Californica cap-and-trade a big success...

"Jim Thompson"  wrote in message  




In a website appropriately named "Hot Air Express". If cap and trade  
applied  
to all states, or by federal mandate, it would work much better. But  
polluters still have buddies in states where legislators, with their  
drooling tongues in the wallets of Big Energy, don't care about cooking,  

choking, poisoning and smoking their populace. They welcome the  
polluters  
and contributors to environmental disaster as they pursue "business as  
usual" tactics that try to preserve dangerous and unhealthy jobs for  
just a  
few more years until the old coots die with the most toys and material  
wealth, while sickening the workforce and leaving them with no health  
care  
or as a burden to the rest of us when the greedy companies shut down and  
the  
executives bail out on their golden parachutes.

This site also is pushing a subscription to the "Town Hall", which I  
already  
have thanks to (probably) one of the right-leaning regulars here. It's  
also  
allied to the Wall Street Journal, which is also hopelessly biased.  
Always  
good to see what the opposition is brewing, but nothing much other than  
reactionary rhetoric and sore loser whining. There are better sources of  

information, such as:

www.nationalmemo.com
www.newsmax.com
www.pfaw.org

Not that I agree with all of their content, but it seems much more  
reasonable than that presented by the right-whiners.

Paul
www.baltimoregreenforum.org  

wrote:



Yes, I can see from your hysterical rhetoric what you would consider
'reasonable'.

"flipper"  wrote in message  



Why is it that so many people with scientific, engineering, and  
technical  
skills, are so dogmatically "religious" about their denialist and  
obstructionist views when it comes to protecting the environment we all  
share? We are all in this together, although many of the older regulars  
here  
may not live long enough to be affected by the catastrophic results of  
ignoring and belittling the evidence and those who try to present  
reasonable  
actions to be taken.

Perhaps you consider yourselves to be like the lucky pilot and die in  
your  
sleep, and not screaming in terror like his passengers.

Paul  

wrote:



You repeating hysterics about 'Armageddon' on the way isn't evidence
and no one is more dogmatically 'religious' than environmental zealots
who's first, middle, and last instinct is to burn at the stake anyone
who speaketh heresy against the holy writ, the only 'evidence'
involved, while chanting the 'save earth' sacrament.

The biggest difference between an environmental zealot and a "sinner
repent, the end is near" flagellant is the latter only beats himself.

As for me, I'm patiently waiting for the 'global warming' priesthood
to present their falsifiable predictions and the repeatable
experimental results testing them because some of us still adhere to
what's called 'science'.

l
here
able
ur

He didn't make any reference to Armegeddon.


at

Actually, we refer them to the peer reviewed scientific evidence,
which is not remotely like holy writ. You've got to remember that
scientists are sceptics, and the way to win fame and fortune as a
scientist is to prove some other scientist wrong. The evidence for
anthropogenic global warming has survived a lot of scepticism so far,
so the scientific community is now willing to act as if it is very
likely to be right.



Environmental zealots may exist, but none of them post here. John
Larkin likes to think that taking global warming seriously means
drastically reducing our energy consumption effectively inventing his
straw man environmental zealot. but this doesn't happen to be true.

We should be getting more of our energy from renewable sources - which
are more expensive at the moment - and retooling society so that we'll
end up getting most of our energy from renewable sources, which is
going to take a while, but should have the effect of providing energy
for less than we now pay for burning the fossil carbon we are
currently importing from countries all around the world.



You shouldn't be  - the IPCC does it every few years.



We've only got one planet. It would be a bit extravagant to trash it
in order to prove that what we are doing at the moment is damaging our
environment.



Not you, obviously.

P E Schoen wrote:


Because people make Doom prophesies out of a lot of it that doesn't
always come to pass. Because the CO levels of the exhaust of a
well-tuned Beetle would pass a tailpipe test but the regs still said
you hadda have a catalytic converter. We've been burned before.

And because our carbon use is what's different about how we
live now and how people lived - as serfs, basically - two-three
hundred years ago. It's also a thing that shines a painfully
strong light on the limits of the nation-state.



To an extent, but we all check out of the planet on our own
time, so there's a limit...



Most of the models predict nobody alive will see it.



*My* main grump about it is that I've never, ever had a projection that  
I made work out. This is one whale of a projection. I lean towards
"it's true", but I don't see a lot we can do about it other than
a few cargo cult measures.

If I thought we really could add Pigovian taxes to the mix and fix it,  
we should. I doubt they'll work. The rewards for defectors is too high.
For some cultures, you cannot even explain them to them.

I have no problem with the science. It's the narratives that people
build on the science that worry me. This means that people now want
to signal eco-conciousness, and that may or many not do any good.
Meanwhile, you can't even keep hackers outta corporate networks.



I think that attributing that much power to our puny species is
hubristic. We came into prominence by accident, and I expect
we'll go out the same way.

And how long did it stay well-tuned?



Collecting solar energy is going to be cheaper than burning fossil
carbon in a few decades anyway. Subsidising renewable energy just gets
us to this point a decade or so earlier - on the usual rule of thumb
that increasing the scale of manufacture by a factor of ten halves the
cost of each individual unit. There's nothing of the cargo cult in
working to get there sooner.



But when solar power really is cheaper, you don't have to explain it
to them.

<snipped obscure comment>



Sadly, it's realistic. The extra CO2 in the atmosphere is all ours,
and we seem hell-bent on adding more.


ay.

We didn't intend to warm up the whole planet when we started digging
up fossil carbon and burning it as fuel, so the current - limited -
disaster probably counts as an accident .We now know more than enough
to know that we ought to stop, so the fact that we are persisting in
activity that will render the planet a lot less suitable for us to
live on probably counts as suicidally irresponsible.

Paul Schoen gets his "science" from Popular Science magazine and knows
absolutely NO history.

And he judges the world based on his Baltimore slum.  Think I
exaggerate?  Go there some time and look around.
        
                                        ...Jim Thompson

wrote:



Cap-and-trade is just another messy complication, prone to influence
and abuse.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-12-12/deutsche-bank-frankfurt-headquarters-raided-in-co2-trades-probe.html

Politicians don't have the guts to simply create or increase carbon
tax.

Some people never learn:

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/Genesis-Of-State-s-Energy-Fiasco-String-of-bad-3302201.php

Some "free market"!

It's amusing that lefties and the press (same thing, mostly) have
started referring to CO2 as "pollution", to imply that CO2 is
hazardous, like ozone or particulates or something. People breath in
400 PPM and exhale about 4%, averaging about a kilogram of CO2
produced per day.

Yes, the EPA has designated CO2 as a pollutant.

Yes, they are crazy.

Yes, that's why we need to cut govt funding  

Mark

On 13 Dec, 12:26, snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote:


It may look crazy to the ignorant, but the logic actually is sound.



In fact you need to spend more on public education, and even more on
stopping people lying to the public to maximise their own short terms
profits. The board of Exxon-Mobil should be put away for fraud, and
Jim Inhofe with them as an accomplice.

OK Bill,
 1) just because someone disagrees with you is no reason to call them
ignorant. Surely you can go better than that.

2) Please provide a scientific logical definition of a "pollutant"
making it worthy of government regulation
 that would include sulfur-dioxide which rightly IS a pollutant and
would also include CO2 but would EXCLUDE nitrogen or oxygen.

Or do you consider oxygen a pollutant as well?
In that case what is NOT a pollutant?

Or does the EPA just "decide" something is a pollutant because it fits
their agenda?



Mark

I can, and frequently do, so often that it isn't really necessary to
be more verbose here.



Why should I? I'm not objecting to the EPA calling it a pollutant.
None of the people who do object have gone to the trouble of digging
out a definition to justify their aversion to the usage, and in
practice a word means what we collectively understand it to mean
rather than what it meant a few decades ago when the relevant
dictionary was last revised.



It certainly was a few billion years ago, and killed off a lot of
blameless, if primitive organisms back then.



Anything that doesn't create a problem.



Or because it has been revealed to be damaging the environment ...

A hundred years ago, ozone was thought to be good for you, rather than
a pollutant. It's now known to be good for you (by absorbing hard UV)
when confined to the stratosphere, but lung-rottingly dangerous if it
shows up in the air we breath.

lied
s
t a
re
 the

eady
lso
ys

Set up by right-wing loonies who'd never heard of "natural
monopolies". Odd that the report doesn't mention Enron once.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_electricity_crisis



CO2 is hazardous. It doesn't damage you in the same way that ozone or
particulates do, but if you put enough into the atmosphere enough of
us will end up dead to create a public health disaster.

Not that John Larkin knows enough science to understand the chain of
cause and effect.

On Wed, 12 Dec 2012 10:55:31 -0800, John Larkin
<snip>


I don't find it amusing at all and it's a standard left wing tactic to
simply redefine the language so it's impossible to rationally discuss
anything. The very name of modern, so called, 'liberalism' is language
theft because the word comes from the Latin liber, or to put it in
plain English "free," as in liberty. But the left are statists,
suborning the individual to the 'collective' (meaning them), the
antithesis of liberty.

'Liberals' love democracy when they 'win' but when they don't they
simply usurp power by other means since the only 'legitimate' purpose
of a vote is to give them power to 'rule'. You see this being acted
out right now in the 'fiscal cliff' battle. President Obama 'won' so,
as far as he is concerned, he's been given the power to 'rule' and
never mind that every single member of Congress also won their
election and are the duly designated representative of their
respective constituents. That vote doesn't 'count' because it produced
the 'wrong' results and they're 'in the way' of our dear 'ruler'.

Of course, you saw exactly the same thing after his first election
when, for the 'bipartisan' meeting to allegedly 'discuss' healthcare,
the first words out of his mouth to Sen. McCain were "I won." (I.E.
Don't bother bringing up things other than what I want because "I won"
and get to 'rule'.)



They do not mean to 'imply' it at all. That's the 'new definition'
intended to shut down any and all debate because you are certainly not
for 'pollution' are you? And now that we all 'agree' we can get on
with persecuting 'polluters'.

The purpose was to further corrupt the EPA and usurp power that pesky
'peoples body' called Congress wouldn't grant. President Obama said it
flat out when he warned if they didn't pass what he wanted he'd do it
anyway... and it would be worse. And he did, since how dare they not
obey their 'ruler'?



Didn't you ask for a carbon tax?

One might also add that every breathing lifeform on the planet emits
CO2, which is arguably a good thing because without this 'pollutant'
all plant life would die.

The right wing idea of "rational discussion" involves asserting what
they - irrationally - believe to be true,



People in general - not just leftists - have a habit of redefining
words for their own convenience. It's how language evolves.

In Europe and Australia, a political liberal is right-of-centre, and
endorses free trade as opposed to protectionism. What "liber" might
have meant in Roman Latin. or now means in Church Latin, doesn't come
into it.



Actually, their votes do count, but the executive is stuck with coming
up with a policy that might work, and the Tea Party nitwits haven't
yet suggested a practical solution.



Probably not what he was saying - more likely what he had in mind was
something about not being pointlessly obstructive when you don't have
the numbers to make it stick.



Congress can always over-ride the EPA - it just takes time.



What on earth do you think you are talking about?



But if we burn enough fossil carbon to raise the average surface
temperature of the planet by 4C, a whole lot of that planet life will
die. It will be replaced by different plants that do well in the new
environment. Not all that many of them will be the plants that we have
bred and cultivated as agricultural plants over the last ten-thousand-
odd years that we have been practicing agriculture, so our food
supplies are going to crash, and our population with it, but since CO2
doesn't correspond to your idea of a pollutant, we shouldn't be
bothered about Exxon-Mobil's plan to extract every possible trace of
fossil carbon that they can get their hands on and sell every last bit
of it to be burnt as fuel.

If we were silly enough to let them, we wouldn't deserve to survive as
a species.

The right-wing nitwits who can't see what's at issue certainly don't
deserve to survive, but they probably aren't sapient enough to count
as homo sapiens in the first place.

flipper wrote:


Liberal in the context of philosophy means free-thinker.  Their opionons are  
defined by thinking, because those opinions are the inevitable result of  
thinking, because they are "correct."  Thinking cannot lead to a different  
point of view.

to
language

opionons  

result  


Veritas vos liberabit. And the truth, veritas, is obtained by free  
thinking,  
not by chanting dogmatic mantras. One of the only sure bets is that  
things  
will change, and "liberals" are champions of change. True, beneficial,  
conservatism should just act as a cautionary force to guard against  
reckless  
abandon, and not as a stone wall intent on blocking progress and  
ignoring  
(or actively denying) new evidence and ideas. Liberty can only survive  
on a  
foundation of truth and reason, and not on blind faith or trust in  
leadership, especially when the motives of those in power, or seeking  
it,  
are personal (or corporate) greed and selfishness.

The freedom of individuals in a connected society is necessarily limited  
to  
that which does not harm the "collective" or its members. The present  
libertarian and conservative Republican factions seek to ignore or deny  
the  
deleterious effect of their selfishly motivated programs where the  
rights of  
the (elite and privileged) individual are imagined to trump the welfare  
and  
very survival of the civilization which provides the framework for their  

ability to exist and benefit from that which is provided by others. Free  

thinkers recognize and respect this, and work in cooperation with others  
to  
achieve a common goal.

Paul  

wrote:



That's a myth created by the people who stole the word 'liberal'. Faux
'liberals' are all for 'change' when not in power but dogmatic
'conservatives' once in. Just try to 'change' anything in the 'Welfare
State'.



You mean like maybe something 'radical' such as perhaps READING
fracking 'healthcare' bills before voting them into law?

'Conservatism' defined as 'resistance to change' is another self
serving myth created by the left who stole, and destroyed, 'liberal'.



Fascism was a 'new idea' too so it must be good, eh?



Okay. Lets start simple. What does "Liberty" mean? As in, the
inalienable right to Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.



Like a solar panel business being given large sums of extorted public
funds because the 'liberals in charge' have decided who they will
favor and who they will persecute.




There is no such thing as the "collective." It is a euphemism for
government and suborning individual liberty to it.

The 'limits' of liberty were establish in the beginning. One's liberty
is limited if it infringes upon another's liberty. I.E. My right to
Life, Liberty, and Property, as expressed by John Locke, does not
extend to taking your Life, Liberty, or Property because you have the
same rights as I.



Utter nonsense.