Oh Bob. It's better to remain silent and let people think you an idiot than to open your mouth and prove it.
97% is not the same thing as 97. Also, the correct number is really closer to 99.9% of all published climatologists, if not higher. Those who know, know. Those who believe don't know jack.
There are many ways to differentiate human produced CO2 from naturally occurring CO2, and therefore prove the rise is due to man. This has been done repeatedly and conclusively. The simplest way is to simply look at the graph of the rise and compare it to our use of fossil fuels, they are exactly the same curve at exactly the same time, with exactly the same dips and bumps. It's certainly not the only method, but is a simple to understand one.
It's ridiculous to state that to live 'green' you must live as if in a 3rd world country. That is simply BS stated by unreasonable men without any knowledge (and usually with a financial incentive to be anti-green/pro-fossil fuel).
It's also ridiculously ignorant to state that being 'green' is not cost effective. As someone who has had a solar system for 7+ years, I can tell you it's paid for itself already (with an estimated 13 more years before needing serious upkeep), has kept me away from the 40-50% rate raises that have happened to others in that time, it heats my house, my shower, and my hot tub and keeps the lights, TV, washer/drier, dishwasher, and fridge on when the grid goes down. It's not at all the expensive, powerless, sacrifice forcing technology you seem to think it is. It saves money even in the short term, and significant amounts in the long term AND has many other benefits. You've been listening to the wrong people about this issue, people who either totally don't know what they're talking about or are bold faced liars. I speak from actual experience.
Cost effective 'green' technologies have existed for well over a decade. You are simply wrong about your estimations.

So there are 97 "scientists" that say unequivocally the sky is falling and you are buying it.

How many Climate Scientists are there in the world? Surly more than 100. What about the other 200 - 300 scientists? Do they agree?
This Carbon dioxide you claim to be the doom of man, how can you differentiate between man made and naturally made?

If you really care about this then ride a bicycle and eat only locally grown food and cut you electricity. Go live "3rd world" and leave reasonable men knowledge in peace.

I'm all for cutting fossil fuel and going "greener" but it has to be cost effective.

Who is going to buy a Chevy Volt at 60K when you can get a gas car for 30K.
Oh wait the Chevy volt was a financial disaster because it cost too much.

What happens when the coal fired electric plants stop producing electricity due to government "green" requirements that they can't meet and you electric bill goes up 30%? are you cool with that?


I think it will take 50 more years to get to cost effective "green" technologies.
Until then keep strong in your 3rd world hut..

I'll invite you over to my electric air conditioned house. I'll even pick you you in a gas power car.. Heck Ill even let you take a warm shower and do you laundry in that electric thing called a washer.




@lantern53

I want to buy some. I want to buy a lot of it. Because I will be advanced, green, technological, and successful, in a global way, immediately.

>> ^Ryjkyj:

Of course, you could always just build a tiny house yourself for whatever you think it should cost.


i call mine a shed and it costs less than 1500 dollars. the trouble with "green" technology is its retarded expensive

im sure if you had that same house, but had a regular ass toilet, a regular ass stove, a regular ass fridge, a regular ass heat/ac unit, and regular ass lights, windows, doors and everything else, itd probably run ya 5000-8000 dollars. you'd be an asshole for having a house with no green technology (god forbid!!) but youd be an asshole with a house that costs less than a dirtbike


......having said that, this house is still rad tho

Let us repeat:
Enlast Personal Male Lubricant is made from the pelts of baby seals. The entire company is dedicated to green technology funded by Nazi war profits, and all proceeds are used to fund terrorist activities domestically and abroad. Do you like to sodomize little schoolboys? Then Enlast Personal Male Lubricant is right for you. If you order today they'll throw in at no extra charge a vial of the tears they've collected from thousand of children working in one of their sweatshops. So order now!

Enlast Personal Male Lubricant is made from the pelts of baby seals. The entire company is dedicated to green technology funded by Nazi war profits, and all proceeds are used to fund terrorist activities domestically and abroad. Do you like to sodomize little schoolboys? Then Enlast Personal Male Lubricant is right for you. If you order today they'll throw in at no extra charge a vial of the tears they've collected from thousand of children working in one of their sweatshops. So order now!

I have a suspicion that Green technology is the next boom market.

I'm sure somewhere there is a fledgling 'solar thermal' or 'tidal energy' startup that will be the next Microsoft... But i don't have the confidence to invest

WP is not only a preeminent sociologist, a brilliant political scientist, but also a climate expert.

Nope - just a statistician who has seen the data, viewed the methodologies, and concluded that if the entirety of the AWG movement's 'evidence' was manifested as water then it wouldn't be able to moisten the inside of a thimble.

Conspiracy

Who said it was a conspiracy? More like standard operating proceedure. Governments have been troweling out millions to scientists for a long time. It is only in the last 15 years or so that they started troweling it out for purposes of justifying 'global warming'. Left wing politicians want taxes to generate revenue to pay for social programs, as well as to 'engineer' society. This carbon credit scheme will be the biggest money sponge of all time. So government hands out the money like candy to any outfit that proposes they can find even the loosest, most distant connections imaginable between human C02 & 'warming'.

The message is crystal clear. Need a big fat grant for your research center? Have a few guys propose a 'global warming' study, and there you go. These outfits try as best they CAN to apply real science, but the fact remains that all of their conclusions rest on specious mathematical models that are absolute garbage (and that's being kind).

The only way taxes will drop C02 level is as a byproduct of punishing prosperity. The money will not go towards 'green' technology that will change the world as we know it. It will just go into government and get spent on the same stuff as always. They are relying on the stifling nature of onerous taxation to force human beings to scale back economic activity.

Pure insanity. Have they even considered what this is going to do economically? Slow down the economy, and you reduce GDP. Reduce GDP, and you reduce revenue. Reduce revenue & government must be REDUCED. But they aren't planning for that. They are thinking they are going to do this cap & trade scheme, and STILL have a steadily increasing GDP. I look at their plans, and can reach no other conclusion than that our leaders have gone completely insane.

I've already run the numbers, and the ONLY possible way to get the planet to return to 230 PPM atmospheric C02 is to reduce Earth's population by about 5 billion people. Anything short of that is window dressing.

The wage conversation is a bit of a tangent, but from my point of view the right answer is to expand unemployment benefits and welfare, rather than reduce the minimum wage. I might be convinced that yes, people in certain situations should be able to work for less, but I'd rather the market just adjust to knowing that projects that rely on cheaper labor can't be done here.

As for your assertion that the entire housing asset bubble was caused by Fannie and Freddie and the 1977 Community Reinvestment Act...I'm disappointed. I'd thought you were more well-read than to believe that story.

Here's the most basic, simplistic response -- if it was all Fannie and Freddie's fault (two formerly privately-owned and operated companies, BTW), why are other banks in trouble? Why is AIG in trouble?

I agree that the problem here was moral hazard, but I disagree that it was government that created that situation. It seems that the market's own mechanisms for accurately gauging risk failed utterly.

>> ^gtjwkq:
Money spent by govt is, in principle, rarely spent as wisely as money spent by people, because people work to earn and therefore value their money, they usually have to be productive to earn it (which isn't easy), while govt is just politicians and bureaucrats deciding over money they easily appropriate from productive people. I don't know how I can put this in simpler terms.

I hear this a lot from Austro-libertarians. If this were true, banks should never work right, either. The people making the investment choices, and choices about loans are not the people who own the banks. The most risk they have to bear is getting fired, and often they get lavish severance packages even when they are fired, and are almost immediately rehired by another bank.

I agree that having some skin in the game helps motivate people to be more wise with their money, but I don't think there are any people in government who're casually disinterested in how taxpayer money is spent -- on the contrary, I think they're highly interested in either spending it on altruistic things (like unemployment, healthcare, green technology incentives) or spending it on selfish things (tax cuts/subsidies for industries that donated to you, aid in skewing regulation to benefit donors). I like to vote for the former, and call for the latter to be jailed (though it seems they're all guilty of both in varying ratios).

I also think government spending is best directed at things that are unlikely to turn a direct profit, but are useful for humanitarian purposes, or a general positive impact on the economy (e.g. infrastructure).

I would like to see less military spending, but I think that will be politically difficult when there are two wars going on, and a recession. I like the way Obama/Gates have shuffled the military budget in terms of reallocating money between different military projects, but I'm annoyed that the budget did still get an increase for next year.

As for the bank bailouts, I feel like they were a necessary evil. I would rather they'd asked more in the way of concessions from the bank in return, but I do think letting them fail would have just made things worse.

When I give you money, the money is now yours, what you do with it is your own business. But when I'm the govt, and I give you money, I'm giving you money that IS NOT MINE and that I SHOULDN'T BE GIVING TO YOU (at least that's what I'm arguing, a keynesian might think differently). So there lies the root of the problem: govt is to blame for handing out free money, not what people did with it, because it's expected that people will be careless about money that is freely handed to them, as opposed to money that is earned.
People with guns don't inevitably commit murder. About the bus driver, it's expected that he'll drive poorly and crash when drunk (maybe not though if he's lucky), even though I said he was force-fed the alcohol, which is not accurate since I'm not sure investment banks were legally obligated to accept govt money, but it's easy to imagine how a bank might be strongly influenced to accept money if it has no strings attached and it's also offered to its competitors.

This, I think is a crucial part of our disagreement. Say you're a well-known investor who's made ridiculous profits through shrewdly investing in successful business. I walk up to you, give you a million dollars, no strings attached. Are you going to necessarily be reckless and wasteful with that money, simply because it was a gift? What if the money had come from some investment that simply performed better than your expectations? Does that make you unwise?

Would it make any difference how I got the money I gave you? Even if I conned it out of a bunch of nice old ladies, wouldn't you still invest it correctly? That's why I think the Austrian theory doesn't make sense, especially on this topic.

It would make sense if the government, before the economy went haywire, said "do whatever ya like, we'll absorb all your losses" -- but it didn't do that, implicitly or explicitly.

All that said, I disagree with your characterization of there being a qualitative difference between money given to companies being theirs, but that money given to government to pay taxes still somehow remains yours. It's this whole idea that government is operating as a giant racketeering organization (which seems utterly incorrect). It's like the managing corporation of a condominium. By living here, you agree to a contract with the government, and you have to abide by the obligations in the contract, like obeying the laws, and paying taxes.

Regardless of how you think government got the money to give away, I don't see why money government gives to banks somehow will automatically be frittered away, especially if they say "this is yours, no strings attached".

Even though I think Ben Bernanke is an idiot, he's smart enough to be the current chairman of the Fed and even he thinks the Fed helped cause the Great Depression. The conclusions one can take about what happened in the 20's and 30's are not as clear cut as you'd think. What is important to understand are the motivations behind those that acted and those who interpret what happened.

I think you should perhaps read that speech of his more carefully -- I find what Bernanke says about the Great Depression persuasive. He's mostly talking about how much he loves Milton Friedman, but the key paragraph is:

Friedman's emphasis on avoiding monetary disruptions arose, like many of his other ideas, from his study of U.S. monetary history. He had observed that, in many episodes, the actions of the monetary authorities, despite possibly good intentions, actively destabilized the economy. The leading case, of course, was the Great Depression, or as Friedman and Schwartz called it, the Great Contraction, in which the Fed's tightening in the late 1920s and (most importantly) its failure to prevent the bank failures of the early 1930s were a major cause of the massive decline in money, prices, and output. It is likely that Friedman's study of the Depression led him to look for means, such as his proposal for constant money growth, to ensure that the monetary machine did not get out of order. I hope, though of course I cannot be certain, that two decades of relative monetary stability have not led contemporary central bankers to forget the basic Hippocratic principle.

He doesn't go into why the Fed thought what it was doing was the right idea here, but it should sound refreshingly Austrian -- they were worried about deviating from the gold standard too much, and weren't concerned about bank failures because they figured, as you do now, that banks failing is a blessing in disguise: ownership just moves from incompetent managers to competent ones, no muss, no fuss (liquidationism, it's called these days).

What Bernanke believes is that the Fed should have known better and reacted by massively expanding the money supply to stave off deflation, and rescuing the failing banks. What it actually did was contract the monetary supply and let them fail, and that was pouring gasoline on the fire (or as one economist said of Austrian advice at the time, it was "to cry, 'Fire! Fire!' in Noah's flood.")

I don't contest that the Fed has a lot of power, and that if wielded incorrectly it can cause a lot of damage. But I think the period of time between the Great Depression and now is a testament to the stability a central bank can create. There were recessions, but no Depressions, or Panics. There's already a debate about whether Greenspan could have prevented this one, but so far that debate is leaning towards the relaxation of banking regulation being at fault, rather than a FRB monetary policy error.

I don't really think debate on the history of the Great Depression is over; Keynesians and Monetarists are still fighting about aspects of it. But Austrian economics fell out of the mainstream in the aftermath of the Great Depression, largely because their policy prescriptions were carried out, to disastrous results. Present-day Austrians don't even deny that a contractionary monetary policy in the late 20's was a bad idea, they just deny it was their idea, even though it's what people like Hayek and Schumpeter were calling for at the time, and what they're calling for now.

That's why I can be perhaps a bit over the top when trying to quash Austrians as quacks; in my opinion their policies caused both Depressions.

As a representative from Tacoma lived there my whole life i do not support using the Narrows Bridge as an political scheme to push coal...oh and i support green technology...and i have been drinking....

Here's your next green technology to save the planet.
Attach a turbine to it and away you go

Weeeee! I'm so excited that slicks are back!
The 'turboboost' button should be interesting as well... and is finally putting F1 on track to develop 'green' technologies.

Imposition of emission standards, etc. would rely directly on the mechanisms, funding, and the political will in place to support enforcement. Right now, it is vastly more profitable to use outdated polluting technologies than it is to use clean technology.

I am encouraged by the progress of green technologies, but a pure cost/benefit analysis (in the context of the climate change argument) still weighs against political imposition of drastic changes in environmental regulations on man-made pollutants.

Depends how you define cheap, is there a value placed on the cost of our atmosphere? What about when everyone in China wants a H2 Hummer?
The problem isn't the amount of oil left, its the rate it can be extracted and refined. Demand has overtaken supply and this reflects in your day to day petrol price at the pump. Even if the most ambitious plans to get more oil like shale oil and magical crystalline oil deposits at the bottom of the ocean come online, they will never be able to catch up with demand.

Bottom line is we have to cut back on our consumption, while replacing our dirty tech with clean tech... and big business doesn't like the sound of that idea.

Nuclear reactors aren't the best solution, but will be the most likely to happen because humans are lazy and proper green technology is still in the too hard basket for half-wit politicians and greedy-ass corporate vampires.

Must burn you up inside to watch an evil electric car out-drag the fastest road cars.