More Global Warming To Shovel

I mean carbon taxes. I mean more domestic restrictions on fossil-fuel discovery and recovery. I mean mandatory imposition of expensive and unproven (and at this point often undeveloped and non-existent) technologies. I mean a significant portion of both national and world GDP going into Green agenda items rather than into other uses that could be immensely more productive.

Almost all the proposals I've heard have to do with reducing fuel consumption (although for political reasons and ignorance they're picking the wrong thing with fuel cells/corn ethanol) and emissions (at least as a start through cheap solutions like scrubbers).

Do you believe that these things come without price tags? That they're cheap or free? Define "cheap." Let's see some cost/benefit analysis there. Because the costs are very real and CAN be estimated*, while the claimed benefits are a wee bit more ephemeral in nature.

And in any case, alt-fuels and alt-energy will be developed anyway as fossil fuels become more expensive. It's called a "market." What the Greens want is to make those fuels more expensive NOW through taxation. We already have one of those solutions that IS economically feasible to implement in the current market--nuclear power. Which the Greens work hard to keep politically unfeasible. I'd note that ethanol fuels also produce carbon output. Ethanol is an alt-fuel solution, not a carbon solution.

The Secretary of the Treasury even thinks we should join Kyoto for these very reasons. He's said that any short term economic loss* caused by pumping billions into the programs now would be made up in the intermediate term by the great inventions and need to spread them around the country.

So what? The Secretary of the Treasury would need to prove that, and he can't. It's speculative BS, "pie in the sky, bye and bye." Paulson's not a scientist (other than a Christian Scientist by religion). He's an English lit major who picked up a Harvard MBA on the road to becoming a very rich Wall Street environmentalist, and he's been preaching the Green gospel for many decades. Which proves my point--he was arguing for carbon taxes and such back when people were still worried about the new looming ice age. The Green agenda remains the same--all that changes is the "problem" to which the preferred Green "solutions" must be applied. As I said, it's amazing how the "problems" always seem to require the same "solutions," even though the "problems" keep changing.

Plus, if they are right about global warming, then because of our understanding of the non-linear dynamics, any reduction could have a huge lessening of the final warming amount.

"If." Mighty BIG if. The "anthropogenic CO2-forced catastrophic runaway warming" scenario promoted by the Apocalyptics is seriously flawed, and the bulk of the observed warming to date is from purely natural causes. We are indeed probably contributing a bit to it, but our contribution to the warming trend is only a fractionof the whole. To accomplish any meaningful reduction in current CO2 levels would require HUGE resource inputs and sacrifice, and the amount of CO2 increase avoided (and any resulting reductions in temperature rise) would be minimal. As in major fractions of world GDP, money that people now use for little things like "food."

Trade-offs. Quantify 'em. Without VERY solid quantifiable backing for cost/benefit analysis, nebulous claims of better-world-if-only fall under the heading of "religion" as far as I'm concerned. We're seeing the heirs of the Club of Rome and The Limits of Growth in their next-generation incarnation. The hair-shirt of modernity.

[*--The estimated ongoing cost of fully implementing the Kyoto protocol alone is 1-1.5% of world GDP, with the greatest effect being felt by already-industrialized nations, while carbon-emissions growth in "developing" nations such as China and Inda would be completely unimpeded. DoE estimates for impact of US Kyoto implementation run as high as 4% of US GDP annually. That's somewhat higher than the ongoing historical average of US GDP growth--at that level, the US economy could actually shrink on an ongoing basis if we fully implemened Kyoto, which is why the US Senate voted unanimously in 1997 to not even consider it.]