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65 comments:
You left out hedge fundie & Wall Street types who will be trading these...things. And, of course, keeping a cut.
Banks have been lobbying for 'cap and trade' good and hard.
The most interesting bit I've recently read on "cap & trade" is at the conclusion of a technical discussion by AGW skeptic David Evans, "The Missing Hotspot." The PDF can be accessed from Evan's 4/3/09 blog post Global Warming: A Classic Case of Alarmism (worth reading on its own). H/T Fabius Maximus.
Whether or not Evans is correct on his analysis of obfuscation of shortcomings of the IPCC consensus, his brief discussion of Cap & Trade stands on its own merits.
From page 22 ff. of The Missing Hotspot (PDF) --
-- begin excerpt --
The Money ConnectionSo what is going on here? In time-honored journalistic fashion, just follow the money:
* The anti-AGW spend is around US$2 million per year. It comes primarily from big-oil and skeptic organizations such as Heartland.
* The pro-AGW spend is about US$3 billion per year, about 1,000 times larger. It mainly comes from big government spending on pro-AGW climate research and on promoting the AGW message, and from the Greens.
* Emissions trading by the finance industry was US$120 billion in 2008. This will grow to over US$1 trillion by 2012, and carbon emission permit trading will be the largest "commodity" market in the world -- larger than oil, steel, rice, wheat etc. Typically the finance industry might pocket 1% - 5% of the turnover, so even now their financial interest matches the pro-AGW spend and soon it will vastly exceed it.
Presumably therefore it is the finance industry that is driving the carbon emission permits agenda. It is not that the "science is settled" (a fine piece of anti-science propaganda!), but that the science is simply irrelevant now because big money interests are in control.
Who benefits? Emission permits are created by government fiat, out of thin air, yet have value. Trading favors the well-informed and those who can move the market, so big financial firms will routinely plunder the pockets of smaller market participants. The rest of us, one way or another, will pay for both the government-issued emission
permits and the trading profits of the finance industry.
A former Chief IMF economist explains that the finance industry is now so powerful that it can sweep aside objections to its profit-making activities, no matter how ruinous they will be in the long term. From The Atlantic:
* But these various policies--lightweight regulation, cheap money, the unwritten Chinese-American economic alliance, the promotion of homeownership--had
something in common. Even though some are traditionally associated with Democrats and some with Republicans, they all benefited the financial sector. Policy changes that might have forestalled the crisis but would have limited the financial sector’s profits--such as Brooksley Born’s now-famous attempts to regulate credit-default swaps at the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, in 1998--were ignored or swept aside.I have met carbon emissions traders who say that they are well aware that carbon emissions almost certainly do not cause global warming. But that they are riding the trading for all it worth while it lasts, because it is good business. They told me that that view is widespread among carbon traders.
All of which suggests that the Greens and the politically-correct are acting in the interests of big money...
-- end excerpt --
The losers will be the people who pay the money; the winners will be the people who get the money. It's big money. According to one estimate, cap and trade will cost the average household $3900 per annum.
Charles Krauthammer said last week that Obama's grand strategy is to use the cap and trade cash to fund socialized medicine. A lot of money will also be raked off by the bureaucracy and the Democrat shakedown machine.
Off the cuff, my list of losers is: manufacturers and their employees, suburbanites, anybody who has to heat a big house in the North, truckers, airlines, travel industry. Any large user of energy will be vulnerable to shakedowns due to the myriad rules that will be written. Private health insurers may be wiped out.
Winners: Railroads, bureaucrats, maybe some medical workers, Democrat shakedown artists, Democrat politicians who will get shakedown cash, colleges (more jobs for bureaucrats who will require college degrees), the GOP, white people.
Cap&trade increases the production cost of coal&gas generated electricity. As these forms of electricity generation already have the highest marginal cost, the marginal cost of electricity and thus the market price of electricity will go up. Big losers: consumers and electricity consuming industry. Big winners: producers of non-greenhouse-gas emitting electricity (ie. nuclear, hydro, wind, solar). Whoever gets the emission permits will also benefit.
Al Gore's hedge fund will be a big winner.
American industrial workers will be the big losers as more industrial production moves to Asia.
The problem is that you are loking at the issue through the standard economic pardigm that will always trap you into the two alternatives mentioned in your post.
This is an indication that you are just winging when it comes to the global warming issue and economics.
I recommend that you start reading up on the field of ecological economics.
Who wins if global warming shuts down the mid-atlantic converyor belt through the dilution of its salinity due to melting glaciers? This is very serious stuff. It could trigger an ice age very soon.
Start thinking outside the neoclassical economic box. It may be a trendy thing to do because you can drop names such as "Brad Delong" but in both the long tern and short term it is lethal.
Just trying to help.
At the global level, the winners will be those nations which refuse to cap or tax their energy production. This list includes new economic giants China and India. The losers will be those nations which participate in this nonsense. States which ratified the Kyoto protocol were the first losers, but I fear America is about to become the biggest loser. We are going to lose more jobs, destroy more of our wealth, and trigger a serious, long term economic decline in this nation.
I have to say that I've never been more depressed to be an American. We face a future of lower living standards, lower achievement, and restricted personal and financial freedom. This government induced, immigration fed economic collapse is just the beginning.
Out of curiosity: is there any way to turn carbon cap and trade against the government? If this becomes the law of the land, can citizens sue the Federal government over its carbon emissions, forcing restrictions on the size and scope of government? Can someone sue to block further immigration claiming that each new immigrant adds to the U.S. and global carbon burden? (Surely an argument can be made that an immigrant creates more carbon here than they would at home.)
Right now I really wish I had studied law instead of IT.
Well, we know from an interview Obama gave in 2001 that Obama isn't interested in the suburbs; the suburbs bore him. You think he gives a rat's ass about what kinds of vehicles they drive? (p.s. "suburban" is code in Obamaland for white)
If you know that cap and trade is going to become law, then buy carbon credits. They will become worth a lot more when the law passes.
Existing companies will benefit at the expense of potential competition. Same old story, bootleggers and baptists.
All our lives, we've been taught that we're supposed to be good citizens; to participate in our democracy. And we all learned in Citizen's Ed classes that the biggest danger to our democracy was the potential that we would elect someone to office simply because of his charisma, ignoring or downplaying that someone's radical agenda.
Thank God that it can't happen here!
One reason for European enthusiasm for cap and trade is that established companies often 'own' and can sell carbon permits based on their historical fuel burns. Union-run British Airways, for example, might become primarily a permit-selling business, rather than an actual airline, while low-fare airlines like Ryanair and easyJet actually, you know, fly people from one place to another.
Cap and trade does not have to work this way, but it might, at least partially.
Well, gee, after the Republicans sat on the money to reconstruct NY and let Amtrak rot, you can't blame us blue-staters for wanting a piece of the pie. Like you said, Steve, 'Who? Whom?' One of the results of reading your blog is that I now analyze political actions in terms of who benefits and who suffers...and as an urbanite, voting Republican strikes me as an increasingly stupid idea.
As for who's better for the country, I think getting rid of the auto companies' huge healthcare costs by socializing medicine would be a good thing for the country. The Buick finally caught up with the Camry in terms of quality, but it didn't help because they were bankrupt from health costs. And I'd like to see my fellow Americans have nice, boring European lives with six-week vacations instead of freaking out about losing their health insurance every time their employer gets hit. This self-reliance stuff strikes me as a way to convince the proles to accept a level of insecurity that no other industrialized country has.
I'd rather see a straight gasoline tax than this cap-and-trade bullshit, but the less oil we use, the weaker the Russians and Arabs get, which sounds peachy to me.
And if you don't believe in global warming...what's with those melting ice caps, hmmm? Of course they're only going to flood coastal areas, which is something most of you ruralites would no doubt like to see. But most of the predictions are for disruptions in the heartland too. Now, right now the geopolitical situation has the USA as the most powerful country in the world...why would we want climate change? It's not good for us. It may even turn frozen Canada into a world power, which is not something we want on our borders.
I don't see why 'good for the heartland' is the same as 'good for America'. You guys are the only real Americans because you don't believe in gay marriage, listen to country music, and drive pickup trucks, right? Every nation has a city-country split.
The winners will be The Middlemen Whose Names We Dare Not Speak.
"Maybe I'm just paranoid, but I'm guessing that losers will tend to include suburbanite and rural vehicle owners, while winners will include urban rapid transit users"
I've never owned a car because I consider it money down the drain. I use the public transportation system to the max. It’s only bearable in that I always take along something to read. OK, all the plebs, the aggressive Turks, the loud teenagers and the rubbish on the floor also get on my nerves.
So how am I going to benefit economically from this scheme? Where do I pick up my EUR100 subsidy which I assume somehow oozes out of this scheme to award those like myself who have been "saving" the environment all along.
"The rest of us, one way or another, will pay for both the government-issued emission
permits and the trading profits of the finance industry. "
Time to get that fuel cell installed in your home. And to develop an affordable hydrolysis system for producing hydrogen from solar. The only way out of this is to decouple from the electrical grid. OK, you’ll still pay for this partially when taking a plane or riding the train. So maybe we should just stay home and begin boycotting public life.
Any existing industry too big to fail will be given an exemption. Any emerging industry, or any small business without enough influence, will be hosed.
The consumer will of course fall in this category as well.
Who benefits from "cap & trade?"
Yes, cui bono? Could it be...the emerging Global Police State?
And in other news:
British government backs down over database plan
LONDON (AP) - The British government said Monday it wants communications companies to keep records of every phone call, e-mail and Web site visit made in the country. But it has decided not to set up a national database of the information, a proposal that had been condemned as a "Big Brother"-style invasion of privacy by civil liberties groups.
"Communications companies"? So who specifically might be running this network infrastructure in the UK? Is it another Mossad front controlling a major Western nation's telephone infrastructure a la the Comverse/AmDocs situation in the USA?
But there's no need to ask such a question, right? After all, the AP headline clearly states that the British government has "backed down".
Whew! That was a close one! For a second I thought the era of Total Information Awareness was upon us.
More likely, there will be specific businesses that win, and they'll support the policy. Others will lose, and they'll try to fight the policy, or at least make sure the policy protects incumbents, so that any upstart competitors get hit harder than they do.
Whoever sells carbon credits benefits. I think GE invested heavily into that.
Its a gargantuan scam Steve, maybe the biggest ever. They've pulled a guilt-scam (convincing the public they are ruining the planet) and have to pay to "offset" the wreckage they do by having electricity. The same people who pumped the scam are the same people (if you follow the money) who oppose every nuclear, wind, solar, waves, and geothermal project out there. This was to extract extra money out of the US consumer and thats all it ever was.
m
Offtopic and stupid...
Is Miss California really saying that homosexuality is a choice?
http://perezhilton.com/2009-04-27-did-she-really-just-say-that
http://www.advocate.com/news_detail_ektid80771.asp
Here is what she says...
http://wockner.blogspot.com/2009/04/interview-with-miss-california-carrie.html
"Carrie: I think it's a behavior that develops over time."
Who benefits from "cap & trade?" Al Gore.
Seriously. He is one of the principals at a green fund.
You know, in Russia shovinist government used to have percent limits for Jews, like 5% in universities etc, because they wanted to block them (as smartest then general population from education, carier, etc). Finally, Jews moved out. What, if whites move out?
I'm guessing that losers will tend to include suburbanite and rural vehicle owners, while winners will include urban rapid transit users. And, I'm guessing, that that's just fine with Obama.Amazingly, the winners are the people who don't pollute as much and the losers are the people who pollute a lot. Why would anyone want to set up an incentive scheme like that? What is Obama trying to do, reduce pollution?!?!?!?
The anti-AGW spend is around US$2 million per year.This comment alone is enough to destroy David Evans' credibility.
In the run up to define the specifics of cap and trade the winners will be lobbyists, politicians, political advisers, experts employed by the above, etc.
As it is implemented the primary winners will be the new members of the enlarged bureaucracy tasked with overseeing this huge industry, tens of thousands of accountants, managers, investigators, programmers, assistants, liasons, etc.
Although the gov will be the big winner, it is also true that the financial sector will get a big boost. This is essentially a hidden tax, enlarging government, allowing them to channel money to their friends in the financial sector and in return these friends will contribute billions to political campaigns.
What Jeff said, and also George Soros, the Democratic Money Man (a truly horrible man in all respects) and Al Gore, who stands to make Bill Gates type fortunes off this scam.
It will however provoke a huge and brutal fight in Congress, because so many losers will in fact lose. Manufacturers, folks like Harley Davidson, foreign auto manufacturers, Caterpiller, all the mining, lumber, ranching, resource extraction folks.
That's ample money to start a populist campaign and provide organizers.
Obama sees this as a permanent funding source for his political class and the SWPL yuppie elite. It supports his base.
As always, the Gender divide hovers over this. Women are almost non-existent in resource extraction and manufacturing industries so won't feel any direct hurt.
Meanwhile, women are far over represented in the sort of Green bureaucracy that will support a "new Priest Class" and skim trillions off the top: Government regulators, lawyers, accountants, various office, White Collar "buzz jobs" ...
Which accounts for the Gender Gap over AGW and measures to put in place Cap and Trade. Obama got elected on the strength of the womens vote, Single Women voted for him 70-29, and a standard rule of thumb is that people are VERY good at sussing out the SHORT TERM benefits to themselves from politicians and policies.
Long term? Often remarkably stupid. But short term yes.
This pretty much insures that the fight over AGW Cap and Trade will have both populist-elite overlays, with as Jeff points out Finance vs. Manufacturing funding sources for the Elites vs. Populists, but also Male-Female base spoils struggles.
It's a Zero Sum Game. Either Women win by gaining a new "Green Priesthood" that employs them and impoverishes most men, or men win by avoiding impoverishment and thus preventing Women from becoming a new Green Priesthood.
"What is Obama trying to do, reduce pollution?!?!?!?"
Nope. Lay off the Kool-Aid, son.
"I've never owned a car because I consider it money down the drain. I use the public transportation system to the max. It’s only bearable in that I always take along something to read. OK, all the plebs, the aggressive Turks, the loud teenagers and the rubbish on the floor also get on my nerves."
Mass transit is not family friendly and those who push for it never address this fact or even come up with solutions to deal with the problems of germs, thugs, and poorly behaved people.
It could be family friendly, so much could be done to make urban life family friendly in general, but NO ONE who is for urban living talks about or questions how to accommodate families with children. No thinking about how society is to grow and regenerate itself:
Cities are good and everyone should live there... we will, however, keep relying on growth from newcomers outside the city (which shouldn't exist, remember) and do nothing about welcoming children from within.
What is Obama trying to do, reduce pollution?!?!?!?Of course not. If he wanted to do that, he'd just submit a bill outlawing the emission of pollutants above a certain level. Cap & trade isn't intended to reduce pollution. It's intended to transfer wealth to select constituencies.
--Senor Doug
GE employs (tens of?) thousands of persons. Gove will not allow it to fail so they get grandfathered at current carbon production. Then any new competitor in a field occupied by GE has to pay GE for the right to produce carbon. So GE can stifle competition or simply going into the business of selling the carbon rights it was given by the govt (slowly getting rid of its mfg and jobs as its carbon rights are sold off).
airtommy,
Maybe some of the money will be used to build those windmills off Cape Cod that'll generate clean energy. Also, there is a bridge for sale. Great condition, very historical and in a desirable neighborhood...
Ronan engages in classic doublespeak and human conceit when he says:
Who wins if global warming shuts down the mid-atlantic converyor belt through the dilution of its salinity due to melting glaciers? This is very serious stuff. It could trigger an ice age very soon.
Global warming could trigger an ice age!
Does he even understand the difference in heat capacities of the atmosphere vs the seas?
I'm pretty sure the guys at CCX (Chicago Carbon Exchange) will benefit. Now who do we know from Chicago...?
@anon: "Also, there is a bridge for sale. Great condition, very historical and in a desirable neighborhood..."
Ouch! Teddy, whack his pipi!
"Urban rapid transit users"... The Metropolitain Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority, MARTA, is known by the impolite as "Moving Africans Rapidly Through Atlanta."
"Who wins if global warming shuts down the mid-atlantic converyor belt through the dilution of its salinity due to melting glaciers? This is very serious stuff. It could trigger an ice age very soon."
Who wins if an undetected asteroid smacks into earth? I DEMAND that unlimited amounts of money be spent on telescopes to detect asteroids, a space program to destroy/ deflect asteroids, and orbital space stations to rescue humanity from the very serious consequences of an asteroid strike. An asteroid strike killed the dinosaurs, you know. Hey, it could theoretically happen, just like global warming might theoretically shut down the mid Atlantic conveyor.
Who wins if Yellowstone decides to erupt tomorrow in a supervolcanic explosion, the ash of which would kill the world due to reflection of solar output? I DEMAND that unlimited amounts of money be spent on volcano research and DEMAND that laws be passed to fund the creation of new technologies for volcanic eruption mitigation. Yellowstone is overdue for its every 600,000 year supereruption, you know. Hey, it's theoretically possible that it could happen TOMORROW.
Who wins if Eta Carinae has undergone its expected hypernova? I DEMAND that unlimited amounts of money be spent and laws be passed DEMANDING that technologies be invented to mitigate against planet-sterilizing levels of cosmic ray bombardment from such a hypernova explosion....
Get the point?
"And if you don't believe in global warming...what's with those melting ice caps, hmmm?"
Antartica is NOT melting:
http://www.news.com.au/story/0,27574,25348657-401,00.html
As far as the Arctic, gee, impossible to think seafloor volcanism might have something to do with it, huh?
Geothermal heat may be melting
Greenland glaciers
http://www.iceagenow.com/Geothermal_heat_may_be_melting_Greenland_glaciers.htm
The losers are oil producers: Arabs, Iranians, Russians, Texas oilmen, etc. Now, is there anybody out there who is 1) in a position of substantial power and 2) happens to dislike every single one of these groups?
That was rhetorical question, by the way.
Who wins if global warming shuts down the mid-atlantic converyor belt through the dilution of its salinity due to melting glaciers? This is very serious stuff. It could trigger an ice age very soon.This scenario is not from the IPCC or even from Al Gore. It is the plot of the recent Hollywood movie "The Day After Tommorow"
This movie was based on a book by Art Bell and Whiley Striber.
Bell of course is the leading purveyor of paranormal ideas in Ameriac. He believes in "goat vampires". Streiber writes books about alien abductions. He claims that they came for him a couple years ago.
Bell's radio show routinely presented very strange guests. I heard one tell an elaborate tale about UFOs, out of body experiences and global warming. Check Google (2M hits for "UFO and global warming"). The modern UFO believers no longer think the aliens are coming to save us from nuclear weapons but from global warming.
"If this becomes the law of the land, can citizens sue the Federal government over its carbon emissions, forcing restrictions on the size and scope of government? Can someone sue to block further immigration claiming that each new immigrant adds to the U.S. and global carbon burden?"
Sovereign immunity and standing combine to say "No" four times (twice for each question).
i'm not super informed on this topic, but i have seen many books on the subject and my assumption is that to some extent, a big beneficiary of cap and trade is wall street. "we put the 'trade' in cap & trade."
it's a left over from the "markets can fix everything" phase. you know, since the whole experiment with credit default swaps worked out so well, we thought we'd extend it to protecting the environment.
Antartica is NOT melting:That is correct; but more accurately, from an article by the libertarian-conservative scientist Steven Dutch, Why Doesn't Anyone Mention the Record Growth of Sea Ice Around Antarctica?:
"The Arctic [ice] decrease is statistically significant, and the Antarctic increase is not. This is Stats 101.... Not all trends are equally statistically significant...."
"To be sure, climate modelers are perplexed by the differing responses of the Arctic and the Antarctic. In general, the Arctic is responding faster than the climate models predicted and the Antarctic is responding more sluggishly."
As far as the Arctic, gee, impossible to think seafloor volcanism might have something to do with it, huh?And that the heat from that activity could be so widespread as to produce the rising surface-temperature trends, in a 3000-km radius around the South Pole, shown in the heat map that Dutch provides (via NASA) at the bottom of the same (linked) page? Or in the adjacent map of regions of snow melt in Antarctica by year of first occurrence?
For those here who are interested in approaching AGW with anything resembling scientific literacy, please consider reading Dutch's The Science and Pseudoscience of Global Warming.
As he puts it, and as the confidently presented anti-AGW data quoted here demonstrates:
"There are lots of legitimate and serious questions about climate change that all researchers in the field readily admit. What convinces me of the reality of climate change, despite the uncertainties, is that the comments put out by climate change denialists are absolute, unmitigated garbage. We find distortion and misuse of credentials, publication of counterfeit papers, and scientific illiteracy of all sorts. This junk is on a par with the creationism of Michael Behe and Darwin's Black Box."
Since this is being hijacked into a dabate about AGW:
When I was in college, no one knew what caused the start of an ice age and no one knew what caused the end of an ice age. There were theories, but no established scientific theory. I believe this is the state of knowledge today. Funny AGW supporters can ignore ignorance about all the most significant climate events in discoverable time, yet believe thay know what is causing small events today. Their theory is intended to cause restructuring of commerce and yield tiantic revenue and power to the government.
And if you don't believe in global warming...what's with those melting ice caps, hmmm?As if the government's actions weren't bad enough, we have to put up with an offensive, smug attitude as well.
You refer to "melting ice caps", but neither you nor I have have any way of knowing that the ice caps are melting. The lesson that independent thinkers learn is that our governments habitually lie for the purpose of expanding their power.
Nice to see a conservative who believes in science. I never really saw how global warming was good for America long-term, just contributors to Republican presidential campaigns...
"I'd rather see a straight gasoline tax than this cap-and-trade bullshit, but the less oil we use, the weaker the Russians and Arabs get, which sounds peachy to me."
I agree. There's plenty of reasons to get off of oil and coal besides GW. Air and water pollution from coal are real. Coal plants dump millions of tons of mercury and other heavy metals into the air. There's oil spills, fresh water used or contaminated by pumping, car and truck exhaust - lots of externalities. Plus oil is the biggest contributor by far to the trade deficit.
The way I see it, cap and trade, if done with a semblance of honesty, will raise money for the government, discourage behavior with unpaid externalities, and encourage alternatives. The latter, by virtue of being relatively inefficient, will create *more* jobs, many of which will be regular middle class jobs like windmill tech, or insulation installer, or industrial engineer.
Sure, the gov. can screw up anything. But the idea here is good - let the market decide who can afford to reduce their oil/coal usage the cheapest.
I'll start believing in global warming when the people who keep screaming it is real start acting like it. Al Gore loves flying around to hold speeeches about how bad flying around is. Obama burned something like 9,000 gallons of avgas in Earth Day and Prince Charles has hired a private jet to fly around Europe to talk about how important saving the environment is. Why should I listen to these clowns?
And then there is this:
"The pro-AGW spend is about US$3 billion per year, about 1,000 times larger. It mainly comes from big government spending on pro-AGW climate research and on promoting the AGW message, and from the Greens."
How many solar farms, windmills, biofeuls, etc...could this have helped build or develop? It is almost like actual energy efficiency, environmental preservation or what have you isn't really the issue. But maybe that's just me.
You censor my comments but you let these Global Warming LUNATICS post at your site?
God, you hurt my feelings, Steve.
When someone can explain to me why we had rapid cooling of the planet (resulting in massive Ice Ages)and then rapid warming of the planet (ending those massive Ice Ages),and how this happened way before men ever had "greenhouse gases" then I will give some credibility to the AGW alarmists.
I don't care how many government-lackey scientists with no marketable skills proclaim the scientific "facts."
Even if they science is correct, there is no way to get other nations to comply with restricting carbon emissions. Are we going to go to war with China and India every time they build too many coal plants? No...of course not.
All we are doing is de-industrializing the USA. That's probably why so many eco groups are probably subsidized by hostile foreign governments.
"Sure, the gov. can screw up anything. But the idea here is good - let the market decide who can afford to reduce their oil/coal usage the cheapest."
Yes...the market will tell companies to move their businesses to China.
With firms leaving the United States, the demand for electricity will go down as America de-industrializes.
There will be no new jobs for industrial engineers, or windmill techs because there will be no manufacturing in the US to speal of.
The way I see it, cap and trade, if done with a semblance of honesty, will raise money for the government, discourage behavior with unpaid externalities, and encourage alternatives.Bull hockeypuck. If carbon emissions are such horrible things just outlaw them like we do murder and rape and other net-consuming activities.
--Senor Doug
Errrm, I might benefit from one of these jobs...
"Any existing industry too big to fail will be given an exemption. Any emerging industry, or any small business without enough influence, will be hosed."
Which is why big businesses will support this. They will [expletive deleted by poster] themselves in their haste to "go green." It freezes out any upstart and consolidates their monopoly positions.
We need a revolution.
The way I see it, cap and trade, if done with a semblance of honesty, will raise money for the government....You say that like it's a good thing. But the government is the enemy of the people.
Lucius Vorenus said...
"You censor my comments but you let these Global Warming LUNATICS post at your site? God, you hurt my feelings, Steve."
Lucius, I'm pretty sure blogspot is eating most of the "censored" comments. Many times I've had totally inoffensive posts disappear into the ether, only to get through on a second try.
Mass transit is not family friendly and those who push for it never address this fact or even come up with solutions to deal with the problems of germs, thugs, and poorly behaved people.Your children must still be very young. Mass transit has to be pretty damn bad before it's worse than being your kids' chauffeur. My 15yo is outside waiting for the bus in the hood right now, cause I'm sure as hell not driving a FIFTEEN YEAR OLD around.
"The modern UFO believers no longer think the aliens are coming to save us from nuclear weapons but from global warming." This precisely describes the difference between the original "The Day the Earth Stood Still" and the new one.
"The way I see it, cap and trade, if done with a semblance of honesty, will raise money for the government, discourage behavior with unpaid externalities, and encourage alternatives."
The first of these is certainly true. Will billions or possibly trillions going through government, corruption and waste will certainly increase as well. As for the other two, they will happen as well. Poor people will be "discouraged" from using heating oil in the winter or air conditioning in the summer, leading to many preventable deaths. Alternatives will gain ground, such as ethanol, which will increase the price of food (leading to starvation) or wind (bird/bat kills, new transmission lines, etc), solar (dependent on battery advances, possible harm to wildlife, hard to scale) or nuclear (too many regulations to do much good in the short term).
I'd like to see government spending cut as much as the next guy here - but it's not going to happen any time soon under either party. So I'd rather they tax things I can reduce, like my carbon usage than things I can't, like my income - or my savings through the insidious inflation of the dollar.
What, if whites move out?
Answer: Zimbabwe or "New" South Africa.
"I'd like to see government spending cut as much as the next guy here - but it's not going to happen any time soon under either party. So I'd rather they tax things I can reduce, like my carbon usage than things I can't, like my income - or my savings through the insidious inflation of the dollar."
There is no policy solution because big finance, aka those filthy greedy banksters who got us into the current meltdown, have already sunk their teeth into this pie. These people notoriously buy politicians and dictate legislation. In spite of the meltdown, pols are only now discussing returning to the legislation in place before the banskters started undermining it in order to rake bucks at taxpayer’s expense. That’s how dead-scared pols are of the banksters. Banksters like to sneer at avg. Joe as patriot, taxpayer and churchgoer, but they sure know that avg. Joe is the best source of income!
On iSteve it was mentioned before that cap & trade is going to be the next bubble. The banksters have just unloaded all their housing bubble shit on us, and we will be coughing up the bill for the next decades, and already they are working on their next bubble. I guess they can because in spite of having been technically bankrupt end 2008, they are now making money again, at taxpayer’s expense of course. There's a word for it, but I cannot think of it now....
Has anyone ever noticed how discussions about AGW and IQ are almost mirror-images of one another? In both cases you have:
a. A really complicated thing (human intelligence, global climate) modeled by relatively simple mathematical models.
b. A broad tracking of the available data with the conclusions of the model. (Admittedly, there's a *lot* more available data from IQ scores.)
c. Politically unpalatable implications for what kind of policies we will have (giving up on AA and closing the black/white school achievement gap, making energy more expensive with all the economic implications that result from that).
d. People deciding whether to believe the predictions of the models based mostly on their starting political positions.
We are going into an extended cooling period on planet earth. The complete absence of sunspots is the tell. No amount of hysteria can stop the trainload of crow that is coming down the tracks for the global warmists. And no one deserves it more than those quack lovin' conformists.
The psychological motivation for the enviro wackos is always the same: intense feelings of lack of control in their own lives that get projected onto The Earth itself. Yeah, is it really Gaia that is having the breakdown and needs to be rescued? Or maybe the one having the breakdown is in the mirror?
The psychological makeup of the really hardcore eco-terrorists is no different than the leaders of primitive tribes obsessed with making human sacrifices to appease the pagan gods. It's like a broken record that has been playing for tens of thousands of years: "You must die, so that the earth will be healed...now into the volcano with you!"
And speaking of leaders of primitive tribes...Al Gore? Anyone who follows Al Gore down any path in this life is destined for a major embarrassment. Al Gore??! Are you kidding?
Turf Tax - you have just earned an "A" in Intro to Nihilism 101.
Next Up: Sun Worship as a means of thanking Sol for cooling the earth to the point that the new Ice Age wipes out significant portions [preferably all!] of the pestilence known as Homo sapiens.
SfG said:
"Like you said, Steve, 'Who? Whom?' One of the results of reading your blog is that I now analyze political actions in terms of who benefits and who suffers ... and as an urbanite, voting Republican strikes me as an increasingly stupid idea.
As for who's better for the country, I think getting rid of the auto companies' huge healthcare costs by socializing medicine would be a good thing for the country... And I'd like to see my fellow Americans have nice, boring European lives with six-week vacations instead of freaking out about losing their health insurance every time their employer gets hit. This self-reliance stuff strikes me as a way to convince the proles to accept a level of insecurity that no other industrialized country has."
As an American who lived 7 years in two (Northern) European countries, I agree with you that there is much that is pleasant about their social safety net and work regulations (I loved the 6 week vacations), however, you are missing the key problem which Steve is endlessly pointing out: This doesn't work in a diverse society where there are large numbers of people from identifiable, poorly performing (and behaving) ethnic/racial groups. I've noticed that Germans and Scandinavians mostly tend to work and pull their weight, despite the moral hazard of a generous welfare system. They also aren't too bothered about charity directed towards their coethnics. However, their mostly Muslim Middle Eastern and African immigrants have been a disaster. They impose hugely disproportionate costs on the welfare system/taxpayers and contribute little but crime and social discord to society. Their ethnic oriented agression and lack of tolerance towards the native culture only serve to rub the Europeans' generosity in their faces.
Do you really think American will be any different as whites become one minority among many and are constantly confronted by ethnically oriented black and Hispanic populations with a huge chip on their shoulder baying for affirmative action preferences and wealth redistribution? When the burden becomes big enough and black/Hispanic (and other minorities') racial chauvinism becomes blatant enough, how do you think whites will react? Do you think they'll still be in a charitable mood and support a socialist welfare state that largely benefits other, more favored peoples?
Your first two commenters said almost all that needs to be said. Even if reducing CO2 emission by making it more expensive really is good policy, cap & trade creates more concentrated winners than a carbon tax would, and it allows the government to play favorites, picking who gets exemptions or more permits to trade, etc.
One large, diffuse group of people (not yet mentioned) who will see a small benefit from either cap & trade or a carbon tax: people whose eletricity comes from nuclear power. Their power rates won't go up nearly so much.
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