Can and trade: reality or fear mongering?

Reality check:

Cap & trade isn't about fuel supply at all, let alone a limitation on it.

We're not going to stop burning fossil fuels anytime in the near future. Maybe not the in the forseeable future at all. It's not just power generation. It's cars. Millions of them on the road this second, just in the US. People still heat their homes & cook with it.

This isn't France. The government doesn't supply our utilities. Personally, I like the French system, but it can't work with a free market grid, & Americans are still hung up in cold war rhetoric to the point that a socialized power grid isn't going to happen.

When you burn fossil fuels, there's going to be emmissions. The trick is to recapture those emmissions, reprocess them, & resell the products created from that process. There's already working prototypes that separate chemical compounds & make organic agricultural fertilizers. The current scrubbers recapture sulpheric acid & the flyash that carries it. Both are resold for a multitude of purposes, & flyash has been a boon to the cement industry. The possibilities are practically endless. It's just a matter of dragging corporate America, kicking & screaming if necessary, into the modern world.

Will speculators be getting involved in trading the caps? Of course they will. This is America. Welcome to the world of capitalism.

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Originally Posted by techi

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Originally Posted by Rogers

Al Gore is NOT a scientist.

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Yes, in this debate we have politicians acting like scientists and scientists acting like politicians. Sigh.

You are right, Al Gore is no scientist. Yet he was the star witness at the congressional hearings on Cap&Trade. And based on his behavior I'm certain that Al Gore himself does not believe the doom&gloom that he speaks regarding man made global warming. If working closely with all the climate change scientists hasn't convinced Al Gore then why should we believe it either?

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Ermm, most climate change scientists aren't full of doom and gloom about things. Scientists are generally practical optimists. What they are saying is that there is potentially a big problem ahead which we should not ignore. The quicker you take action against any kind of damage being done to a complex system, e.g. disease, the less damage there will inevitably be. And I've got to say it one more time: Al Gore is NOT a scientist.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Precautionary_principle

I agree with you on nuclear energy unfortunately, though carbon capture and storage looks promising. But we should have spent some of the billions we've spent on Iraq making controlled fusion work now.

On a side note, T. Boone Pickens just annouced that he's shelving plans to build the world's largest wind farm.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/07/08/p...arm/index.html

I never thought wind was gonna be a large part of the energy mix but some people certainly had high hopes for it.

Parts of NYC have decent public transport(subway), we need more of that and in more cities. That doesn't eliminate the car problem but it does make it much smaller.

Al Gore is not a scientist!!! :lol:

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Al Gore is not a scientist!!!

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No, but he's done his homework. This has been one of his passions for a long time, & you don't have to be a pro to know a subject.

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Originally Posted by hippifried

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Al Gore is not a scientist!!!

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No, but he's done his homework. This has been one of his passions for a long time, & you don't have to be a pro to know a subject.

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Hmm, his two main passions seem to be global warming and personally using ungodly amounts of energy at his home. You don't have to be a pro to turn the lights off before you go to sleep! :wink:

Al Gore is not a scientist!!!

Sure he is. Science isn't just chemicals & numbers. There's organizational sciences too, among others. He's the pro. Nobody's ever brought more people together on a single issue in such a short amount of time. By putting himself in the spotlight & keeping the organization loose, he becomes the only visible target for the naysayers. No matter what you or anyone else says about or does to Al Gore, it doesn't affect the organization at all, & there's no other lightning rod. There's no attacking the science itself because the only face is Al Gore, & as you say: "Al Gore is not a scientist!!!"

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Originally Posted by techi

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Originally Posted by hippifried

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Al Gore is not a scientist!!!

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No, but he's done his homework. This has been one of his passions for a long time, & you don't have to be a pro to know a subject.

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Hmm, his two main passions seem to be global warming and personally using ungodly amounts of energy at his home. You don't have to be a pro to turn the lights off before you go to sleep! :wink:

Al Gore is not a scientist!!!

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Originally Posted by techi

The entire issue has become politicised to the point of absurdity.

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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gmt_vLZS1mg

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Originally Posted by hippifried

Sure he is. Science isn't just chemicals & numbers. There's organizational sciences too, among others. He's the pro. Nobody's ever brought more people together on a single issue in such a short amount of time. By putting himself in the spotlight & keeping the organization loose, he becomes the only visible target for the naysayers. No matter what you or anyone else says about or does to Al Gore, it doesn't affect the organization at all, & there's no other lightning rod. There's no attacking the science itself because the only face is Al Gore, & as you say: "Al Gore is not a scientist!!!"

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"The usual oil industry flacks and dogmatic skeptics have surfaced to denounce Al Gore's global warming movie. But climate scientists say that, basically, he got it right."
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2006/06/10/truths/

The lag between temperature and CO2. (Gore’s got it right.)
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php...-temp-and-co2/

It's been studied to death. The Gaia principles are well known & universally accepted, except when inconvenient & money can be made from trying claim otherwise. The simplistic junk science is geared to the gullible illiterate who open the window & say "Hey, there's no global warming! It's snowing outside." Remember the Reagan statement that the biggest polluters are all those trees that breath. I don't remember the exact wording, but that was the gist. Trees = CO2 = baaaad. He managed to weasel out of it by making an even more stupid comment a couple of days later while his staff worked on the spin.

I think the biggest problem today is that we've seen so much stupid that we've grown to expect & sometimes even admire it. Sarah Palin is still beloved by a large group & Rush still has his audience. America broke out of its memetic trance & voted for intellect. Let's see if we can hang onto the trend for a while. The short-sighted tunnel vision has grown tiresome, at least for the time being. We'll see how long focus on the future hols up.

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Originally Posted by hippifried

I think the biggest problem today is that we've seen so much stupid that we've grown to expect & sometimes even admire it. Sarah Palin is still beloved by a large group & Rush still has his audience. America broke out of its memetic trance & voted for intellect. Let's see if we can hang onto the trend for a while. The short-sighted tunnel vision has grown tiresome, at least for the time being. We'll see how long focus on the future hols up.

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Well, I would certainly hope that Rush and Palin's fan base have diminished after 8 horrible years of Bush. We certainly did vote for intellect but it's entirely unclear to me that that is what we've received.

When you talk about large scale, base load, low carbon footprint energy sources, only one technology is currently developed enough to be used on a large scale. That's nuclear energy technology. Yet we are not actively pushing for the construction of nuclear plants, instead we are pussyfooting around with technologies that are not currently ready. And it's not yet clear that they ever will be ready.

I hear arguments that we cannot use nuclear because we are not France and because it's three times as expensive. That's not "intellect", that's Coal and Oil industry scare propaganda that might as well come out of the mouth of Rush Limbaugh.