Because we haven't been able to answer that question for decades and now we NEED to know the answer before we continue, if that's the case.
A revenue neutral carbon tax would put the free-market to work at finding solutions. Far from picking winners and loser, a carbon tax would actually reflect the hidden cost of polluting the atmosphere. Such approaches have been implemented in many places in the developed world, and have been shown to have negligible impact on the economy. (An empirical argument can be made that they help the economy by ploughing carbon profits directly into new goods and services.)
Those who cry about economic armageddon are the real alarmists in the climate-change story, and that particular crowd made the same cries of economic armageddon over acid rain and the ozone hole. (Fixing these problems has negligible net effect on the economy.)
Land ice is decreasing, but sea ice is increasing. This is not a good sign. Instead of geting third-hand accounts from right-wing faithfuls, why not read the original source:
This little canard about Antartic ice being okay will continue well beyond being a pants-on-fire bald-face lie. We will have to wait until it is *so* obvious that Antartica is losing ice, that even Glenn Beck has to admit it. But then, the forbes (and the conservative think tanks) will just slip right on to another canard.
Seems to me that if you're telling only half the story you can't possibly be telling more then half the truth.
Well, this is pretty sad if you think that. These masses of ice are not floating in the ocean. So there is a fundamental difference. Also, there is no rule that says everything must be symmetric with climate change.
fyi, east antartica is growing (a tiny bit), and west antartica is shrinking (faster.) If they *do* melt, it will take decades to hundreds of years past the tipping point, which we probably haven't yet reached. If they *do* melt, it really will be a catastrophe. Even a 1% chance of them melting is not worth the risk.
We will probably see dramatic changes on Greenland before Antarctica -- not least because Greenland is now part of a much warmer north pole.
Because the solution is NOT to use less energy. The solution is to have less kids and lower the population.
Alternatively, educate everyone, lift them out of poverty, and population increase flat-lines. This can be achieved with technological advancement.
I'm all for limiting population growth though. If the above doesn't solve the population explosion, then we *will* need to prevent growth at some future stage, or exponential growth will devolve into something nasty, akin to bacteria fighting over an agar dish with nuclear weapons (i.e., anti-biotics.)
The way people have built here, ten or twenty centimeters in sea level rise will have little effect on us.
Because of the interesting relationship between gravity (of ice masses) and sea-levels, the east cost of the USA will experience the bulk of global sea rises. If it is 1m globally, it may be 5m on the east coast. If the modest current forecasts are true, then Boston will be fine; however, scientists and the IPCC are conservative. Anything could happen. (Including little-to-no sea rise.)
The liberals most certainly throw around poorly defined crap like "fair share,"
As part of a psych course, I went around to 12 different people (6 conservatives, 6 liberals), and asked them all the same questions about what they think should be done on certain policy issues. I also asked them what the typical liberal would say, and what the typical conservative would say.
Turns out (and this is a very robust result in literature), that most everybody agrees on everything. AND, most everybody believes that conservatives and liberals are polarized on the issues.
The moral of the story is, that if you think "liberals think this and conservatives think that", then you are almost certainly talking about a caricature in your head, and not what liberals and conservatives really think. This is such a common mistake it is shocking when you try it for yourself.
And I invite you to try it for yourself, and learn something about the nature of political discourse.
Well... this right there -- the head of the EPA knew Nixon personally. Watch and decide for yourself whether Nixon believed in environmental issues, or was simply being politically expedient.
Nixon was. He admired them. He didn't know much about the environment, and frankly, he wasn't very curious about it. He never asked me the whole time I was at EPA -- the first time he appointed me or the second time -- "Is the air really dirty? Is something wrong with the water? What are we worried about here?" Reagan asked me that several times, when I worked there the second time. Nixon never did.
So without that awkward example, that leaves the basic difference as, the right looks for problems in the individual (eg. responsibility, incentive, lack of morality, etc.) and the left looks for problems in the system (eg. the banks, the lack of medical care, corporations, the loopholes in taxes, etc.)
I can agree with that, and from that point of view, you will find that most conservatives and liberals have vast overlaps in how problems should be approached. I am yet to meet a moderate liberal who does not agree with personal responsibility. I am yet to meet a moderate conservative who does not recognise the role of institutions and policies in creating incentive structures that drive human behaviour.
Politics would be far saner without the 20% wing-nuts somehow ensure that we don't get a real policy debate, but instead something that resembles groups of children fighting on the playground.
Are you mad? Welfare, pensions (largely social security), education, and health care account...
Education and health-care are not social justice programs. The social justice approaches to these programs does not alter the cost.
Pensions are (supposedly) paid into by payroll taxes -- like compulsory superannuation. The idea is that you can remove poverty of the elderly (which was a huge problem) by forcing people to save over their lifetime. You *buy* your pension. Would work if the rest of the government didn't just plunder the money.
Australia set up a much better system where you are forced to pay for your retirement, but can choose how you do it. In this way, the government doesn't get to spend your retirement dollars on *guns*.
Really? the only balanced budget in recent history happened with a republican congress
Clutching at straws much??
Reagan, Bush & Bush were huge budget offenders. At least the first two had the sense to try and raise revenue to cover their big-government spending. George W's own treasury secretary resigned because of GW's profligate attitude towards money.
Left -- the system is rigged, so increase taxes and redistribute to make it fair
I see this so often, but honestly think it is baloney. Some liberals eye others' stuff -- the homologues to Hannity and Beck -- but the *vast* majority of liberals do not believe that taxes should be increased to make a rigged system fair. There are two orthogonal concerns there. The first is social justice, which doesn't involve raising taxes at all. (Most social justice programs are generally cheap.) The second is about balancing the budget -- something that the GOP seems unable to do, but the Dems have a fine record. And the second is also about Kensyian economics, and liberals have the record on job creation by 2-1. (Rich people take money out of the system because they save moe. This slows down the economy. Poor people spend everything, and this raises demand and speed the economy. Trickle-down economics is about increasing the amount of investment money; however, we already have a glut of that.)
Only someone in a cognitive bubble could possible believe these snippets cast a pall of the science. Go educate yourself, and but that, I mean try to understand what the counter-arguments are -- not by reading counter-counters, but by actually reading the original source material well enough so that you can explain it accurately.
If you simply look at the total debt, you can see more clearly. A lot of the debt Obama incurred was actually due to continuing GW policies. (Medicaid Part D, tax cuts for the wealth, unfunded wars), and a retraction of the economy (means less federal revenue).
Anyway, it looks like you're willing to generate whatever belief it takes to avoid thinking critically about the GOP.
How about the Ryan plan from the other year? I think that had figures you could add up.
Yet the congressional budget office has to fill in the gaps themselves. And now Romney/Ryan are simply saying "trust us, we'll tell you how we'll pay for it when we're in office."
I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration of what's presented in that video. He's for a carbon tax if and only if it replaces some other tax which is more harmful to the economy.
Most carbon tax proposals are revenue neutral. Laffer is in agreement with that, but the GOP base is not.
Well, why don't try and find an AGW theory that doesn't involve CO2. Gee, that will be like half of them.
That is, quite literally, Statistics 101 material.
I have a degree in stats, and have worked for a market research company in the past. It doesn't matter how you study your population and calibrate -- you cannot change the inherent randomness in how people respond. As a rule of thumb, you can ask anybody anything, and get a positive response at least 10% of the time -- even for the patently ridiculous.
Jane Q Public, I think you are truly stupid, and in a clever way.
Keep some of your writings from this year, and look at them in 10 years time, and you will know what I mean.
At the current level of spending, that's hard to take seriously. Bush spent a lot of money. Obama has spent more. Forgetting the stimulus for a minute, why do we now spend so much money every single year?
How much did Bush spend, and why? Don't forget to account for the tax cuts, and also the projected future cost of Medicaid Part D.
How much did Obama spend, and why? Don't forget to include the actual justification of the spending.
It should be obvious that we can't just spend more than we take in perpetually.
Indeed, which is why the dems have a credible plan to reduce the deficit. The GOP doesn't have the type of plan where you can add up the figures; however, they do want to cut more taxes and give the military $2 trillion more than they asked for.
Simply taxing the rich will _not_ pay for the deficits we currently have.
The Dems plan includes far more spending cuts then revenue increases. Something like 4-1. However, the GOP are all pledgy about not increasing revenues at all. Hardly a responsible attitude.
That's not true. See Wilson & Schooler (1991): "Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions". It is clear that blind taste tests are in accordance with what experts believe is tasty when participants do not introspect on their choices.
Gee... and to reduce this to absurdum -- I be a mouthful of dirt is less tasty then ice-cream, blind taste test or not.
Thankfully, that's true. Many of their own policies from a few years back were terrible. We spent way too much money back then. GWB spent more than anyone before him. On the other hand, BHO has spent more than anyone before him (including GWB)*.
Only the Dems have a history of fiscal responsibility. The reason for the recent rise in the deficit is three-fold: the economy shrank, and GOP would not let revenues rise, and the dems employed fiscal stimulus. On the last point, most economists (but not all) believe that this is the right thing to do. Those economies that did not employ stimulus during the global recession shrank.
You might disagree with Keynesian economics, but even so, the dems are the only party of fiscal responsibility, and the deficit would not be so bad if the GOP didn't try to ram those tax cuts for the rich down the dems throat. The story will be different next time.
When Bush got things done, it was either because the GOP was different, the Dems were different, or both. You don't have to spend much time listening to the GOP today to realize that they are causing the gridlock. All those tax pledges, for example. The GOP faithful will never accept that their party did anything so low, but the rest of the world sees it, and there is material evidence to the fact.
Maybe the Dems should start trying to work on some bipartisanship
Yet we have several GOP explicitly stating that compromise is "my way or the highway." Heck, the Dems can't get the GOP to vote in favour of their own policies from a few years back.
But I don't hold out much hope that it will ever, at least ever again, work that way.
Indeed, from my small studies of the history of ancient Rome -- once a precedent is set, it is never unset, and a nation is slowly ruined. The effect is slow an pernicious, and often not felt for quite a long time.
"Young man, there's a lot of ruin in a nation." Adam Smith
But the GOP simply filibustered constantly. Without a filibuster proof 60 votes, the dems couldn't get anything done. The Dems only had 4 months of a filibuster proof congress.
Slashdot Mirror
Because we haven't been able to answer that question for decades and now we NEED to know the answer before we continue, if that's the case.
A revenue neutral carbon tax would put the free-market to work at finding solutions. Far from picking winners and loser, a carbon tax would actually reflect the hidden cost of polluting the atmosphere. Such approaches have been implemented in many places in the developed world, and have been shown to have negligible impact on the economy. (An empirical argument can be made that they help the economy by ploughing carbon profits directly into new goods and services.)
Those who cry about economic armageddon are the real alarmists in the climate-change story, and that particular crowd made the same cries of economic armageddon over acid rain and the ozone hole. (Fixing these problems has negligible net effect on the economy.)
This little canard about Antartic ice being okay will continue well beyond being a pants-on-fire bald-face lie. We will have to wait until it is *so* obvious that Antartica is losing ice, that even Glenn Beck has to admit it. But then, the forbes (and the conservative think tanks) will just slip right on to another canard.
History repeats itself. We've seen this before.
Seems to me that if you're telling only half the story you can't possibly be telling more then half the truth.
Well, this is pretty sad if you think that. These masses of ice are not floating in the ocean. So there is a fundamental difference. Also, there is no rule that says everything must be symmetric with climate change.
fyi, east antartica is growing (a tiny bit), and west antartica is shrinking (faster.) If they *do* melt, it will take decades to hundreds of years past the tipping point, which we probably haven't yet reached. If they *do* melt, it really will be a catastrophe. Even a 1% chance of them melting is not worth the risk.
We will probably see dramatic changes on Greenland before Antarctica -- not least because Greenland is now part of a much warmer north pole.
Because the solution is NOT to use less energy. The solution is to have less kids and lower the population.
Alternatively, educate everyone, lift them out of poverty, and population increase flat-lines. This can be achieved with technological advancement.
I'm all for limiting population growth though. If the above doesn't solve the population explosion, then we *will* need to prevent growth at some future stage, or exponential growth will devolve into something nasty, akin to bacteria fighting over an agar dish with nuclear weapons (i.e., anti-biotics.)
With 50-100 years to adapt, I'm sure it'll be fine. We survive much more immediate disruptions from natural disasters every year.
I'd say that that is the most likely possibility. The costs will be *huge*, but the project of civilization will continue.
There is a non-zero possibility of catastrophy, and a non-zero possibility of nothing bad happening.
So... what is the prudent risk-management thing to do? Nothing?? 'cause it'll all be fine???
The way people have built here, ten or twenty centimeters in sea level rise will have little effect on us.
Because of the interesting relationship between gravity (of ice masses) and sea-levels, the east cost of the USA will experience the bulk of global sea rises. If it is 1m globally, it may be 5m on the east coast. If the modest current forecasts are true, then Boston will be fine; however, scientists and the IPCC are conservative. Anything could happen. (Including little-to-no sea rise.)
The point is that removing 15% is extremely poor performance compared to what a heat sink gives you.
The liberals most certainly throw around poorly defined crap like "fair share,"
As part of a psych course, I went around to 12 different people (6 conservatives, 6 liberals), and asked them all the same questions about what they think should be done on certain policy issues. I also asked them what the typical liberal would say, and what the typical conservative would say.
Turns out (and this is a very robust result in literature), that most everybody agrees on everything. AND, most everybody believes that conservatives and liberals are polarized on the issues.
The moral of the story is, that if you think "liberals think this and conservatives think that", then you are almost certainly talking about a caricature in your head, and not what liberals and conservatives really think. This is such a common mistake it is shocking when you try it for yourself.
And I invite you to try it for yourself, and learn something about the nature of political discourse.
Nixon was. He admired them. He didn't know much about the environment, and frankly, he wasn't very curious about it. He never asked me the whole time I was at EPA -- the first time he appointed me or the second time -- "Is the air really dirty? Is something wrong with the water? What are we worried about here?" Reagan asked me that several times, when I worked there the second time. Nixon never did.
Memories of Nixon and his interest in the environment
So without that awkward example, that leaves the basic difference as, the right looks for problems in the individual (eg. responsibility, incentive, lack of morality, etc.) and the left looks for problems in the system (eg. the banks, the lack of medical care, corporations, the loopholes in taxes, etc.)
I can agree with that, and from that point of view, you will find that most conservatives and liberals have vast overlaps in how problems should be approached. I am yet to meet a moderate liberal who does not agree with personal responsibility. I am yet to meet a moderate conservative who does not recognise the role of institutions and policies in creating incentive structures that drive human behaviour.
Politics would be far saner without the 20% wing-nuts somehow ensure that we don't get a real policy debate, but instead something that resembles groups of children fighting on the playground.
Are you mad? Welfare, pensions (largely social security), education, and health care account ...
Education and health-care are not social justice programs. The social justice approaches to these programs does not alter the cost.
Pensions are (supposedly) paid into by payroll taxes -- like compulsory superannuation. The idea is that you can remove poverty of the elderly (which was a huge problem) by forcing people to save over their lifetime. You *buy* your pension. Would work if the rest of the government didn't just plunder the money.
Australia set up a much better system where you are forced to pay for your retirement, but can choose how you do it. In this way, the government doesn't get to spend your retirement dollars on *guns*.
Really? the only balanced budget in recent history happened with a republican congress
Clutching at straws much??
Reagan, Bush & Bush were huge budget offenders. At least the first two had the sense to try and raise revenue to cover their big-government spending. George W's own treasury secretary resigned because of GW's profligate attitude towards money.
Left -- the system is rigged, so increase taxes and redistribute to make it fair
I see this so often, but honestly think it is baloney. Some liberals eye others' stuff -- the homologues to Hannity and Beck -- but the *vast* majority of liberals do not believe that taxes should be increased to make a rigged system fair. There are two orthogonal concerns there. The first is social justice, which doesn't involve raising taxes at all. (Most social justice programs are generally cheap.) The second is about balancing the budget -- something that the GOP seems unable to do, but the Dems have a fine record. And the second is also about Kensyian economics, and liberals have the record on job creation by 2-1. (Rich people take money out of the system because they save moe. This slows down the economy. Poor people spend everything, and this raises demand and speed the economy. Trickle-down economics is about increasing the amount of investment money; however, we already have a glut of that.)
So please get the motivations correct.
He started the EPA, but was resistent, and personally didn't give fsck.
"Hide the decline"
Only someone in a cognitive bubble could possible believe these snippets cast a pall of the science. Go educate yourself, and but that, I mean try to understand what the counter-arguments are -- not by reading counter-counters, but by actually reading the original source material well enough so that you can explain it accurately.
and say something political
Political any code for any science that disagrees with your politics.
This graph is much more descriptive: federal debt 1901-2010.
Anyway, it looks like you're willing to generate whatever belief it takes to avoid thinking critically about the GOP.
How about the Ryan plan from the other year? I think that had figures you could add up.
Yet the congressional budget office has to fill in the gaps themselves. And now Romney/Ryan are simply saying "trust us, we'll tell you how we'll pay for it when we're in office."
I think that's a little bit of an exaggeration of what's presented in that video. He's for a carbon tax if and only if it replaces some other tax which is more harmful to the economy.
Most carbon tax proposals are revenue neutral. Laffer is in agreement with that, but the GOP base is not.
and that is any AGW, not just CO2.
Well, why don't try and find an AGW theory that doesn't involve CO2. Gee, that will be like half of them.
That is, quite literally, Statistics 101 material.
I have a degree in stats, and have worked for a market research company in the past. It doesn't matter how you study your population and calibrate -- you cannot change the inherent randomness in how people respond. As a rule of thumb, you can ask anybody anything, and get a positive response at least 10% of the time -- even for the patently ridiculous.
Jane Q Public, I think you are truly stupid, and in a clever way.
Keep some of your writings from this year, and look at them in 10 years time, and you will know what I mean.
At the current level of spending, that's hard to take seriously. Bush spent a lot of money. Obama has spent more. Forgetting the stimulus for a minute, why do we now spend so much money every single year?
How much did Bush spend, and why? Don't forget to account for the tax cuts, and also the projected future cost of Medicaid Part D.
How much did Obama spend, and why? Don't forget to include the actual justification of the spending.
It should be obvious that we can't just spend more than we take in perpetually.
Indeed, which is why the dems have a credible plan to reduce the deficit. The GOP doesn't have the type of plan where you can add up the figures; however, they do want to cut more taxes and give the military $2 trillion more than they asked for.
Simply taxing the rich will _not_ pay for the deficits we currently have.
The Dems plan includes far more spending cuts then revenue increases. Something like 4-1. However, the GOP are all pledgy about not increasing revenues at all. Hardly a responsible attitude.
Oh, btw, Art Laffer is for a carbon tax. In his own worlds. Bet you didn't know that.
That's not true. See Wilson & Schooler (1991): "Thinking Too Much: Introspection Can Reduce the Quality of Preferences and Decisions". It is clear that blind taste tests are in accordance with what experts believe is tasty when participants do not introspect on their choices.
Gee... and to reduce this to absurdum -- I be a mouthful of dirt is less tasty then ice-cream, blind taste test or not.
Thankfully, that's true. Many of their own policies from a few years back were terrible. We spent way too much money back then. GWB spent more than anyone before him. On the other hand, BHO has spent more than anyone before him (including GWB)*.
Only the Dems have a history of fiscal responsibility. The reason for the recent rise in the deficit is three-fold: the economy shrank, and GOP would not let revenues rise, and the dems employed fiscal stimulus. On the last point, most economists (but not all) believe that this is the right thing to do. Those economies that did not employ stimulus during the global recession shrank.
You might disagree with Keynesian economics, but even so, the dems are the only party of fiscal responsibility, and the deficit would not be so bad if the GOP didn't try to ram those tax cuts for the rich down the dems throat. The story will be different next time.
When Bush got things done, it was either because the GOP was different, the Dems were different, or both. You don't have to spend much time listening to the GOP today to realize that they are causing the gridlock. All those tax pledges, for example. The GOP faithful will never accept that their party did anything so low, but the rest of the world sees it, and there is material evidence to the fact.
Maybe the Dems should start trying to work on some bipartisanship
Yet we have several GOP explicitly stating that compromise is "my way or the highway." Heck, the Dems can't get the GOP to vote in favour of their own policies from a few years back.
But I don't hold out much hope that it will ever, at least ever again, work that way.
Indeed, from my small studies of the history of ancient Rome -- once a precedent is set, it is never unset, and a nation is slowly ruined. The effect is slow an pernicious, and often not felt for quite a long time.
"Young man, there's a lot of ruin in a nation." Adam Smith
But the GOP simply filibustered constantly. Without a filibuster proof 60 votes, the dems couldn't get anything done. The Dems only had 4 months of a filibuster proof congress.