06-25-2009, 10:33 PM
Quote:You've heard of the carrot and the stick? Implementing it by artificially inflating the price of energy that emits CO2 is a "stick". Rather than, promote the alternative energies first being the "carrot". I associate the "stick" approach with tyranny, while the "carrot" approach seems more like incentives. We are all out of carrots, I'm afraid.So, you're all out of carrots, and the stick is tyrannous. Therefore, you're utterly unable to fix your pollution problem, even if it's the world's poorest who will end up suffering for it. Rather convenient, really.
Quote:Why wouldn't it be better to have the government leading by prompting a surplus of *clean* cheap energy? You know, employ a bunch of out of work people by helping to plan and build the infrastructure. Why (in the midst of a recession/depression) would you think that punishing energy consumption would be the right way to start reducing CO2 emissions? This can only lead to even higher inflation, higher than I already whined about in the other thread.Wouldn't it be nice if there was some kind of provision in the stimulus package for clean energy. They could have put that money towards weatherizing houses. Or researching clean energy. Or modernizing the electrical grid. Or developing battery technology. Man, wouldn't that have been great.
Quote:Cap in trade is economic suicide if it is implemented now.As they say over here, bollocks. The CBO estimates 22 billion a year by 2020. That's not peanuts, but if your economy's back is going to be broken by this, what the heck are you still doing spending twenty-five times that much on the world's most powerful military? This is simply not an impractically large amount of money, let alone "economic suicide". The current stimulus package, were you to just set it aside and use it to pay that cost, would last you from now until 2050.
-Jester