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Originally Posted by LWakefield
I agree that mankind doesn't cause climate change. A professor at MIT completely disproved that theory. Scientists are biased by money.
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Just remember that bias works both ways. When one side says A, and the other says B, the truth is usually somewhere in the between.
Quote:
Originally Posted by LWakefield
CO2 is a lost cause. It would take 33 years to drop the temperature 1 degree Fahrenheit is there was no CO2 emissions. CO2 is such a small volume of green house gases.
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I'm not going dispute that changing the CO2 levels in the atmosphere would be very difficult at this point, but I recently came across a great Op-Ed piece in the New York Times about the folly of cap-and-trade at slowing CO2 emissions* while promoting a new idea called "fee and dividend".
Carbon taxes in the form of "fee and dividend' are genius: place a tax on carbon, then take 100% of this tax money, divide it equally among all tax-paying Americans, and cut them a rebate check each year. While the carbon tax would increase the price of goods, the rebate check would negate this increase (and if you're "green", you would actually profit off the system). This is lightyears better than "cap and trade", as every American would see direct benefits from living more economically sustainable as it takes all the hidden, negative
economic externalities** and directly builds them into the price of goods.
It would have the added benefit of being like a tax cut ("Woohoo! I just got a check for $3000!") while financially encouraging consumers to make greener choices ("do I drive my SUV to the corner store a 1/2 mile away for a gallon of milk, or do I walk there enjoying some fresh air and exercise?"). Businesses would have the incentive to make their products/services more sustainable, because the consumers would demand greener products to try to profit off the carbon tax.
At the same time, people would start walking and biking more (weather permitted) for short trips. This would have the bonus of reducing pollution emissions from cars while actively increasing the physical fitness of America (which with 2/3 of the population overweight, needs a lot of exercise!). Plus, new sidewalks and bike paths are relatively inexpensive to implement quickly in suburbia.
Would this force people out of their cars? Certainly not. It's kind of difficult to go to Ikea or Home Depot and bring anything of appreciable size home on a bike. But what it would do is create a system which which gives people more freedom of choice, as opposed to the current system which all but coerces every citizen to buy a car for any hope of getting from point A to point B.
The carbon fee and dividend is so simple. No carbon markets, no issues of who gets grandfathered in, no massive increases in energy costs with little to directly benefit consumers in the short term, no tax credits or bailouts to maybe encourage companies to maybe fund one green project, no screwing around with heavy and hard to enforce regulations. Since consumer spending makes up about 80% of the economy, just put in a carbon tax+rebate system and its market forces would cause the system to fix itself (by reducing our imported oil and pollution output) from the bottom-up far quicker than any other solution.
* The idea of taxing CO2 is more like an umbrella tax on pollution. Sources which emit large quantities of CO2, such as burning fossil fuels, often release a whole host of other pollutants. These other pollutants, whether its particulates like soot or various chemicals, have been shown time and time again to have direct negative impacts on human health, particularly for children, pregnant woman, and the elderly. By reducing CO2 emissions (such as my switching from fossil fuels to renewable or nuclear energy), you'll also reduce these other pollutants, thus increasing air quality and decreasing health related problems from pollution in a market-driven manner.
** For example, at current traffic volumes every car that drives into Manhattan imposes a cost of $160 in externalities on the economy of New York. Since obviously the tolls on the GW aren't $160, these costs are shouldered ("subsidized" if you will) by other segments of the economy.