A climate for change: A solution conservatives could accept

Shouldn't people have to pay for breathing...

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Thoughts?

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I mean, all these manufactured goods are demanded by our society. We want them, buy them, etc. We, as a society, have chosen to have automobiles and air conditioning, almost 100%. Therefore, things are going to be dirty.

Industry in the U.S. is cleaner now than at any point since the industrial revolution.

Nobody is for dirty air or dirty water. But they are unavoidable in modern society. The questions should be: "How clean is clean enough?" and "At what cost, is being cleaner not worth it?"

ETA: And - Carbon Dioxide is NOT a pollutant. It's a naturally occurring gas REQUIRED for life to exist on this planet.

Get china on board and we'll talk

CO2 is NOT a pollutant.

/thread

/climate change debate

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putting a price on emissions that reflects the environmental damage they cause.

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Who would determine this? Seems like just another case of proposed bullshite.

Is forcing people to buy emissions credits a market based solution like forcing people to buy health insurance is a market based solution?

I think the problem is a misunderstanding of the term market.

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What about sulfur dioxide, mercury, nitrogen oxides and particulate matter like ash & soot?

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What about them? Those molecules are potentially damaging to the surrounding environment and they are regulated today, as they should be.

Goldman Sachs and the federal government are just dying to get this carbon credit scheme off the ground. There are billions to be made.

In most cases to find a answer always follow the money.

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As economists see it

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Not all economists.

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The same is true of oil and coal when brought into a position in which they can be used to heat and light homes and provide power for man’s tools and machines. The same is true of the relationship between all chemical elements that have come to constitute the material stuff of products compared with those elements lying in the ground.

Insofar as the essential nature of production and economic activity is to improve the relationship between the chemical elements constituting the earth and man’s life and well-being, it is also necessarily to improve man’s environment, which is nothing other than those very same chemical elements and their associated energy forces. The notion that production and economic activity are harmful to the environment rests on the abandonment of man and his life as the source of value in the world and its replacement by a non-human standard of value—i.e., the belief that nature is intrinsically valuable.

With man and his life as the standard of value, the environment is improved when it is filled with houses, farms, factories, and roads, all of which serve directly or indirectly to make his life easier. When nature in and of itself is seen as valuable, then the environment is harmed whenever man creates any of these things or does anything whatever that changes the existing state of nature, for he is then destroying alleged intrinsic values.

A final inference that may be drawn is that a leading problem of our time is not environmental pollution but philosophical corruption. It is this that underlies the belief that improvement precisely in the external material conditions of human life is somehow environmentally harmful.

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Preventing government imposed reductions in the use of fossil fuels is not something that is merely in the narrow self-interest of the oil and coal industries. Rather it is in the self-interest of the hundreds of millions of average people who vitally depend on the products of these industries.

Perhaps there will someday be economical substitutes for fossil fuels. Until then, substantially reducing the use of fossil fuels means imposing the certainty of a drastic decline in the standard of living of the average person in order to avoid what is at most the possibility of some seriously bad weather.

And if we need such things as massive sea walls to avoid such effects of that bad weather as the flooding of coastal areas, we had better be sure that we have the largest possible modern industrial base available to construct them.

It’s equally remarkable that those who fear global warming have given virtually no consideration to non-destructive ways of dealing with it, assuming that the threat is real in the first place. Why aren’t major prizes being offered for the development of low-cost, effective methods of removing large quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere? For example, is it beyond us to develop plant species that will absorb vast multiples of the CO2 that plants normally absorb? Why is the only possible solution thought to be the destruction of modern economic life?

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If global warming is a real threat, why haven’t politicians the world over made the negotiation of treaties for free immigration a top priority? If it’s a serious threat, and people will not willingly deal with it by committing economic suicide in the form of depriving themselves of the massive amounts of energy that would be lost through such measures as imposing a 70 percent reduction in CO2 emissions, then preparations should be starting now to allow for the future migration of hundreds of millions of Indians and Chinese into what will then be an inhabitable Siberia. The United States, Mexico, and the countries of Central America, should likewise be negotiating for free immigration into what will then be an inhabitable central Canada. Greenland should be declared open to all comers. Whatever the problems it may cause, global warming, if it really comes, will also be accompanied by vast new economic opportunities if not blocked by government migration barriers.

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