This week and next will result in some resolutions and commitments to cut green house gasses. Obama will make some commitments which Congress may or may not (as in the case of Bill Clinton) pass.
Any predictions as to what will be the effect on car ownership? A universal carbon tax will increase the cost of driving, but not a great deal. A $30 per tonne tax on carbon (a typical proposed figure) will increase gas prices by about $0.75 per gallon.
My own feeling is that it will not affect the car business too much. The new mileage standards coming up will compensate for any tax increases.
Phasing out all coal fired electric generating plants will make electric cars much cleaner overall. Gas fired plants emit about one half the amount of carbon compared to coal fired plants.
More Taxing And Spending? That Won’t Fix Anything.
I’m Still Trying To Figure Out Where The Nearly $1,000,000,000 Went That Obama Pledged To Fix Our Infrastructure.
Unintended consequences will bite these geniuses in the rear-end, as usual.
IMO taxes and tariffs send the message- we can’t reduce the {insert offending item here} but we can charge people a fee and use that money to fund some other pet project (or line someone’s pockets anyway)…
The theory is that fuel or carbon taxes should be refunded back to the tax paying population. But that seldom happens the way it was intended. Part of a carbon tax SHOULD fund research in low carbon or no carbon technologies.
Direct fuel taxes on transportation fuels should be spent on better highways, roads and streets. That usually does not happen either.
I read that that feel good conference generated something like 300,000 tons of co2 emissions. Kinda like Al Baby flying around in his private jet from his many homes complaining about the inconvenient truth. There is an inconvenient truth but its not what some of these folks are talking about. Just read about the Hamilton College uprising and I really fear for us when these illiterates hit the streets and take jobs in DC.
Well I do believe that climate change is real, but as a practical matter I doubt if much, if anything is actually going to be done about it. The so-called “green” technologies aren’t ready for prime time. There’ll be a lot of hand-wringing and resolutions passed, but at the end of the day, nobody wants to give up their 21st century life and go back to living like the Amish to reduce their carbon footprint (myself included).
If the President (Obama) really wants to get a resolution on carbon reduction, he should call a press conference and announce that he (Obama) now believes that climate change is a hoax. Since the Republicans in congress are reflexively against anything the President is for, my guess is they would have a bill on his desk within the week.
But seriously, I think things are going to get, very, “interesting” in the coming decades. More and more people around the world putting more & more cars on the road, turning on more & more air conditioners, and so on. Humans by their nature are short-sighted and narcissistic. This planet may be all but uninhabitable by humans by the end of this century. I really hope I am wrong.
quoting @“common sense answer” “I’m Still Trying To Figure Out Where The Nearly $1,000,000,000 Went That Obama Pledged To Fix Our Infrastructure.”
As I recall, so many members of congress broke off little chunks of that money to fund pet projects in their districts in exchange for voting for the bill that very little of the money actually went to infrastructure. Darn shame. If all that money had actually been spent upgrading and repairing roads, bridges, airports, etc. we would have put a lot of people to work, reduced traffic congestion (and thus pollution), and made the highways safer too. Oh well. As George Carlin said, “Whenever you hear the word ‘bipartisan’, it means that some larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”
What flavor Kool-aide are you drinking? Of course there is climate change. It has been happening for thousands of years. Remember the cold days in Europe not too many centuries ago, the dust bowl of the 30’s, or even the glaciers covering Minnesota at one time. The question is the human impact and who is profiting from the whole issue. And those poor Walrus’ that are huddled on land because there is no ice, turns out that’s what they have been doing for centuries. Just one example of the lack of an aggressive media and scare tactics so the sheep will follow.
Cutting energy consumption does not imply living like the Amish. I have lived and worked in countries that use about half the energy per person as the USA, such as France and they live very will indeed. Getting 30% of our energy from renewables such as solar, wind, hydro and geothermal is entirely possible and need not raise the cost of living. Getting ALL our energy from renewables, like the Green parties suggest is suicidal and will really lower your living standard.
Agree with others that the climate has warmed and cooled many times in the past and MITIGATION and ADAPTATION are the best solutions.
Ever wonder how GREENLAND got its name. During the Middle Ages warming period there was extensive farming by the Vikings on that island.
The climate will be more volatile in the future. Adaptation and mitigation means the Dutch raising their dikes by 1.5 meters, a project that is now complete. Head in the sand denial meant George Bush refusing $7 billion to the US Army Corps of Engineers to raise the levies in Louisiana which would have MITIGATED the Katrina disaster.
Bing
"What flavor Kool-aide are you drinking? Of course there is climate change."
Not too long ago your argument had some validity, that’s when these same folks called it Global Warming, but that didn’t explain the cooling and other normal weather extremes.
Now they refer to this normal weather as Climate Change! Voila!
I call it weather. Climate is average weather and is measured in longer periods of time than what the Global Warming Climate Change folks are citing. Climate change certainly has happened forever. What melted the ice sheet covering Minnesota at one time? It was not human activity!
When enough time passes that show that the climate is not changing or perhaps cooling, what name will they give the movement next?
Um, CSA, I agree with you. Ed Frugal was the one concerned about our future and potential death from the change in climates. Me, I just had the furnace tuned up so I’m ready for the next switch to global freezing again-which is what it is doing in Minnesota right now. Investment tip though-don’t buy any water front property.
George Bush refusing $7 billion to the US Army Corps of Engineers to raise the levies in Louisiana which would have MITIGATED the Katrina disaster
Uhm, No, it wasn’t GW Bush, it was 40 years of incompetence and lawsuits trying to PREVENT the Army Corps of Engineers from raising and strengthening the levees as prescribed in the Flood Control Act of 1965. The link below is interesting reading of the history.
Nothing will come from this climate change conference so driving will not be more expensive to purchase carbon credits. And the biggest carbon dioxide producer, China, isn’t included at all. And CO2 is not China’s problem, it is all the other pollutants we and Europe have already excised from our cars, trucks and power plants. And the fast rising polluters like India still burn manure for energy. Mmmm, THAT’s gotta smell good!
Just one example of the lack of an aggressive media and scare tactics so the sheep will follow.
It’s actually just the opposite…Fox News media (the mouth for Big Oil)…have a lot at stake to deny that human factor has any effect on the climate. The data is out there…Peer review scientific journals for everyone to read. When my daughter was doing her undergraduate work at MIT in chemistry…I read a few of the articles. Most were well beyond my scientific knowledge…but there’s a so much evidence pointing to the FACT that man has been a huge driving factor in climate change in the past 60+ years…it’s can’t be denied. Well it can…but only by funding from the MILLIONS Big oil and Coal industry has put into funding junk science. Yet even with that…one study funded by the Koch brothers to once and for all PROVE that the climate isn’t warming…the scientist actually proved that it was.
Thanks for all the lively input. The scare media this week showed the air pollution in Bejing, China as “proof” that the earth was warming. It had nothing to do with that; the smog was particulate air pollution from burning coal and not controlling the soot and ash coming out of the stack.
Basin Electric has a plant called Antilope Valley burning the exact same coal and their is no visible emission coming out of the stacks since it has both ash precipitators and SO2 scrubbers. If the Chinese did the same thing the air in Bejing would be a lot clearer.
Bjorn Lomborg is a Danish scientist who has written several books on Climate Change. He has no agenda, right or left, and one of his books is “Cool It” and advises a sensible approach to adapting to climate change. I’ve met him recently at a lecture and was able to get his next book “Smart Solutions to Climate Change” which offers again sensible methods for dealing with a more variable climate.
I highly recommend reading both these books and ignoring the Hollywood penthouse environmentalists who jet set all over the world, Green Peace, the Sierra Club, and Obama’s political grandstanding to leave a “Legacy” of his reign.
One thing I have noticed is that most of the so-called “climate experts” quoted are not schooled in the field.
It’s often stated with great regularity that “97% of climate scientists believe in global warming”. Do some research on how that BS figure was obtained.
The focus has been to shift “global warming” to “climate change” because the numbers are not backing up the former in spite of the tripe often repeated on TV and absorbed by viewers.
Well, at the risk of being reprimanded for going “off-topic”, I’d like to elaborate a little on my previous comments. I’m not necessarily saying that “climate change” is going to be the end of us, but I do think it is one piece of a larger, very complicated set of problems. An already overpopulated world continues to grow exponentially in population, so you’ve got more and more people competing for a finite and dwindling pool of resources (OIL, GAS, coal, arable farmland, clean water, etc and so on)
As countries like China, India, and dozens of other countries grow their economies, they’ll continue to put 10’s of millions of additional CARS and TRUCKS onto hundreds of thousands of miles of new roads, almost certainly without the pollution controls we have in the 1st world countries. The earth only has one thin atmosphere. If you could drive straight UP at highway speed (65mph) you’d be in outer space within an hour.
Most of the people in these 3rd world countries aspire to live like they see Americans living, what they’ve seen on American tv and movies, they don’t want to hear our “leaders” telling them they should forego central air conditioning and car ownership in order to prevent the seas from rising. To be fair, if I were one of those people I would not want to hear it either. I’d rather own my own CAR than ride to work on a bus packed full of people and chickens and goats too, I don’t fault them one bit.
But let’s suppose that sea levels do rise 2 or 3 feet over the next century, whether through natural causes or man-made. There’s something like 500 million to a billion people living in coastal communities around the world, who will have to be re-located. Countries go to war over issues like land use, mineral rights, and access to natural resources like oil. Its easy enough for us to sit in the comfort of our homes and say, “Pssht! The sea level’s not gonna rise!” But suppose it does. I don’t think those 500 million people are going to quietly crawl into an alley and die. They’re gonna fight for land, food, and oil. Just my opinions, feel free to disagree. I could go on and talk about how everybody’s so upset about the Iranian nuclear deal while Pakistan and North Korea continue to crank out more & more nukes as fast as they can while nobody even mentions that, let alone has any kind of a plan to deal with that problem, but that would be off-topic so I will stop here. SORRY for being such a downer today.
It's often stated with great regularity that "97% of climate scientists believe in global warming". Do some research on how that BS figure was obtained.
I have done the research…it looks like you haven’t.
The 97% figure is based on peer review papers published on the topic. 97% of all research published in peer review scientific journals about climate change have concluded that global warming is happening. Now if you’re a so-called climatologist who denies global warming…your opinion hasn’t counted…if you NEVER did any research or published any papers. I met a couple of the leaders in this field when my daughter was at MIT. Her Senior year she was doing some field work for two of them.
Or sure CONSERVATIVE slanted news outlets have tried to show otherwise.
You conspiracy people…who think it’s a GLOBAL conspiracy to think that all the scientists and media got together to try to fool everyone…to what end?
If it’s the MONEY…then surely there would be far more papers DENYING global warming because that’s where most of the money has been spent…mainly the oil and coal industry.
