Get ready for a lot of contrarianism about the cap-and-trade bill. Yglesias has a pretty good take down:
I’ve heard some clever people who don’t want to be silly denialists about the threat of climate change, and who don’t want to be silly alarmists about the threat of Waxman-Markey, but who don’t have a self-conception as belonging to the same political coalition as Henry Waxman and Nancy Pelosi attempt to argue that the answer is “decrease.” But I’ve never heard any of the people actually charged with the international negotiations say that. As best I can tell, everyone involved with the Copenhagen process, everyone involved with the U.N., and all the climate negotiators from the major European countries are hoping for something like this bill to pass in order to give the international diplomatic process additional momentum.
Commenter Hob describes the rhetoric perfectly:
“Everyone thinks recycling is better than throwing all our shit in the river, but if you look beyond the conventional wisdom of our hippie overlords, you may be surprised to learn…”
Obviously, the only truly rational position here is to do nothing until we’re sure that aliens won’t pelt us with small asteroids traveling at 99 percent of the speed of light.
The Grand Panjandrum
I’m glad Tim F blogs here. Otherwise, I would have to decloak and make Easterbrook my new bitch. Jesus! When are these guys going to quit? … …. ….. …… ……. OK, I got it.
Comrade Stuck
Tell me about it. There was a passel of em huddled on the floor of The House of Reps today, squawking, flapping their arms, and a layin’ eggs.
I suspect they were calling the Mother Ship but I don’t know fer sure, fer sure.
Balconesfault
Have they figured out that plate tectonics thing up in Oklahoma yet?
Dennis-SGMM
Out of nowhere, I thought about Paula Cole’s “Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?”
So, with an ad, here it is.
The word “haunting” would not be misapplied.
Wile E. Quixote
I read the link to Brad Johnson’s post and now I want to cave his skull in with a hammer for being a pedantic little shit.
Brick Oven Bill
I have gotten to know a third generation garbage man and recently asked him about the truth behind recycling. They really do send the recycling streams down conveyors, and people sort out the streams. And then the different streams are trucked to different places. This doubles the cost of collection.
There is no one who is buying much of the sorted garbage these days.
So they sort it, and they truck it, and it sits in piles at significant expense. The truly green solution is to cut a deal with an Indian reservation, and just put all the garbage in landfills.
Comrade Kevin
Al Gore is fat, and has a big house. Therefore, climate change doesn’t exist.
Martin
How about just not buying all the shit in the first place?
Good to see the snake didn’t get you. You cook it in your brick oven?
Brick Oven Bill
I buy very little shit in the first place, but used to be a little league pitcher Martin, and was a good little league pitcher. Do not slide into first base as this will wreck your prospective MLB career.
Anyway, looking for rocks gets old and there were two spent AAA batteries. The first one was a direct hit and made a big ‘thud’ in the side of the snake, who kept hissing at the AAA battery for like an hour. The second was an indirect hit.
He hasn’t been back.
MarkusB
Might there not be a resource-effective point, say just a few more percentage points below the speed of light, where the energy gain of a thermonuclear payload might offset the loss of destructive potential, at a considerable energy savings compared to attaining the higher velocity? These are important questions!
I mean, nukes are sexy. Rocks are just… rocks. Then again, being able to say “I wiped out your entire planet with a rock, dude,” is kind of extra demeaning. So, okay. Rocks, then.
What? We discussed all this last century? Sorry.
Balconesfault
“And then the different streams are trucked to different places. This doubles the cost of collection. There is no one who is buying much of the sorted garbage these days.”
Yes, but by doing this, when prices/demand for certain recyclables changes in the future, either because of higher energy costs, reduced availability of compenting sources of raw materials, or new technologies for processing recyclable materials, those different piles of stuff will be easily recoverable for processing.
Why don’t right wingers just hang signs around their necks that say ‘long term planning sux’?
srv
Look, as Greg Bear so happily pointed out, it only takes one xenophobic race with Von Neumann Machine technology to give the galaxy a really bad hair day.
If we get to that level and we still have Wingnuts around, the Milky Way is pretty much screwed.
Bill E Pilgrim
Okay so if someone points out that the entire housing development I live in has decayed to the point where every house is a crumbling fire trap, the yards are overgrown with now-dead dry grass two feet high and strewn with dry branches and discarded lumber, and basically the entire street is on the verge of going up in flames in a huge inferno that will destroy the whole place, my response is “Well, some of the other houses aren’t going to do anything about it, so why should I?”
I try these little thought experiments to try and understand the thinking, but it usually doesn’t do the trick.
Bony Baloney
Remember a few years ago when people were supposed to cut their six-pack rings so that dolphins wouldn’t muzzle themselves and starve? That fucking rocked. “Mista Soprano, your slip is showing.” Like double duct-taping your sharps containers to protect the beaches of New Jersey from used, exposed hypodermic needles. It’s a belt-and-suspenders thing, right?
99% of lightspeed? The stupid, it burns. A single lima bean or ping-pong ball travelling at 0.25% of lightspeed could do really grim things to the ISS, or a CVN for that matter. This reminds me of the Poindexters who wanted to recover satellites onto strategic targets in Iraq early in the war. They succeeded in far more damaging misuse of materiel — if you have to ask, you’re probably American, but laser-guided missiles and Abrams tanks are pretty well parameterized by the Bad Guys at this point — but nothing beats the applesauce-though-a-straw stupidity of using satellites as KE weapons. Except torturing the hell out of everyone we capture, of course. …How do you say “kamikaze” in Gulf Arabic, by the way?
Woody
It is precisely for that reason that I hope that there’s some kind of galactic “Truly Nolan” pest service that’s parked some irresistible bauble out in the Van Allen belt which, when humans venturing off their wrecked and ruined planet see it and swarm to investigate, acts like a kind of cosmic mousetrap and snuffs the effort…
It doesn’t make sense to me that ANY one species ought, in the inter-galactic swing of things, to be permitted to fuck up more than their own home planet…
Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s
Anyone who doesn’t think that human beings have a negative effect on their environment has never been in a public restroom
Bill E Pilgrim
@Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s:
Hmm. I think we can actually assume that anyone who has never been in a public restroom has had a negative effect on the environment.
Brian J
Part of the problem is that the well has become so poisoned by nonsensical claims that it’s hard for someone who hasn’t had much exposure to this stuff but who may be concerned or interested in it to know what’s a legitimate point and what’s garbage. And yes, the media has been a partner in this, as it hasn’t done its job in separating the legitimate points of debate from the crap.
4tehlulz
@Brian J: However, some say that the media has been fair in its treatment of the climate change debate.
Kafka
I’m all for cleaning up after ourselves- but I’ve been duped it appears concerning cap and trade. Matt Tiabbi article on Goldman lists cap and trade as the next investment bubble that Goldman has been pushing for a while.
http://www.scribd.com/doc/16752803/The-Great-American-Bubble-Machine
Kucinich votes against it for some other very good reasons.
http://rawstory.com/08/news/2009/06/26/dennis-kucinich-votes-against-climate-change-bill/
Brian J
@4tehlulz:
Who? What? James Inohofe? The coal companies and Big Oil?
Nick
I don’t recycle and take few environmentally friendly measures.
It’s not because I’m not concerned about the impact of human actions on the environment–I am.
It’s because 20 years ago I realized that voluntary individual action wouldn’t stop us from overusing resources and polluting the environment. Too many people will not voluntarily take the necessary action, and thus whatever actions I take will essentially be fruitless.
It’s top down regulation or it won’t work.
SGEW
[O/T, kinda]
As far as “aliens pelting us with rocks traveling at 99% of light speed” goes, one must mention the seminal work by Pellegrino and Zebrowski, The Killing Star, wherein they posit the 3 RULES OF SENTIENT ALIEN SPECIES (with a hat tip to Asimov, who apparently helped them come up with them during a brainstorming session at a scifi con):
[from th’ wiki]
1. THEIR SURVIVAL WILL BE MORE IMPORTANT THAN OUR SURVIVAL.
If an alien species has to choose between them and us, they won’t choose us. It is difficult to imagine a contrary case; species don’t survive by being self-sacrificing.
2. WIMPS DON’T BECOME TOP DOGS.
No species makes it to the top by being passive. The species in charge of any given planet will be highly intelligent, alert, aggressive, and ruthless when necessary.
3. THEY WILL ASSUME THAT THE FIRST TWO LAWS APPLY TO US.
Therefore, we can assume they will a) expand as quickly as possible in order to b) watch for intelligent life wherever it might arise so that they can c) control or exterminate it.
In other words, “First Contact” will probably come in the form of a rock the size of Rhode Island hitting the Pacific Ocean at a sizable fraction of light speed. Hooray! [Puts pessimism about climate change into perspective, no?]
malraux
I find that the Silicoid/Sakrka hyper-expansionist early strategy isn’t as effective as the Psilon turtling strategy.
And what’s the fascination with first accelerating rocks to relativistic speeds? Nothing says they can’t just use the earth’s gravity well as the accelerator and just go for volume.
Jay Severin Has A Small Pen1s
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Some people walk in and walk right back out.
gbear
@Nick:
That is some fucked up reasoning.
The Moar You Know
Dammit, I am stupider for having read that idiocy.
The Moar You Know
@Nick: I could make the exact same argument for not wiping my ass.
In fact I think I will. Let’s see how my social life picks up.
Martin
California uses the same amount of electricity per capita today than it did 30 years ago, in spite of the proliferation and drop in costs of TVs, etc. It largely a voluntary effort with some public incentives to help people choose/replace inefficient appliances. Californians use half the amount of electricity on average as the average American.
If you look at who would be impacted by cap-and-trade, California comes out low on the list, mainly because we’ve already done most of the work.
srv
@SGEW: I couldn’t remember the books name, since I don’t own a bank to buy a copy.
What Arthur C. Clarke said, Lost Worlds of 2001:
So maybe we’re in someones superfund site, and they have really long procedures for cleanup.
srv
@malraux:
Haven’t read it, but he may have gotten that from the Killing Star (mentioned above), which posits an alien race using a space-based accelerator to toss micro-meteors (diamonds) at near relavistic speeds to splatter planets from afar.
Brachiator
@srv:
I also wonder whether the guy was cribbing something from “The Long, Twilight Struggle,” an episode of the tv series, Babylon 5: Using their now overwhelming advantage over the Narn, the Centauri launch their final attack on the Narn homeworld, using universally outlawed mass drivers for planetary bombardment.
In the B5 universe, “Mass drivers work by taking asteroids or other massive objects and firing them at a target. Effectively using asteroids as ammunition. The ammunition is accelerated by use of Gravimetrics, magnetics, or mechanical means. By far the deadliest is the use of gravimetrics, as the powerful accelerators can bring the object to frightening speed, passing it through the atmosphere and into the ground far faster than any natural object would strike.”
I agree that Yglesias makes a pretty good argument, but a graph extrapolating anything out to 2050 is sheer fantasy.
For me, the question is whether we have evidence that cap-and-trade schemes actually work to reduce emissions, and as far as I can tell, the answer is a definite “maybe, maybe not” (see the various references and external links off the Wikipedia entry for Emissions trading).
Blogreeder
@Brachiator
Cap and trade is a system to hide the Carbon tax. Politicians like it because they can claim that they did something about AGW and still blame price increases on someone else. It’s a win win. Last night I saw an exchange on Nancy Grace and the speaker for the bill said that it would only cost the average American the equivalent of a stamp a day. How is that going to change anyone’s behavior? What a dick. Last year’s gas prices sure changed behavior. If Obama wants to impose his will on the teeming millions he’ll have to do more than a stamp a day.