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If you have the option of burning rainforest to build a sad farm (they are poor, temporary farms created from rainforests), then you already have the clean air and orangutan habitat. Sell it as carbon offsets to existing polluters until a better system is created, don't destroy it permanently to make far less money for a short time. Duh.
Again, this bullshit idea that thoughtful conservation is antithetical to economic gains is pure, utter bullshit. Not destroying and polluting is almost always better economically if you force polluters to pay for cleanup, or if you look at the big picture. Burn the Amazon or starve aren't our only choices.

I think this whole video is premised on part of the problem with how Obama ran his 2008 campaign. Basically, he allowed himself to become a vessel for every progressive to fill with their hopes and dreams.

Like Cenk says here, Obama said, in these exact words, "I don't want to just play the game better, I want to change how politics works."

Cenk seemed to think that translated into "I promise I will end corporate influence over politics, and utterly break the back of the Republican party so they can't stop us from implementing every aspect of the progressive agenda."

Obama never really disabused people from this notion -- he never said "no no, that's wrong, here's what I really mean" and those chickens are coming home to roost now.

As someone who listened carefully to what Obama actually said in the boring parts of his speeches, and read his books, I can say Cenk just misunderstood.

See, Obama thought he was going to "change how politics worked" by essentially accepting all the Republican counter-proposals from history. He thought we didn't have health care because liberals were too fixated on single-payer, when even Romneycare would be a massive improvement to our healthcare system. He thought we didn't have carbon controls because he thought liberals were too gung-ho for carbon taxes, and rejecting the Republican idea of cap & trade.

So basically, his big idea was that the progressive agenda could finally be implemented, by just selling the Republican solutions to the issues liberals care about to liberals. And by and large, he succeeded in that part of his plan.

The problem he ran into, and still seems to have not fully come to grips with, is that Republicans never really proposed those because they wanted to solve the problems with health care or global warming, they just wanted to use those plans as a cover for their obstruction of more liberal legislation. They never really believed in individual mandates or carbon offsets, they just needed to present those ideas because they needed to pretend (at least in earlier decades), like they only objected to the way Democrats were addressing those problems, and not objecting to the problem being addressed at all.

Now, of course, America has largely been brainwashed through decades of conservative-dominated media, and they no longer feel the need to pretend to give a shit about issues, and can just go straight for the outright denial of the problem itself. Oh, and they also have no problem lying to people about where these policy prescriptions really came from: their own party.

Remember carbon offsetting? Plant trees instead of actually reducing your emissions to meet caps. You could even sell any reductions under your caps to other companies. Travellers could offset the CO2 emissions of a flight. Ofc, only about 30$ of the money actually went to offsetting CO2 emissions and its questionable how well you can actually get CO2 out of the air so it just gave companies an excuse to be dirty. Occasionally it actually more profitable to emit more C02 and simply offset it later, or be particularly polluting one year so that your base CO2 emission was artificially high so that you could really cash in next year.

Not that I'm saying his ideas are bad, its just that market forces often manipulate things in ways you don't expect.

Oh well, our energy addicted civilisation will burn out eventually and then we'll have to learn to live sustainably.

>> ^brain:
I hate this video. She seems to have some good points here and there, but most of it seems like total propaganda to make you hate cap and trade.

Occasionally she gets a bit too dismissively pessimistic, but ultimately she's not saying that cap & trade as envisioned wouldn't work, she's mostly saying that the same evil companies and their lobbyists are getting things put into the existing legislation that will make it meaningless, and possibly worse than meaningless.

For example, I knew about the giveaway part, but I didn't know you could get credits for offsets. They either need to kill that, or regulate the crap out of it.

That's where the new Ponzi scheme will come from -- fake carbon offsets.

I hate this video. She seems to have some good points here and there, but most of it seems like total propaganda to make you hate cap and trade.

1. How does it make any sense that she's comparing cap and trade to the dot com bubble and the sub prime mortgage bubble?! What does it mean that its "coming from the same guys"? What is she even talking about? Why does she automatically infer that there will be a carbon credit bubble that will burst? I don't think I'll be investing my money in carbon credits anyway. Is she just scared of the word 'market'? Or is she intentionally playing off of people's fears of 'markets' in recent times?

2. She mentions that we'll be giving carbon credits to companies that already pollute. She may have a point there. That sounds stupid. If you read on wikipedia though, some cap and trade plans auction off all carbon credits to companies. Other ones "grandfather" companies into carbon credits. Some plans do both. She decides to not even mention auctioning carbon credits. She decides to just rename all cap and trade plans to "cap and giveaway" plans. Nice propaganda.

3. She mentions that people can cheat the laws to receive carbon offset credits. Ok.. lets fix that. Lets get rid of carbon offset credits if we have to. Why would we scrap the whole thing?

If she was just discussing points and problems, it would have been great. But it seems like the whole point of the video is to make you scared of cap and trade. The fundamental concept of cap and trade is still sound.

Before I get into a more serious commentary, I just want to point out that blankfist, supposed proponent of Austrian economics, upvoted this comment:

>> ^deedub81:
More about the Merril Lynch investment bankers I met with today:
In short, they felt that we don't need to worry too much about inflation unless a few more things go wrong. As things stand, we shouldn't worry. Because of all the debt that is being absorbed and written off through the bailouts and the slack that has been created in the economy due to the trend toward smaller leveraging raitos, the amount of money that the government is creating is balanced out.

Which leads me to wonder, blankfist, why are you now upvoting someone who's using Keynesian theory to say inflation won't be a problem? You're supposed to declare that the Fed, and everything the government does leads to inevitable ruin!

>> ^deedub81:
I just spent the last 3 hours (I just walked in the door) with Merril Lynch associates and had the whole economic mess explained to me in great detail. I think I get it pretty well now. I'm all good with the whole AIG bailout. I'm clear that the government's hands were pretty well tied there. I'm all for re-instating some of the restrictions that were loosened in the 90's and in 2004.

This is good news. I'm not sure why you believe it when it comes out of Merrill's mouth, since it's government action that stands to directly benefit them, and not the governments' when it said the exact same thing, but I'll try not to look the gift horse of common ground in the mouth.

(I would quibble slightly about the necessity of bailing out AIG vs. bailing out their counterparties, but it's water under the bridge now)

I'm not so sure about bailing out GM, Cap and Trade, Health Care (horrible timing is just one reason), and no help for the small businesses.

I'm not so sure about GM either, but really the "bailout" is just government providing credit for them to go into Chapter 11, rather than having them be forced into Chapter 7. When you look at it that way, it makes a lot more sense. Fewer people lose their jobs, and lots of small businesses that supply/support the auto industry's infrastructure get to keep their businesses as well.

Health care is probably worthy of it's own full-length discussion thread, but here's the short version of why I think it's desperately necessary, and the timing is perfect for it. We pay more per capita for healthcare in this country than any other. However, our healthcare outcomes rank somewhere down below mid-pack for industrialized nations. In countries with a more intrusive government plan for healthcare, people never go bankrupt for the care they receive, and never have an incentive to avoid getting treatment or preventive care. There are lots of different systems out there, and all of them combine government and private programs in varying degrees (including ours). Most of what's different in other countries is that they have made explicit changes to try to keep a lid on costs, and to remove perverse incentives from the system (such as a profit motive for denying care).

The key pillars of the Democratic proposals are a) an employer mandate to provide insurance (small business excluded), b) laws against denying insurance coverage, c) a public option, where essentially the government sells medicare to people under 65. I bolded the word sells, because it will not be taxpayer subsidized. There would be a separate subsidy for people with low incomes, but they are free to purchase a private plan with the subsidy if they so choose.

This is already longer than I wanted, but lastly the reason why it's important now is because if we don't do anything, the costs will just continue to increase, and more and more people will lose their coverage as their employers drop their plans. Also, we have a huge number of people who've lost their jobs, and are unlikely to be able to afford COBRA payments for very long. There's also the problem with medicare and medicaid -- if costs keep rising like they are, we're headed for a huge set of tax increases in the future, or a huge cut in benefits (and no one will want either). If we fix the cost problem, we may have fixed our long-range deficit issues. There's also the matter of Democrats having the House, 60 votes in the Senate, and the White House, and who knows when there will be a better chance to finally get this done.

Cap and trade I'm worried about the timing on. The plan as it is now is very weak though, and most of the carbon "credits" are being given away for free. CBO says the current plan will cost people an average of $175/yr over the next 10 years. That's about the price of mailing a letter a day. In return it will reduce emissions by 20% by 2021. There's a bit of progressive wealth distribution going on in terms of who pays for it, the bottom 20% income group will receive a tax credit which should actually more than offset the costs of the cap.

As for small business, the American Clean Energy and Security (ACES) Act (the cap & trade bill), yours may not get special treatment, but there will be subsidies offered to businesses who will work on clean energy technology (e.g. carbon offsets, wind, solar, battery tech, etc.).

Personally, I think it's a shame we didn't put that in place 30 years ago, and I don't think we can put it off any longer, but the timing will definitely work against it.

Large corporations use auctions and corporate bonds to increase liquid assets, small businesses use credit card and bank loans. Because of the bailouts, large corporations and banks are starting to thaw and we're seeing movement and lending between banks. What we don't see is increased loans and cash flow to the lifeblood of America: small businesses.

Why do you think we aren't seeing that happen?

How can you not see how terrible Obama's timing is? How can he promise that he won't raise taxes on people who make under $250,000/year with all of the government expansion that he's heading up? How can you not see that congress is out of control?

I've already given my answer on timing, and the "out of control" bit too. The problem with the accusation of "expansion of government" coupled with concern about taxes is a bit misplaced. The goal with healthcare is to make it revenue neutral, and stave off large future expansions. Ditto for Cap and trade. We'll see if Obama can keep his tax promise, but remember, us under $250k people have had our taxes go down so far under Obama.

Knowing how this goes, Obama will almost certainly be accused of breaking that promise by 2012 (The "OMG, he raised taxes on cigarettes!!!" is already making the rounds), but I suspect that he's going to bend over backwards to keep it.

I feel like we've got a bunch of ignoramuses and corrupt punks running the show. They act in behalf of the highest bidder. They cheat on their wives, they cheat on their taxes, they lie through their teeth, and they're stealing food right off of my family's table!

So find better politicians and get 'em elected. In the meantime I would suggest that Republicans have Democrats beat on ignorance, corruption, influence peddling, cheating on wives, cheating on taxes, lies, and theft (from us and other nations).

>> ^Irishman:
It's corporately funded studies/PR, government funded studies/PR on BOTH sides.
Listening to the conclusions of both sides is exactly what the scientific method is.


Actually, the scientific method requires reproducible results from a methodology that withstands peer review. Who counts as a "peer" is a bit of an elitist meritocracy, but suffice to say ad hominem arguments like "Exxon-Mobile funded you" don't factor into the critique of these so-called studies. Generally, the critique of these studies comes from methodology that is either demonstrably flawed, or not explained within the study (which makes the study worth less than the paper it's printed on).

The fact that those junk studies are often funded by oil and coal companies is more of an argument for the political arena.

But since we're at the "I have experts who agree with me, and so do you, so obviously it's just a matter of personal belief" impasse that gets manufactured into this debate, let's try a bit of Pascal's wager.

Maybe Global Warming might not be real. But what if it is? What if doing nothing will cause global famine, and skyrocketing energy prices? Wouldn't you rather try to conserve, and support government incentives for clean energy, in order to prevent it?

If you're wrong, all you have is cleaner air, more efficient use of energy around your home & office, and potentially a source of renewable energy that isn't reliant on finite fossil fuel resources. There'd also be an economic expansion into "green industry" that works on things like carbon offsets, energy efficient homes (and home improvement), and alternative energy which would create jobs and bring profits to investors.

That's more or less the rhetoric John McCain used, before he became Mr. Driller (and likely will continue to use despite that).

The resistance to addressing environmental concerns seems very short sighted to me, even when it comes from those who stand to benefit directly from a continued reliance on fossil fuels.