And with the Copenhagen Consensus you have the opposite view. The third world wants our standard of living and it would be hypocritical to be pro Bono's philanthropy but prevent the third world from growing.
Of course, and at the moment the only model they have is our energy-intensive economies. Copenhagen is pretty much anything but a consensus, it simply underscores the complexities of reconciling long-term objectives with day-to-day, more short-term worries. I don't blame developing countries for wanting a higher quality of life and using lots of energy to do it. But eventually, we'll hit a wall: economic and/or environmental.
Wind and solar is not going to hack it. Since there is no technology that can replace fossil fuels we would have to wait until someone like Craig Venter can create enough bacteria to convert CO2 into octane in large enough quantities, or new nuclear fusion technologies move from prototype to something safe and viable.
Fusion power - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
I agree that wind and solar won't cut it. I'm a realist here, we'll be using fossil fuels for decades to come. This does not mean that we should sit here and keep paying the onerous price of our current energy model (inefficiencies, health issues, climate change, etc.) without acting on it.
The major problem is what is natural and what is man made. That hasn't been even close to be proven:
Not sure what I'm looking at here.
Aren't we supposed to have more storms now? Is Global Warming/Climate Change supposed to have less winter or more winter? No matter what happens the AGW types say they predicted it. It also becomes fishy when you have supposed scientists using El Nino and La Nina variations as proof of AGW.
And this goes back to the communication issue that I was mentioning earlier. We'll see people blaming climate change for many things, and others claiming that it's all natural. It's silly to be an alarmist, but just as silly to voluntarily keep one's head in the sand. It will be hard to quantify the contribution of climate change to many phenomena, there is no question here. This amplifies the issue of communication and the difficulty to reach political consensus.
Go tell that to the Spanish. Even they ditched their solar subsidies. At 20% unemployment and a horrible budget, economic realities appear. The U.S. isn't immune to the same story. If I wanted a depression I would follow the same course of action. Whether it's intended or not it hurts. Though I should qualify my words because SOME Democrats are against wiping out coal because they have constituents that would vote them out if they did.
You're cherry picking. Spain is not doing too well (but is it really due to its environmental policies?), but you could very well look at, say, Denmark, with its distributed energy systems and high renewable capacity, and conclude otherwise. I wouldn't attribute Denmark's entire success to their energy policies, but their aggressive approach doesn't seem to have held them back (unemployment below 5% right now...).
Are we in the middle ages with "just prices" that Aquinas supported? There is no clairvoyance to special knowledge to allow bureaucrats to set the price. The artificial price would be after cap and trade.Even the current prices are somewhat artificial because of regulation and a cartel.
In a cap-and-trade system, bureaucrats set the emissions cap, the market sets the price. You're thinking of a carbon tax. Regardless, this is not a new concept. Many jurisdictions, including your own, have prices on air pollutant emissions. Or on tobacco. Or on gasoline. Trying to internalize externalities is nothing new, and greenhouse gases should be no different.
You totally ignore the European experience. Green jobs cost jobs overall. Higher energy prices means you will have less money in your pocket to buy and save, meaning lost jobs. If green jobs could gain jobs they would have to be not only better than nuclear is right now but be close to fossil fuels. In which case we would be celebrating because lots of people would want to invest in cheaper energy sources.
Our move to green energy is going to be much slower than you want because of economics.
I actually agree with this. I'm a realist, I am not against fossil fuels and I recognize that economics will drive change, as it always does. The difference between our approaches is that I recognize the issues with our current energy model (environmental, geopolitical, supply limitations) and think we should act on it, as cost effectively as possible.
This is already happening in Spain and Germany. They stuggle with just the most basic targets to meet.
Germany is not too shabby, their economy is strong and growing, last I checked they were going to meet their reduction targets, and the country is becoming a prime mover in several fields that we North Americans are barely touching yet. Who will come out ahead when oil prices reach 200 $/bbl? (Well, Canada won't be complaining heh)
We do teach about innovation in school but the problem here is that the AGW supporters want growth without the innovation.
Not sure what you're alluding to. I want economic growth as a result of innovation. At the moment, this is not happening much. Proportionately, the energy industry invests very little on R&D (the last figure I saw was 0.3% of sales, whereas automotive is at 2.4%, aerospace and defense at 11%, pharmaceuticals at 19%).
You just answered it. Solar and wind can't replace it so what technology related to your point of "In many cases" are you talking about? At best nuclear can replace coal but we don't want all countries to have nuclear because many would like to use it for more nefarious reasons than energy. If the U.S. did it there would have to be some decades to build it and we still would use oil and natural gas as well. I would love to see Obama actually pushing for nuclear instead of just talking about it
There is no silver bullet. A combination of technologies will lead to reductions, and that includes fossil fuels (looking at you, natural gas), renewables, efficiency improvements, and others. Again, you're right in the sense that things won't change overnight, the technology and infrastructure is not ready. But we need to start acting.
Why don't we discuss the figure (from McKinsey & Co) that I posted a page or two earlier?
Yes it will be gradual and the market will exploit cheap energy sources whether they are green or not. BTW we don't have any scientific smoking gun that can actually predict with models exactly our progress of 1-2C when nature has more variability than that.
CO2 is hardly the main climate driver. The climate models are too reductive to predict well. When the natural climate wants to go into an ice age 10 times the CO2 doesn't affect it. CO2 creates marginal warming. Once the blanket is set adding more is not going to kill the planet. We would have to run out of fossil fuels to actually try and aim for the Cambrian period. Doubling CO2 will have little effect.
Paul Macrae? Good grief.
The graph you'll see in independent papers looks more like this:
I don't have "pure" free market ideals. What does that mean? Should I be against all government? Should NASA never go into space? Government needs to be limited because the private sector can only pay so much one generation at a time. The U.S.'s current budget will send the country into a debt crisis. We can't afford billions of dollars of green taxes. I'd rather have prototypes created that prove themselves before we foist them on the general public.
I get the feeling that whichever argument I present, you will respond with a "taxes are evil" mantra, even if a properly designed system can take advantage of market forces to minimize costs and lead to considerable reductions. The Acid Rain Program in the US is a good example of a market-based instrument that led to reductions without significantly hampering economic growth and profits from the sector.
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Ultimately, I think we agree on many points, the most important being: it's the economy, stupid. I just sense that you're trying to discredit climate science at all costs to fit your view that environmental / energy policies should not be enacted at all.