Ustwo

Increasing the cost of doing business does not make an economy stronger. You add to the cost of the goods and services directly and indirectly and claim it somehow is better that way for the economy?

If there was a law that all doors had to be 10 feet tall tomarrow, there would be people who would make money on that change but that does not make it a good law to pass.

Your argument makes absoultely no sense in terms of economic progress. By your logic we should keep adding more and more rules and regulations on everything and we will all be stinking rich when its over.

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kutulu

The businesses are still there and the regulations created hundreds of thousands of high paying jobs. Plants are cleaner and the environment is being protected (as it should be). Absolutely terrible for the economy, I agree. I think it would be much better if 99% of us made minimum wage.

Rodney

One would hope that ultimately the real losers would be foreign energy producers. We would no longer need to buy their product, and all the money we would have given them stays at home -- stimulating the economy and perhaps paying for even more energy efficiency and, ultimately, an economy that costs less and less to run with a greater benefit for more and more people.

Remember, retrofitting in this way is not an expense; it is an economization. It cuts base operating costs, while directing remaining costs more towards labor-intensive activities and away from simple purchase of raw materials that somebody pumped out of the ground.

Charlatan

The thing is Ustwo... someone has to ultimately pay for the negative externalities of our continued abuse of the environment... Why should I subsidize industry for their pollution?

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Ustwo

1. Because humans are not causing the issue, one way or another.
2. You do pay for it as its not as if there is 'the people' and 'industry' as seperate entities.

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Charlatan

What I'm getting at Ustwo is that things like respiratory disease, that has been increasing due to poor air quality, are being paid for by individuals rather than the company that is causing the pollution.

I'm not talking about Global Warming per se, rather pollution in general. You cannot dispute the fact that pollution is on the rise. That smog is an issue.

Why should someone who does not drive a car pay for harm done to them by industry and car drivers? As it is, the price of energy is subsidized because it does not include the negative externalities associated with things like pollution.

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flstf

Most costs associated with taxes and regulations on industry will probably wind up being paid by individuals via higher prices for goods and services. There is some truth to the old saying "businesses don't pay taxes, people do".

There are good reasons to have regulations for pollution control to protect the environment but I don't believe global warming is one of them.

Tamerlain

I find it hard to comment on an issue as complex as global warming. As a species we are hardly able to accurately predict tomorrow's weather - how is it then that we think we can predict an increase in hurricanes years in advance? It seems to me absurd to base corporate and government policy around a process which, to my knowledge, has not been proven to have a reliable degree of accuracy.

That said, I do believe it is prudent to err on the side of caution and promote alternate sources of energy. In the big picture, money can be replaced, the environment cannot.

-Tamerlain

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kutulu

I'm not getting on you about this because I think your comment was geniune, but it's a common comment made by those who are ignorant of the issue. Climate and weather are two completely different beasts.

Tamerlain

Forgive my ignorance then, but while climate and weather are two different things, they must be related, no? It would stand to reason (to me at least) that if we cannot predict weather, we cannot predict climate.

-Tamerlain

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kutulu

Weather is the day to day temp, humidity and wind. Climate is the average weather over a long period of time. We cannot predict the weather precisely, but we absolutely can predict that climate. If you live in Arizona, it's going to be hot 8 months of the year. The winter will be cool and you'll have a monsoon somwhere between June and August. Global climate mostly refers to the global average temperature.

Climate change models consider the sources and sinks of greenhouse gas emissions. Neglecting human interference and rare catastrophic events (like a HUGE volcano eruption) greenhouse gas concentrations are relatively static because the emissions are consumed by biogenic sinks.

Now, our industrialization adds a LOT of greenhouse gasses to the system. There are no sinks for the additional emissions and as a result CO2 levels rise. Normally, most radiant energy is reflected back into space. Greenhouse gasses aborb the energy and allow more heat to be trapped in the atmosphere. We have sampled ice cores and determined historic CO2 levels we can line them up with known sea levels at those times and we know that when CO2 levels are low, there is more land mass and the climate is cooler. At high CO2 levels, the climate is hotter and we have less land mass because the ice caps have melted.

These are facts that cannot be disputed. THe arguements (logical ones at least) are with the models, and hte projections built into the models.

Tamerlain

Those are just generalizations though, they aren't predictions. They're also based off of past knowledge of the climate of Arizona. It was hot for 8 months of the year last year, and the year before, and the year before that, etcetera. If it rained last Thursday and the Thursday before that, I couldn't logically say that it will rain this Thursday. While it's not exactly a solid example, it does show that the past does not dictate the future.

How can we accurately know sea levels from thousands of years ago? It seems to me that there are too many variables to trust even recorded sea levels from hundreds of years ago. The landscape has changed, measuring methods have since become more precise and record keeping has become more strict.

I'm not trying to be argumentative, but this is the exact reason I don't understand how we can understand something as complex as climate. Aren't there too many variables to take into consideration?

-Tamerlain

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tecoyah

Scientists spend entire careers researching the variables involved in these scenarios. That is what they do, and because of these people we can gain some limited understanding of world climate. After reading for many years the results of these data it has become clear to me that indeed, the climate is warming. Though the information they use is not disputed in scientific circles, the implications of the data are constantly argued, and theories about the results of models, computer simulations, and formulas used to calculate future changes vary depending on the pieces of Data used.
The sheer amount of gathered information makes a complete model unlikely, and even if created, the interaction of forces would create results that are undependable, thus we go by statistical analysis. Though there is no way to verify what will happen to this Globe we live on....it seems to me a good Idea to at least think about what "Might" happen, and try to gain more knowledge.

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Ustwo

But since the climate models do not match up with each other, or even past data its rather silly to think that they are anything but a bad guess as to future climate.

We are still in a colder climate than just after the Roman period as we recover from the little ice age (yes the temperatures were WARMER than then now). We had a cooling period in the 1970's where all the doom and gloom types were predicting starvation by the 1990's. We have had ice ages and rapid rising of the earth temperature many times in the past.

Was it a lack of industry that caused the cooling known as the little ice age? Of course not, so what was it? What caused the ice ages? What caused the snowball earth? What caused the extinction events which all seem related to climate change? Do your models predict any of this?

No, the models are very simple, based only on a few variables, relying on what we say happens.

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Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.