Global cooling

mac · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 10:59 am Post subject:

GT--you are substantially overstating your criticisms of the middle of the road recommendations to global warming. And you are conflating debate overr the proper response to climate change, which is an arena where many viewpoints are valid, and there can be legitimate differences of opinions, with attempts by the carbon industry to deny that the climate is changing in response to CO2 emissions.

Middle of the road recommendations for responding to climate change involve eliminating subsidies for development and use of new carbon-based energy sources, modest subsidies to encourage technological development of sustainable energy sources, subsidies to encourage conservation--which is the most cost-effective source of new energy, and a carbon tax to capture the externalities associated with burning carbon-based fuels.

MalibuGuru · Joined: 11 Nov 1993 Posts: 9300

All climate regulation is designed by the investors in the Chicago Carbon Exchange to benefit the big insiders, politicians and their donors to your political party (the D's) Mac.

These policies have done nothing for the middle class who is broke and shivering in the cold winter of '14.

You need to re-evaluate who's side you're on. Because our country's middle class have become so poor under your president O, there may have already been deaths caused by lack of heating oil in the Midwest.

pueno · Joined: 03 Mar 2007 Posts: 2807

J64TWB · Joined: 24 Dec 2013 Posts: 1685

SB we are having a cold one for sure. 8th so far. Last year we had freakish heat. 3 weeks of 80 degrees had all the trees, lawns green and AC's on by early March. Last 5 or six winters very warm.

GURGLETROUSERS · Joined: 30 Dec 2009 Posts: 2643

'Objecting to middle of the road recommendations to global warming', my Aunt Fanny!!!!

Our country is;

a) setting the world standard in cutting CO2 emmissions, beyond even what the EU have now bactracked on doing. (Targets for 2030, and beyond.)

b) We spend billions on subsidies to wind farm proliferation. (40 of them built a year ago 1 mile out to sea off our windsurfing beach, now all out of action owing to damage to under sea cables, all of which must now be dredged up, and relaid with new!)

c) We have far in excess of your countries tax on fuel.

d) We are closing sound and necessary coal fired power stations to meet the said CO2 targets, and running into supply crisis territory as a result.

e) We send billions of pounds each year to 'poorer' countries in aid, to help them combat global warming. (As if! India has its own space program and they say they don't need our money, but they still take it of course,AND, they are building new coal fired power stations!!!)

A key member of our government (Eric Pickles) just yesterday stated that the billions we are sending in aid to poorer countries, to help combat global warming, will prevent floods in future! (LIES!!) (Even our Met Office contradicted the Prime minister when he originally trie to blame the floods on global warming. It is down to known weather patterns, and failure to dredge the channels, culverts, streams, and rivers of the flood plains.)

So what am I, and my countrymen, railing at? To be taken as gullible fools! But please, lecture US on what we are doing wrong!

GURGLETROUSERS · Joined: 30 Dec 2009 Posts: 2643

P.S. I can't reply tonight. I'm off up to the moors, to feed the Unicorns!!

nw30 · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 12:18 pm Post subject:

mac · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 1:27 pm Post subject:

NW--for a change, I agree with most of what you have said. Jim Hansen has recommended a carbon tax that would be revenue neutral--it would replace other taxes that are more regressive, and thus would benefit those that might end up paying more for heating oil in the short term. http://www.carbontax.org/who-supports/scientists-and-economists/

It would readily pass Constitutional muster because it reflects the costs that the carbon industry passes along to others. It would not be dramatic, and would not stop use of carbon fuels--but begin to balance the playing field.

Given the decades of subsidies to the carbon industry, I continue to believe that encouraging energy conservation--insulation, mostly--and solar energy, through subsidies, is good policy. I don't think that those subsidies should be permanent, but I think we have already seen that what amounts to Federal funding for solar research has dramatically increased the cost-effectiveness of both passive solar heating and solar electricity generation.

GT--I cannot comment about what is going on in England--I don't know. I am interested in long term changes in the economy, and ways to make those changes with less subsidy to damaging behavior, and without huge economic dislocation. There is no question that the carbon industry funds the same kinds of liars that the cigarette industry did. In some cases they are the same "scientists."

mac · Posted: Mon Feb 10, 2014 8:54 pm Post subject:

GT--in railing indiscriminately at all responses to global warming you are committing the same sins of hyperbole that you rail against. I might agree that some ideas about alternative energy--particularly large scale offshore wind farms or harnessing the tides--are foolish. But you are over the top with this comment--which happens to be in my wheelhouse: