Quote:It's not just me. It's also the Congressional Budget Office. But, hey, its the Dems who are lauding Obama as the next FDR, and condemning Bush as the new Hoover. So, Pelosi and Reid must be the new Smoot and Hawley.The CBO is comparing cap-and trade and health care reform to Smoot-Hawley? Wow. That seems less coherent than their usual down-to-earth analysis. Where do they do this?
Edit: Also, there is the minor problem that Smoot and Hawley were Republicans who passed their tariff under Hoover, not Dems under FDR.
Quote:Thats all well and good if *everyone* plays by the same set of self limiting rules. If China, however, decides to burn coal, go nuclear, build wind mills, and drill baby drill they will become the 800 lb gorilla in the world, while the rest of us breath their dirty air and buy their manufactured goods.Fine. Then China will be the problem. But for now, the West is the problem, and has been for a hundred years. If we don't step up to the plate, what incentive, moral or otherwise, would China have to *ever* do it? They would just turn your argument on its head, and ask what possible right the West has to keep China's standard of living down with pollution controls, when they have neither polluted as much, nor enjoyed the benefits of recklessly polluting. That argument seems to lead to global environmental suicide, but it at least seems a hell of a lot more sensible than the American version, that the *future* threat of Chinese pollution somehow justifies the *current* failure of the US to do a damn thing about it. Repeat argument for any pair of first and third world countries.
Quote:I lived through the 70's, and that was not as bad as the current economic crisis might shape out to be. I remember it was a time when the paycheck no longer covered the fuel we needed to run our farm, get my dad to work, and pay for groceries. My mom needed to go out and also earn money to cover expenses, and we spent our summers weeding a 5 acre garden to grow and preserve our own food.Not to belittle your economic troubles from the 1970s, but if you have a farm, and someone extra in the household who can enter the labour force to earn money, then you're a rather long way from "living off the land". This is a deep recession, maybe even a depression; it isn't a return to the bronze age.
Quote:Ok, so lets make sure we have the horse in front of the cart. I don't see a horse yet. Let's focus on getting a horse. (...) I want wind, solar, nuclear, and whatever else to offset the need for petroleum. That would be putting the horse before the cart.These goals are congruent with carbon reductions, and the actions needed are more or less identical. If you institute a cap-and-trade scheme, that creates a direct economic incentive to do exactly what you're looking for: swap off a petroleum-based economy to something more sustainable. What's the issue?
-Jester