Pennsylvania, West Virgina, and Colorado; Listen up!
Update: The video version, where the full context is no better:
With 49% of our power from coal, and current coal plants aging rapidly, look for some cold nights in the future under Obama. Obama only wants to surpass Kyoto in the amount of economic damage he does.
Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket.
Normally, you could count on Congress to scramble such ideological and economically devestating plans as full cap an trade; not with Pelosi and Reid in charge. But don’t worry: that coal will eventually be mined- as I predicted before.
Filed under: Barack Obama, Politics, taxation
FACTS, JUST FACTS, ONLY FACTS
THAT WILL SCARE ANYONE
http://ngoldfarb.wordpress.com/2008/10/22/barack-obamas-boss-and-mentor-william-ayres-group-killed-more-people-than-the-kkk-klu-lux-klan/
Irresponsible indeed
Well, McCain and Obama have essentially the same plan for cap and trade so what is your point Mike?
P.S. I think Cap and trade is horrible but not because of the increased cost, but because it won’t make a damn bit of difference. There is no amount of tax in the world that can compensate for the global cost of increased desertification, droughts in the southwest, and rising oceans(not just from glaciers but from warmer temperatures expanding water). This is one big farse to collect more taxes and not do anything about potential climate catastrophes.
The notion that you can tax pollution is ABSURD. That is the equivalent logic of saying you can dump industrial chemicals in the water supply as long as you pay a tax. As long as the benefit from pollutng is less than the tax it won’t make a bit of difference.
What we need is for nuclear, solar, wind, tidal, geothermal, biofuels to be cheaper than coal, gas, diesel. How can you do that? Increase the coal tax, increase the gas tax, increase the diesel tax slowly over time until these clean technologies are less than or equal to dirty fuels in cost. The market will switch over immediately and as the infrastructure develops and clean fuels become even cheaper you can lessen the tax on dirty fuels.
This is very different from taxing carbon output because you are not restricting production output, you are restricting dirty fuel use in the production input. If you tax carbon output but the cost of using dirty fuels is cheaper than the tax, it will not limit pollution or greenhouse gases at all. It will just fill the coffers of the government and our atmosphere with CO2 and other pollutants.
Bring on the supercooled grid!
“Bring on the supercooled grid!”
Did you know that China has had one in operation for over a decade now?
Basically I agree on the raising of cost as the way to end the fossil fuel situation, but it must be done very slowly so as to avoid major restructuring problems.
However, we could stop all fossil fuel use immediately and global warming would not slow down measurably.
It is going to happen. It is unstoppable.
We should be figuring out how to cope, rather than panicking about the causes, of which man is but a tiny contributor.
Democracy is not conducive for large scale coordinated national infrastructure projects such as a supercooled grid. Too many fractionalized decisions being made for political(money) reasons than for true economical benefit. Too much beaurocracy. We do a damn fine job however of stocking a grocery store with what people want and putting satellites in orbit.
I agree man is not the only cause, but regardless, if we can take measures to limit or reverse a disaster(i.e. some wild ideas such reflective mirrors in space, inert substances floating in the stratosphere, solar power..) and we choose not to adequately prepare because we claim it is not man made, isn’t that akin to 911? We saw it coming and didn’t do anything about it.
The one I love is the concept of pumping huge amounts of carbon dioxide underground; that one’s a real scream. After a decade or so of that stupidity, the cola manufacurers would just have to add syrup to the groundwater, since the carbonation process would already be taken care of.
Infrastructure takes decades to develop, especially for new technology. Taxation crushing an industry can occur in a single year. The gap in between would be very ugly. ANd governmental social and ecological engineering efforts have a long history of failure.
An example from my own family past: After the DUst Bowl years, the government essentially declared this nation had an erosion crisis. SO they toolk to promoting several plans to reduce it. One of their biggest efforts was to get their agricultural services to advocate planting ground cover where crops were not growing or out of rotation. My grandfather was part of that advocacy program. It makes sense, right? Except you need to consider the plant chosen to ‘fix the environment’: Kudzu. Kudzu is now considered an expression of profanity in the SOuth. You can look at the Corn ethanol program as another example of governmental interference with energy production. The resulting burning of food will end up costing millions in lives lost from starvation before we’re through.
Government is just inept in these areas, because political factors are allowed to impact the technical ones. Using taxation to drive people like lemmings will work just about as well as HOV lanes do to change behavior.
“if we can take measures to limit or reverse a disaster”
I agree, but that “if” is just too big. Like trying to slow down a locomotive by throwing snowballs at it.
“We saw it coming and didn’t do anything about it.”
That is the point of figuring out how to cope with it: how do we minimize the effects, garner whatever benefits there may be, handle the relocations in a humane way, etc.
If we waste all our efforts on snowballs, we WILL get run over.
The displacements are going to be the biggest problem. We are looking at maybe 2 billion refugees over the next century or two, an average of 10 million a year or more. That’s a bunch by any standard.
Nothing in human history suggests how to deal with that. We better get on with figuring out something, or it may get resolved by nuclear extermination.
Mike, just a little change in tax policy(subsidization that is) gives us a country that is absolutely corn crazy when other crops are far superior for it’s various purposes, as I believe you will agree. So I fail to see how reverse subsidization (raising taxes on the bad product instead of deciding the good one) will fail to change behavior. The almighty dollar drives everything.
Jack, one thing I was reading about was the potential of using large solar power plants near coastal deserts to pull freshwater from the Ocean. I would love to see a study on how much water could be feasibly pumped from the ocean in case we do have more desertification and rising sea levels. The point to all of this is that it would be far cheaper if we could keep mother nature a little more stable. Hell, if an ice age was coming I would be supporting increasing C02 output.
The corn subsidy is a perfect example; what was the result? Positive? No, it skewed the results and today, one of the golden children of that grand strategy filed for bankruptcy. Government market manipulation results nearly always in negative outcomes, a lesson Obama ignores even more than McCain.
I think I read somewhere that there is a desalinization plant on the Mexican coast that is solar powered. It is to produce drinking water.
There couldn’t be enough for open crops, but hydroponics could easily be run on a relatively small solar plant. I think they are doing that there as well.
My argument isn’t about supporting government intervention in the marketplace, generally speaking I am against it. However, I am more adverse to subsidies(a tax) for alternative energies than I am against raising taxes on select products that have an environmental impact or cost. I interpreted your response to my comment about raising taxes on environmentally unfriendly products as saying that it wouldn’t alter behavior. It is pretty obvious to me at least that the government can influence behavior, but it is usually negative as in the case of the corn subsidy.
As another example we have an additional liquor and cigarette tax and it doesn’t cause any market problems, it just raises the price. Why not a coal and fossil fuel tax? Notice we don’t have a Miller Sharps or bubble gum subsidy.
But we DO have the tax breaks for Puerto Rican Rum that were put into the bailout bill !!