CAP AND TRADE-FOR IT/AGIN IT?

@CowDoc,

I was outside in my yard this morning doing the morning "hug my tree" routine when I noticed that the tree in the center of my yard had a lot fewer leaves than it did last week so I came in and got on the internet where I signed a petition begging the US Senate to pass a "weather control bill." After hitting the "send" I button I remembered that I had that tree pruned last week.

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@dyslexia,

you an cowdoc , set and I are going to become the pariahs of A2K, cause we question the "settled science" of global warming and human activities.
I too stay away from the "it Aint good news..." Thread. Mostly because its a series of secondary post ups from both sides.
I asked the question on that thread and several others to be shown evidence, (convincing evidence) that the climate change is induced afo human CO2.
So far, most of the climate graphs Ive seen show a peaking of CO2 that is a "following" indicator. That is a critical piece of data that is being shushed.

NOW. My Crux goes to a wider issue. Obama stated that he was going to let science rule itself and not be politicized. I see no difference between hocking man induced climate change and the religious based bullshit "science" of the pst admin.
Ive sent several letters to my DEM senators (both state and Fed) about the issue of climate change /half vast wasteage of our money on dubious "cures" to climate change when we dont really have a firmn handle on the relationship between the climate and planetary perturbations.

I get letters back from DEms that state that the vast number of scientists Accept human induced climate change. I can say, without any reservations taht , in an informal poll of the professional geologists associations and the AUP ' geoscientists that the number is more than evenly split favoring the theory that "THE BIGGEST CONTROL ON OUR CLIMATE IS

1THe SUn

2THE planets wobble and precession.(There are 3 or 4 sets of precessions , cysles , and wobbles that , every 11000 years or so, all coincide and cause a greater occultation in the climate trends.

I agree that Cap and Trade would be a workable methodology (because its been shown to SPUR better technology , including source controls as seen in the SOx case) . However SOx was easily seen as a cause of acid rain and was easily mapped and therefore easily controlled with time.
In the case of CO2,if one would place a coal fired power plant in Greenland, one would never see ANY CO2 plume because the area exudes CO2 like farts in a bean tasting party.

Set has summarized my case ,Im dubious about doing what many of us consider to be a waste of money to attack a problem that may be no more than 0.002% human induced.(That was an AGI number that was squelched last year just after the election)

Im beginning to become annoyed with how both sides of the aisle politicize science to fit their patrons.

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@farmerman,

FM thanks for understanding the intent of my post, I don't think many a2k'ers will.

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On Thursday evening I discovered that my congressman (Kirk R-IL) was on a list of those who were undecided on HR 2454. I wrote to him expressing my interest in clean air, reduced dependency on foreign oil, and creating jobs but was not convinced that HR 2454 was the way to go to achieve any of those outcomes. Kirk was one of 14 R members to vote Yes. Here's his response to my email.

Quote:

Thank you for taking the time to contact me about the American Clean Energy and Security Act (ACES), H.R. 2454.

For 2009, our top goal should be energy independence. I support exploring for energy off our coasts, expanding nuclear power and building a natural gas pipeline across Canada to lower heating costs in the Midwest - an "all-of-the-above" energy strategy. As a Navy veteran, I think our policy should defund the Middle East by cutting our foreign oil bill, giving our troops less to worry about. That is why during the debate on the ACES bill, I voted for the Rep Forbes (R-VA) substitute amendment, based on the text of the New Manhattan Project for Energy Independence, H.R. 513. The Manhattan bill set a goal of reducing our dependence on foreign oil by 50% in 10 years and 100% in 20 years. It costs $24 billion but would eliminate the $400 billion Americans currently spend on foreign oil. The bill backs solar, wind, hydro, clean coal and nuclear power. It enhances research, especially in fusion, bio-fuels, carbon-capture systems and efficiency upgrades. Unfortunately, this bill was defeated by a vote of 172 to 256.

While less ideal than the Forbes substitute amendment, the underlying ACES bill would still lower our dependence on foreign oil by diversifying our energy production. With regard to the main thrust of the ACES bill, I am concerned about growing air pollution, both from our country and overseas. I do not think we should ignore this problem. While the ACES bill is overly bureaucratic and complicated, I voted in favor of the legislation to address these problems, looking forward to major improvements in the Senate.

In 1998 and 1999, I served as part of the U.S. delegation to both the Kyoto and Buenos Aires UN Climate Change conferences. In those years, there was a significant debate about the amount and effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide. I was a skeptic and spent hundreds of hours on the subject of climate science. In the Congress, our job is to learn as much as possible from the latest peer-reviewed non-partisan scientists and then plot the best course for our nation.

There is a growing scientific consensus that the level of atmospheric carbon dioxide affects average temperatures. According to the National Academy of Scientists, carbon dioxide levels rose to a high of 290 parts per million 130,000 years ago, causing a 20 degree increase in temperature. As carbon dioxide levels fell, so did average temperatures. Both Presidents Bush and their advisors recognized this relationship and put forward their own plans to reduce the recent rapid growth of atmospheric carbon dioxide, both here and abroad.

According to NASA, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere rose from a pre-industrial level of 280 parts per million in 1850 to 385 parts per million today. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the rate of increase is accelerating, from 376 parts per million in 2004 to 385 today. The National Academy of Sciences reports that the earth's average temperature already increased by 1.4 ?F, from 56.8 ?F in 1920 to 58.2 ?F in 2007. NOAA also reports that due to a 30% drop in winter ice covering the Great Lakes since 1972, evaporation may be the cause of Lake Michigan's declining water level.

If we examine the lowest-case NASA projection, they expect the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide to rise to 440 parts per million by 2020. The non-partisan Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reports that peer-reviewed scientists expect the world's average temperature to increase by 9 degrees by 2100, lowering U.S. economic output by 3% annually.

The main section of the ACES bill affects entities that emit more than 25,000 tons of carbon annually, roughly 7,400 sites across the U.S. (e.g. the current Clean Air Act covers 22,000 sites). The best way to understand this bill is to look at its effect on our district's main source of electricity, the Midwest Generation electrical plant in Waukegan. If you go to any beach in our district, you will see it on the northern Lake Michigan shoreline. In sum, Midwest Generation burns coal to produce four million megawatt hours of electricity, serving 330,000 households annually in northern Illinois. Under ACES, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) would issue permits for the four million tons of carbon this plant plans to emit in 2012. Half of the permits would be issued for free, half at a cost of $15 per ton, totaling $33 million in new costs (other generators using solar, wind, hydro and nuclear technologies do not emit carbon and would not pay such costs).

Midwest sells its electricity to Commonweath Edison. Under ACES, EPA would refund to ComEd $30 million of the $33 million Midwest paid to EPA. The Act requires that this funding be used to reduce the cost of electricity to lower and middle income families. In the end, Commonwealth Edison would pass about $3 million in new costs on to northern Illinois consumers, or roughly $14 annually per home. As you can see, the costs of this bill are modest, mainly intended to move energy production in the United States to renewable technology.

Major emitters can also invest in plants and trees that remove carbon from the atmosphere. By planting nine acres of trees, an emitter can offset a ton of carbon emissions annually. Many of these investments may be arranged by the Chicago Climate Exchange, using our city's expertise in trading credits for agricultural products. Under this legislation, we also expect total wind power generation to expand at an annual rate of 16%, doubling wind production from its current 3% of U.S. totals power to 6% over the next 10 years. Because the U.S. solar and wind production is still so small, the legislation also contains provisions to encourage the construction of new nuclear plants to power our economic growth.

ACES also increases energy efficiency standards for homes and commercial buildings - but recently passed Illinois standards are already as stringent as the new federal standards. The effect of this bill will be to increase other states to the Illinois standards. By one estimate, such efficiency standards will lower household energy costs by $3,900 annually.

In sum, I would have preferred a bill that focused more on energy independence and less on some of the bureaucracy included in this bill. Nevertheless, the 1990 Clean Air Act signed by President Bush established a cap and trade system to reduce acid rain that proved to be a great low-cost success. In the coming Senate debate, I hope we can repeat this environmental success and aggressively back a national program to defund Iran and Venezuela by reducing America's need for foreign oil.

It sounds like he was in favor of the desired outcomes, isn't convinced that this bill will accomplish it's goals, and hopes that there are major modifications in the Senate.

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It also sound as though he has made up his mind that the alleged mainstream scientific assessment of the impact of human-produced CO2 is correct.

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@Setanta,

Setanta wrote:

Nuclear is do-able, and it can be done safely. I will be interested to see if this now becomes a desirable option. I suspect that Three Mile Island no longer casts the shadow it once did.

Says you. I suspect you are wrong, and all the real estate within an unknown radius, of any nuclear plant, could have lower real estate values. One person remembers Three Mile Island (like a history buff; know any?) and the anti nuclear petitions start very quickly.

It might be better to build nuclear plants in a neighboring country, and buy the electricity from them. That might even solve the illegal alien concerns, if a neighboring country became prosperous from selling us electricity, and then its population might not look upon the U.S. as a desired destination.

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@Foofie,

Quote:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4JhruinbWc

There was an interesting study done by OMB and the EPA project admin offices between 1984 and 1998.It actually looked at the housing values in and around several classes of "contaminated sites". Three Mile Island was actually counter to any property diminution that could have been projected by standard interview and regression analyses. Actually , at TMI, the property values have INCREASEd about the plant. (its achieved some kind of historical aite status and the large amount of sustained OPEN SPACE that the NRC and PADEP have maintained around the plant has caused a mini boom of property desirability (Since no new properties were being developed BY LEGISLATIVE DECREE, the existing homes and properties have shown a calculable PREMIUM, closer to the plant.
In actuality a recent book called"WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PROPERTY", has discovered that, of all "urban disamenities" that can exist, nearness to airports , shopping centers, landfills, and gas refineries cause the gretest property diminutions when normatized from around the country.

Quote:

It might be better to build nuclear plants in a neighboring country, and buy the electricity from them.

I hope your kidding because the idea hoped for is to do away with dependence on foreign energy, no?

The Waxman Markesy bill is kind of a loss to me because its just been voted out and apparently nobody's read the porky stuff thats been included in the last 300 page amendment.

I was concerned about the overall impact of a very heavy cost of the Waxman Bill on the nations economic structure. Unless , the science shows that this MUST be implemented, we are taking a chance of weighing our fragile economy with a whole bunch of new "fees" that will drive the costs of Waxman Marksey into our laps.
There is talk that the Bill will create so many , many green jobs(amounts not quantitated). What it doesnt say is that the loss of manufacturing jobs will probably outweigh that differential by an order of magnitude or more.

An argument has been made that many European countries have adopted Cap and Trade already. Ive asked my Senator (Casey) and several of my Reps to provide any information that shows that EU cap and trade has had ANY effect on the CO2 levels in EUland.

If GERMANY and UK jump off a cliff, are we similarly obliged?

Id like this to get back burnered until scientists have reached some accord. The argument that "if we do C$T and its found not to be fully effective, we will have done nothing of harm" or something like that. On the contrary, WE WILL have done a lot of indelible harm. Itll be like taking our already "Life supported" economy and turning it into Weimar Germany, thats all MY OPINION THOUGH.

Noone has come up with any data that supports human induced climate change, I AM dead serious about that, and Im a DEMOCRAT.Gungasnakey and several other of the true believers believe that I should be walking lock step with Waxmann Marksey(using the GOP mentality where , if you swallow the fly, you MUST swallow the horse on which it is standing). I am a DEM because we make love like cats. We often agree on little but embrace other ways . So, I guess Im agin it and its all baed on the science , not the punditry.

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@dyslexia,

Thank you, even though I despise your pepper growin sandbox of a dust infested state.

NUKE power is a safe and sane alternative for power. I recall reading about how people used to drink crude oil because they felt that it cleansed the system and cured "fluxion" (whatever the hell that was).
ALSO we used to bathe very infrequently, sometimes even seasonally in the belief that cleaning was an occasion to diseases and foulness.
I think we need to put ourselves in a 2009 frame of mind and understand that weve really solved the TMI issues just by the advances in computing power that weve attained in the LAST 30 years. Id love to see the nuclear industry get back to doing what its really good at, providing power . Hell, if the French can safely do it anybody can do it. Weve become our own worst enemies by never learning from mistakes. We just seem to stick our heads in the sand and act like time is a static.

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Turnbull faces climate test
Josh Gordon
June 28, 2009 Australia

PRESSURE is building on Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull to clarify his position on emissions trading after the US lower house passed a historic bill to slash carbon dioxide emissions.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong hailed the passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act through the US House of Representatives late Friday night as an "extraordinarily important and historic step".

http://www.theage.com.au/environment/turnbull-faces-climate-test-20090627-d0kz.html

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Rudd sticks to emissions trading plan
March 10, 2009 Australia

The Australian Government released its long-awaited carbon trading legislation, sticking to its timetable for a carbon market by mid-2010 and a minimum 5% cut in emissions by 2020.

The package of six carbon trading bills will be introduced to parliament in May and the government hopes to get the laws passed by the end of June.
The draft laws state that emissions trading will start on July 1, 2010, and set a 2020 greenhouse emissions reduction target between 5% and 15%, and 60% by 2050.

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@dadpad,

you guys s are able to jump off your own cliff. Im afraid weve boughten into scientific double talk.

Quote:

Penny Wong hailed the passage of the American Clean Energy and Security Act through the US House of Representatives late Friday night as an "extraordinarily important and historic step".

Should be rading as a "Historic LEAP'

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@farmerman,

farmerman wrote:

you guys s are able to jump off your own cliff. Im afraid weve boughten into scientific double talk.

See thats were you and i differ I think were all tied up in this together.
IF global warming is real human induces or not we all need to act together. No more of this "we'll just protect our industry and all the rest can go hang".

If human induced global warming is not real we still need to become less reliant on energy consumption because energy consumption leads to over-consumption of natural resources.

Pretty soon there will be nothing left to consume if we continue along this road.

Back to cap and trade
What protectionism is being provided to US industry?

What seems to have been proposed for Aust. is a cap of some kind (1990 levels). Then Industry determined to be "special cases" (read able to lobby effectivly) such as coal fired power stations or Aluminium smelters are issued with credits that allow them to produce more Co2.
Then they are able to trade ie buy credits from tree farmers or other sequestration method. This will allow the industry to produce even more.

Credits can be bought world wide so Co2 credits being sequestered in (say) Romainia can be bought by an Australian coal fired power station.
If credits could be only bought within ythe country it may provide jobs with the "sequestration industry".

I havn't followed your posts on this issue FM so fill me in...
Do you belive global warming is real or just not human induced global warming?

I have to say the evidence in my own experience (which isnt backed up by science) definitly supports some kind of global warming.

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@dadpad,

Quote:

IF global warming is real human induces or not we all need to act together. No more of this "we'll just protect our industry and all the rest can go hang".

If human induced global warming is not real we still need to become less reliant on energy consumption because energy consumption leads to over-consumption of natural resources.

I agree but these are not linked because 1 will use economics as the weapon to achieve the desired (but undefined)goal. building our way out by governmental or private incentivizing of innovation is the only way that I see . We are going to spend BAzillions of dollars of study on capturing and repositing CO2 in-situ. Yet there is not one dime being proposed for seeing whether this will have any effects. .

Global warming has been occuring throughout earths geologic history , and weve been on a warming trend since the end of the "little Ice Age", weve had perturbations and reversals in the trends (such as the last 10 years).
Solid scientific evidence doesnt support human induced climate change and this worldwide attempt to cap and trade is a not well thought out answer to a problem that may just be out of our capability to control.

Ive been consistently requesting data be provided that shows that CO2 is actually a "leadup" to warming events and not a following effect. EG the arctic muskeg is emitting large volumes of CO2.

Cap and trade is essentially a tax on continued use of fossil fuels no matter how its spread about on various components of the world economy.

I might reinforce my earlier observations that AIR POLLUTION, measurable and tracked to souces , IS a thing worthy of control and cap and trade has worked on various emmissions and has ultimately brought down the costs of control technologies and has spurred on new environmental industries. CO2, not so much. Its a blindly developed commodity, and because its globally ubiquitous, source termns have been "made up" by many reserachers to help calibrate dubious models.

A sub committee of paleoclimate geoscientists is only now working on some of these source terms for ocean vents, bacteriological sources, dissilution of carbonates and natural composting of peats etc. The calibrations of these models are so dependent on better source terms that Im amazed that these kind of data werent bettr known earlier. Im kind of incredulous.

If Germany , UK and Oz want to jump off a cliff, I dont feel that the US has a similar duty , at least until the science IS settled.

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Before i settle in to read the posts of Dadpad and FM, i wanted to point out that we already do buy electric power from other countries, and have since the day one. The first big public energy fight was between George Westinghouse and Nicola Tesla on the one hand, and Thomas Edison and his supporters (such as William Thomson, one day to be Lord Kelvin) on the other. Basically, power generation on a large scale (people all over Europe and North America had been doing power generation with DC for decades) did not get done until George Westinghouse took the leap of faith and backed Tesla's plan for huge, innovative bi-phase asynchronous generators, which produce AC.

Once the plants were built, and it became clear that Edison's routine was just scare tactics in an attempt to protect his near monopoly on DC generation, it appeared that the sky was the limit with AC power generation. There is a long, tortured story with Adam Beck and the first big power generation stations on the Canadian side of the Niagara escarpment, but that's not germane--what is germane is that since the beginning, Adam Beck One, Adam Beck Two and Adam Beck Three have had American customers for their electric power generation. The province of Québec jumped on the same bandwagon, and they've been selling electric power to the United States since they started. Quebec didn't have the Niagara River, but they had lots of excellent smaller candidates such as the Chaudière, the Saguenay, and, of course, the St. Laurent with its huge rapids at La Chine.

Now both Ontario's and Québec's hydros (which is what people have come to call the power companies in eastern Canada) both sell electric power, and are inextricably tied into the northeast grid. In fact, the amount of generating capacity sold to the U.S. has been a bone of contention in Canada almost since the beginning, and Adam Beck Two and Adam Beck Three both got built to respond to public demands for more hydro in Ontario. The power we are now sold is a mix of hydro, nuclear and coal- or oil-fired plants. The Canadian and American electric grids are so inextricably interwoven that a fault in an American transformer grid in upstate New York cause the fail-safe system at Adam Beck to kick in (a sensible and well designed system, the Canadian fail safes lead to a black out precisely because the rest of the grid was a Rube Goldberg system with no built-in fail safes of its own), and the sudden power drop caused power stations to drop off-line like a string of tumbling dominoes, and hence the great northeast blackout of 1967. The recent blackout in the northeast early in this decade was caused by a bunch of venture capitalists in Cleveland who had bought a series of small and many of them out-dated power generation plants, and had no clue how to operate them efficiently or safely. So when their plants started to fail, it caused a ripple effect in the northeast grid, and it shut down a huge swathe of towns and cities in Ontario as well (les habitants got smart after 1967--any sudden load or drop coming across the transmission lines at La Chine--Montréal--and their fail safes just cut off the lines to the U.S.; so sad, too bad, screw you).

So, anyone who bemoans buying energy in any form from foreign sources (i won't even go into the mare's nest of buying natural gas from Mexico, and trying to get away with paying them less than we pay the Canadians--but i find it amusing that for a few years, they just burned off the NG at Tampico, and screw the Americans) is pig-ignorant about where we get energy--and always have.

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My only beef with pollution has nothing to do with global warming nor getting our energy from foreign sources but more to do with our health in connection with our environment. I live a coal mining county plus I live just down the street from a pretty big power plant and I know that the people around here suffer sinuses and other respiratory problems and I just bet it has to do with that power plant. People who lived elsewhere and move around here have said they never had so many headaches and sinus colds as they have since they moved here. I know this is just hearsay on my part and not proof of anything, but for my own part, anything that cuts down on the pollution on power plants is a good thing regardless of the cost. In the long run, it would probably save on health care. If this bill will do that, then I am for it, if it won't then I am not. Don't really know if it will or not yet. Also this is just what I privately think and only meant as an opinion, can't prove any of it, but nevertheless, still think it.

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Cap and Trade has nothing to do with reducing emissions are making the environment cleaner.

Cap and Trade is all about raising tax revenues and increasing control over the free market.

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cap and trade;

http://www.westpointaog.org/NetCommunity/view.image?Id=5737

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I have to say that I'm quite surprised that questioning the science behind the assertion that increased CO2, let alone man made CO2, is causing global warming has not resulted in a flood of scornful rebuttals.

It seems to me this would not have been the case 8 to 10 months ago.

Someone on one of the Sunday morning news shows suggested that the "Global Warming" as an issue has dropped well down the list of concerns of the American public. This makes sense in light of our economic woes, but I wonder if it in any way explains the less than incendiary nature of this thread, and , more importantly, how it will affect the chances of passage of the Cap and Trade legislation.

I freely admit that I am in no way an expert or even a journeyman as regards the science of this issue, but I have read a large number of the opinions of scientists who do not believe global warming is anything approaching the problem the current orthodoxy declares it to be and/or that man-made CO2 is the primary or even a significant cause of climate change. All of these scientists have impressive credentials and none seem to be kooks (I appreciate the same can be said of those scientists that accept the orthodox position), but one of these scientist's opinion holds considerable weight for not only me, but for the scientific community in general: Freeman Dyson.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/29/magazine/29Dyson-t.html

Given that I cannot independently confirm which side of the debate most strongly supported by science, I have to apply less technical filters to the subject:

We are constantly told by the proponents of the Global Warming orthodoxy that there is no ongoing scientific debate on the issue, that the world's scientists all agree, and that only a handful of scientists dispute the orthodoxy.

Quote:

Former Vice President Al Gore (November 5, 2007): "There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat." Gore also compared global warming skeptics to people who "believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona." (June 20, 2006 )

Quote:

CNN's Miles O'Brien (July 23, 2007): "The scientific debate is over," O'Brien said. "We're done." O'Brien also declared on CNN on February 9, 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming "are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually."

Quote:

On July 27, 2006, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein described a scientist as "one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels."

Quote:

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC view on the number of skeptical scientists as quoted on Feb. 20, 2003: "About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members."

Quote:

Agence France-Press (AFP Press) article (December 4, 2007): The article noted that a prominent skeptic "finds himself increasingly alone in his claim that climate change poses no imminent threat to the planet."

Quote:

Andrew Dessler in the eco-publication Grist Magazine (November 21, 2007): "While some people claim there are lots of skeptical climate scientists out there, if you actually try to find one, you keep turning up the same two dozen or so (e.g., Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Christy, etc., etc.). These skeptics are endlessly recycled by the denial machine, so someone not paying close attention might think there are lots of them out there -- but that's not the case."

Quote:

The Washington Post asserted on May 23, 2006 that there were only "a handful of skeptics" of man-made climate fears.

Quote:

UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland on May 10, 2007 declared the climate debate "over" and added “it's completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific “consensus."

Quote:

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said it was “criminally irresponsible” to ignore the urgency of global warming on November 12, 2007.

Quote:

ABC News Global Warming Reporter Bill Blakemore reported on August 30, 2006: "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate" on global warming.

Source with links: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2674e64f-802a-23ad-490b-bd9faf4dcdb7

The reality is something quite different

Over 700 international scientists, some current and former UN-IPCC scientists, dissent from the 2007 IPCC report

http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=83947f5d-d84a-4a84-ad5d-6e2d71db52d9

Over 31,000 American scientists (Over 9,000 with PhDs) have signed the Global Warming Petition :

http://www.petitionproject.org/gw_images/Teller_Card_100dpi.jpg

The proponents of Global Warming have been pronouncing the debate over for several years now, and insinuating that what little dissent that remained was from scientists who were paid by the oil and coal industries.

It's not a scientific conclusion, but my experience tells me to question the credibility of any group that wants to shut down objective debate well before it has run its natural course.

Even if we dismiss the dissent and accept the orthodoxy, the Cap and Trade plan will not solve the problem. To the extent that there is a problem, it is global and any activity limited to a single nation cannot possibly solve it.

I appreciate that one aspect of the support for this bill is based on the hope and/or belief that by taking this action the US will set an example that is followed by the rest of the world, and that if you believe the dire predictions around Global Warming going alone and taking the risk we will remain alone is the only moral choice.

However, the dire predictions have not been scientifically proven, and the risk to our economy represented by this bill are not worth taking.

The Cap and Trade bill is being touted as a jobs program, but this is based on the presumption that the legislation will result in the creation of jobs developing alternative energy sources such as solar and wind. The limitations of these technologies are not being acknowledged and massive investments and subsidies have as good a chance of failing as succeeding. Job created in industries that cannot thrive are not of particular value.

If the supporters of the Global Warming orthodoxy also supported investment in the expansion of our nuclear energy industry I might take their cries of urgency more seriously. Nuclear energy is a proven alternative source of clean and safe energy which would create as many jobs as wind and solar alternatives, and present the better possibility of these jobs being sustainable.

This is a complex issue and sometimes more information provides overload rather than clarity, but I've found what I think is the most objective source of information on this topic on the web. See if it will help you from your opinion.

http://climatedebatedaily.com/

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http://boortz.com/images/2009/06/stop_energy_tax_m.jpg

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@Finn dAbuzz,

Well stated Finn. We usually disagree on everything else but this is an accord that is, to me, similar to whether we both support the "Law of Gravity".

The international counsels of earth scientists and the members of AGU and AGI have been quite vocal in their dissent with their sister organizations(AGU and AGI upport the Global Warmists ). Several hundred members of AGU and AGI have written to the organizations threatening separation unless the science is fully evaluated.

As far as the issue being downgraded, I firmly believe that the good sense of the thousands of dissenting scientists has been having an effect at least locally. One of my organizations has been publishing some "point/counterpoint" debates in our newsletters.

There seems to be a systemic avoidance of nuclear power as a viable progression of energy production. Its amazing how the anti nuke hysteria has paralyzed the govt and the power industry. I work with several power companies on a series of committees and I get to see the heads of their engineering staffs . These guys are totally cheechako about proposing new reactors.Part of the problem is a very mature and well funded "NIMBY" attitude that pervades almost anything new.

Alternative energies are themselves viable but the entrenched corporate interests (IMHO) will still be fighting the research because it interferes with business models. We have enough energy potential in solar/wind etc to serve our needs several times over. Recoverable alternative energies are not only viable but need to be championed by more groups so that it too gets a fair deal on the menu.
The portability of electricity as the energy of the future, is something that still holds us back scientifcally. The technology of using batteries (no matter how efficient) is the limiting feature..

So I can put you down as being in favor of cap and trade?

NOT?

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CAP AND TRADE-FOR IT/AGIN IT?

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