they might not have. But they certainly weren't doing it at the time, and the outcome was much better than what existed before.
Because 10GW of wind power gives you a LOT less energy than 10GW of nuclear. Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40% (wind doesn't always blow), typical (fission) nuclear capacity factors are 90%-ish. Thus nuclear plants are cheaper than wind even if they cost 3 times as much per GW.
But does that make it a bad deal? Even if you have to scale up by three times to get the equivalent energy, is the cost (at scale) going to be substantially higher than that of nuclear? (When you take into account the government-subsidized costs of waste-management, fuel re-processing, security, ensuring non-proliferation when developing countries seek to implement it, etc.) I'm asking this as a question--- it's not rhetorical.
In addition, wind power needs additional grid investment and lots of pumped storage to even out spikes in capacity to be suitable for base load power, while nuclear power plants are suitable from the get-go.
This is a big deal. But my guess is that we're overestimating the base load power requirement. Even with a large nuclear component, it seems to me that industry is going to have to move to a more flexible "operate when power is cheapest" model anyway. (This is especially true, since energy cost is increasingly going to dominate the cost of human labor in an automated plant.) Even residential use may have to go this way to some extent. Of course, there's satellite forecasting and other sources (solar, for instance) that make renewable power availability more predictable.
This will require huge grid upgrades, but quite frankly, given the political environment, those are substantially more likely than large-scale construction of nuclear power near population centers
Of course what McCain didn't count on was that she was as big a nit wit as she is, and that the press would give her so much play.
Which is why he shouldn't have picked an unvetted candidate in order to win a few popularity points before the Convention. The point of a candidacy is to convince voters that you can be trusted to make important decisions. McCain's damning sin isn't that he lost his gamble, it's that he took one in the first place.
Giving false information during a Federal investigation. If you ever do it, expect to go to jail for some time --- and deserve it. Doesn't matter if you're even the target of the investigation.
Now, if you are one of the targets of the investigation and you lie to investigators to cover your tracks and impede the investigation... then expect to be convicted on all counts and really deserve it.
(Incidentally, every time a Republican defends Scooter Libby, a Democratic Congressman somewhere wins a special election:)
Even if there's a 90% probability that they're wrong --- i.e., the planet has the ability to absorb astonishing amounts of GHG-emissions without massive population displacement and loss of life (a highly unlikely proposition) --- the prudent course of action is still to curtail our carbon emissions. The radical position is to go on emitting at our current rate for a few more decades and hope that it's all ok.
The old man was just one natural attraction in a place full of them.
And I think most people would agree with that, after they made the trip. At the end of the day, the Old Man was just a lump of rock. It may have been the ostensible destination that pulled people out of their apartments to take a trip to the country, but I'll bet most of them were more impressed by the journey than by its resolution. And that journey could include all of those things you mention.
It would be a shame if people just stayed home, thinking "oh, there's nothing there to see anymore".
This is tragic, and please don't view the following unrelated rant as indicating lack of sympathy or some kind of judgement against the public agency that's getting slammed in this case.
A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days at the RSA security conference, one of the biggest conferences/trade shows in the security industry. Roughly 7 out of 10 of the products being hawked were absolute nonsense: buzzword-compliant BS. "Security risk management" software, hacked-together IDS systems, encryption systems that have pretty Windows GUIs (and probably, lots of pretty Windows code vulnerabilities), AV that's easy to circumvent, etc. They'd do absolutely nothing to protect you in the face of a serious attack. I say this as both a security professional and a business owner, which makes me somewhat well qualified to make that judgement. Often the most obviously ineffective products were the best sellers.
My point? In terms of commercial spending, "security" has so far been an excuse to spend a bunch of money and check a lot of little boxes. Corporations and organizations aren't really serious about preventing attacks, because for the most part it isn't happening (to most companies). An executive wants to say he "did something", so he buys a bunch of stuff and wastes time configuring it. It probably doesn't protect him against a motivated attacker, and he doesn't have the skills in-house to deal with it (which would be a lot more valuable than the equipment and software he purchased).
When I see something like this story, well, it's absolutely not gratifying. It's tragic. And of course, the fact that it's hitting a public agency makes it even nastier. But at very least, I hope that things like this do at least scare the crap out of some of the companies buying this nonsense, and convince a few of them to take the problem seriously. Because it is a problem. The reason we have the luxury of pretty trade shows that sell fluffy products is because this very real problem just hasn't manifested itself in an expensive enough way to shock people into taking the problem seriously. I really hope people start taking it seriously before this kind of thing becomes too pernicious.
Oh please. This wasn't some investigative reporter who was fired for exposing political corruption or some such. This was an entertainment columnist who was fired for breaking a well known company policy.
There are plenty of people out there who would be equally derisive about a real piece of investigative journalism. That's why I'm uncomfortable with dictating what subjects Journalists are 'allowed' to talk about, purely on the basis of whether I think their beat is important enough.
And I'm/extremely/ uncomfortable with a large media conglomerate overriding the decisions of their supposedly-independent news division in cases where they have a vested financial interest. Compared to that, the movie piracy issue is pretty unimportant.
A vast chasm divides Wikileaks (which publishes hidden information to expose issues and problems in society) and movie piracy (which exists for the selfish purposes of greedy and impatient children). They are not the same thing, even remotely.
Among other things, this was an article about movie piracy. No, it's not the Nixon tapes, but it's journalistically relevant --- the movie's leaking was a fact and certainly deserving of journalistic attention.
Once you start deciding what subjects journalists are 'allowed' to talk about, you're on your way down an extremely slippery slope, and this does Wikileaks no particular favors.
"You'll have to pry my Beta Blockers out of my cold, dead hands."
Point: when the government "retires" beta blockers --- based on strong evidence that they're ineffective --- you can expect objections having to do with 'patient choice' and how the government is telling doctors what to do. Merits be damned: this will be used as an example of why we can't afford government-subsidized health care.
It's no coincidence that the people who oppose "socialized medicine" are often the same ones who avoid evidence-based medicine in large-scale situations where it might be effective. It's also no coincidence that our health care costs more on average than many other nations, and yet our health outcomes are worse.
However, the lack of a random pool that the selection would occur from available to study in present time disproves the concept that it occurs as randomly and directionlessly as it was explained to me in school. How's that?
Unfortunately, that's becoming the problem. The Obama team is being so careful in their vetting that some nominees are dropping out, getting fed up with the whole process.
We see these stories about eight times a year. "New alternative to embryonic stem cells just around the corner". It's never clear how far around the corner it really is, though.
In any case, I'm certain that sooner or later some brilliant soul will crack this code. I can't help but wonder, though: how much scientific effort has been displaced into "finding other ways to make stem cells" that could otherwise have gone into "finding ways to use stem cells to treat medical conditions".
Check to see if the URL to the site begins with http:/// before you login. If it does, and it's displaying a padlock icon (suggesting that it is 'secure'), then you're being attacked. Really, you should already be wary when a site asks you for login information over HTTP rather than HTTPS.
Slashdot Mirror
There would be no progressiveness there. And if everyone got a rebate, then costs getting passed on to the consumer would just negate any potential influences the tax would have because the consumer is compensated for the increased costs.
Not at all. Consumers can allocate their dollars in many different ways, and "passing through to the consumer" means that the energy sector is going to be demanding a greater chunk of the consumer's income stream. Thus, any consumer that can reduce usage will actually be saving money. Similarly, any corporation that can reduce their costs (e.g., by improving efficiency, say) will be more competitive than their less efficient competitors. And away we go.
Anyway, I linked to the CBO report. To make a long story short, costs will go up, but they will go up slightly less for the poorer members of society than for the extremely wealthy. In some cases the costs will remain neutral.
You probably should pay attention to the things you are attempting to speak about. The republicans have offered their own solutions and they are not apposed to "anything".
I apologize. I've read quite a bit about the subject it and haven't seen any Republican-offered proposal that's likely to be effective and likely to draw real support from the Republicans in Congress. But I'm willing to be educated if you really think I've missed something.
Well, I think that's exactly what I meant when I said: "'Unilateral disarmament' is symbolic at best."
I would even disagree there. I think that there are huge technological developments (and efficiency improvements) to be discovered, but only if the richest nations incentivize their discovery. If the first world can bring alternative energy technologies to maturity, it will be a whole lot easier for, say, China to sign on.
But it's not even necessary to play a game of "you go first"; so long as there's international enforcement, everyone can start at the same time.
Unfortunately there's no international enforcement other than maybe Mother Nature. First you'd have to get people to sign on to creating such enforcement, but that's a catch 22.
This particular regulatory scheme employs a market mechanism. That's not the same as The Market.
What is this "The Market" that you refer to with such reverent caps? Are you perhaps referring to the global energy market--- which is distorted by subsidies, national security spending, and a lack of pricing on externalities such as pollution?
In the short run, even local carbon taxes will drive substantial technological development, and more efficient processes. These benefits will be exported, and there will be network effects by which they improve efficiency worldwide. I suspect it will also make us a bunch of money.
In the long run, we will probably need some way to prevent the exportation of emissions. It might require modifications to the WTO framework, or a whole bunch of carrots and sticks. Perhaps domestic corporations can be taxed for moving manufacturing operations (note that many of the "imports" are from US firms that have simply operations abroad.) But this may not need to happen for a decade or two, and we'll have a much better handle on the problem then (both in terms of the economics and the climate science).
Any plan for such a global problem MUST take into account the actions of such "defecting" countries, or you might as well not bother.
Absolutely you might as well bother. Do you really think that we're ever going to convince any of the BRIC countries to volunteer for this, if the richest developed nations won't?
Basically if you only support a cap provided that everyone signs on now, then you don't support a cap.
The best strategy right now is for us, richest developed nations, to implement a cap now. Work the bugs out of it. And --- most importantly it to incentivize technological innovation that will ultimately make compliance affordable to developing nations down the road. It might also make us a lot of money.
You're not counting coal reserves, which will eventually tail off as well, but could probably see considerable increase in production (particularly as China continues to develop).
In any case, "solving the problem" --- by burning through so much of our reserves that other technologies become cost-effective --- may not be the safest strategy.
...is that it's not progressive. So Joe Sixpack bears a much higher load in proportion to, say, Al Gore
Whether a Cap & Trade scheme is progressive depends entirely on how you give out the emissions permits. Auction them off and rebate the proceeds to the taxpayer (even if it's a flat check to every American), you have an enormously progressive plan.** Give them away and you have a regressive plan.
Now if you want a progressive version, contact your member of Congress and tell them to support that. Unfortunately, the regressive version seems to be what the most conservative members of Congress want, and since the Republicans are opposing anything, then that's probably what we'll get. It's still better than nothing, and if you want better, then stop concern trolling about it and start voting for more progressive Congresspeople.
** Citation, from the CBO analysis. Sadly I have to give the graph excerpted on this blog page, since I didn't have time to hunt for the original: http://yglesias.thinkprogress.org/archives/2009/04/making_cap_and_trade_regressive.php).
As this article points out (with a nice graph), the market has recovered from its initial missteps. Carbon emissions have been trending down (even before the mega-recession began), and Europe is on track to meet the Kyoto requirements (8+% below 1990 levels) by 2011. The major problems had to do with a lack of data about how much carbon the European countries were emitting. Therefore the cap was set too high. There have been several adjustments since then, and the results have become much better.
One hopes that we'll be able to avoid this, since we have much better emissions data. To my mind, the most important finding of the post above is that corporations are finding massive improvements in efficiency, since the cap has essentially set a price on emitting carbon. This, plus technological development, is going to make the problem a lot less scary than conservative estimates would have you believe.
(Now there are various caveats. The really big one being the ability of nations to "outsource" their emissions by importing from nations with no such caps. But I don't think this is an argument for removing the caps --- rather, we should be finding ways to integrate the trading schemes of those nations with caps, and recover some of the carbon cost on imports from the other nations.)
Thats where your wrong. For one, all this hype by the media has made a lot of people go out of their way to buy things that are "green", this creates a market for things such as home solar panels, etc. Eventually with this niche market it will become cheaper to produce giving the rise of cheap high capacity solar panels. For another this could lead to cheaper energy costs which would allow for a thriving consumer market for these things. Computers used to be a niche item too, then they got smaller and cheaper to where everything now uses a computer. They went from being only in a few science labs to being in just about every home in a few short years.
"Green" products have overwhelmingly been a disappointment. Either they're not as green as they report to be, or the damage is just shifted to another area of the production chain. And that's the problem here --- the end consumer only sees a product and a price. They don't have any incentive to minimize GHG output and waste during the production of the product. And with incomplete information, the free market cannot produce an optimal outcome.
Adding a cost to carbon would provide the right incentives all the way up and down the chain. The manufacturer can pass some of this along to the consumer in the form of a more environmentally friendly product. As you point out consumers are already willing to make sacrifices (less material, higher price) if the manufacturer can convince them that there's an environmental benefit. Everyone wins --- that is, actually wins, rather than simply getting the appearance of winning.
Cap and trade fails for the simple thing that why should I be penalized for being productive in 2009? There is no power source that has the safety, reliability, and price of fossil fuels.
You should be slightly penalized so that we can develop those replacement power sources and so that you can enjoy a high standard of living in 20-30 years, rather than the rapid decline in standards of living that will accompany a belated, last-minute push to deal with the problem. Think of it as a retirement strategy.
One way or another we're going to see massive reductions in our use of fossil fuels (at very least, petroleum) in the next 20-30 years. Remember after Katrina, when a supply shock doubled the price of gasoline? Even without the inevitable supply shocks, a growing world economy will drive the cost of oil far above where it is now. We could replace some of that with coal, but the infrastructure changes there are nearly as massive. Worse, if the effects of global warming do become impossible to ignore, you can bet that we'll be forced into a major last-ditch reduction, plus we'll be dealing with the loss of our coastal infrastructure.
The cost of not preparing now is to see huge reductions in our standard of living, probably starting within the next two decades and getting much worse from there. If you plan to be dead by 2030, I suppose you could live it up now. But I'm very much hoping to be alive then. And personally I like central heating, modern transporation, etc. I don't want to watch all that GDP growth we "protected" in 2009 slip away because we didn't plan.
In a nutshell, we're wealthy now and we have the energy resources to build an infrastructure that's resilient to a reduction in fossil-fuel consumption, and we can do it in a way that doesn't seriously impact our standard of living. There are no technical problems in the way, just a willingness to invest a small fraction of our GDP to protect ourselves. And technology, as you say, will come to our aid -- you can assume that the costs will be significantly lower than the pessimistic projections made today.
Scan it at high resolution, OCR what you can, and load it into Distributed Proofreaders. Or if the material is too technical for the layperson, ask for a copy of the web-based software and set up your own private site. Let bored grad students work on it in exchange for some kind of minor credit on the final digitized work. (I believe that the bored grad students phenomenon produces half of the highly-technical articles on Wikipedia.)
To summarize your post:
1. I'm a reasonable person. I think massive increases in the earth's Methane/CO2 levels are probably-to-possibly going to induce massive changes in the biosphere, thus placing large numbers of human beings (including myself and my offspring) in harm's way.
2. But here's a personal anecdote about some crunchy tree-huggers I hung out with.
Ergo,
3. On balance, I think it would be valuable to take an unsubstantiated swipe at the scientists who are qualified to researching this incredibly complicated subject. And even though I haven't read his report, I place more faith in this guy's undergrad BS degree than in real scientists in the area.
If you really want to stand by this guy's BS in physics, I urge you to read this comment --- from someone who actually read his report (or better, read the report). Post back to me if you still think the guy is making a strong, scientific argument.
I agree that there could be global warming. However government restrictions on the economy are not the answer. The free market will always have a solution to the problem.
I guess it's good that you wrote this, and someone modded it up to 5 --- at least it gives a chance to address some of the fallacies in your post.
First, The free market will (sometimes) optimize to maximize profits (though not necessarily over the long term --- see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009"). It will only "find a solution" if carbon emissions/global warming decreases profits, or if there's a clear case that developing a solution will lead to new profits. And even then, it may not actually succeed in producing an optimal outcome (see "Global Financial Services Industry, 1990-2009" for a handy set of examples.)
Finding a solution either involves a massive change to our energy infrastructure, or some random-chance brilliant invention (try as it might, even the free market can't do more that set the right conditions for this --- it's largely blind luck and human intuition).
At present, there is minimal incentive for the market to restructure our energy (consumption/transmission/generation) infrastructure. So outside of a few edge cases, all the brilliance of the free market is doing nothing at all to solve the problem. It will probably continue to fail to solve the problem until global warming starts to become a serious threat to industry profits (i.e., customers vanishing beneath the waves). Unfortunately, the best science on this issue indicates that there'll be very little we can do about it then. Even cold fusion won't reduce the CO2 levels, and all but the most radical technological breakthroughs will be inadequate to the problem.
What the US government is trying to do with Cap & Trade is use the power of the free market to achieve a valuable goal now. Specifically, the purpose is to avoid radical solutions and central planning, and to simply place a price on carbon emissions. The free market, in all of its brilliance, should then adjust to those price changes and find technological alternatives that achieve the same purposes but without emitting as much carbon. In other words, the purpose of the law is simply to price the emissions and let the free market optimize them down.
We've done similar (and even heavier-handed things) before, and we've found that it's been enormously successful without destroying our economy (see "The Clean Air Act" and the existing emissions markets). Industry might have eventually found an incentive to make these changes --- or they might not have. But they certainly weren't doing it at the time, and the outcome was much better than what existed before.
Because 10GW of wind power gives you a LOT less energy than 10GW of nuclear. Typical wind power capacity factors are 20-40% (wind doesn't always blow), typical (fission) nuclear capacity factors are 90%-ish. Thus nuclear plants are cheaper than wind even if they cost 3 times as much per GW.
But does that make it a bad deal? Even if you have to scale up by three times to get the equivalent energy, is the cost (at scale) going to be substantially higher than that of nuclear? (When you take into account the government-subsidized costs of waste-management, fuel re-processing, security, ensuring non-proliferation when developing countries seek to implement it, etc.) I'm asking this as a question--- it's not rhetorical.
In addition, wind power needs additional grid investment and lots of pumped storage to even out spikes in capacity to be suitable for base load power, while nuclear power plants are suitable from the get-go.
This is a big deal. But my guess is that we're overestimating the base load power requirement. Even with a large nuclear component, it seems to me that industry is going to have to move to a more flexible "operate when power is cheapest" model anyway. (This is especially true, since energy cost is increasingly going to dominate the cost of human labor in an automated plant.) Even residential use may have to go this way to some extent. Of course, there's satellite forecasting and other sources (solar, for instance) that make renewable power availability more predictable.
This will require huge grid upgrades, but quite frankly, given the political environment, those are substantially more likely than large-scale construction of nuclear power near population centers
Of course what McCain didn't count on was that she was as big a nit wit as she is, and that the press would give her so much play.
Which is why he shouldn't have picked an unvetted candidate in order to win a few popularity points before the Convention. The point of a candidacy is to convince voters that you can be trusted to make important decisions. McCain's damning sin isn't that he lost his gamble, it's that he took one in the first place.
Giving false information during a Federal investigation. If you ever do it, expect to go to jail for some time --- and deserve it. Doesn't matter if you're even the target of the investigation.
Now, if you are one of the targets of the investigation and you lie to investigators to cover your tracks and impede the investigation... then expect to be convicted on all counts and really deserve it.
(Incidentally, every time a Republican defends Scooter Libby, a Democratic Congressman somewhere wins a special election :)
we have to act in ten years or it'll be too late
Even if there's a 90% probability that they're wrong --- i.e., the planet has the ability to absorb astonishing amounts of GHG-emissions without massive population displacement and loss of life (a highly unlikely proposition) --- the prudent course of action is still to curtail our carbon emissions. The radical position is to go on emitting at our current rate for a few more decades and hope that it's all ok.
But you know that.
The old man was just one natural attraction in a place full of them.
And I think most people would agree with that, after they made the trip. At the end of the day, the Old Man was just a lump of rock. It may have been the ostensible destination that pulled people out of their apartments to take a trip to the country, but I'll bet most of them were more impressed by the journey than by its resolution. And that journey could include all of those things you mention.
It would be a shame if people just stayed home, thinking "oh, there's nothing there to see anymore".
This is tragic, and please don't view the following unrelated rant as indicating lack of sympathy or some kind of judgement against the public agency that's getting slammed in this case.
A couple of weeks ago I spent a few days at the RSA security conference, one of the biggest conferences/trade shows in the security industry. Roughly 7 out of 10 of the products being hawked were absolute nonsense: buzzword-compliant BS. "Security risk management" software, hacked-together IDS systems, encryption systems that have pretty Windows GUIs (and probably, lots of pretty Windows code vulnerabilities), AV that's easy to circumvent, etc. They'd do absolutely nothing to protect you in the face of a serious attack. I say this as both a security professional and a business owner, which makes me somewhat well qualified to make that judgement. Often the most obviously ineffective products were the best sellers.
My point? In terms of commercial spending, "security" has so far been an excuse to spend a bunch of money and check a lot of little boxes. Corporations and organizations aren't really serious about preventing attacks, because for the most part it isn't happening (to most companies). An executive wants to say he "did something", so he buys a bunch of stuff and wastes time configuring it. It probably doesn't protect him against a motivated attacker, and he doesn't have the skills in-house to deal with it (which would be a lot more valuable than the equipment and software he purchased).
When I see something like this story, well, it's absolutely not gratifying. It's tragic. And of course, the fact that it's hitting a public agency makes it even nastier. But at very least, I hope that things like this do at least scare the crap out of some of the companies buying this nonsense, and convince a few of them to take the problem seriously. Because it is a problem. The reason we have the luxury of pretty trade shows that sell fluffy products is because this very real problem just hasn't manifested itself in an expensive enough way to shock people into taking the problem seriously. I really hope people start taking it seriously before this kind of thing becomes too pernicious.
Oh please. This wasn't some investigative reporter who was fired for exposing political corruption or some such. This was an entertainment columnist who was fired for breaking a well known company policy.
There are plenty of people out there who would be equally derisive about a real piece of investigative journalism. That's why I'm uncomfortable with dictating what subjects Journalists are 'allowed' to talk about, purely on the basis of whether I think their beat is important enough.
And I'm /extremely/ uncomfortable with a large media conglomerate overriding the decisions of their supposedly-independent news division in cases where they have a vested financial interest. Compared to that, the movie piracy issue is pretty unimportant.
A vast chasm divides Wikileaks (which publishes hidden information to expose issues and problems in society) and movie piracy (which exists for the selfish purposes of greedy and impatient children). They are not the same thing, even remotely.
Among other things, this was an article about movie piracy. No, it's not the Nixon tapes, but it's journalistically relevant --- the movie's leaking was a fact and certainly deserving of journalistic attention.
Once you start deciding what subjects journalists are 'allowed' to talk about, you're on your way down an extremely slippery slope, and this does Wikileaks no particular favors.
"You'll have to pry my Beta Blockers out of my cold, dead hands."
Point: when the government "retires" beta blockers --- based on strong evidence that they're ineffective --- you can expect objections having to do with 'patient choice' and how the government is telling doctors what to do. Merits be damned: this will be used as an example of why we can't afford government-subsidized health care.
It's no coincidence that the people who oppose "socialized medicine" are often the same ones who avoid evidence-based medicine in large-scale situations where it might be effective. It's also no coincidence that our health care costs more on average than many other nations, and yet our health outcomes are worse.
However, the lack of a random pool that the selection would occur from available to study in present time disproves the concept that it occurs as randomly and directionlessly as it was explained to me in school.
How's that?
Unfortunately, that's becoming the problem. The Obama team is being so careful in their vetting that some nominees are dropping out, getting fed up with the whole process.
We see these stories about eight times a year. "New alternative to embryonic stem cells just around the corner". It's never clear how far around the corner it really is, though.
In any case, I'm certain that sooner or later some brilliant soul will crack this code. I can't help but wonder, though: how much scientific effort has been displaced into "finding other ways to make stem cells" that could otherwise have gone into "finding ways to use stem cells to treat medical conditions".
Check to see if the URL to the site begins with http:/// before you login. If it does, and it's displaying a padlock icon (suggesting that it is 'secure'), then you're being attacked. Really, you should already be wary when a site asks you for login information over HTTP rather than HTTPS.
Try Wachovia's site: http://wachovia.com/
Lock icon: check.
Unsecured HTTP page: check.
I don't have a Wachovia account, so I can only assume that the actual UID/password info goes over SSL, but that's irrelevant to this attack.