Standard economics ignores environmental contribution.

It isn't an obsession. It is a recognition. Let someone point a gun at you sometime, and order you to do something, and tell me how much you like it. I didn't, and learned quite the lesson at the age of 18. So yes, I can be a bit particular nowadays about folks trying different forms and degrees of the same basic stunt.

And because of my objection to that event, I choose to live in a state where the law tends to be on my side when I decide to object to such behavior....vigorously. You feel free to trust GovCo to protect you, rules to work the way they are supposed to, and people to follow them. Never forget, the police do not exist to PROTECT you. Their job is to clean up the mess afterwards, and hopefully catch the bad guy and punish them after the fact, hopefully discouraging the next bad guy from doing the same thing.

So sure, I'm all for a topic on its merits, but I will never forget to follow the money, build the science from first order principles, watch what they say versus what they do, and always see the consequences behind what appear to be innocent words, or the concepts taught to all of us in the hopes we will fall for the way some WANT it to be, rather than the way it IS.

 

Sorry, but what is destroying the planet, eh?

 

Sorry to see you don't have the imagination to contemplate infrastructure improvement beyond endless fossil fuel.

So let's make things worse. That makes a lot sense.

It will reduce the rate of warming, uh duh!,

A higher carbon tax means less fossil fuel usage. That is about as simple as 2+2=4. I will not waste time trying to make it even simpler for you.

As to what we do with the momentum of carbon gas we have already accumulated, hopefully some in the pipeline technologies like CCS will begin to mitigate some of the effects of CO2. Unfortunately go for broke denialists like yourself will never let us get there.

 

And if this was my animating concern I would take it to a law and order site.

I haven't noticed any first order principles coming from you, just ranting that environmental services and economics don't belong together along with by gosh, by golly no environmentalist is ever going to make you do anything. All those armed environmental militias, it really gives one pause. LOL

 

You got me there because it takes quite a bit of imagination to see how building more roads for more trips in cars that churn out 8K+pounds of carbon a year each is the magic bullet in saving humanity from extinction. It takes 120 healthy full grown trees to absorb the carbon of each new car we put on the road.

Lowering the standard of living is the only way to reduce carbon output in the near term when your magic technology doesn't exist.

No it will reduce the rate of increase of warming at best. We are past the alleged tipping point, uh duh!

No it won't mean less fossil fuel usage--it just means people will have to spend less on other things to pay for their $5/gallon gas and $500 per month electric bills.

Keep dreaming with your unrealistic imagination. The only way to cut carbon in an increasing demand for electricity environment is to go full bore nuclear which would have its own heavy price.

Says the person who thinks that making it unattractive for shipped plastic bowls from China that people can buy at the Dollar Store is too high a price to pay to reduce carbon output. I bet you are one of those same folks that think that spending $100B more than we canpay back instead of $200B they want to spend on a program is "austerity" as well.

 

Humans are not capable of destroying the planet, even if they tried. This kind of hyperbole, when what you REALLY meant was something more akin to "sorry, but what is changing the biosphere in near microscopic ways" would better characterize what has happened to date, or is even predicted in this century. Humans could set off every nuke they have, and let every nuke plant melt down simultaneously, and we wouldn't even BOTHER the planet....just irritate those insignificant organisms crawling around on the surface. So this then begs the question, have you FALLEN for the hyperbole employed in this debate because you haven't taken the time to think about it, or are you doing it on purpose to scare people around to your point of view?

 

I wouldn't bet your house on that.

http://science.howstuffworks.com/nuclear-winter.htm

 

I bet you are one of those folks who think spending 5 times as much on our military as China is better than preparing ourselves to head off environmental disaster.

 

Us humans, but perhaps I slightly overstated it. After we bring about the 6th major extinction event in our planet's history the planet will still keep orbiting the sun.

 

And yet here we are today with no evidence to support your claim. Blah, blah, blah........LoSiNG

- - - Updated - - -

And yet here we are today with no evidence to support your claim. Blah, blah, blah........LoSiNG

 

I have no clear evidence whether or not your responses are computer generated. Say something that sounds like a minimum of thought process is going on and I'll try to give you the benefit of the doubt.

 

Nuclear winter doesn't destroy the planet. You appear to be confusing a minor change in the thin slice of ecosystem sitting on top of the planet with the planet itself. The planet could take every nuke we've got, and the continental plates will still drift, and volcanoes will still erupt, and the tides rise and fall, and the gravitation pull still ensnare the moon…and I'm betting even life would go on. Just as it has before...

 

Feel free to prepare for all the environmental disaster you'd like, no one is stopping you. But just imagine how silly it is, preparing to environmental "disaster", when it is just as easy to argue that we should be strip mining the planet to create processes and weapons and schemes to save the world from REAL disasters.

 

I like to think that most folks understood I was talking about the biosphere which the experts say would be severely impacted. As you suggested earlier you suffer from an excess of literalism.

 

Of course it will. Because as I said, humans aren't capable of destroying the planet. Life will continue as well. The hubris of humans, thinking they are the only life that matters…when in fact big chunks of human perspective is all about the battle to ignore the obvious…that each and everyone one of us…even ALL of us…are insignificant in the scheme of things.

 

15 years of technical writing, where someone would throw it back in my face if I wrote something that could be interpreted two different ways, is a tough habit to break. Even on the internetz!

 

Yeah, you sound like you operate in a technical cubby hole divorced from simple common sense.

 

Really? What an amazingly amusing statement. An inside joke of course.

 

No, just the common sense knowledge that historically extinction events don't mean the planet is thrown off course in its orbit or blown to pieces.

 

I already knew this, obviously. I wasn't the one claiming that the planet would be "destroyed" by the actions of insignificant organisms changing the CO2 content of the atmosphere by fractions of a percent. And extinctions have happened before, and will happen again. Only goldfish are allowed to be continually amazed by their reality on a minute by minute basis, humans are supposed to know better, and when they do, they don't use words like "destroyed" to describe their effect on the planet.

 

No you weren't. But you do add a curious new wrinkle to the "discussion." We are an 'insignificant organism'. Really? Also are you math challenged? Going from 280 ppm of CO2 to 400 ppm and climbing is a fraction of a percent?

 

Absolutely. In any reasonable perspective, our species, the planets ecosystem, even the planet itself, is insignificant. The universe if quite large, and probably wouldn't be bothered in the least if we and our home just vanished one afternoon.Let alone some species overrun by hubris, thinking that it matters whether they change the CO2 content of the atmosphere from 0.028% to 0.04%. Hubris doesn't even begin to describe how ridiculous this exercise is, to be honest.

0.028% to 0.04%. You can go bananas over such small changes in a particular trace gas in the atmosphere, past, present or future, but I think anyone with a perspective of risk and probability naturally understands that it would be PERFECTLY ACCEPTABLE to run the numbers quite a bit higher, if it was conditional on putting that effort into stopping the real threats to not just humans, but things that really CAN destroy the planet.

 

One can only scratch one's head around the spin that is offered here. No doubt the Ebola virus is insignificant too because it is a low percentage of the organisms around. I'd say if a doubling of CO2 causes an average of a 3 degree C rise in air temperature, not even mentioning ocean temperature and increased acidity, that is significant whatever strange game you want to play with fractions.

 

Of course ebola is insignificant. If people are insignificant, certainly their trials and tribulations are as well.

Certainly the planet has warmed (and cooled) before. Certainly if humans become extinct because of it, that will be a bummer, personally, but it is still..ultimately…insignificant.

The entire hysteria around all sorts of things, economic growth and opportunity (or lack thereof), resource scarcity, climate change, what happens when we die, all boils down to a single, simple, fear. Fear of change. And humans then leverage this fear into all kinds of reactions and schemes and arm waving and it is a reaction to that deep down fear that…humans don't like change. And fight it everywhere and all the time because ultimately, it stands in as a proxy for their own mortality.

the cultists of peak oil are the ones who taught me this, but I am becoming increasingly suspicious of the same issue inside of other fear memes.

 

Your idea that taking down the human race and most species is no big deal is noted. I guess posting on this forum is just some kind of kinky Friday the 13th type thrill thing.