13 Dec 16
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Originally posted by whodeyTrump built a flood wall around his golf coarse in Ireland. Translation, Trump believes in global warming
Trump built a flood wall around his golf coarse in Ireland. Translation, Trump believes in global warming.
Trump merely has to appease the right by saying he does not believe it and sneak in the back door in terms of supporting legislation to curb it.
Only time will tell, but I'm guessing I'm right.
Not necessarily. He may have built a flood wall because of investors and others who might be concerned about GW. Addressing their concerns over GW doesn't automatically mean he thinks it's a problem.
The customer isn't always right, but ignoring their concerns is generally not good for business.
13 Dec 16
Originally posted by whodeyFlood walls are usually built to keep back water from ocean storms.
Trump built a flood wall around his golf coarse in Ireland. Translation, Trump believes in global warming.
Trump merely has to appease the right by saying he does not believe it and sneak in the back door in terms of supporting legislation to curb it.
Only time will tell, but I'm guessing I'm right.
Originally posted by sh76It doesn't matter if Tillerson will tell all of these things to the President-elect or not. Neither Trump or anyone in his cabinet gives a hoot about out planet. Environmental laws are just an inconvenience to this group who have a proven track record of poisoning our planet for profit, hiring their flesh eating lawyers to shield them from anything but a fine (without admitting guilt) and chalking it up to the cost of doing business. May these bastards burn in hell, and their lawyers along with them! 😞
Tillerson, the CEO of ExxonMobil, has acknowledged the reality of anthropogenic climate change, supported the Paris agreement and has called reducing CO2 emissions "responsible policy."
Will Tillerson tell all of these things to the President-elect?
http://money.cnn.com/2016/12/12/news/economy/rex-tillerson-exxon-climate-change/
14 Dec 16
Originally posted by mchillflesh eating lawyers
It doesn't matter if Tillerson will tell all of these things to the President-elect or not. Neither Trump or anyone in his cabinet gives a hoot about out planet. Environmental laws are just an inconvenience to this group who have a proven track record of exploiting our planet for profit, hiring their flesh eating lawyers to shield them from anything but a fin ...[text shortened]... e cost of doing business. May these bastards rot in hell, and their lawyers along with them! 😞
14 Dec 16
Originally posted by lemon limeMoreover, it is unlikely that Trump himself is involved in this dispute concerning one of his many golf courses.
[b]Trump built a flood wall around his golf coarse in Ireland. Translation, Trump believes in global warming
Not necessarily. He may have built a flood wall because of investors and others who might be concerned about GW. Addressing their concerns over GW doesn't automatically mean he thinks it's a problem.
The customer isn't always right, but ignoring their concerns is generally not good for business.[/b]
14 Dec 16
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Originally posted by twhiteheadhttp://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_flawed_logic_of_the_cap-and-trade_debate/2153/
Not according to science.
[b]Is it worth curbing economic growth at a time of looming economic collapse? My guess is this is what Trump is contemplating,
Cap and trade and the Paris agreement do not curb economic growth.[/b]
by ted nordhaus and michael shellenberger
In early May, anxiety among climate activists about the fate of cap-and-trade legislation erupted into a full-throated roar with the release of a scathing open letter by Dr. James Hansen. In it, the NASA scientist called a bill by Representatives Henry Waxman and Ed Markey a “temple of doom,” savaging it for being complex, corrupt, and “a minor tweak to business-as-usual.” Hansen called for a carbon tax in its place, one that would establish a “substantial and rising price on carbon emissions.”
Hansen was right about Waxman-Markey. It will do little to reduce U.S. emissions, will transfer billions to incumbent energy interests in the form of free pollution permits, and will send billions more to timber, agriculture, and other interests, here and abroad, in the form of dubious “offsets.” But Hansen’s analysis of why climate legislation has gone so terribly off the rails is wrong.
Hansen argues that the problem has to do with the mechanism by which Waxman-Markey would establish a carbon price — a cap-and-trade system. In this, Hansen is joined by many other greens and economists, who argue that cap-and-trade is a cumbersome and economically inefficient means of establishing a carbon price, one that is particularly vulnerable to manipulation by polluters and politicians.
On the other side of this debate stand many business interests, some prominent climate scientists, and green groups like the Environmental Defense Fund and the Natural Resources Defense Council. They argue that
No government in the world has been willing to place a high price on carbon.
cap-and-trade is a superior approach, because it guarantees certainty of actual emissions reductions, and a more pragmatic one, because it does not require politicians to vote for a new tax on pollution. They say taxes are just as prone to manipulation by politicians and polluters and that simple carbon taxes exist only in the ivory tower equations of academic economists, not in the real, rough-and-tumble world of politics and legislating.
The truth is, however, that neither of these approaches will lead to significant reductions in carbon emissions, and for a basic reason: Both Hansen and those he criticizes focus on pollution regulation and pricing to make fossil fuels more expensive, rather than on innovation to make clean energy cheap. This approach ignores the history of technological breakthroughs, which has primarily been driven by public investment. And public investment in clean energy is what is needed today, because no effort to achieve deep reductions in carbon emissions, domestic or international, will succeed as long as low-carbon energy technologies cost vastly more than current fossil fuel-based energy.
The Power of Positive Thinking
For more than a decade, the cap vs. tax debate has taken on a ritual quality, with carbon tax advocates conveniently ignoring the reality that the reason that capping and trading carbon has been so ineffectual has been the unwillingness of politicians to establish a high price on carbon. Similarly, cap-and-trade advocates have ignored the fairly obvious fact that carbon caps are not binding and provide no certainty of reductions if policies substantially limit the maximum amount that emitters will be required to pay to reduce greenhouse gases.
Ironically, both sides share the same pollution paradigm, which views the massive transformation of the global energy economy as fundamentally the same as past pollution battles over acid rain and air pollution. In fact, the debate pits one central objective of that paradigm, the establishment of strict pollution caps, against another, making industries pay to pollute.
But the debate between carbon tax and cap-and-trade proponents is a false one. The problem is that no government in the world so far has been willing to establish and sustain a high price on carbon, whether through taxes or caps. This is due to at least four substantial and interlinked issues: the political power of incumbent energy interests, low consumer tolerance for high energy prices, the economic impacts that substantially raising energy prices will have on key energy-intensive sectors of the economy, and — most importantly — the substantial price gap that continues to exist between fossil fuels and clean-energy alternatives.
Yet so powerful has been the mental model imposed by the pollution paradigm that neither party to the tax vs. cap debate has much acknowledged either the ways in which the climate crisis differs from past environmental problems or the larger socio-political context in which any climate policy must function. Clean energy technologies cost much more than fossil fuels. Binding caps requiring deep and rapid reductions in carbon emissions must allow carbon prices to rise to whatever level they must (read: very high) in order to comply with the cap. As a result, no society has been willing to establish high carbon prices, regardless of the mechanism.
The serial failures of the European Emissions Trading System, the recent rollback of emissions reduction commitments in Australia, and the looming passage of the Waxman-Markey legislation in the United States are evidence not that carbon trading is the “temple of doom,” but rather
Environmentalists must look to low carbon prices to fund public sector research into clean energy.
that most political economies are highly resistant to high carbon prices. Yet when confronted with this reality, proponents of traditional cap-and-trade or tax schemes have had three responses. The first has been to produce a blizzard of economic models that downplay the economic impacts of high carbon prices. But even when these models show that long-term benefits outweigh the costs, someone will still have to pay in the short-term, and those interests — whether consumers or industries — are well-represented in the U.S. Congress.
Others, such as Peter Barnes of CapandDividend.Org, have proposed refunding to consumers all revenues generated by auctioning pollution allowances, under the assumption that doing so would blunt consumer opposition to high carbon prices and the energy price increases they bring. But there is no evidence that rebates would have this effect. Moreover, the strategy would do nothing to soften the impacts on regional economies and energy intensive industries.
Another strategy, prominently championed by author Bill McKibben, argues that it will be necessary to build a much more powerful movement to mandate the deeper emissions reductions and higher carbon prices needed to stabilize the climate. But there is strong evidence that as long as such a movement is predicated on deeply cutting carbon emissions, no matter the cost, such a political tipping point is unlikely to arrive — at least not before climate catastrophe is so close at hand that substantial mitigation actions will be largely beside the point.
All three strategies have been offered with the best of intentions, but have allowed greens and others to ignore the ways in which economic and political realities constrain carbon pricing. Greens have sunk enormous political and intellectual capital into an emissions reduction framework that simply can’t succeed — at least as long as the price gap between fossil fuels and clean alternatives remains large and so requires the maintenance of high carbon prices to close. This is what we identified in 2007 as “global warming’s Gordian Knot”: price carbon too high and provoke political backlash that results in the evisceration of emissions caps and other policies to reduce emissions; price it too low, and you don’t have a sufficiently high price to drive the innovation and technology investment necessary to make the transition to clean energy alternatives.
For this reason, we argue that environmentalists must shift from looking to high carbon prices to drive private sector energy innovation to using low carbon prices to fund public sector research, development, and deployment of clean energy technologies.
Rather than focusing on emissions reduction targets and timetables, a new framework will establish price declines in the real, unsubsidized costs of clean energy technologies as the explicit objective of climate and energy policy. Rather than attempting to establish high carbon prices globally in order to create sufficient incentives for private interests to invest in energy technology innovation, this new framework focuses on
Far better to set a low carbon price and implement a simple and transparent program.
establishing very modest and politically sustainable carbon prices in developed economies to fund very large public investments in technology innovation and to help bring competitive technologies to market. Rather than viewing private interests and markets as the primary driver of technology innovation, this framework recognizes public investment as the most effective method of driving technology innovation. Rather than insisting that developed economies “go first” by achieving symbolic but largely irrelevant emissions reductions, the new framework sees developed economies as critical laboratories that will finance and invent the low-cost technologies that will make deep global emissions reductions possible.
The serial contortions of cap-and-trade programs around the world result from the political necessity of containing the costs and price impacts while maintaining the fiction that strict pollution caps are being enforced. Offsets promise cheaper reductions somewhere else. The liberal distribution of free pollution allowances to energy interests and industry promises to ameliorate the impacts of high carbon prices. The various schemes to borrow allowances from future compliance periods promise to keep carbon prices from rising too high. When all is sa...
14 Dec 16
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Originally posted by whodeyThank You for that fine, detailed analysis Whodey. The bottom line is allowing business leaders such as oil company executives such wide reaching power to dictate government policy regarding our environment is much the same as allowing a foxes, weasels, and python's to guard a hen house, and the really sad thing about this is most people are so busy chattering policy and procedural details they can't see this is nothing more than an opportunity for big business to continue to poison our planet at an even greater rate than before, under the guise of right wing deregulation.
http://e360.yale.edu/feature/the_flawed_logic_of_the_cap-and-trade_debate/2153/
by ted nordhaus and michael shellenberger
In early May, anxiety among climate activists about the fate of cap-and-trade legislation erupted into a full-throated roar with the release of a scathing open letter by Dr. James Hansen. In it, the NASA scientist called a bill by Re ...[text shortened]... future compliance periods promise to keep carbon prices from rising too high. When all is sa...
14 Dec 16
Originally posted by mchillOriginally the left set up the Chicago Climate Exchange to collect the cap and trade revenue. Had they passed cap and trade the fund would have been worth around $10 trillion or so. Those who were set to enrich themselves from it read like a whose who on the left, with crazy Al Gore leading the charge.
Thank You for that fine, detailed analysis Whodey. The bottom line is allowing business leaders such as oil company executives such wide reaching power to dictate government policy regarding our environment is much the same as allowing a foxes, weasels, and python's to guard a hen house, and the really sad thing about this is most people are so busy chatterin ...[text shortened]... ison our planet at an even greater rate than before, under the guise of right wing deregulation.
Sadly, this is the only way to motivate politicians. They preach to us about not driving SUV's while owning 5. They preach to us about not keeping our thermostat too high in the winter or too cool in the summer, but they themselves heat and cool 5 or so mansions they own. They just assume take a plane to cross the street when a plane ride can equal about as much carbon emissions as driving an SUV for an entire year.
Of course, these busy body preachers don't pretend to be followers of God so such hypocrisy is celebrated world wide.
16 Dec 16
Originally posted by mchillPanic! We are going to be as warm as the Pliocene even though our CO2 levels are about the same as back then.......oh wait..........it is clear to any moron that it was not CO2 that caused the Pliocene to become so warm all the glaciers in the world melted.
It doesn't matter if Tillerson will tell all of these things to the President-elect or not. Neither Trump or anyone in his cabinet gives a hoot about out planet. Environmental laws are just an inconvenience to this group who have a proven track record of poisoning our planet for profit, hiring their flesh eating lawyers to shield them from anything but a fine ...[text shortened]... cost of doing business. May these bastards burn in hell, and their lawyers along with them! 😞
Go back to the drawing board you moron!
16 Dec 16
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Originally posted by sh76But not S. Fred Singer I suppose. I'm sure you ignore anybody that contradicts your unscientific point of view no matter how impressive his qualifications as a climate scientist.
No offense, MB. I'm sure you're a great thinker and all, but I'm going to get my information on climate change from scholarly articles, major media pieces, government websites and university publications rather than from a random anonymous guy on the Internet.
You avoiding the thread I created on the science forum shows you don't want to debate the facts. Tell me, do any of these articles you read mention the Pliocene at all? Have you even did any research on it in the slightest?
Show me some peer reviewed articles if you dare.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2013/05/97-study-falsely-classifies-scientists.html