The jury isn't out - the case has been well established. There are a bunch of well-paid advocates trying to get the case reversed, but that just a del aying tactic.
There's no good reason for any government to fail to tax carbon emissions. There's a risk of beggar-my-neighbour competition to offer lower tax rates than the neighbour next door, but a tax of $50 per ton of carbon burnt is g oing to justifiable enough that international pressure could keep everybody in line.
The EU has set up a carbon offset trading scheme, but they made a mess of i t and offsets are currently trading at closer to $10 a ton of carbon, which is cheaper than they ought to be.
Sure we can - and it's been done. The various guess don't agree too well, n ot least because the well-heeled fossil carbon extraction industry doesn't miss many chances to corrupt the people making the estimates.
The significance of right-wing ideology get discussed in the book "Merchant s of Doubt".
which looks at number of instances where commercial interests have worked t o slow down the general acknowledgement of the significance of scientific e vidence.
One persistent feature was the enthusiasm of right-wing scientists to rejec t scientific facts that should have stopped the free market from making mon ey out of selling cigarettes or chemicals that destroyed the ozone layer.
They confused government regulation of dangerous substances with anti-free- market central planning. James Arthur does exactly the same thing here at f airly regular intervals - what he doesn't like is the government regulation , but what he chooses to object to is the scientific evidence that backs up the government regulations. He understands very little about the scientifi c evidence, but he does know he doesn't like it.
The Proceeding of the National Academy of Sciences article on the acceptanc e of anthopogenic global warming by climate scientists looked at about a th ousand published climate scientists, ranked them by the usual criteria - ci tation rates and publications in more frequently cited journals, and found that 97% of the top 300 - that's 291 of them were persuaded by the case for anthropogenic global warming. I think I can name four of the hold-outs, an d each one that I can name has an irrational reason for no going along with the concensus.
Of the remaining 700-odd some 95% were persuaded. You'd expect that kind of group to include 35 nutters.
The severe shortage of detail can only mean that you have been relying on t he popular press
As they should. He hasn't got a clue, and hasn't put in the work he should have done before opening his mouth.
It's been 25 years since the scientific case started looking settled.
Arrhenius first published on the idea in 1896.
goes into the history, and the evidence, in a lot of detail. It's aimed at graduate physicists, so the technical could be daunting to the less educate d.
It looks feasible to people who have looked at it in detail. Jenny Riesz an d her crowd aren't commercially constrained in the way the Google engineers were and while the see renewable power as somewhat more expensive in the s hort term, they do see it as perfectly feasible.
If they are conscious of trashing the planet. Self-deceit is extremely popu lar.
Only under substantial external pressure. Without that pressure the cheats just evade the controls. Look at the history of fishing as whole - it's non
-stop over-fishing. As soon as the technology lets them wreck the fishing g rounds somebody comes in and strips them clean.