[Falcon] Re: Global Mean Temperature

[Surlethe]

Not to sound like a vulture here, but why didn't anybody ask Falcon to demonstrate why loosing a little liberty (in this case, liberty to pollute freely) is a bad thing, objectively? Without resorting to his pet ideology, that is.

I did, with a different wording. His unstated assumption is that liberty is the ultimate arbiter of any government decision: i.e., if a policy could presumably take away liberty from people or corporations, it's bad.

EDIT: I was struggling to word it in my earlier post. Your way of saying it is better.

[Sikon]

I see no reason to start tearing down civilization, denying development to the third world, and otherwise infringing on people's liberties.

To ensure logical accuracy, one must be careful to distinguish between the question of whether global warming is occurring versus whether or not one likes some countermeasures proposed. They are objectively, logically separate.

For example, suppose one knew an extreme individual who has views including the following:

• 1. Global warming is occurring.
• 2. Nuclear power is unnatural and bad.
• 3. Expansion of human industrial consumption and output must be stopped. The factor of 3+ increase in future world energy consumption that would occur if those currently dirt-poor eventually rose to even half of average U.S. consumption worldwide can not be allowed, unless most people die out first.
• 4. The destiny of mankind is to die out like 99+% of species have in the geological past. Human civilization shouldn't expand and colonize space to help prevent that, rather waiting indefinitely to solve problems on earth first and avoiding energy-intensive activities like rocket launches for space tourism.

If one disagreed with beliefs #2 through #4, it could be emotionally tempting to automatically disagree with the person universally and also disagree with view #1 no matter what. For example, that can happen between people who have formed ideological tribes, particularly if different groups of people belong to different political parties.

However, it is logically a separate issue, and view #1 being valid doesn't really imply any of the other beliefs being valid. The scientific evidence shows that human-caused global warming exists.

I agree with view #1 even while simultaneously disagreeing with views #2, #3, and #4.

I gave the preceding for an extreme example, and, naturally, my point is that holding view #1 does not imply the other views, like the view #3 that might correspond to the "denying development to the third world" you mentioned as a concern.

One discussion of ideological tribes is indirectly very relevant:

I get some very quick reactions to my main page on the sustainability of material progress. Quick reactions, whether favorable or unfavorable, cannot be based on reading the 50 or so pages. They are reactions to my attitude, which is apparent in the first paragraph. For many, prophesying doom if we don't change our ways, is a signal of virtue. Others are irritated by doom-saying and have an immediate favorable reaction. There are at least some who are worried by the problems that have been proposed as obstacles to sustainability and can be relieved by information about why they are not likely to stop progress. Maybe these are few, judging from the small number of questions that I get asking for elaboration of a particular point.
[...]

Ideological Tribes in America
Let's try to get above the battles for a while and look at human ideologies from a Martian point of view.

1. American social thought is mainly polarized along one axis - the liberal - conservative axis.
2. Most people who pay attention to the issues belong to one or the other ideological tribe. Each tribe has its views on a whole spectrum of issues, although logically these issues are not strongly correlated.
3. Here are some of the issues.
* abortion
* gun control
* nuclear power
* national defense
* affirmative action
* multi-culturalism
* what to do about poverty
* what to do about the environment
* gay rights
* global warming
* relative importance of equality of opportunity and equality of outcome
* punishment of harassing or offending others vs. free speech

People's attitudes on these 10 issues tend to be strongly correlated, although logically there should be little connection between a person's attitude to abortion and his attitude to multi-culturalism.
[...]
6. Most politically aware people get their opinions on the separate issues from the media leaders of their tribe.
7. The views about who are the bad guys and who are the good guys are often more influential with a tribe member than any of the specific issues, and they outlast opinions on the issues.
[...]
10. Some scholars distinguish between classical and romantic personalities, the latter supposedly more interested in how they feel than in what they think. I fit the classical model.
[...]
12. In spite of the tribalism, objective thinking about issues and problems does play a role in determining a person's position. The interaction of this with subjective factors needs to be understood. Objective thinking needs to be distinguished from merely thinking up arguments in favor of a pre-existing position.
13. The primary reservoir of objective thinking in human society is professional science. However, many scientists do not preserve their scientific attitude when the issues are far from their own fields. Many do, however, and individuals differ a great deal in the breadth of their scientific study. Some read only in a narrow field while others are well informed about many.

Source.

"There is a principle which is a bar against all information, which is proof against all arguments, and which cannot fail to keep a man in everlasting ignorance—that principle is contempt prior to investigation." Att.

Part of the problem is that there are only limited, expensive options as far as most public knowledge and perception is concerned, although technical possibilities are actually quite good if not for lack of public knowledge.

According to a 1998 poll, converted to today's dollars, while few Americans (19%) would be willing to pay $95/month extra in energy costs for compliance with the Kyoto treaty, most (63%) would be willing to pay $32/month extra.

As implicitly implied by the percentage reaching 76% for a cost a bit less, the public wants to counter global warming and other negative effects of continued fossil fuel dependence. But support for major countermeasures isn't that high, because the public thinks that such would cost too much.

For all U.S. households, the $32/month figure is $3.5 billion a month, amounting to $0.84 trillion or $2.1 trillion cumulatively over a 20-year or 50-year period respectively.

In comparison, switching all current U.S. electricity generation to nuclear power would cost around $0.4 trillion in reactor capital cost if four hundred 1-GW reactors were appropriately produced on sufficient scale with a return to economics like $1000 per kW of capital cost.

Such would be closer to the $740/kW in today's dollars or $146/kW in 1970-71 dollars that was the cost of Commonwealth Edison's Dresden power plants.

Actually, the government wouldn't even have to spend $0.4 trillion. Nuclear power was temporarily the most economical means of electrical generation in the U.S., before high inflation rates in the late 1970s and 1980s ruined new construction due to cost escalation factors of 2 or 3 when combined with typical construction times increasing from 5.5 years to eventually 12 years. Such was influenced in part by a largely hostile political environment, including sometimes several years of unnecessary delays in permits.

References for the above are within here.

Indeed, if the government ever minimized regulatory delays for safe next-generation reactor designs and gave appropriate incentives (perhaps zero-interest loans and tax credits of sufficient size?), nuclear power plants would become again the preferred choice for investors and corporations, out-competing fossil fuel power plants in the market and replacing them until nuclear rather than coal power became dominant.

Since that would cost much less than the government paying 100% of capital cost, cost to taxpayers could be a small fraction of $0.4 trillion, which is a mere fraction of $8 billion to $20 billion annually over 20 to 50 years. That's less than the portion of the $2600+ billion annual federal budget that is indirectly related to Middle Eastern oil dependence. The cost for such a conversion to about 100% zero-pollution nuclear electricity generation could be under $2 per month per U.S. household, before eventually net savings in electricity costs.

Replacing all fossil fuel power plants with emission-free nuclear power would decrease U.S. carbon dioxide emissions by 42%, aside from future growth, proportionally like eliminating up to 2.5 billion metric tons of CO2 out of 5.9 billion tons total. For perspective, the Kyoto treaty was to mandate a 7% cut in U.S. emissions by 2010 relative to 1990, though effectively a much greater than 7% cut due to growth. To also eliminate the other 60% of carbon dioxide emissions would be more expensive but the same basic idea in regard to technical possibility without being unpleasant, aside from sociopolitical factors preventing it from being done in the right manner.

What has prevented even as much change as the Kyoto treaty is that the public does not see anything like the preceding as an option. Such is partially due to some opposition to nuclear power and particularly due to a popular perception that the only options are unpleasant.

Unfortunately, almost all people supporting measures to combat global warming do not talk about how all fossil fuel power plants could be replaced with nuclear power through the right government measures for under a couple dollars a month per household. Many talk about how people must switch to buses, bicycles, smaller houses, and how the modern lifestyle can not be sustained, when they are not saying that civilization is doomed regardless of what mankind does.

A lot of the public concludes that countering global warming and fossil fuel dependence would really suck and/or not succeed anyway.

And many of them fall into the ideological tribe situation where that is indirectly non-objectively affecting their views on the validity of human-caused global warming.

But the ability of human activities and emitted chemical species to alter planetary temperatures is believed by people of varying ideological backgrounds, not just the stereotypical Greenpeace-type. A random example are those who estimate that Mars could be partially terraformed away from an original average temperature of -63 degrees Celsius through induced heating of 40 degrees through 43 GW of nuclear power plants (~ 2% of terrestrial power generation) operating for 20 years, by them producing CFCs that would indirectly liberate enormous amounts of frozen carbon dioxide and raise atmospheric pressure. Another random example is those who estimate that earth's temperature could be lowered by multiple degrees if appropriate by a geoengineering method with 0.01-0.02 billion tons of stratospheric dust injection annually, with sub-micron dust having a residence lifetime orders of magnitude longer than low-altitude dust.

It is known that millions to billions of tons of substances released from volcanoes can affect climate, and it really isn't surprising that a cumulative total of hundreds of billions of tons of human emissions can also affect planetary temperatures. Human emissions of CO2 are headed for trillions of tons cumulatively, and there is also a particularly major effect due to methane emissions from current agriculture, increasing over time.

There are other factors, and the effect of increasing greenhouse gases is unclear at best.
http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar

First, it is worth noting that the views of a small number of individuals should not be considered more reliable than the peer-reviewed consensus of the world's community of scientific experts in the field as a whole.

I see a lot of people questioning global warming who seem to often be motivated by the ideological tribe effect discussed earlier. But one doesn't see a body of experts really equivalent to the IPCC doubting it.

When that web page argues against anthropogenic global warming being significant, its main argument is that the indirect cooling effect of human-caused aerosols mostly or entirely eliminates the warming effect of other pollutants. It uses an older graph, while my graph in my previous post in this thread is from the same original source (the IPCC) but more recent.

The IPCC added up the radiative forcing effect of various pollutants as shown in my graph, considering uncertainty with the error bars. There is some cooling effect from some pollutants, but it is not like intentional geoengineering, rather very inefficient low-altitude release of the wrong substances. Even considering some uncertainty in the exact amount of aerosol effect, the net human-caused radiative forcing is estimated as 1.6 W/m^2 of warming. The total range with uncertainties is 0.6 to 2.4 W/m^2, still net warming.

A bit later in this post, I will illustrate the big picture.

Cosmic rays are a very limited argument in regard to attempting to disprove human-caused global warming. I would quote from the American Geophysical Union here, but it is mostly equivalent to what Patrick Degan already pointed out in a post earlier.

The National Center for Policy Analysis, for one, has this to say on the subject: “The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it. Instead, the warming seems to be part of a 1,500-year cycle (plus or minus 500 years) of moderate temperature swings.”

And the National Aeronautic and Space Administration—NASA—isn’t so sure, either. “It may surprise many people that science—the de facto source of dependable knowledge about the natural world—cannot deliver an unqualified, unanimous answer about something as important as climate change. Why is the question so thorny? The reason, say experts, is that Earth’s climate is complex and chaotic. It’s so unwieldy that researchers simply can’t conduct experiments to check their ideas in the usual way of science. They often rely, instead, on computer models. But such models are only as good as their inputs and programming, and today’s computer models are known to be imperfect.”

One can look at NASA's publications directly rather than what a third party quasi-political organization (the National Center for Policy Analysis) states and rather than selective quoting of someone at NASA.

What NASA's Goddard Institute has found is described on their web page here, a 0.8 degree Celsius temperature rise this past century that includes a 0.6 degree Celsius rise during the past 30 years, which they attribute primarily to greenhouse gas emissions.

I wasn’t referring to the Independent Online article, but to the actual IPCC and its failure to address the influence of causes other than man made mechanisms. Not everyone agrees with the IPCC, its methods, or its conclusions though. http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=9591

The Heartland article you quote claims the rate of warming for this century will be below 1.5 degrees Celsius, barring any major decreases in greenhouse emissions.

The natural tendency is for there to be more warming in the future, a lot more than 20th century warming.

Politicians may talk about reducing greenhouse gas emissions and make new promises each decade since the 1970s, but let's look at historical trends. Much of the world's population is rising out of poverty, with total world economic output and industrial output rising at a rate of tens of percent per decade. That's a good thing. Unfortunately, a lack of effort on changing the energy source (e.g. going nuclear) leads the increased energy consumption to cause a lot more emissions.

In the 20th century, there was 1.0 to 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit increase in average temperature (0.74 +/- 0.18 degrees Celsius). Meanwhile, CO2 had gone from 300 to 370 ppm due to a net rise of 550 billion cumulative tons of CO2 over the century. Over most of the 20th century, the world's population was very poor and mostly pre-industrialization outside of some exceptions like European countries.

Now that the world is less poor on average, emissions are headed for vastly more than those of the 20th century. In 2005, emissions were 7.85 billion tons of carbon, which is 29 billion metric tons of CO2. Each gram of carbon becomes 3.7 grams of CO2 after reacting with oxygen, given masses of 12.01 g/mol for carbon versus 44.01 g/mol for CO2.

At that rate alone, new emissions would be on the order of 2900+ billion tons in the 21st century. Even that is enough for a number of times more than the increase in the 20th century. And such tends to be much an underestimate, as long as the energy source doesn't drastically change. The trend is exponential growth.

By default, emissions are headed for 34 billion tons a year by 2015, 44 billion tons a year by 2030, and so on. Such is not surprising. For perspective, proportional emissions to Americans per capita for the mid-21st-century world would be about (19.8 tons/person-year) * 9 billion people or 180 billion tons per year, aside from the tendency for most people to still be poorer than Americans even then and emit not nearly quite so much. But if 21st century emissions were on average at all above the 2030 estimate per year, they would be upwards of 4000 billion tons.

Total cumulative human CO2 emissions from the past through the foreseeable future are easily headed towards 5000+ billion tons, with an additional huge increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, far beyond the 550 billion ton net increase in the 20th century. Whatever the exact rate of future emissions, they add up over time, so 21st century climate is affected both by 21st century emissions and the already elevated CO2 levels from past emissions.

In the preceding context, for the IPCC to predict a 1.8 degree to 4.0 degree Celsius rise in temperature during the 21st century does not look like a careless overestimate at all, not compared to the temperature rise in the 20th century after a mere 550 billion tons of CO2 rise.

The 1 trillion tons of remaining world coal reserves amounts to enough for 4000 billion tons of CO2 emissions. Adding in the more limited but still significant amounts of remaining oil and natural gas would make that figure substantially higher. Also, if the historical foolish focus on spending trillions of dollars on fossil fuels rather than nuclear power continues, there is such an astronomical amount of methane hydrates available that they might (possibly) lead to many times more cumulative CO2 emissions.

There is also the effect of pollutants other than CO2, but methane levels will tend to rise too, such as how more people will be able to afford to eat meat, leading to more cows, etc.

In practice, temperatures will not increase indefinitely. For example, once global warming becomes obvious to everyone and once decades of conventional energy-conservation approaches to global warming are observed to be insufficient, some countries may finally implement a combination of geoengineering techniques and nuclear energy conversion a little like that I described in another thread. But until unusual countermeasures, global warming will continue and accelerate.

It would be better to switch away from fossil fuels earlier rather than later, letting industrialized nations provide a nuclear rather than fossil-fuel model for developing countries to emulate. Nuclear power can be a lot cheaper than fossil fuels in the right environment; it needs real mass-production. There are a lot of problems with fossil fuel dependence beyond global warming. For example, the U.S. spends on Middle Eastern involvement a large fraction of $5 trillion per decade military spending, yet proportionally not excessive expenditure could have eliminated need for foreign oil imports entirely. Of course, nothing like the preceding is happening, but more people recognizing it as possible and desirable would be better for the long-term future.

Dr. Shariv's digging led him to the surprising discovery that there is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. Even research from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change-- the United Nations agency that heads the worldwide effort to combat global warming -- is bereft of anything here inspiring confidence. In fact, according to the IPCC's own findings, man's role is so uncertain that there is a strong possibility that we have been cooling, not warming, the Earth.

That's not the IPCC's findings. I read their publications. See the graph from them earlier including error bars.

In general, there isn't reason to place trust in this dissenting astrophysicist above the peer-reviewed body of evidence determined by the climate scientists of the IPCC, and the big picture of exponentially increasing emissions is illustrated above.

"I am therefore in favour of developing cheap alternatives such as solar power, wind, and of course fusion reactors (converting Deuterium into Helium), which we should have in a few decades, but this is an altogether different issue."

With uranium from seawater when needed, nuclear reactor technology of today is quite sufficient if the public and government would only provide a little of the right support. There is no need to wait indefinitely on hypothetical technological development like has seemed to practically be the implicit popular plan since U.S. nuclear power plant licenses ceased being granted in 1973. (Some reactors with licenses granted earlier were completed into the 1980s after years of delays, but that was all). U.S. electricity generation remains dominated by coal, only 17% nuclear and 2% renewables aside from hydroelectric. But this is the 21st century. Let's hope not more generations go by before there is more progress away from primitive fossil fuel dependence.

[Sikon]

EDIT:

To be technically correct, the net CO2 emissions from fossil fuel plants might be reduced by carbon sequestration, if such was implemented one day on a large scale. But changing the energy source to nuclear power rather than fossil fuel power has a lot more potential and solves more of the various problems with fossil fuel dependence. For example, fossil fuels still run out eventually and have price rises before then. As implied earlier, nuclear power can obtain less costs in the long-term while obtaining zero-pollution.

[Falcon]

What liberty pray tell are we tossing away?

Economic freedom to consume the kind of energy you want to, to drive the kind of vehicle you want to, to purchase the kind of manufactured goods you want to.

You don't have that "freedom" right now, moron. Almost all manufactured goods, particularly vehicles, are subject to volumes of regulation. That's because, despite your libertarian wankery, ordinary people should not be allowed to make these choices for themselves. They're too ignorant.

I'm well aware that those liberties are already being infringed upon, but that doesn't disqualify me from wanting to prevent further infringement. You are not the judge of who is too ignorent to lead their own lives. I doubt you would want some other arrogent technocrat coming around and dictating your life to you.

Pure libertarianism ignores the enormous complexity of the modern consumer marketplace. Most people have no idea what the fuck they're talking about when it comes to 90% of the things they buy. They trust the authorities to make sure that their safety is being taken care of, so they can choose from a pre-filtered list of options on the basis of luxury and preference. That's why you have an FDA rather than letting people make their own judgments about the safety of medicine by Googling articles. And that's why judgments about the environment should be put in the hands of scientists, not ordinary people.

That kind of paternalism is a short road to tyranny and it doesn't even work to ensure safety. The FDA discovers defective drugs after it has already approved them all the time.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/upi/index.p ... iviro3.xml

Public pressure has intensified as FDA's failure to protect the public from unsafe - even lethal drugs. That failure included the failure to at least warn physicians and the public about severe adverse drug effects. The Associated Press reports that the FDA has asked the Senate committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions to grant the agency authority to dictate warning labels on drugs eliminating the delays caused by having to negotiate with manufacturers. That's a tiny first step toward putting drug safety decision making authority with the federal agency.

The latest prescription drug to be pulled off the market after it killed a patient is Tysabri, which had been approved on FDA's accelerated fast-track for the treatment of multiple sclerosis. It triggered a neurological condition called progressive multifocal leukoencephalopathy (PML) in two patients during a 2-year clinical trial.

http://www.ahrp.org/infomail/05/03/01a.php

Vioxx has been scrutinized for a potential heart risk for several years, but until now Merck maintained the drug was safe. As recently as April, 2004 the FDA also approved Vioxx for the acute treatment of migraine attacks.

http://arthritis.about.com/od/vioxx/a/vioxxrecall.htm

I have no problem with the government making sure that drugs are pure, that they contain what they claim to contain in terms of chemical compounds, etc... However, if we were to deal with drugs like you propose to deal with the environment we would have a situation where each person is forced to medicate on a doctor's orders whether they want to or not. Our society has long held that this is a gross infringement on liberty even when the medical intervention is performed to save someone's life. If you make a sound case for global warming then many people will choose on their own to take the green alternatives and that will cause the change you desire much more effectively than the heavy hand of government.

You claimed that I was motivated by some kind of emotional laziness denial. That isn't true.

Perhaps you should go back and reread what I wrote. Nowhere have I claimed that you in particular are motivated by some sort of lazy denial.

Here is what you said:

Thank you for entirely missing the point, which was that the emotional motivation for your sort of crazy denials seems to be laziness.

It looks an awful lot like your accusing me personally of being motivated by laziness (among other things), but if that wasn't your intent then nevermind.

You're correct that I think profit and ideology (read: lust for power) is a big motivation for many in the global warming movement. I disagree that free markets are anti-Christian. Perhaps anti pop culture understanding of Christianity, but not anti my understanding of Christianity.

Obviously it's not against your understanding of Christianity. I don't see though how you can reconcile "love your neighbor" (remember, love your neighbor and love God sum up the law) with the effects of an anarcho-libertarian society, which effectively boils down to "fuck your neighbor".

The kind of love God wants can't be compelled by law, it has to come from within. Everyone should be free (this is a secular society, remember?) and uncoerced. Then those who want to follow a religious teaching that emphasizes "love thy neighbor" will act accordingly.

I didn't think that I needed to specify how that the efforts to combat global warming would infringe on liberty because its self-apparent. If you are being dictated to by the government on how much energy you can consume (carbon credits, regulations, taxes), how you can conduct commerce (methods of manufacturing, types of products produced, etc), what you can do with your own property (drill for oil, mine for coal, build a new power plant, etc) then the very heart of liberty (the liberty to be "left alone" by the government) has been struck through.

Upon what basis do you found your premise that "liberty to be 'left alone' by the government" ought to be the ultimate arbiter of decisions regarding government policy?

The only legitimate purpose of government is to secure the liberty of the people. When a government starts doing more than that where does it end? If the government can overrule your free will when it comes to the environment then why not when it comes to your diet, your investments, how many hours you work, what type of job you hold, etc...? A government with such unlimited powers is an anathma to freedom, not a champion of it.

What liberty pray tell are we tossing away?

Economic freedom to consume the kind of energy you want to,

So you want the freedom to choose between say natural gas and heating oil to heat your home? Despite the fact that natural gas is 30% more efficent and will therefore cost you less in the long run and will help reduce our dependency on oil. At little cost to yourself to switch to gas.

Then let me make the economically wise choice on my own, if indeed it is that clear cut. (Not to mention that there are other options inbetween like electricity or wood)

to drive the kind of vehicle you want to,

To drive what exactly, a gigantic SUV or full size pickup that serves no purpose but to serve as a dick measuring device against your neighbor? When you could drive a car or small SUV hybrid, which again helps reduce dependency on forgein oil.

I personally get excellent milage and have never owned a full sized truck or SUV. I also don't sit around judging what motivates individuals who do drive such vehicles or wondering how best to get the government to take away their freedom of choice to do so. Everyone seems to love the ivory tower feeling of deciding that they know best how to run other people's lives than they do, but I suspect you wouldn't want someone running your life in a similar way.

to purchase the kind of manufactured goods you want to.

To what end exactly? Perhaps your aware if I'm not mistaken that with the end of oil, the plastics industry is going to go for shit. So most of your personal goods are going to disapear. That sounds like a good reason to conserve to me.

Sure, its a great reason to conserve, but a poor reason to force that conservation at the point of a government gun. As oil supplies contract and prices rise conservation, substitution, and invention will occur naturally and most efficiently. Change driven by economics instead of government decision making has historically almost always worked better. After all, the government didn't have to tax horses for the car industry to take over did it?

When the government uses taxes, or worse yet regulations, to interfere with individual behavior that is a type of liberty loss.

Everything you buy from your TV to your car is already heavily regulated by the government jackass.

Right and I oppose those too, what's your point? If a little liberty is taken then I should roll over and accept any subsequent liberty loss?

Not only are you unable to behave freely economically in the matters directly related to energy, but the increased costs imposed by the government limits your ability to act in other spheres of the economy (since more of your wealth has been spent on energy).

I've already pointed out one case (natural gas) in which you can save money and help the enviroment in one go without unduely comprimising yourself.

Yet I notice you're not trying to generalize that one instance across the entire economy because you realize that "helping" the environment usually comes with sticker shock.

Not to sound like a vulture here, but why didn't anybody ask Falcon to demonstrate why loosing a little liberty (in this case, liberty to pollute freely) is a bad thing, objectively? Without resorting to his pet ideology, that is.

We're a long way from the liberty to "pollute freely." Where we are at is a choice between using persuasion and science to coax a change that might be needed. A voluntary change of this nature would truly set the free market to work in developing substitutes and finding ways to cope with the problem. The coercive change, where liberty is lost, threatens to concentrate more power in the hands of government (even if you think this is a serious problem that should still bother you), allow the government to direct our search for substitutes (which will inevitably lead to squandering a huge amount of resources in politically popular fixes like bio-fuels that have no chance of supplying long term energy needs) and make the problem go on longer, cost more, and in the end probably result in an inferior solution. The government has a much worse track record at managing money wisely than the private sector so I fail to see why everyone is running over themselves to turn over a problem like this to the government.

The historical example of leaded gasoline may be useful here. It was not the "free market" that got of leaded gasoline. It was scientists and doctors who drove the change to get rid of leaded gasoline, and they did so by encouraging lobbying at the legislative level, using mechanisms almost identical to the mechanisms being used now to promote change on global warming.

Consumers were and are ignorant and stupid, and would have continued buying leaded gasoline indefinitely if they were allowed to. And the people who pooh-poohed concerns over leaded gasoline 30 years ago were the same kind of people who blithely handwave away environmental concerns about greenhouse gases today.

Why look so far afield? A better analogy for what's going on now would be the government and activists who were instrumental in banning DDT.

Thirty years ago, on June l4, l972, the Environmental Protection Agency's first administrator, William Ruckelshaus, rebuffed the advice of his scientific advisors and announced a ban on virtually all domestic uses of the pesticide DDT. This was done despite the fact that DDT had earlier been hailed as a "miracle" chemical that repelled and killed mosquitoes that carry malaria, a disease that can be fatal to humans.

Ruckelshaus (who later worked with the Environmental Defense Fund, the very activist organization that had urged the ban) cited health concerns in defending his decision. He reported that DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichlorethane) killed many beneficial insects, birds, and aquatic animals — not just malarial mosquitoes — and that it "presents a carcinogenic risk" to humans, based on laboratory studies showing increased cancer risk in mice fed extremely high doses. The scientific community was outspoken in opposing such a ban, noting that there was no evidence that DDT posed a hazard to human health. Yet the ban still took effect.

Now, thirty years later, it is vividly apparent that DDT was not hazardous to human health and that the banning of its domestic use led to its diminished production in the United States — and less availability of DDT for the developing world. The results were disastrous: at least 1-2 million people continue to die from malaria each year, 30-60 million or more lives needlessly lost since the ban took effect. This is especially tragic since there was hope of eradicating the disease altogether when DDT was first introduced and its potential was recognized.

Incredibly, despite the harsh lessons that should have been learned from the banning of DDT, governments around the world now stand poised to compound the error by enacting a global ban on DDT and related chemicals. Today, though DDT is banned in the U.S. and its use is discouraged by influential international aid agencies, some governments are at least able to use old stockpiles of the chemical or make a case for carefully controlled outdoor use of the chemical in emergency circumstances (though spraying homes would be more effective).

http://www.acsh.org/healthissues/newsID ... detail.asp

Just because you think the scientific community and the government synch up on this issue is no reason for you to believe that they always will. Do you really want the government to have the power to compel bad science? If you give it the power to compel good science then you necessarily give it the other dreaded power too. If science has the facts on its side then make the case to the people, invite those who are critical and demonstrate how they're wrong instead of freezing them out of the system and reacting to dissent like some kind of protectors of the orthodoxy. The people will make the right decision without dangerously empowering government. (If bans on lead gas, paint, etc, were lifted now do you seriously think everyone would go back to using them? The ban was a reflection of what the people were already coming to want, thus making it mostly redundant in terms of affecting the real world, but no less dangerous in setting a precedent for government power)

Oh, and in regards to Nir Shaviv's paper which was seized upon by Denial Inc:

Linky
Shaviv and Veizer (2003) published a paper in the journal GSA Today, where the authors claimed to establish a correlation between cosmic ray flux (CRF) and temperature evolution over hundreds of millions of years, concluding that climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide was much smaller than currently accepted. The paper was accompanied by a press release entitled “Global Warming not a Man-made Phenomenon", in which Shaviv was quoted as stating,“The operative significance of our research is that a significant reduction of the release of greenhouse gases will not significantly lower the global temperature, since only about a third of the warming over the past century should be attributed to man”. However, in the paper the authors actually stated that "our conclusion about the dominance of the CRF over climate variability is valid only on multimillion-year time scales". Unsurprisingly, there was a public relations offensive using the seriously flawed conclusions expressed in the press release to once again try to cast doubt on the scientific consensus that humans are influencing climate. These claims were subsequently disputed in an article in Eos (Rahmstorf et al, 2004) by an international team of scientists and geologists (including some of us here at RealClimate), who suggested that Shaviv and Veizer's analyses were based on unreliable and poorly replicated estimates, selective adjustments of the data (shifting the data, in one case by 40 million years) and drew untenable conclusions, particularly with regard to the influence of anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations on recent warming (see for example the exchange between the two sets of authors). However, by the time this came out the misleading conclusions had already been publicized widely.

So we've got the scentific equilivant of he said she said. How nice, everyone can believe what they want to believe and accuse the other side of fixing the data. http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar

No we do not. We have a case where a scientist's words are being misquoted to force them to fit a particular argument. That is called "dishonesty".

The article at that link is written by the scientist in question as near as I can tell (it says "By:Nir J. Shaviv). Surely he isn't misquoting himself.

Individuals making the decisions in the economy means that each individual has to make that decision. By your argument the dictator is an individual so his command economy must be capitalism.

Capitalism is a way of distributing wealth, but that doesn't mean that it isn't about individuals making economic decisions rather than government. It isn't about distributing resources by some arbitrary notion of need or merit either. It isn't up for you or I to decide that someone else is making a wrong decision with their property and then set about to use the coercive force of government to dictate our will upon them. That kind of authoritarianism and paternalism have no place in a free society.

You fucking think I don't know that, birdseed-for-brains?!! I just said that capitalism is a way of distributing wealth according to true need or merit, and didn't elaborate on that. Including who gets to say what that need or merit is — in capitalism, the parties involved in the transaction get to decide need or merit. If A doesn't need a flemmik, then he doesn't buy it. If B decides A doesn't deserve to own his flemmik, he doesn't sell it to A. Sounds like capitalism to me, you flying turkey.

You tried to assert that capitalism couldn't work unless all costs are assessed and counted for. You included climate change in that category. You then implied that it was necessary for a third party (government) to come in and impose those costs on one part of the economy (business). You also made an incidental implication that individuals were in the government so that therefore government interference in the economy was still capitalistic individual decision making (but I assume you abandoned that position since you didn't mention it). Now, to tie back to the original point: the kind of government intervention you seem to favor here is anti-capitalist because it artificially tries to impose costs on one segment of the economy. What you don't seem to realize is that in a free market the costs of global warming, if any, will be distributed within that economy automatically without any government intervention (If people are persuaded to buy more expensive but fuel efficient cars, for example, they will pay the expense for that just as surely as if you taxed the car manufacturer or forced the manufacturer to produce those cars and then the manufacturer passed that cost on in higher prices). The only difference is that the money won't have to travel through the hands of the government and get squandered in its bureaucracy, nor will the government get to flex its regulatory muscles.

A free market necessarily entails the prevention of fraud or force. That is the true legitimate function of government in a free market.

EXACTLY, YOU BASTED BUZZARD!! Quickly, now, who sets the standard of decent behavior? That's right: THE PEOPLE! People decide that it's unseemly to have (their) children work in sweatshops, thus you get child labor laws. People decide that certain products to have a certain expected standard of safety, and thus you get safety regulations. People decide that workers should have a reasonable expectation of safety while on the job, thus you get standards of job safety.

The problem here is when the people try to force the dissenting minority to conform to their standards. The free market already made those judgments; no one was forced to work in substandard conditions, they could quit. No one was forced to buy certain products, they could buy alternatives. Businessmen didn't want to upset their customers or workers, they want smooth production and consumption. What happened is the majority decided it knew best and limited people's freedom to work and consume as they saw fit because the majority had qualms with it. Let me decide for myself in what conditions I want to work, for what wage, and for how many hours.

The people decide whether global warming (and environmental damage) is important to them, thus you get green taxes and environmental regulations.

Free markets take these group statements of what people consider important to them and redistribute weath accordingly. Companies that can deliever on these requirements get rewarded; those that cannot get penalized.

Its the same old story of the majority forcing its tyranny on the minority. What are you going to do some day when you're in the minority and all that power is used against you and your interests?

A free market is not one which is compelled in any way by force. Only mutual agreement in an uncoerced setting can produce a free market. Companies should be rewarded or penalized by the consumers voting with their wallets not by voters using the government to hit companies in their wallets.

However, that government action can't be generalized to legitimize any government involvement in the free market. You can refer to the Gilded Age all you want, but it doesn't support your argument. There, the government often intervened on the side of big business. That kind of intervention is just as harmful as government intervention to step on big business.

Fuck you, you deranged raptor turd. Why do you think the government came to the aid of big business? Because the government was in big business's pocket!

You missed the point. Government intervention to help the little guy is just as bad as government intervention to help the big guy. Its best for the government to have no power to unfairly favor one person over another at all.

The free market bears the cost of everything,

No, it doesn't. You'd be amazed how many services companies get absolutely free, or at reduced cost.

Nothing is free, someone always pays for it. Resources are limited after all.

the difference is that you want to step in and decide from which pocket that expense should come. If there is a problem (and there is a problem, energy is limited and will run out forcing a switch regardless of global warming) then the free market will, on its own, develop a solution.

Bullshit. I have faith in the free market, but I recognize its limitations. The free market, especially in America, can and has been extremely short-sighted.

The government can and has been just as short sighted as any market, plus more inefficient and more apt to be arbitrary and tyrannical because it has the legitimate use of force whereas markets do not.

Government intervention will merely impede, delay, and thwart the market's natural inclination to adapt to new times.

Bullshit. If regulations can only impede businesses, then why do so many businesses boast exceeding those regulations as a selling point?

The regulations are moot if the market demands a product exceeding them. It isn't really government intervention if nothing changes now is it?

I can't think of anything done efficiently by the government, can you?

Roads. Police. Universal, free health care. That's for starters.

Sigh, if I said something like that there would be a dozen posts screaming "proof."

Anyway, you think roads are maintained or constructed efficiently? Perhaps you've never heard of the big dig "Although the project was estimated at $2.8 billion in 1985, over $14.6 billion had been spent in federal and state tax dollars as of 2006."

True, the good examples don't occur in America, but you have to broaden your horizons: these things can be done correctly.

I've failed to see evidence of them happening efficiently anywhere. I'm willing to put up with inefficient roads and police since those things are strongly tied to the government's ability to defend liberty. Health care on the other hand is something each consumer should purchase on their own. Like everything else, health care resources are limited and should be distributed to those who can most afford to pay for them not to whoever shows up first. This naturally conserves limited resources since people won't go to the doctor unless they are truly ill instead of clogging up the system for every sniffle. Plus, when resources are limited it is fairer to bestow them upon those who can pay first because typically those who can pay have done more for society and are more productive. I wish that health care could be unlimited for everyone to enjoy, but it can't be.

Even worse, the government, with its monopoly on power, never goes out of business. At least in the free market if a company becomes wasteful and inefficient it goes broke to free up resources for fresh blood.

And misbehaving politicians get booted out of office and replaced with fresh blood. Your point?

When a company squanders resources or displeases the public with what it produces the effects are usually fairly swift and connectable. When the government does it the people don't know who to blame often time. Plus, if the government is wasting billions on some pet project the people are not seeing the results in the form of an inferior product and the government has a captive source of revenue that the company does not. The bottom line is that if the store down the street displeases you you'll stop going to it, but if the government does something displeasing it may be stuck down in the middle of an appropriations bill that doesn't affect you directly and you will never find out unless you're unusually dilligent.

They're no more responsible for any of it than the people who buy their products.

Sure they are! The company has direct control over what process it uses to manufacture a product. It has direct control of what resources it uses to make the product, and direct control of whether it decides to market a product with all its flaws and benefits. They are also responsible for all greenhouse gasses they pump into the atmosphere.

The people have direct control over whether they buy said product or not and trust me, without people buying said product the company won't manufacture it.

They're also in the best position with money, people, and organization to find solutions to the problem,

You'll often find they need a firm kick in the seat to do it, though.

A firm kick best delivered by the people, not the government.

but they won't be able to when you tax them into olbivian.

Sell your false dilemmas somewhere else. Nobody's talking about taxing them into oblivion.

That's what often ends up happening though. No business is going to run unless it can make good profits; there's too much expense and risk.

Not to mention that it isn't the government's job to run around making subjective statements about who is responsible for what. If 20 million people buy a car and pollute the atmosphere it was mostly their fault. The company was merely fulfilling a market that the people created.

What about all the other 20 million people who didn't buy that car, but opted for the more fuel efficient car? They get hit too. We're all in this problem together, whether or not any individual helped cause it, or how much they contributed to the problem.

Don't create another problem trying to solve this supposed problem. If there's really a problem I'd like to fix it too, but not by empowering the government to run my life.

The free market on the other hand is a truely democratic place where millions of individuals dictate what goods are manufactured, traded, etc... A rich guy can lobby Congress and get a bill passed, but if someone doesn't want to buy his product he is out of luck.

Bullshit. You've swung straight from betraying little faith in the free market to suckling its cock and calling it "daddy". Free markets are only this democratic when everyone has all the relevant data at their command. But a big powerful company has much power to limit control of information, for starters, and the customer, in his ignorance, buys his product anyway.

Why must everyone have all the relevant data? Everyone need only have the option of getting the relevant data. If they choose not to then their ability to voice their opinion (however uninformed) is not diminished. Furthermore, people have the most incentive to inform themselves in a free market because their actions will most directly impact themselves. The government should be there to prevent fraud, remember? That includes preventing a company from hiding information from the public.

Funny, that's exactly MY argument for green technologies, environmental regulation, and so forth. You think regulating companies will induce industrial ennui and waste? Bullshit. They'll rise to the challenge.

They'll rise to the money and if the government invests the money poorly you'll get a poor result.

Thank you, Captain Obvious. My model has goverment translating the challenge into money, so that the company that rises to the challenge rises to the money, and vice versa. Now, care to elaborate why a private company would be able to see the correct path more easily than governments, especially given that the companies hasn't initiated this change themselves?

The companies are motivated by profit. If they get profit from doing research that the government is funding then they'll do it, regardless of whether its a good idea. If they get profit from coming up with the best solution as quickly as possible so that they can mass market it then they'll do that instead. The government, of course, doesn't care if it wastes money, especially if its to help the politicians get re-elected, so the money it spends is more likely to go to an idea that will serve their purpose of dishing out pork rather than the purpose of finding the best solution.

Sikon - That's all lovely, but in the end its still just speculation. For the record I am all for switching to nuclear power, having electric cars, and in all ways removing ourselves from fossil fuels since they are limited and insecure. What I am not for is using a supposed concensus that advocates an extreme view of climate change as a justification for arbitrary increase in government power to tax, regulate, and redistribute wealth. Especially when the peer reviewed body seems to have a political and economic agenda driving their solutions to the problem that they identified and that militantly shouts down everyone who disagrees rather than persuading them. That might not make you suspicious, but it certainly does me. You've choosen to put your faith in a body of self-reinforcing individuals (getting in lock step behind an agenda is not synonymous with truth); I think the detractors have a good enough argument to defeat any justification for plans like Kyoto, for new taxes on energy, etc... I believe that we can voluntarily come up with alternative energies using an uncoerced free market that will be good for liberty and economics and the environment.

[Aaron]

Then let me make the economically wise choice on my own, if indeed it is that clear cut. (Not to mention that there are other options inbetween like electricity or wood)

Which are all more expensive than natural gas. If it's the economically wise choice than why do you need to make the choice on your own?

I personally get excellent milage and have never owned a full sized truck or SUV. I also don't sit around judging what motivates individuals who do drive such vehicles or wondering how best to get the government to take away their freedom of choice to do so. Everyone seems to love the ivory tower feeling of deciding that they know best how to run other people's lives than they do, but I suspect you wouldn't want someone running your life in a similar way.

Unlike you I accept government regulation and "liberty" restricting laws if they serve a greater purpose. If the government mandated that all cars had to be hybrids by x year, when it was time to trade in my car I'd buy a hybrid. Canada has all kinds of laws that others consider "nanny laws" but I don't have a problem with. People are stupid and need regulation for their own good.

Sure, its a great reason to conserve, but a poor reason to force that conservation at the point of a government gun. As oil supplies contract and prices rise conservation, substitution, and invention will occur naturally and most efficiently. Change driven by economics instead of government decision making has historically almost always worked better. After all, the government didn't have to tax horses for the car industry to take over did it?

Except we had the resources to change from horses to cars. Unless someone comes along to correct me I haven't seen anything to indicat that anything will replace plastics. How do you suppose that we build new computer casings? Out of glass? The free market won't fix everything you know, it seems quite happy to cruise along in ignorant bliss. There is the real possibility that nothing will be done to change things until it is to late. Partially because of fools like you.

Right and I oppose those too, what's your point? If a little liberty is taken then I should roll over and accept any subsequent liberty loss?

You haven't adequetly explained why losing your liberty in these matters is serious.

Yet I notice you're not trying to generalize that one instance across the entire economy because you realize that "helping" the environment usually comes with sticker shock.

Why don't you prove that adopting enviromentally friendly practices will destroy the economy instead of screeching about it.

[Surlethe]

It looks an awful lot like your accusing me personally of being motivated by laziness (among other things), but if that wasn't your intent then nevermind.

Read it again: "Thank you for entirely missing the point, which was that the emotional motivation for your sort of crazy denials seems to be laziness."

Obviously it's not against your understanding of Christianity. I don't see though how you can reconcile "love your neighbor" (remember, love your neighbor and love God sum up the law) with the effects of an anarcho-libertarian society, which effectively boils down to "fuck your neighbor".

The kind of love God wants can't be compelled by law, it has to come from within. Everyone should be free (this is a secular society, remember?) and uncoerced. Then those who want to follow a religious teaching that emphasizes "love thy neighbor" will act accordingly.

I'm not talking about the love being compelled by law; I'm talking about the citizens who make up the government not demonstrating that love to citizens simply because they're in government. Put bluntly, hardcore libertarianism does not at all permit sympathy to be a factor in government policies, whereas Christianity demands sympathy for all men.

Upon what basis do you found your premise that "liberty to be 'left alone' by the government" ought to be the ultimate arbiter of decisions regarding government policy?

The only legitimate purpose of government is to secure the liberty of the people.

Why? By your definition of liberty, the only legitimate state of a government is nonexistence.

When a government starts doing more than that where does it end? If the government can overrule your free will when it comes to the environment then why not when it comes to your diet, your investments, how many hours you work, what type of job you hold, etc...?

This is a classic slippery slope argument. Do you realize why it's wrong?

A government with such unlimited powers is an anathma to freedom, not a champion of it.

Naturally; this is why deciding how much power each government ought to have is a balancing act each society has to walk. At the same time, there's no reason a government can't have more powers than you seem to prefer: there's no reason to consider government power to interfere in daily life to be an all-or-nothing affair.

[Patrick Degan]

So we've got the scentific equilivant of he said she said. How nice, everyone can believe what they want to believe and accuse the other side of fixing the data. http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar

No we do not. We have a case where a scientist's words are being misquoted to force them to fit a particular argument. That is called "dishonesty".

The article at that link is written by the scientist in question as near as I can tell (it says "By:Nir J. Shaviv). Surely he isn't misquoting himself.

You fucking well know who's doing the misquoting and who's cherrypicking evidence to try to handwave away human intervention in global warming.

But by all means, keep trying to pile up your Wall of Ignorance.

[Patrick Degan]

This requires a response:

Just because you think the scientific community and the government synch up on this issue is no reason for you to believe that they always will. Do you really want the government to have the power to compel bad science? If you give it the power to compel good science then you necessarily give it the other dreaded power too. If science has the facts on its side then make the case to the people, invite those who are critical and demonstrate how they're wrong instead of freezing them out of the system and reacting to dissent like some kind of protectors of the orthodoxy.

What a load of horseshit. It's already been pointed out to you in this thread that the government is not directing the course of the studies in question and that they are being conducted under independent authority and review. Furthermore, science is a matter of cold hard fact, not one of democratic choice between competing opinions. The rest of your spew is nothing more than doctrinaire paranoia, which seems to be all you are capable of.

The people will make the right decision without dangerously empowering government. (If bans on lead gas, paint, etc, were lifted now do you seriously think everyone would go back to using them? The ban was a reflection of what the people were already coming to want, thus making it mostly redundant in terms of affecting the real world, but no less dangerous in setting a precedent for government power)

No, the bans were the result of the gasoline makers not making the "right" decisions but the ones which maximised their narrow consideration of profits instead. It was also the result of the demonstrated harm lead levels in the general environment as well as in the home were causing.

And you can take your continual bleating about "dangerously empowering government" and shove it up your ass. The government's entire function is to protect the citizenry as much as to safeguard and enforce their liberties under the framework of law. The government is already empowered to act upon those imperatives by virtue of what is laid down in constitutional law and by virtue of the peoples' consent. And as corporations are large and powerful entities which can and regularly do ignore the wishes of the people at large as well as societal good, government acts as the necessary counterbalance to that power. That's the way things work in the Real World as opposed to Libertarian Fantasy-Land™.

[Darth Wong]

You don't have that "freedom" right now, moron. Almost all manufactured goods, particularly vehicles, are subject to volumes of regulation. That's because, despite your libertarian wankery, ordinary people should not be allowed to make these choices for themselves. They're too ignorant.

I'm well aware that those liberties are already being infringed upon, but that doesn't disqualify me from wanting to prevent further infringement.

I don't give a fuck what you personally want. If we're talking about what's best for an entire society, you need to produce evidence that your anarcho-libertarian bullshit would actually work in the real world. Because right now, it's about as plausible in the real world as Marxism: another worldview based on mamby-pamby nonsense about how people should ideally think even though they don't.

You are not the judge of who is too ignorent to lead their own lives.

Why not? And since when is it impossible to "lead your own life" just because science experts are making decisions related to science, which are beyond your knowledge?

I doubt you would want some other arrogent technocrat coming around and dictating your life to you.

On the contrary, I allow that all of the time. As engineers, we are subject to considerable regulatory oversight, and due to the enormous complexity of modern science and technology, we are forced to put a certain amount of trust in the "technocrats", as you so derisively call them. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot who is so truly ignorant that he doesn't even recognize how little he knows.

That kind of paternalism is a short road to tyranny and it doesn't even work to ensure safety. The FDA discovers defective drugs after it has already approved them all the time.

The fact that the FDA is not perfect does not mean that the situation would somehow improve with even less regulatory oversight, you idiot.

[Falcon]

Then let me make the economically wise choice on my own, if indeed it is that clear cut. (Not to mention that there are other options inbetween like electricity or wood)

Which are all more expensive than natural gas. If it's the economically wise choice than why do you need to make the choice on your own?

Wood isn't more expensive if you have a supply on your own land. I'm not aware of the relative rates between the other options, but it doesn't matter. There are other considerations beyond economics such as convienence or personal preference that should be respected. You can't always quantify costs when personal preference comes into play.

I personally get excellent milage and have never owned a full sized truck or SUV. I also don't sit around judging what motivates individuals who do drive such vehicles or wondering how best to get the government to take away their freedom of choice to do so. Everyone seems to love the ivory tower feeling of deciding that they know best how to run other people's lives than they do, but I suspect you wouldn't want someone running your life in a similar way.

Unlike you I accept government regulation and "liberty" restricting laws if they serve a greater purpose. If the government mandated that all cars had to be hybrids by x year, when it was time to trade in my car I'd buy a hybrid. Canada has all kinds of laws that others consider "nanny laws" but I don't have a problem with. People are stupid and need regulation for their own good.

Who's greater purpose? Lot's of tyrants have championed the greater purpose beyond the individual, but when it comes down to it we shouldn't be able to force someone else to serve something that we think is for a greater purpose. I doubt you would want to serve in the things I consider a greater purpose so afford those who disagree with your greater purpose the ability to opt out.

Sure, its a great reason to conserve, but a poor reason to force that conservation at the point of a government gun. As oil supplies contract and prices rise conservation, substitution, and invention will occur naturally and most efficiently. Change driven by economics instead of government decision making has historically almost always worked better. After all, the government didn't have to tax horses for the car industry to take over did it?

Except we had the resources to change from horses to cars. Unless someone comes along to correct me I haven't seen anything to indicat that anything will replace plastics. How do you suppose that we build new computer casings? Out of glass? The free market won't fix everything you know, it seems quite happy to cruise along in ignorant bliss. There is the real possibility that nothing will be done to change things until it is to late. Partially because of fools like you.

I'd rather have individuals seeking their own self interest trying to come up with a substitute for plastic than a bunch of self interested politicians dedicating tax dollars to their cronies to come up with a substitute. I've seen nothing to suggest that the government is ever going to do a better job at innovating than the free market.

Right and I oppose those too, what's your point? If a little liberty is taken then I should roll over and accept any subsequent liberty loss?

You haven't adequetly explained why losing your liberty in these matters is serious.

You've got it backwards. Compelling and overwhelming reasons have to be given to diminish liberty, not to retain it. Liberty also has to be surrendered voluntarily for the government's exercise of that authority to be legitimate and in an American context I never surrendered any of the liberty in question here to the central government.

Yet I notice you're not trying to generalize that one instance across the entire economy because you realize that "helping" the environment usually comes with sticker shock.

Why don't you prove that adopting enviromentally friendly practices will destroy the economy instead of screeching about it.

Who could prove anything that vague? How much economic damage has to be incurred before the economy is considered "destroyed?" What exactly are "environmentally friendly practices," in this context? Adopting Kyoto? Taxing emissions? Banning all carbon based energy? You can't escape from the fact that intervening in the economy to limit the cheapest most reliable source of energy will have a negative economic impact. Does that mean we'll all be living in mud huts as a result? Probably not. Will we all be poorer? I haven't heard anyone even attempt to argue no.

It looks an awful lot like your accusing me personally of being motivated by laziness (among other things), but if that wasn't your intent then nevermind.

Read it again: "Thank you for entirely missing the point, which was that the emotional motivation for your sort of crazy denials seems to be laziness."

Putting the emphasis on sort doesn't really change much. If I said "your sort" of car pollutes a lot (keeping in theme with the thread here) then wouldn't you conclude that your car was probably being fingered as a polluter? "Your sort" generalizes the emotional motivation as laziness to all the crazy denials across the board, including mine.

Obviously it's not against your understanding of Christianity. I don't see though how you can reconcile "love your neighbor" (remember, love your neighbor and love God sum up the law) with the effects of an anarcho-libertarian society, which effectively boils down to "fuck your neighbor".

The kind of love God wants can't be compelled by law, it has to come from within. Everyone should be free (this is a secular society, remember?) and uncoerced. Then those who want to follow a religious teaching that emphasizes "love thy neighbor" will act accordingly.

I'm not talking about the love being compelled by law; I'm talking about the citizens who make up the government not demonstrating that love to citizens simply because they're in government. Put bluntly, hardcore libertarianism does not at all permit sympathy to be a factor in government policies, whereas Christianity demands sympathy for all men.

Why should the government practice sympathy, an inherently subjective concept? Should one of two equally situated persons before the law be discriminated against because they happened to come before a government official who sympathizes with the one and not the other? Why should Christian notions of sympathy (or any religious or philosophical notions of sympathy) be worked into the government's operation? Far fairer (and better for a stable predictable society) is to apply the rules the same to everyone as much as possible and then have a minimal number of rules so the opportunity for government error, favortism, etc, is minimized.

Upon what basis do you found your premise that "liberty to be 'left alone' by the government" ought to be the ultimate arbiter of decisions regarding government policy?

The only legitimate purpose of government is to secure the liberty of the people.

Why? By your definition of liberty, the only legitimate state of a government is nonexistence.

Obviously not my definition of liberty... If the government exists to protect liberty then it does that by preventing the use of force, fraud, etc, by one individual against another. When the government starts using its force for ends other than securing liberty it ceases its legitimate function.

When a government starts doing more than that where does it end? If the government can overrule your free will when it comes to the environment then why not when it comes to your diet, your investments, how many hours you work, what type of job you hold, etc...?

This is a classic slippery slope argument. Do you realize why it's wrong?

It isn't wrong, its happening right now. New York has banned types of fat. How many hours we work, the types of jobs we can do, the age at which we can work, etc, are all already regulated. If the government can regulate them in one direction then it has the power to regulate them in the other direction. I'm not saying it is inevitable (that one foot on the slope will without fail cause us to slide to the bottom) but that the mere possibility, the mere granting of the possibility of that power to the government, is too dangerous to be acceptable.

A government with such unlimited powers is an anathma to freedom, not a champion of it.

Naturally; this is why deciding how much power each government ought to have is a balancing act each society has to walk. At the same time, there's no reason a government can't have more powers than you seem to prefer: there's no reason to consider government power to interfere in daily life to be an all-or-nothing affair.

Sure, there's no reason for us to have a free society other than I think its the most desirable type of society for individuals to live in and for humanty to progress. The government's power to interfere in daily life isn't an all or nothing affair, but when the government is not restrained by extraordinary means the passions of the people more easily allow encroachment on their liberty.

This requires a response:

Just because you think the scientific community and the government synch up on this issue is no reason for you to believe that they always will. Do you really want the government to have the power to compel bad science? If you give it the power to compel good science then you necessarily give it the other dreaded power too. If science has the facts on its side then make the case to the people, invite those who are critical and demonstrate how they're wrong instead of freezing them out of the system and reacting to dissent like some kind of protectors of the orthodoxy.

What a load of horseshit. It's already been pointed out to you in this thread that the government is not directing the course of the studies in question and that they are being conducted under independent authority and review. Furthermore, science is a matter of cold hard fact, not one of democratic choice between competing opinions. The rest of your spew is nothing more than doctrinaire paranoia, which seems to be all you are capable of.

The government is pouring some billions into global warming research each year. That directs scientific effort. If the community were to say "there's no problem here" the money would go away. Is that the sole reason that there is so much pro-man made warming hype? No. Does it have some effect? I hardly see any way for it to not have an effect. People follow the money. Science may be a matter of cold hard fact, but people are political, they have opinions, and there's no reason to accept their word for what science says when they have ideological, financial, and power incentives to say one thing over another.

The people will make the right decision without dangerously empowering government. (If bans on lead gas, paint, etc, were lifted now do you seriously think everyone would go back to using them? The ban was a reflection of what the people were already coming to want, thus making it mostly redundant in terms of affecting the real world, but no less dangerous in setting a precedent for government power)

No, the bans were the result of the gasoline makers not making the "right" decisions but the ones which maximised their narrow consideration of profits instead. It was also the result of the demonstrated harm lead levels in the general environment as well as in the home were causing.

People obviously desired to purchase those products or else manufactures would not have produced them. If you lifted the bans now no one would want to buy those products thus no manufacturer would produce them even if they were technically cheaper to produce (a cheap product that doesn't sell is still worthless).

And you can take your continual bleating about "dangerously empowering government" and shove it up your ass. The government's entire function is to protect the citizenry as much as to safeguard and enforce their liberties under the framework of law. The government is already empowered to act upon those imperatives by virtue of what is laid down in constitutional law and by virtue of the peoples' consent. And as corporations are large and powerful entities which can and regularly do ignore the wishes of the people at large as well as societal good, government acts as the necessary counterbalance to that power. That's the way things work in the Real World as opposed to Libertarian Fantasy-Land™.

The Constitution doesn't empower the government to become a nanny state. The people can't consent to extra-Constitutional means without altering the Constitution. Corporations can't ignore the wishes of the consumers who purchase their products because no matter how powerful they are the people can destroy them at a whim by refusing to purchase their products. Government has jails and guns to bring to bear against the population, corporations do not.

You don't have that "freedom" right now, moron. Almost all manufactured goods, particularly vehicles, are subject to volumes of regulation. That's because, despite your libertarian wankery, ordinary people should not be allowed to make these choices for themselves. They're too ignorant.

I'm well aware that those liberties are already being infringed upon, but that doesn't disqualify me from wanting to prevent further infringement.

I don't give a fuck what you personally want. If we're talking about what's best for an entire society, you need to produce evidence that your anarcho-libertarian bullshit would actually work in the real world. Because right now, it's about as plausible in the real world as Marxism: another worldview based on mamby-pamby nonsense about how people should ideally think even though they don't.

You don't know what's best for society and even if you did you have no right to dictate to society.

You are not the judge of who is too ignorent to lead their own lives.

Why not? And since when is it impossible to "lead your own life" just because science experts are making decisions related to science, which are beyond your knowledge?

I doubt you would want some other arrogent technocrat coming around and dictating your life to you.

On the contrary, I allow that all of the time. As engineers, we are subject to considerable regulatory oversight, and due to the enormous complexity of modern science and technology, we are forced to put a certain amount of trust in the "technocrats", as you so derisively call them. Anyone who says otherwise is an idiot who is so truly ignorant that he doesn't even recognize how little he knows.

Putting trust in someone and voluntarily accepting their direction is a far cry from allowing your life to be wholly dictated from afar by someone without your consent who you can have no assurances will be putting your best interests first. I'll accept advice from people who have knowledge beyond my own, but I won't substitute their will for my own.

That kind of paternalism is a short road to tyranny and it doesn't even work to ensure safety. The FDA discovers defective drugs after it has already approved them all the time.

The fact that the FDA is not perfect does not mean that the situation would somehow improve with even less regulatory oversight, you idiot.

We're not talking about regulatory oversight here though, are we? We're talking about letting the government substitute its judgment for our own. I like having the FDA check out my drugs and food, but I wouldn't want them mandating what I ate or what prescriptions I had to take. I want to retain those final judgments to myself.

[Aaron]

Wood isn't more expensive if you have a supply on your own land. I'm not aware of the relative rates between the other options, but it doesn't matter. There are other considerations beyond economics such as convienence or personal preference that should be respected. You can't always quantify costs when personal preference comes into play.

Now your just bullshitting. Who's got a reasonable, sustainable supply of wood on their land? And if you prefer using oil, electricity or oil over cheaper natural gas than your an idiot.

Who's greater purpose? Lot's of tyrants have championed the greater purpose beyond the individual, but when it comes down to it we shouldn't be able to force someone else to serve something that we think is for a greater purpose. I doubt you would want to serve in the things I consider a greater purpose so afford those who disagree with your greater purpose the ability to opt out.

You haven't adequetly demonstrated why adopting enviromentaly friendly laws and legislation would curb our liberty or freedom anyways. All you've done so far is bullshit. Prove that we're going to lose meaningful liberty in a an attempt to fix the enviroment. How would forcing the world to adopt hybrid vehicles for example restrict your personal liberty? Your already forced to recycle and no reasonable person complains about the fine they get from mixing their paper and metal recyclables.

I'd rather have individuals seeking their own self interest trying to come up with a substitute for plastic than a bunch of self interested politicians dedicating tax dollars to their cronies to come up with a substitute. I've seen nothing to suggest that the government is ever going to do a better job at innovating than the free market.

Your making the claim that the free market will fix it, than prove it. So far the market has done jack and shit to find a replacement for oil, which we are fast running out of. Why would the market magically do anything to fix the enviroment without outside prompting?

You've got it backwards. Compelling and overwhelming reasons have to be given to diminish liberty, not to retain it. Liberty also has to be surrendered voluntarily for the government's exercise of that authority to be legitimate and in an American context I never surrendered any of the liberty in question here to the central government.

Once again explain why losing this trifling amount of liberty is serious. If all your going to do is masterbate to American platitudes you may as well fuck off right now.

Who could prove anything that vague? How much economic damage has to be incurred before the economy is considered "destroyed?" What exactly are "environmentally friendly practices," in this context? Adopting Kyoto? Taxing emissions? Banning all carbon based energy? You can't escape from the fact that intervening in the economy to limit the cheapest most reliable source of energy will have a negative economic impact. Does that mean we'll all be living in mud huts as a result? Probably not. Will we all be poorer? I haven't heard anyone even attempt to argue no.

You don't understand how this works, you make the claim. That means you back it up. What you don't seem to understand is that the West could develop enviromentally friendly technology and sell it to the rest of the world and generate a profit.

[Thinkmarble]

Free markets arguments are sugar and spice and everything nice till one realizes that we do have a textbook example of marketfailure.
Ever heard the term externalities, Falcon ?

Fossil fuels are at the moment priced at lower then they should because not all cost are accounted for. Kyoto was an (imperfect and crude) attempt to fix that by setting a price on CO2 production.

In regards to the freedom argument, though cookie, your right to pollute ends the moment when someoneelse has to suffer the consequences.

At the end you want to buy fossil fuels at artifically supressed prices, at the end you want to have privileges so that you can hurt the freedom of other, all while posing as the defender of freedom.
Dont make me laugh.

[Wyrm]

You tried to assert that capitalism couldn't work unless all costs are assessed and counted for. You included climate change in that category.

Correct. Without the correct feedback of benefits and costs, how can the free market make the correct decisions? Even if "correct decisions" are subjective?

You then implied that it was necessary for a third party (government) to come in and impose those costs on one part of the economy (business).

If the costs of climate change does not figure into the cost model of businesses at present, and currently they do not (they didn't with environmental damage, either—that too had to be externally imposed), then the government has to impose them.

Furthermore, who says that they only apply to the businesses? Joe Citizen should be held to the same standard. The difference is one of scale.

What's that you're gibbering? The free market should be free of outside influence? Bullshit. It's impossible. If a free market were truly free from all outside influence, it simply wouldn't work. At all.

In the free market, how do you decide whether or not to burn a pound of coal? By assessing all the costs involved with burning the pound of coal (including the cost of the climate change you are about to induce) verses the benefits you gain from burning that coal. If the costs outweigh the benefits, you don't burn the coal. But (and this is the important part) these costs and benefits come from outside the free market itself: it depends on human values (both in general and in particular for the individual), scientific data, and all the sundary influences on what humans consider to be of value and their knowledge of their interactions.

So, you see, it's impossible for a free market to even function without outside influences.

Now that we've established that outside forces are necessary for a free market's proper function, we have to have some criterion to decide which influences should be allowed. "It comes from the government" should not be a criterion for exclusion, because even governments can come up with influences that it would be silly not to include. Furthemore, "it comes from the people" should no be a criterion for inclusion either, because people can (and have) practiced consuming habits that are, in retrospect, silly.

You also made an incidental implication that individuals were in the government so that therefore government interference in the economy was still capitalistic individual decision making (but I assume you abandoned that position since you didn't mention it).

What the fuck are you blabbering about, birdbrain? Of course the free market isn't part of the government. But guess what! The Free Market is not teh uber! It's but one aspect of our democracy, and it cannot operate alone.

Now, to tie back to the original point: the kind of government intervention you seem to favor here is anti-capitalist because it artificially tries to impose costs on one segment of the economy.

I like how you think that government feedback to the free market about how humans value a stable environment automatically means "anti-capitalist." It's just more of your libertarian tripe. You think that everything would be hunky-dory if the government got off businesses back. And the Spanish Empire thought the influx of gold from the new world would make their empire rich. Similar cause: both the Spanish Empire and you have no idea how economies actually function.

What you don't seem to realize is that in a free market the costs of global warming, if any, will be distributed within that economy automatically without any government intervention (If people are persuaded to buy more expensive but fuel efficient cars, for example, they will pay the expense for that just as surely as if you taxed the car manufacturer or forced the manufacturer to produce those cars and then the manufacturer passed that cost on in higher prices). The only difference is that the money won't have to travel through the hands of the government and get squandered in its bureaucracy, nor will the government get to flex its regulatory muscles.

What bullshit! We're not talking about people making more efficient energy choices, like it'll have no real effect on the way we live and have costs that are not objectively forseeable in the future. The costs are real, foreseeable, and the first payments are happening now.

Climatologists have been sounding the alarm bells for decades, that climate change is a serious matter, would cause serious damage to our entire civilization, and the point of no return was fast approaching. Did industry sit up and heed the warning, knowning that any crisis disrupting human civilization itself would really hurt their bottom line? Nooooooo! The point of no return has probably already passed us, and industry is still not doing enough to control the coming damage. The first snowless November in Vermont is only the tip of the iceberg, my friend!

Given the urgency of the problem, and the irresponsibility that businesses (and the public — don't forget the public) has displayed, a powerful institution needs to take the reigns and guide us to the correct path. That institution is the government.

All the screeching you and your ilk are doing now is just an attempt to absolve yourselves of guilt. "Oh, we shouldn't be regulated! The Free Market™ will save us all!" Fuck you. We gave you and the free market ample chance to self-regulate. You blew it. Now someone else has to kick you in the right direction.

The problem here is when the people try to force the dissenting minority to conform to their standards. The free market already made those judgments; no one was forced to work in substandard conditions, they could quit.

People did knuckle down and work in conditions I would call substandard! The business has no interest in your working conditions if it thinks it can trade your life for more of their profit. It's an easy choice for them. Much harder choice for me, especially if everyone's making the same tradeoff (my life for their profit); even if my job puts my life at risk, I still gotta eat.

Only when a collective statement was made that we consider workers' reasonable safety to be a right protected by the government did workers' safety improve.

No one was forced to buy certain products, they could buy alternatives. Businessmen didn't want to upset their customers or workers, they want smooth production and consumption.

Only these businesses would make the same choice for their consumers as they did for their workers. We just had a case recently where companies knew that an entire class of painkillers increases the risks of heart disease. Yet they continued to pimp these drugs. So much for being scared straight.

What happened is the majority decided it knew best and limited people's freedom to work and consume as they saw fit because the majority had qualms with it. Let me decide for myself in what conditions I want to work, for what wage, and for how many hours.

And, I notice, businesses were NOT sent to the poorhouse in droves and collapsed the economy when this happened. All the major industries implemented them and were none the worse for wear because of it.

Also, you obviously have no idea what "symmetry breaking" is, have you?

Its the same old story of the majority forcing its tyranny on the minority. What are you going to do some day when you're in the minority and all that power is used against you and your interests?

Don't pull that slippery slope shit on me, you great tit. Corporations are powerful, and they're not people. All I see from these regulations on industry has been the improvement in the quality of life for people.

A free market is not one which is compelled in any way by force. Only mutual agreement in an uncoerced setting can produce a free market. Companies should be rewarded or penalized by the consumers voting with their wallets not by voters using the government to hit companies in their wallets.

A free market floating out there in empty space, with no external inputs about the costs and benefits of certain actions, is completely impotent. A free market with the wrong inputs on costs and benefits, or one with incomplete inputs on costs and benefits makes demonstratably wrong decisions. You keep wanking the free market, when in reality a well-behaved free market that truly serves everyone needs regulation.

You missed the point. Government intervention to help the little guy is just as bad as government intervention to help the big guy. Its best for the government to have no power to unfairly favor one person over another at all.

Corporations have a lot of power on their own, fucknut. Those companies bought influence in the government — by you're argument, they bought their influence fair and square. Even if mythical uncorruptible politicians were in office at the time:

See companies buy mercinaries to break strikes.

See little man get crushed by the mercinaries.

See the same shit happen.

Nothing is free, someone always pays for it. Resources are limited after all.

I'm not just talking about resources, you fuck. I'm talking about services that these companies get for free or at reduced cost. Like the roads. We all have to chip in for maintenence, but industries see a lot more use out of it than we do.

Also, if the environment were a corporation and could charge us for goods and services, and sue us or slap us with surcharges for pollution, you would see industries push for green technologies pretty quick, and consumers buy them like illicit drugs.

The government can and has been just as short sighted as any market, plus more inefficient and more apt to be arbitrary and tyrannical because it has the legitimate use of force whereas markets do not.

The government can be short-sighted, as you say. The unguided free market you propose, however, is short-sighted by its very design.

See, you have yet to demonstrate why posing restrictions on your precious free market is necessarily bad, whereas I've made arguments that such restrictions are not only not bad, but are actually necessary for free markets to make correct decisions.

The regulations are moot if the market demands a product exceeding them. It isn't really government intervention if nothing changes now is it?

You fail the argument. A regulation is a guarantee that the company has not made the undue tradeoff of your safety in a certain area for their profit. That means you can expect a certain minimum standard of safety from those products, no matter which one you choose. Also, for every product that is advertised to exceed the regulation, there are many more that just meet them. Choosing a product that doesn't advertise itself as exceeding the regulation doesn't mean that you will be choosing a product that doesn't at least meet them. Furthermore, choosing the product that does advertise as exceeding that standard will not be deficient in other respects to make up for the expense.

Furthermore, many safety regulations we live with nowadays owe their existence to coffins in the ground. In these cases, companies were not self-regulating in these matters.

Anyway, you think roads are maintained or constructed efficiently? Perhaps you've never heard of the big dig "Although the project was estimated at $2.8 billion in 1985, over $14.6 billion had been spent in federal and state tax dollars as of 2006."

Interesting. Using an example from a country I purposefully singled out as being not the best contender in such to "disprove" my argument, which was never intended to demonstrate that Government Involvement always leads to an Efficiency Seal of Approval. You are one dumb fuck.

Also, it's not like private companies don't go over budget. Or use it as leverage to get more funding from governments so that the project can be completed, as opposed to absorbing the costs themselves.

Finally, Wiki-fail!

I've failed to see evidence of them happening efficiently anywhere. I'm willing to put up with inefficient roads and police since those things are strongly tied to the government's ability to defend liberty.

So efficiency is not the overriding concern in all cases?

I conceed on the efficiency issue, because that was brain fart on my part. (I don't retract the statement immediately above that you are one dumb fuck. Even if you're right on the efficiency issue, your argument above is still fallicious.) Unfortunately, you have just replaced my efficiency bludgeon with a brand new one: namely that efficiency is not the overriding concern for all projects. For one, you're willing to give on efficiency if liberty is a concern.

Also, are you willing to put up with inefficiency when safety is a concern? When property?

Health care on the other hand is something each consumer should purchase on their own. Like everything else, health care resources are limited and should be distributed to those who can most afford to pay for them not to whoever shows up first. This naturally conserves limited resources since people won't go to the doctor unless they are truly ill instead of clogging up the system for every sniffle. Plus, when resources are limited it is fairer to bestow them upon those who can pay first because typically those who can pay have done more for society and are more productive. I wish that health care could be unlimited for everyone to enjoy, but it can't be.

Very interesting values you're betraying here. No, that's not a complement.

When a company squanders resources or displeases the public with what it produces the effects are usually fairly swift and connectable. When the government does it the people don't know who to blame often time. Plus, if the government is wasting billions on some pet project the people are not seeing the results in the form of an inferior product and the government has a captive source of revenue that the company does not. The bottom line is that if the store down the street displeases you you'll stop going to it, but if the government does something displeasing it may be stuck down in the middle of an appropriations bill that doesn't affect you directly and you will never find out unless you're unusually dilligent.

I'm not making excuses for appropriation bills, but you're dead wrong if you think that companies are somehow immune from this. As my pet example, I point to Microsoft. Microsoft is reviled by just about everyone with a brain and even the barest briefing of their misdeeds. Microsoft OSes are bloated pieces of shit that make the tradeoff of your computer resources for to save their money in the form of reduced cost of design. (Take a look a Linux to see what a proper OS for PCs looks like.) They also lock up your data in their proprietary formats, forcing you to spend your money to access your data when they change formats. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. See Mike's rants for a more complete list of things shitty about Microsoft. It's scary.

The people have direct control over whether they buy said product or not and trust me, without people buying said product the company won't manufacture it.

Yea, and the average consumer is not in a position to make such judgements. If they did, Microsoft would be out of business. So no, I don't trust you.

A firm kick best delivered by the people, not the government.

And if the people are unable and/or unwilling to deliver it, it falls to government to do it in their stead. Environmental issues are one such instance.

That's what often ends up happening though. No business is going to run unless it can make good profits; there's too much expense and risk.

Name an industry that was taxed into oblivion, shitstain.

Don't create another problem trying to solve this supposed problem. If there's really a problem I'd like to fix it too, but not by empowering the government to run my life.

So, you'd rather exchange the future of human civilization itself for precious perceived freedoms of corporations... not even fucking real people. If you and your ilk were in control of my government, I'd be even more scared than I am now.

Why must everyone have all the relevant data? Everyone need only have the option of getting the relevant data. If they choose not to then their ability to voice their opinion (however uninformed) is not diminished.

I'm sorry, is this supposed to be an argument for an unfettered free market? What decision is better made in ignorance rather than knowledge?

Furthermore, people have the most incentive to inform themselves in a free market because their actions will most directly impact themselves.

Oh, the omniscient, omnipotent consumer. Tell this to the climatologists who have been screaming at the public to do something about CO2 emissions or else, for decades. People continue to buy junk food dispite the (entirely avoidable) detriment to their health, continue to smoke dispite the definite link between smoking and cancer. Ect.

The government should be there to prevent fraud, remember? That includes preventing a company from hiding information from the public.

And yet they do it. Even in this supposedly over-regulated era.

The companies are motivated by profit. If they get profit from doing research that the government is funding then they'll do it, regardless of whether its a good idea. If they get profit from coming up with the best solution as quickly as possible so that they can mass market it then they'll do that instead.

So you admit that companies sometimes make the wrong choices.

The government, of course, doesn't care if it wastes money, especially if its to help the politicians get re-elected, so the money it spends is more likely to go to an idea that will serve their purpose of dishing out pork rather than the purpose of finding the best solution.

Hmm. So let me get this straight: Senator A values his incumbancy more than his principles in voting against other senators' pork-barrel projects, so he exchanges his vote for money for his state, which he then uses to buy a better chance of retaining his incumbancy. The constituency values the money they gain from pork-barrel projects more than other state's taxes, so they approve of Senator A's actions with continued incumbancy. The other senators want their pork and are willing to give up a little of the budget for Senator A's vote, so they write it in. Everyone gets something of value from this exchange of pork.

Why, this sounds like a Free Market™ exchange! And we know what you libertarians think about Free Market™ exchanges! HANDS OFFA 'EM!!

[Surlethe]

Read it again: "Thank you for entirely missing the point, which was that the emotional motivation for your sort of crazy denials seems to be laziness."

Putting the emphasis on sort doesn't really change much. If I said "your sort" of car pollutes a lot (keeping in theme with the thread here) then wouldn't you conclude that your car was probably being fingered as a polluter? "Your sort" generalizes the emotional motivation as laziness to all the crazy denials across the board, including mine.

Are you trying to be retarded? "Your sort" tends to mean "things like yours"; given that I explicitly stated I recognize that your arguments are not motivated strictly as I speculated, I'd have hoped you would recognize that I was referring to similar arguments.

Why should the government practice sympathy, an inherently subjective concept? Should one of two equally situated persons before the law be discriminated against because they happened to come before a government official who sympathizes with the one and not the other? Why should Christian notions of sympathy (or any religious or philosophical notions of sympathy) be worked into the government's operation?

You're ignoring the consequences of a government that does not incorporate some measure of sympathy into its policies. How can you, as a Christian, condone an organization that sits by and wilfully lets the poor and sick rot? Also, in answer to your question, governments should practice sympathy because that maximizes social welfare -- a concept which is probably unfamiliar to you, even though, as a Christian, you're explicitly called to work for social welfare by loving your friends and your enemies.

Far fairer (and better for a stable predictable society) is to apply the rules the same to everyone as much as possible and then have a minimal number of rules so the opportunity for government error, favortism, etc, is minimized.

How about a government that works to maximize the welfare of the individual members of the society? Not only does this subsume working to minimize government error, favoritism, etc., as you desire, it also permits the government working to minimize harm civilians can inflict on themselves and each other -- a role you refuse to accept, for some brain-dead reason.

Why? By your definition of liberty, the only legitimate state of a government is nonexistence.

Obviously not my definition of liberty... If the government exists to protect liberty then it does that by preventing the use of force, fraud, etc, by one individual against another. When the government starts using its force for ends other than securing liberty it ceases its legitimate function.

Your definition of liberty is contained implicitly in, "the very heart of liberty (the liberty to be "left alone" by the government) has been struck through." According to you, the very heart of liberty is to be left alone by the government; since the government's purpose is to secure the people being left alone by it, nonexistence follows quite handily.

And since when has restating the claim under question been a valid defense?

This is a classic slippery slope argument. Do you realize why it's wrong?

It isn't wrong, its happening right now.

Thank you for entirely missing the point.

New York has banned types of fat. How many hours we work, the types of jobs we can do, the age at which we can work, etc, are all already regulated. If the government can regulate them in one direction then it has the power to regulate them in the other direction. I'm not saying it is inevitable (that one foot on the slope will without fail cause us to slide to the bottom) but that the mere possibility, the mere granting of the possibility of that power to the government, is too dangerous to be acceptable.

Stating a claim without providing sufficient conditions is not a valid form of argument, you insipid fuck.

Sure, there's no reason for us to have a free society other than I think its the most desirable type of society for individuals to live in and for humanty to progress. The government's power to interfere in daily life isn't an all or nothing affair, but when the government is not restrained by extraordinary means the passions of the people more easily allow encroachment on their liberty.

What the fuck is this even supposed to mean? You don't think pithy slogans are valid points in debate, do you?

[Patrick Degan]

Just because you think the scientific community and the government synch up on this issue is no reason for you to believe that they always will. Do you really want the government to have the power to compel bad science? If you give it the power to compel good science then you necessarily give it the other dreaded power too. If science has the facts on its side then make the case to the people, invite those who are critical and demonstrate how they're wrong instead of freezing them out of the system and reacting to dissent like some kind of protectors of the orthodoxy.

What a load of horseshit. It's already been pointed out to you in this thread that the government is not directing the course of the studies in question and that they are being conducted under independent authority and review. Furthermore, science is a matter of cold hard fact, not one of democratic choice between competing opinions. The rest of your spew is nothing more than doctrinaire paranoia, which seems to be all you are capable of.

The government is pouring some billions into global warming research each year. That directs scientific effort.

No it does not, liar. That has been pointed out to you several posts back and either you are too stupid to understand what was said regarding the point or you are simply dishonest in continuing to repeat a discredited claim with no evidence to back it.

To quote the point for your benefit again:

Sceptic view: NERC only funds research that will agree with government policy

NERC is independent from the government (although it receives its resources from them) and determines which science to fund entirely by itself – the so-called Haldane principle. It funds projects based on the quality of the science proposals received rather than their anticipated results. NERC is deliberately set up in this manner to remove any possible bias.

If the community were to say "there's no problem here" the money would go away. Is that the sole reason that there is so much pro-man made warming hype? No. Does it have some effect? I hardly see any way for it to not have an effect. People follow the money. Science may be a matter of cold hard fact, but people are political, they have opinions, and there's no reason to accept their word for what science says when they have ideological, financial, and power incentives to say one thing over another.

Except the problem would not go away, stupid —the reason for what you dismiss as "hype". Which is why scientific decisions are not best left to democratic choice the same way as political opinions are.

The people will make the right decision without dangerously empowering government. (If bans on lead gas, paint, etc, were lifted now do you seriously think everyone would go back to using them? The ban was a reflection of what the people were already coming to want, thus making it mostly redundant in terms of affecting the real world, but no less dangerous in setting a precedent for government power)

No, the bans were the result of the gasoline makers not making the "right" decisions but the ones which maximised their narrow consideration of profits instead. It was also the result of the demonstrated harm lead levels in the general environment as well as in the home were causing.

People obviously desired to purchase those products or else manufactures would not have produced them. If you lifted the bans now no one would want to buy those products thus no manufacturer would produce them even if they were technically cheaper to produce (a cheap product that doesn't sell is still worthless).

Wrong, asswipe —people purchased the products because for a long time they were made only one way and that was with lead as a base component because it was the cheaper method. The companies resisted the bans against lead because of their desire to avoid expense in reformulating their product. Those bans are kept in force today because lead in gasoline and paints has been demonstrated to be dangerous to the environment and to human beings.

And you can take your continual bleating about "dangerously empowering government" and shove it up your ass. The government's entire function is to protect the citizenry as much as to safeguard and enforce their liberties under the framework of law. The government is already empowered to act upon those imperatives by virtue of what is laid down in constitutional law and by virtue of the peoples' consent. And as corporations are large and powerful entities which can and regularly do ignore the wishes of the people at large as well as societal good, government acts as the necessary counterbalance to that power. That's the way things work in the Real World as opposed to Libertarian Fantasy-Land™.

The Constitution doesn't empower the government to become a nanny state.

Too bad for your little fantasies that it does. Evidently you flunked Civics in high school.

The people can't consent to extra-Constitutional means without altering the Constitution.

Except they're doing no such thing you endlessly dissembling moron. There is nothing in the Constitution which prohibits the Congress from acting as a national legislature nor from establishing the agencies to carry its laws into effect.

Corporations can't ignore the wishes of the consumers who purchase their products because no matter how powerful they are the people can destroy them at a whim by refusing to purchase their products. Government has jails and guns to bring to bear against the population, corporations do not.

Corporations often ignore the wishes of the people and more so the greater good and use advertising to gull them into buying what they put out. The main American car manufacturers are at present resisting legislation mandating increased fuel efficiency standards and have been for years and keep pushing large inefficient vehicles on a gullible public —which is one reason why the marketplace is a piss-poor decisionmaker for the society at large. THAT —and not your endless ideological wankage— is the reality.

[Darth Wong]

I'm so sick of this lie about the "orthodoxy" in science, suppressing the truth. What people who deny global warming (and evolution) ignore is that both of these theories were initially the upstarts, and had to overcome well-entrenched opposition in order to become accepted. That they did become accepted despite almost universal initial rejection is proof that this talk of orthodoxy is nonsense, and that the scientific community was moved to accept these conclusions by the data, not by some sort of face-saving pride.

I think some people need to review the history of greenhouse-gas theory, to see how many obstacles it had to overcome. Here's a good summary essay from the American Institute of Physics:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

It is not an argument per se; it is a description of the history of the theory: when it was first proposed, how many alterations it's gone through, and how many objections it had to overcome over the last century.

As for Falcon's absurd handwaving about scientific accuracy being determined by popular democracy and the free market magically solving problems that historically did require government intervention such as the leaded-gasoline problem, I quite frankly think he's now reached the level of self-parody, virtually indistinguishable from Stephen Colbert.

PS. The fact that creationists and global-warming skeptics tend to be the same people is not coincidental. One of the methods used to establish that elevated CO2 levels are due to human activity is to look for "fossil CO2", which is CO2 where the carbon comes from ancient buried sources such as coal or oil. They can make this determination by using the technique of carbon-14 dating ... which creationists dismiss as bullshit. In short, it really helps to be a creationist if you want to deny global warming.

[Falcon]

Wood isn't more expensive if you have a supply on your own land. I'm not aware of the relative rates between the other options, but it doesn't matter. There are other considerations beyond economics such as convienence or personal preference that should be respected. You can't always quantify costs when personal preference comes into play.

Now your just bullshitting. Who's got a reasonable, sustainable supply of wood on their land? And if you prefer using oil, electricity or oil over cheaper natural gas than your an idiot.

There are huge numbers of people living in the countryside who have such supplies of wood. Liberty is about being able to do things that someone else might consider idiotic, inefficient, etc.

Who's greater purpose? Lot's of tyrants have championed the greater purpose beyond the individual, but when it comes down to it we shouldn't be able to force someone else to serve something that we think is for a greater purpose. I doubt you would want to serve in the things I consider a greater purpose so afford those who disagree with your greater purpose the ability to opt out.

You haven't adequetly demonstrated why adopting enviromentaly friendly laws and legislation would curb our liberty or freedom anyways. All you've done so far is bullshit. Prove that we're going to lose meaningful liberty in a an attempt to fix the enviroment. How would forcing the world to adopt hybrid vehicles for example restrict your personal liberty? Your already forced to recycle and no reasonable person complains about the fine they get from mixing their paper and metal recyclables.

Hybrid vehicles are more expensive so the difference in cost would be the financial representation of the loss of choice created by such an imposition.
http://www.wisegeek.com/should-i-buy-a-hybrid-car.htm

Financial expense is one of the worst kinds of imposition on liberty because it can touch all other aspects of your ability to enjoy your personal freedoms. It does one little good to be free in all other respects if the government spends your entire salary before you get it.

I'm not already forced to recycle nor have I ever known of the possibility of any fine for mixing paper and metal recyclables.

I'd rather have individuals seeking their own self interest trying to come up with a substitute for plastic than a bunch of self interested politicians dedicating tax dollars to their cronies to come up with a substitute. I've seen nothing to suggest that the government is ever going to do a better job at innovating than the free market.

Your making the claim that the free market will fix it, than prove it. So far the market has done jack and shit to find a replacement for oil, which we are fast running out of. Why would the market magically do anything to fix the enviroment without outside prompting?

Oil supplies will diminish which will create costs which will create demand for alternatives which will prompt innovation. You haven't attempted to prove that the government can do a better job at this process than the free market, nor is there any indication from history that it can do a better job.

You've got it backwards. Compelling and overwhelming reasons have to be given to diminish liberty, not to retain it. Liberty also has to be surrendered voluntarily for the government's exercise of that authority to be legitimate and in an American context I never surrendered any of the liberty in question here to the central government.

Once again explain why losing this trifling amount of liberty is serious. If all your going to do is masterbate to American platitudes you may as well fuck off right now.

First of all, it isn't a trifling amount of liberty. It is a serious amount of authority for the government to be able to regulate and control the most prominant form of energy available. It is a serious amount of authority for the government to be able to dictate one type of car over another. Its serious because of its nearly unlimited potential for abuse by politicans and bureaucrats. If a company is doing something that the people in power don't approve of it could come in and stomp on them with fines, cripple their ability to produce, etc, whilst giving latitude to companies or individuals who those in power favor. The government can already do that to an extent, we shouldn't eagerly hand them more authority to abuse.

Who could prove anything that vague? How much economic damage has to be incurred before the economy is considered "destroyed?" What exactly are "environmentally friendly practices," in this context? Adopting Kyoto? Taxing emissions? Banning all carbon based energy? You can't escape from the fact that intervening in the economy to limit the cheapest most reliable source of energy will have a negative economic impact. Does that mean we'll all be living in mud huts as a result? Probably not. Will we all be poorer? I haven't heard anyone even attempt to argue no.

You don't understand how this works, you make the claim. That means you back it up. What you don't seem to understand is that the West could develop enviromentally friendly technology and sell it to the rest of the world and generate a profit.

We're both making claims and counter claims; you aren't backing yours up and at the same time complain that mine are insufficient (ironically). My assertion here is that global warming solutions will almost inevitably put a strain on the economy. My evidence is Kyoto, carbon trading credits, emissions limits, etc... http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv21n1/21-1f6.pdfhttp://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=7545

Putting a stop to global warming would require Herculean social and economic change, and the economic costs associated with those changes are steep – an annual $1,154 per household in the United States, according to the recently released Stern Review.

You've made the laughable assertion, with no supporting fact, that we can develop new technology at a cost of who knows how much and then sell it to who, Africa?

Free markets arguments are sugar and spice and everything nice till one realizes that we do have a textbook example of marketfailure.
Ever heard the term externalities, Falcon ?

Fossil fuels are at the moment priced at lower then they should because not all cost are accounted for. Kyoto was an (imperfect and crude) attempt to fix that by setting a price on CO2 production.

In regards to the freedom argument, though cookie, your right to pollute ends the moment when someoneelse has to suffer the consequences.

At the end you want to buy fossil fuels at artifically supressed prices, at the end you want to have privileges so that you can hurt the freedom of other, all while posing as the defender of freedom.
Dont make me laugh.

Artificial costs that environmentalists are attempting to impose by fiat are not externalities. You're projecting future costs based on supposition. I agree that you shouldn't be able to pollute to the point you hurt someone else, but I disagree that our current consumption of fossile fuels is hurting anyone.

You tried to assert that capitalism couldn't work unless all costs are assessed and counted for. You included climate change in that category.

Correct. Without the correct feedback of benefits and costs, how can the free market make the correct decisions? Even if "correct decisions" are subjective?

You then implied that it was necessary for a third party (government) to come in and impose those costs on one part of the economy (business).

If the costs of climate change does not figure into the cost model of businesses at present, and currently they do not (they didn't with environmental damage, either—that too had to be externally imposed), then the government has to impose them.

There are no costs though, its all supposition on future costs. If there were real costs then they'd be figured in without any government actions.

Furthermore, who says that they only apply to the businesses? Joe Citizen should be held to the same standard. The difference is one of scale.

What's that you're gibbering? The free market should be free of outside influence? Bullshit. It's impossible. If a free market were truly free from all outside influence, it simply wouldn't work. At all.

In the free market, how do you decide whether or not to burn a pound of coal? By assessing all the costs involved with burning the pound of coal (including the cost of the climate change you are about to induce) verses the benefits you gain from burning that coal. If the costs outweigh the benefits, you don't burn the coal. But (and this is the important part) these costs and benefits come from outside the free market itself: it depends on human values (both in general and in particular for the individual), scientific data, and all the sundary influences on what humans consider to be of value and their knowledge of their interactions.

So, you see, it's impossible for a free market to even function without outside influences.

That's such a retarded mischaracterization of what I was saying its stunning. Costs and benefits do not come from "outside" the free market, those things are an integral part of the free market. Outside influence are relegated to, for our purposes here, government imposed costs or mandates that have nothing to do with the actual marketable cost and benefit of some act. When the government comes in and imposes an arbitrary cost based on some theory of what might happen in a hundred years then that is most definately an outside influence that ought not be permitted.

Now that we've established that outside forces are necessary for a free market's proper function, we have to have some criterion to decide which influences should be allowed. "It comes from the government" should not be a criterion for exclusion, because even governments can come up with influences that it would be silly not to include. Furthemore, "it comes from the people" should no be a criterion for inclusion either, because people can (and have) practiced consuming habits that are, in retrospect, silly.

The key phase there is "in retrospect." You're diluding yourself into thinking that you can peer ahead into the future with the 20\20 vision of the past and then use the government to compel what you assume to be the best outcome. I see no basis for such an assumption. What's vital about a free market is that each person individually is led to seek their own self interest (whatever the individual perceives that to be). Those individuals collectively then drive society's development. You want to turn that on its head and have a few individuals in power substitute their will for the collective will of society. You don't see a problem with that because you think that "the right way" is going to be the outcome, but what will you do next time when something you perceive as being wrong is getting crammed down our throats like this global warming policy is now?

You also made an incidental implication that individuals were in the government so that therefore government interference in the economy was still capitalistic individual decision making (but I assume you abandoned that position since you didn't mention it).

What the fuck are you blabbering about, birdbrain? Of course the free market isn't part of the government. But guess what! The Free Market is not teh uber! It's but one aspect of our democracy, and it cannot operate alone.

The free market is a necessary consequence of individual liberty, not an inherent component of democracy. You can't have liberty unless the right to property is held above all other rights and accordingly you can't have a right to free property unless you can buy, sell, trade, destroy, etc, your property freely in an uncoerced market. Of course this is getting far afield from your original and apparently abandoned statement equating individuals in the government making decisions with individuals collectively in the market.

Now, to tie back to the original point: the kind of government intervention you seem to favor here is anti-capitalist because it artificially tries to impose costs on one segment of the economy.

I like how you think that government feedback to the free market about how humans value a stable environment automatically means "anti-capitalist." It's just more of your libertarian tripe. You think that everything would be hunky-dory if the government got off businesses back. And the Spanish Empire thought the influx of gold from the new world would make their empire rich. Similar cause: both the Spanish Empire and you have no idea how economies actually function.

I realize that when you artifically decrease the supply or increase the cost of energy you create cost increases across the board. That kind of inflation would be every bit as damaging as creating a glut in the money supply, or more so, since increased energy costs inevitably means less production of goods and services dependant on those energy sources.

What you don't seem to realize is that in a free market the costs of global warming, if any, will be distributed within that economy automatically without any government intervention (If people are persuaded to buy more expensive but fuel efficient cars, for example, they will pay the expense for that just as surely as if you taxed the car manufacturer or forced the manufacturer to produce those cars and then the manufacturer passed that cost on in higher prices). The only difference is that the money won't have to travel through the hands of the government and get squandered in its bureaucracy, nor will the government get to flex its regulatory muscles.

What bullshit! We're not talking about people making more efficient energy choices, like it'll have no real effect on the way we live and have costs that are not objectively forseeable in the future. The costs are real, foreseeable, and the first payments are happening now.

Then where are they? I haven't seen a single dime's worth of expense from global warming? Most of the costs I see attributed to global warming, like hurricane damage, is the result of government bailouts taking away the economic disincentive to build your house in the path of routine natural disasters.

Climatologists have been sounding the alarm bells for decades, that climate change is a serious matter, would cause serious damage to our entire civilization, and the point of no return was fast approaching. Did industry sit up and heed the warning, knowning that any crisis disrupting human civilization itself would really hurt their bottom line? Nooooooo! The point of no return has probably already passed us, and industry is still not doing enough to control the coming damage. The first snowless November in Vermont is only the tip of the iceberg, my friend!

Its funny you should mention iceberg because it used to be global cooling, not global warming, that got everyone in such a twist. This is just alarmist propaganda for the sheep so that the wolves in power can seize more control for themselves.

Given the urgency of the problem, and the irresponsibility that businesses (and the public — don't forget the public) has displayed, a powerful institution needs to take the reigns and guide us to the correct path. That institution is the government.

All the screeching you and your ilk are doing now is just an attempt to absolve yourselves of guilt. "Oh, we shouldn't be regulated! The Free Market™ will save us all!" Fuck you. We gave you and the free market ample chance to self-regulate. You blew it. Now someone else has to kick you in the right direction.

That's it, get all the terror out of your system. Go to your happy place.

The problem here is when the people try to force the dissenting minority to conform to their standards. The free market already made those judgments; no one was forced to work in substandard conditions, they could quit.

People did knuckle down and work in conditions I would call substandard! The business has no interest in your working conditions if it thinks it can trade your life for more of their profit. It's an easy choice for them. Much harder choice for me, especially if everyone's making the same tradeoff (my life for their profit); even if my job puts my life at risk, I still gotta eat.

Only when a collective statement was made that we consider workers' reasonable safety to be a right protected by the government did workers' safety improve.

Worker's safety was already improving naturally as the nation became more affluent and workers didn't need jobs. Labor is just another service subject to supply and demand. If you need to work so bad that you'll work in awful conditions it is just as fair as the other side of the coin where you don't need to work badly so the employer has to bribe you with generous benefits. What really hurts people and the economy is when the government imposes regulations such that people who want to work, and employers who want to hire, are forbidden from entering into those mutually acceptable agreements as a result of the government act.

No one was forced to buy certain products, they could buy alternatives. Businessmen didn't want to upset their customers or workers, they want smooth production and consumption.

Only these businesses would make the same choice for their consumers as they did for their workers. We just had a case recently where companies knew that an entire class of painkillers increases the risks of heart disease. Yet they continued to pimp these drugs. So much for being scared straight.

As long as all parties have the relevant information who cares? If the public knows that there is an increase in risk by using a product and continue to use it, however unwisely, that's their own business. The company is just fulfilling a demand.

What happened is the majority decided it knew best and limited people's freedom to work and consume as they saw fit because the majority had qualms with it. Let me decide for myself in what conditions I want to work, for what wage, and for how many hours.

And, I notice, businesses were NOT sent to the poorhouse in droves and collapsed the economy when this happened. All the major industries implemented them and were none the worse for wear because of it.

Also, you obviously have no idea what "symmetry breaking" is, have you?

You haven't noticed all the companies fleeing offshores and incurring shipping expenses, local instabilities, and the like just to access cheaper labor? You haven't noticed all the people who lose their job everytime the minimum wage goes up?

David Neumark, an economist at the University of California, Irvine, has found that increasing the minimum wage does not reduce poverty. Rather, for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage, he estimates that the poverty rate increases by 3 percent to 4 percent.

http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=6484

Its the same old story of the majority forcing its tyranny on the minority. What are you going to do some day when you're in the minority and all that power is used against you and your interests?

Don't pull that slippery slope shit on me, you great tit. Corporations are powerful, and they're not people. All I see from these regulations on industry has been the improvement in the quality of life for people.

Who do you think corporations are if not people? They're just people who have entered into a legal construct for economic protections. It isn't a slippery slope argument to raise concerns about giving government power it can abuse. No one is saying such abuse in evitable, merely too risky.

A free market is not one which is compelled in any way by force. Only mutual agreement in an uncoerced setting can produce a free market. Companies should be rewarded or penalized by the consumers voting with their wallets not by voters using the government to hit companies in their wallets.

A free market floating out there in empty space, with no external inputs about the costs and benefits of certain actions, is completely impotent. A free market with the wrong inputs on costs and benefits, or one with incomplete inputs on costs and benefits makes demonstratably wrong decisions. You keep wanking the free market, when in reality a well-behaved free market that truly serves everyone needs regulation.

The market itself is a function of costs and benefits, it doesn't need the government adding arbitrary costs as a result of speculations. The regulations needed are those that ensure free flow of accurate information and the prevention of coercion.

You missed the point. Government intervention to help the little guy is just as bad as government intervention to help the big guy. Its best for the government to have no power to unfairly favor one person over another at all.

Corporations have a lot of power on their own, fucknut. Those companies bought influence in the government — by you're argument, they bought their influence fair and square. Even if mythical uncorruptible politicians were in office at the time:

See companies buy mercinaries to break strikes.

See little man get crushed by the mercinaries.

See the same shit happen.

Which only serves to illustrate my point that the government shouldn't have the power to intervene on anyone's side in such a situation, neither for business nor labor. Companies shouldn't be allowed to use force either (mercinaries), that's a violation of the free market.

Nothing is free, someone always pays for it. Resources are limited after all.

I'm not just talking about resources, you fuck. I'm talking about services that these companies get for free or at reduced cost. Like the roads. We all have to chip in for maintenence, but industries see a lot more use out of it than we do.

Industry chips in a lot more than you do though. I haven't seen any evidence that industry pays disproportionately less than anyone else. Plus, you are the reason that industry uses the roads (to transport goods to you, the consumer) so you're going to bear the ultimate cost as the end user no matter what.

Also, if the environment were a corporation and could charge us for goods and services, and sue us or slap us with surcharges for pollution, you would see industries push for green technologies pretty quick, and consumers buy them like illicit drugs.

If any resource were a corporation that could charge us for its use then that use would alter.

The government can and has been just as short sighted as any market, plus more inefficient and more apt to be arbitrary and tyrannical because it has the legitimate use of force whereas markets do not.

The government can be short-sighted, as you say. The unguided free market you propose, however, is short-sighted by its very design.

See, you have yet to demonstrate why posing restrictions on your precious free market is necessarily bad, whereas I've made arguments that such restrictions are not only not bad, but are actually necessary for free markets to make correct decisions.

You haven't done what you think you've done. The free market isn't inherently short sighted either, especially on big capital projects, but even on the individual level. People can choose to be short sighted, sure, as is their right, but they can also take a very far reaching look at where they want to go in life as they make decisions. The free market has one thing going for it that government doesn't and that's results. Innovation, efficiency, dependability, etc, are all superior, on average, when the free market is in charge rather than the government.

The regulations are moot if the market demands a product exceeding them. It isn't really government intervention if nothing changes now is it?

You fail the argument. A regulation is a guarantee that the company has not made the undue tradeoff of your safety in a certain area for their profit. That means you can expect a certain minimum standard of safety from those products, no matter which one you choose. Also, for every product that is advertised to exceed the regulation, there are many more that just meet them. Choosing a product that doesn't advertise itself as exceeding the regulation doesn't mean that you will be choosing a product that doesn't at least meet them. Furthermore, choosing the product that does advertise as exceeding that standard will not be deficient in other respects to make up for the expense.

You've shifted the argument. First premise: the market demands goods at a level higher than government regulation. Government has affected nothing. Second premise: the market demands goods both at and above government regulation. Government has still affected nothing. Third premise: the market demands goods below the government regulation. Government has interfered with free choice and has now likely denied some individuals (the poor) the ability to purchase said product (since government regulation usually increases costs). Who are you to tell someone that they can't get a product at a certain level of quality if they knowingly want to purchase that product? That's why the government should prevent fraud or force, but not interfere with free choice.

Furthermore, many safety regulations we live with nowadays owe their existence to coffins in the ground. In these cases, companies were not self-regulating in these matters.

As long as everyone was uncoerced by fraud or force then they have a right to risk their lives. It isn't for us to stand in judgment over someone else's situation and deny them their ability to choose.

Anyway, you think roads are maintained or constructed efficiently? Perhaps you've never heard of the big dig "Although the project was estimated at $2.8 billion in 1985, over $14.6 billion had been spent in federal and state tax dollars as of 2006."

Interesting. Using an example from a country I purposefully singled out as being not the best contender in such to "disprove" my argument, which was never intended to demonstrate that Government Involvement always leads to an Efficiency Seal of Approval. You are one dumb fuck.

A Freedom of Information request to the Highways Agency in October 2005 showed that the cost of constructing a mile of motorway had risen from £23 million to £28 million in just 6 months [5].

The rising cost of the roads programme has not gone unnoticed by both the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives [6]. Both parties have pointed out that the roads programme is now £1.5 billion over budget.

http://www.roadblock.org.uk/press_relea ... -03-23.htm

Also, it's not like private companies don't go over budget. Or use it as leverage to get more funding from governments so that the project can be completed, as opposed to absorbing the costs themselves.

Finally, Wiki-fail!

If private companies go overbudget they lose profits or go out of business. If government goes overbudget it just keeps on spending your dime. Don't blame companies for government waste.

I've failed to see evidence of them happening efficiently anywhere. I'm willing to put up with inefficient roads and police since those things are strongly tied to the government's ability to defend liberty.

So efficiency is not the overriding concern in all cases?

I conceed on the efficiency issue, because that was brain fart on my part. (I don't retract the statement immediately above that you are one dumb fuck. Even if you're right on the efficiency issue, your argument above is still fallicious.) Unfortunately, you have just replaced my efficiency bludgeon with a brand new one: namely that efficiency is not the overriding concern for all projects. For one, you're willing to give on efficiency if liberty is a concern.

Also, are you willing to put up with inefficiency when safety is a concern? When property?

Safety is my own concern, I'm not willing to give up liberty for safety. The right to own property is fundamental to liberty, but there is no right to have your property protected from environmental damage by the government (such as insurance or bailout schemes like those on the coasts).

Health care on the other hand is something each consumer should purchase on their own. Like everything else, health care resources are limited and should be distributed to those who can most afford to pay for them not to whoever shows up first. This naturally conserves limited resources since people won't go to the doctor unless they are truly ill instead of clogging up the system for every sniffle. Plus, when resources are limited it is fairer to bestow them upon those who can pay first because typically those who can pay have done more for society and are more productive. I wish that health care could be unlimited for everyone to enjoy, but it can't be.

Very interesting values you're betraying here. No, that's not a complement.

I wouldn't complement you on your values either, but who cares?

When a company squanders resources or displeases the public with what it produces the effects are usually fairly swift and connectable. When the government does it the people don't know who to blame often time. Plus, if the government is wasting billions on some pet project the people are not seeing the results in the form of an inferior product and the government has a captive source of revenue that the company does not. The bottom line is that if the store down the street displeases you you'll stop going to it, but if the government does something displeasing it may be stuck down in the middle of an appropriations bill that doesn't affect you directly and you will never find out unless you're unusually dilligent.

I'm not making excuses for appropriation bills, but you're dead wrong if you think that companies are somehow immune from this. As my pet example, I point to Microsoft. Microsoft is reviled by just about everyone with a brain and even the barest briefing of their misdeeds. Microsoft OSes are bloated pieces of shit that make the tradeoff of your computer resources for to save their money in the form of reduced cost of design. (Take a look a Linux to see what a proper OS for PCs looks like.) They also lock up your data in their proprietary formats, forcing you to spend your money to access your data when they change formats. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. See Mike's rants for a more complete list of things shitty about Microsoft. It's scary.

Linux is a lot more like the free market (individual control) and microsoft is a lot more like government (monopoly). Microsoft is starting to take some licks in the market though and unless it addresses the problems it has it will face consumer retaliation.

The people have direct control over whether they buy said product or not and trust me, without people buying said product the company won't manufacture it.

Yea, and the average consumer is not in a position to make such judgements. If they did, Microsoft would be out of business. So no, I don't trust you.

Not everyone judges things in the same way. People are familiar with Microsoft and so even if they are aware of its problems they still continue to use it. I use it, despite all the griefs I have with it, because it would be too troublesome to use linux in my current situation and I don't like apple (or any of the other alternatives). As long as I have all the information it should be up to me, even if you think my decision unwise.

A firm kick best delivered by the people, not the government.

And if the people are unable and/or unwilling to deliver it, it falls to government to do it in their stead. Environmental issues are one such instance.

No, it doesn't fall on the government. The government has no business substituting its will (or the will of the majority over the minority) for that of the people.

That's what often ends up happening though. No business is going to run unless it can make good profits; there's too much expense and risk.

Name an industry that was taxed into oblivion, shitstain.

It should be common sense; if a company is taxed then it either passes those costs on or else it fails if it cannot. When taxes go up it isn't like the businesses all say "oops, we can't pay these taxes," because the cost is hidden. Instead it looks like a simple failure to provide goods at a price the market demands.

Don't create another problem trying to solve this supposed problem. If there's really a problem I'd like to fix it too, but not by empowering the government to run my life.

So, you'd rather exchange the future of human civilization itself for precious perceived freedoms of corporations... not even fucking real people. If you and your ilk were in control of my government, I'd be even more scared than I am now.

I've not been convinced that there is a problem yet and yes, freedom is my first concern.

Why must everyone have all the relevant data? Everyone need only have the option of getting the relevant data. If they choose not to then their ability to voice their opinion (however uninformed) is not diminished.

I'm sorry, is this supposed to be an argument for an unfettered free market? What decision is better made in ignorance rather than knowledge?

I didn't say it would be "better" just that there was no reason to claim that the market is undemocratic because there are people who have the option to inform themselves and choose not to.

Furthermore, people have the most incentive to inform themselves in a free market because their actions will most directly impact themselves.

Oh, the omniscient, omnipotent consumer. Tell this to the climatologists who have been screaming at the public to do something about CO2 emissions or else, for decades. People continue to buy junk food dispite the (entirely avoidable) detriment to their health, continue to smoke dispite the definite link between smoking and cancer. Ect.

If they want to trade lifespan for junkfood and smoking then that's their value judgment. If they don't want to believe the shaky inconsistant bleating of agenda driven individuals then that's their value judgment too. You're upset because you can't convince people on the merits, or even with doomsaying, so now its time to get out the gun and compel them by force.

The government should be there to prevent fraud, remember? That includes preventing a company from hiding information from the public.

And yet they do it. Even in this supposedly over-regulated era.

That's what the legal system is for, to punish the offenders who try to use fraud and force.

The companies are motivated by profit. If they get profit from doing research that the government is funding then they'll do it, regardless of whether its a good idea. If they get profit from coming up with the best solution as quickly as possible so that they can mass market it then they'll do that instead.

So you admit that companies sometimes make the wrong choices.

Companies make the profitable choice. If left to their own devices they'll attempt to make the right choice. If driven by government money they'll make whatever choice the government wants. The government typically makes the wrong choice more than the companies.

The government, of course, doesn't care if it wastes money, especially if its to help the politicians get re-elected, so the money it spends is more likely to go to an idea that will serve their purpose of dishing out pork rather than the purpose of finding the best solution.

Hmm. So let me get this straight: Senator A values his incumbancy more than his principles in voting against other senators' pork-barrel projects, so he exchanges his vote for money for his state, which he then uses to buy a better chance of retaining his incumbancy. The constituency values the money they gain from pork-barrel projects more than other state's taxes, so they approve of Senator A's actions with continued incumbancy. The other senators want their pork and are willing to give up a little of the budget for Senator A's vote, so they write it in. Everyone gets something of value from this exchange of pork.

Why, this sounds like a Free Market™ exchange! And we know what you libertarians think about Free Market™ exchanges! HANDS OFFA 'EM!!

It isn't the free market when its not mutual agreement between all parties in question. That money isn't given to the government by choice. The wealthy, a minority, are taxed for the bulk of the federal budget. The voters who make up the majority that demands pork are largely outside this taxed group. Thus the majority is using government power to coerce the majority into wealth redistribution. That's prime example of why the government shouldn't have such power and its as far away from a free market as one can get.

Read it again: "Thank you for entirely missing the point, which was that the emotional motivation for your sort of crazy denials seems to be laziness."

Putting the emphasis on sort doesn't really change much. If I said "your sort" of car pollutes a lot (keeping in theme with the thread here) then wouldn't you conclude that your car was probably being fingered as a polluter? "Your sort" generalizes the emotional motivation as laziness to all the crazy denials across the board, including mine.

Are you trying to be retarded? "Your sort" tends to mean "things like yours"; given that I explicitly stated I recognize that your arguments are not motivated strictly as I speculated, I'd have hoped you would recognize that I was referring to similar arguments.

Both interpretations are reasonable. Further, why speak of emotional motivatons like laziness if not to try and sully, by proximity and comparison, my motivations to those others that you so doggedly maintain you weren't trying to indicate were the same as mine? Only you can know what you truly intended, but I'll take your word for it.

Why should the government practice sympathy, an inherently subjective concept? Should one of two equally situated persons before the law be discriminated against because they happened to come before a government official who sympathizes with the one and not the other? Why should Christian notions of sympathy (or any religious or philosophical notions of sympathy) be worked into the government's operation?

You're ignoring the consequences of a government that does not incorporate some measure of sympathy into its policies. How can you, as a Christian, condone an organization that sits by and wilfully lets the poor and sick rot?

How could I condone, as a Christian, an organization that takes money unwillingly from one person to bestow upon another person who hasn't earned it? Did we forget, Thou shalt not steal?

Also, in answer to your question, governments should practice sympathy because that maximizes social welfare -- a concept which is probably unfamiliar to you, even though, as a Christian, you're explicitly called to work for social welfare by loving your friends and your enemies.

Loving friends and enemies isn't a blanket endorsement for a Christian to let himself be pillaged by anyone who asks it of him. Love means bringing the light of the Gospel to the sinner's immortal soul, not merely ministering to this dying body. Social welfare isn't something for the majority to decide because it violates property rights and gives too much power to the government. Power that can be used for good can also be used for ill. Furthermore, government is highly inefficient:

Today, 70 cents of every dollar goes not to poor people, but to government bureaucrats and others who serve the poor. Few private charities have the bureaucratic overhead and inefficiency of government programs.

http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-ta3-9.html

Far fairer (and better for a stable predictable society) is to apply the rules the same to everyone as much as possible and then have a minimal number of rules so the opportunity for government error, favortism, etc, is minimized.

How about a government that works to maximize the welfare of the individual members of the society? Not only does this subsume working to minimize government error, favoritism, etc., as you desire, it also permits the government working to minimize harm civilians can inflict on themselves and each other -- a role you refuse to accept, for some brain-dead reason.

That's the spin, but it has never been the reality. Welfare creates dependancy, crime, and more poverty, not less.

http://www.cato.org/testimony/ct-wc67.html
http://www.cato.org/pubs/journal/cj16n1/cj16n1-1.pdf

Why? By your definition of liberty, the only legitimate state of a government is nonexistence.

Obviously not my definition of liberty... If the government exists to protect liberty then it does that by preventing the use of force, fraud, etc, by one individual against another. When the government starts using its force for ends other than securing liberty it ceases its legitimate function.

Your definition of liberty is contained implicitly in, "the very heart of liberty (the liberty to be "left alone" by the government) has been struck through." According to you, the very heart of liberty is to be left alone by the government; since the government's purpose is to secure the people being left alone by it, nonexistence follows quite handily.

And since when has restating the claim under question been a valid defense?

I should think that when the "claim" is in fact my own definition of liberty (which I would be in the best position to know since it is my definition after all) would be a perfect defense to someone else's improper characterization of my definition. Also, since when was the government's purpose to "secure" the people? The government's purpose is to secure liberty, not "the people."

This is a classic slippery slope argument. Do you realize why it's wrong?

It isn't wrong, its happening right now.

Thank you for entirely missing the point.

New York has banned types of fat. How many hours we work, the types of jobs we can do, the age at which we can work, etc, are all already regulated. If the government can regulate them in one direction then it has the power to regulate them in the other direction. I'm not saying it is inevitable (that one foot on the slope will without fail cause us to slide to the bottom) but that the mere possibility, the mere granting of the possibility of that power to the government, is too dangerous to be acceptable.

Stating a claim without providing sufficient conditions is not a valid form of argument, you insipid fuck.

It's an observation.

Sure, there's no reason for us to have a free society other than I think its the most desirable type of society for individuals to live in and for humanty to progress. The government's power to interfere in daily life isn't an all or nothing affair, but when the government is not restrained by extraordinary means the passions of the people more easily allow encroachment on their liberty.

What the fuck is this even supposed to mean? You don't think pithy slogans are valid points in debate, do you?

Can't you understand plain english that isn't strewn with profanities? The whole design of the government in America was to make things slow and difficult to do so that the liberties preserved could not be given up easily or quickly. You people want to wholesale undo what protects still remain by giving the government vast new regulatory\taxiation authority and rely on the public to keep government encroachments on liberty in effect.

What a load of horseshit. It's already been pointed out to you in this thread that the government is not directing the course of the studies in question and that they are being conducted under independent authority and review. Furthermore, science is a matter of cold hard fact, not one of democratic choice between competing opinions. The rest of your spew is nothing more than doctrinaire paranoia, which seems to be all you are capable of.

The government is pouring some billions into global warming research each year. That directs scientific effort.

No it does not, liar. That has been pointed out to you several posts back and either you are too stupid to understand what was said regarding the point or you are simply dishonest in continuing to repeat a discredited claim with no evidence to back it.

To quote the point for your benefit again:

Sceptic view: NERC only funds research that will agree with government policy

NERC is independent from the government (although it receives its resources from them) and determines which science to fund entirely by itself – the so-called Haldane principle. It funds projects based on the quality of the science proposals received rather than their anticipated results. NERC is deliberately set up in this manner to remove any possible bias.

The NERC receives its resources from the government. If there's a big sensational problem with global warming the NERC might get a bigger budget to self direct. Hence even it is not secure. The fact that the government spends billions on global warming research specifically still remains as well.

If the community were to say "there's no problem here" the money would go away. Is that the sole reason that there is so much pro-man made warming hype? No. Does it have some effect? I hardly see any way for it to not have an effect. People follow the money. Science may be a matter of cold hard fact, but people are political, they have opinions, and there's no reason to accept their word for what science says when they have ideological, financial, and power incentives to say one thing over another.

Except the problem would not go away, stupid —the reason for what you dismiss as "hype". Which is why scientific decisions are not best left to democratic choice the same way as political opinions are.

Science isn't immune from politics.

No, the bans were the result of the gasoline makers not making the "right" decisions but the ones which maximised their narrow consideration of profits instead. It was also the result of the demonstrated harm lead levels in the general environment as well as in the home were causing.

People obviously desired to purchase those products or else manufactures would not have produced them. If you lifted the bans now no one would want to buy those products thus no manufacturer would produce them even if they were technically cheaper to produce (a cheap product that doesn't sell is still worthless).

Wrong, asswipe —people purchased the products because for a long time they were made only one way and that was with lead as a base component because it was the cheaper method. The companies resisted the bans against lead because of their desire to avoid expense in reformulating their product. Those bans are kept in force today because lead in gasoline and paints has been demonstrated to be dangerous to the environment and to human beings.

They were made that way because no one knew better. Now that people know better even if the bans were removed no one would buy those dangerous products.

And you can take your continual bleating about "dangerously empowering government" and shove it up your ass. The government's entire function is to protect the citizenry as much as to safeguard and enforce their liberties under the framework of law. The government is already empowered to act upon those imperatives by virtue of what is laid down in constitutional law and by virtue of the peoples' consent. And as corporations are large and powerful entities which can and regularly do ignore the wishes of the people at large as well as societal good, government acts as the necessary counterbalance to that power. That's the way things work in the Real World as opposed to Libertarian Fantasy-Land™.

The Constitution doesn't empower the government to become a nanny state.

Too bad for your little fantasies that it does. Evidently you flunked Civics in high school.

The government has assumed that power to itself, but you'll struggle in vain to find that power bestowed upon it in the Constitution.

The people can't consent to extra-Constitutional means without altering the Constitution.

Except they're doing no such thing you endlessly dissembling moron. There is nothing in the Constitution which prohibits the Congress from acting as a national legislature nor from establishing the agencies to carry its laws into effect.

They're a legislature of limited and enumerated powers. No where in those powers can you find justification for what they're now doing according to the intent of the Constitution when it was written. The government has merely assumed those powers and because the people went along with it there were no reprecussions (other than lost liberty).

Corporations can't ignore the wishes of the consumers who purchase their products because no matter how powerful they are the people can destroy them at a whim by refusing to purchase their products. Government has jails and guns to bring to bear against the population, corporations do not.

Corporations often ignore the wishes of the people and more so the greater good and use advertising to gull them into buying what they put out. The main American car manufacturers are at present resisting legislation mandating increased fuel efficiency standards and have been for years and keep pushing large inefficient vehicles on a gullible public —which is one reason why the marketplace is a piss-poor decisionmaker for the society at large. THAT —and not your endless ideological wankage— is the reality.

The people have access to all the information, they have a right to be as gullible as they want and it isn't your place to substitute your judgment for theirs.

I'm so sick of this lie about the "orthodoxy" in science, suppressing the truth. What people who deny global warming (and evolution) ignore is that both of these theories were initially the upstarts, and had to overcome well-entrenched opposition in order to become accepted. That they did become accepted despite almost universal initial rejection is proof that this talk of orthodoxy is nonsense, and that the scientific community was moved to accept these conclusions by the data, not by some sort of face-saving pride.

I think some people need to review the history of greenhouse-gas theory, to see how many obstacles it had to overcome. Here's a good summary essay from the American Institute of Physics:

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/co2.htm

It is not an argument per se; it is a description of the history of the theory: when it was first proposed, how many alterations it's gone through, and how many objections it had to overcome over the last century.

As for Falcon's absurd handwaving about scientific accuracy being determined by popular democracy and the free market magically solving problems that historically did require government intervention such as the leaded-gasoline problem, I quite frankly think he's now reached the level of self-parody, virtually indistinguishable from Stephen Colbert.

PS. The fact that creationists and global-warming skeptics tend to be the same people is not coincidental. One of the methods used to establish that elevated CO2 levels are due to human activity is to look for "fossil CO2", which is CO2 where the carbon comes from ancient buried sources such as coal or oil. They can make this determination by using the technique of carbon-14 dating ... which creationists dismiss as bullshit. In short, it really helps to be a creationist if you want to deny global warming.

That a theory was once an upstart proves nothing, especially when the theory is so ideologically, financially, and politically convenient for those who are its staunchest advocates. This isn't about creationism, nor does religion have anything to do with this whatsoever (like God can create the universe but He can't make it look however old He wants it to?). This isn't about democracy deciding scientific accuracy either, a point you'd do well to remember when people start going off about the supposed "concensus" of scientists that exists out there. Its about something that, even if it is a problem, is being used as a vehicle, whether intentionally on the part of all those involved or not, to expand the power of government over all our lives and harm our economies, probably to favor the third world. If its purely science then make the social agenda disappear and I'll be a lot more receptive.

[Thinkmarble]

Free markets arguments are sugar and spice and everything nice till one realizes that we do have a textbook example of marketfailure.
Ever heard the term externalities, Falcon ?

Fossil fuels are at the moment priced at lower then they should because not all cost are accounted for. Kyoto was an (imperfect and crude) attempt to fix that by setting a price on CO2 production.

In regards to the freedom argument, though cookie, your right to pollute ends the moment when someoneelse has to suffer the consequences.

At the end you want to buy fossil fuels at artifically supressed prices, at the end you want to have privileges so that you can hurt the freedom of other, all while posing as the defender of freedom.
Dont make me laugh.

Artificial costs that environmentalists are attempting to impose by fiat are not externalities. You're projecting future costs based on supposition. I agree that you shouldn't be able to pollute to the point you hurt someone else, but I disagree that our current consumption of fossile fuels is hurting anyone.

Enviromentalist ? by fiat ? More like duly elected goverments according to
the best science we can get.
Funny how that works.

But thanks for admitting that all your liberty-wanking is just a red herring.

[Aaron]

Wood isn't more expensive if you have a supply on your own land. I'm not aware of the relative rates between the other options, but it doesn't matter. There are other considerations beyond economics such as convienence or personal preference that should be respected. You can't always quantify costs when personal preference comes into play.

There are huge numbers of people living in the countryside who have such supplies of wood. Liberty is about being able to do things that someone else might consider idiotic, inefficient, etc.

And once again I ask you how many people have a sustainable supply of wood on their land? Do you understand what sustainable means dipshit? Do you want me to look it up and post the meaning for you? Because your obviously not understanding what it means. And even then burning wood is not the most enviromentally concious thing to do. At least burning natural gas doesn't remove a CO2 removing resource from the earth. And burning natural gas is the economical choice. I fail to see why you should have the liberty to fuck up the earth just because you think that a 200+ year old peice of paper that you continusily masterbate to says you do.

Hyrid vehicles are more expensive so the difference in cost would be the financial representation of the loss of choice created by such an imposition.
http://www.wisegeek.com/should-i-buy-a-hybrid-car.htm

Buying a hybrid isn't about saving money, it's about doing what's right for the enviroment and extending our dwindling oil reserves as far as we can. I am fully aware that you don't recoup the costs of owning a hybrid in gas savings.

Financial expense is one of the worst kinds of imposition on liberty because it can touch all other aspects of your ability to enjoy your personal freedoms. It does one little good to be free in all other respects if the government spends your entire salary before you get it.

More mindless rah rah rah I'm American look at me bullshit.

I'm not already forced to recycle nor have I ever known of the possibility of any fine for mixing paper and metal recyclables.

Well were I live, you know responsible land, you get fined for mixing your recyclables. Usually with your garbage.

Oil supplies will diminish which will create costs which will create demand for alternatives which will prompt innovation. You haven't attempted to prove that the government can do a better job at this process than the free market, nor is there any indication from history that it can do a better job.

I asked you to prove your assertion, are you going to or are you going to conceed the point? The govenments of the world stopped industry from using CFC products that damaged the ozone, have you forgotten about that?

First of all, it isn't a trifling amount of liberty. It is a serious amount of authority for the government to be able to regulate and control the most prominant form of energy available. It is a serious amount of authority for the government to be able to dictate one type of car over another. Its serious because of its nearly unlimited potential for abuse by politicans and bureaucrats. If a company is doing something that the people in power don't approve of it could come in and stomp on them with fines, cripple their ability to produce, etc, whilst giving latitude to companies or individuals who those in power favor. The government can already do that to an extent, we shouldn't eagerly hand them more authority to abuse.

Are you not aware that everything you own and do is already regulated by the government? Or do we have to go over this again? I fail to see why new regulation to govern new areas of industry, such as those that crop up to fight global warming should be any different.

We're both making claims and counter claims; you aren't backing yours up and at the same time complain that mine are insufficient (ironically). My assertion here is that global warming solutions will almost inevitably put a strain on the economy. My evidence is Kyoto, carbon trading credits, emissions limits, etc...

I have not said that your claims are insufficent dumbass, I said you haven't backed up anything.

Putting a stop to global warming would require Herculean social and economic change, and the economic costs associated with those changes are steep – an annual $1,154 per household in the United States, according to the recently released Stern Review.

This can easily be recoverd by taxing big business.

You've made the laughable assertion, with no supporting fact, that we can develop new technology at a cost of who knows how much and then sell it to who, Africa?

To the first, second and third worlds dipshit. That's literally billions of dollars waiting to be made. Or do you think that if other countries adopt global warming legislation that they won't need to technology to back it up. BY sitting on it's hands America is wasting time that could be spent develpoing technology that could be sold on the open market at a tidy profit. Frankly if you can't see the benefit than your not just a moron your a fucking moron.

[Darth Wong]

That a theory was once an upstart proves nothing

It proves that your claim about global warming being an unexamined theory defended mindlessly by an entrenched orthodoxy is bullshit. It triumphed over heavy scientific resistance, from people who made real scientific objections instead of your Appeal to Motive and Appeal to Consequence fallacies.

especially when the theory is so ideologically, financially, and politically convenient for those who are its staunchest advocates.

Appeal to Motive fallacy. Show what is wrong with the optical transmission data for infrared frequencies through upper-atmospheric CO2, and then you might have a case against the greenhouse-gas mechanism. Explain what's wrong with the carbon-dating method of proving that a significant fraction of atmospheric CO2 is due to human fossil fuel burning and then you might have a case against the argument that humans are contributing significantly to the problem. Until you do that, you've got nothing but fallacious bullshit and ideological grandstanding.

This isn't about creationism, nor does religion have anything to do with this whatsoever (like God can create the universe but He can't make it look however old He wants it to?).

I love the way you say it's not about religion, then you promptly trot out a mindless religious argument. If you've got a scientific objection to the greenhouse gas mechanism or the carbon-dating method of establishing human influence, bring it.

This isn't about democracy deciding scientific accuracy either, a point you'd do well to remember when people start going off about the supposed "concensus" of scientists that exists out there.

Scientific consensus has nothing to do with democracy because scientists aren't granted the "right" to vote on this matter; they earn it by establishing their credentials in a related field of study. When scientists show broad consensus on something, it means that the people who have the most knowledge about the subject agree, not that the most number of ignorant fucks like yourself agree. And they've made real scientific arguments, which you don't bother to read yet you feel you are competent to judge as inadequate.

Its about something that, even if it is a problem, is being used as a vehicle, whether intentionally on the part of all those involved or not, to expand the power of government over all our lives and harm our economies, probably to favor the third world.

Appeal to Consequence fallacy.

If its purely science then make the social agenda disappear and I'll be a lot more receptive.

So the scientific argument is somehow weakened by the presence of a "social agenda"? Nice red herring fallacy, fucktard.

[Surlethe]

Skimming through Falcon's huge-ass post looking for his reply to me, this caught my eye:

So, you'd rather exchange the future of human civilization itself for precious perceived freedoms of corporations... not even fucking real people.

I've not been convinced that there is a problem yet and yes, freedom is my first concern.

Ladies and gentlemen, the comedy writes itself. Falcon would indeed sacrifice human civilization rather than give up an iota of what he perceives as his personal freedom.

[Wyrm]

Skimming through Falcon's huge-ass post looking for his reply to me, this caught my eye:

So, you'd rather exchange the future of human civilization itself for precious perceived freedoms of corporations... not even fucking real people.

I've not been convinced that there is a problem yet and yes, freedom is my first concern.

Ladies and gentlemen, the comedy writes itself. Falcon would indeed sacrifice human civilization rather than give up an iota of what he perceives as his personal freedom.

It's not just that. Look at my entire quote and his response. He'd rather sacrifice human civilization than one iota of what he percieves as freedoms of fake people (corporations).

[Patrick Degan]

As expected, Falcon persists in his stupidity.

The government is pouring some billions into global warming research each year. That directs scientific effort.

No it does not, liar. That has been pointed out to you several posts back and either you are too stupid to understand what was said regarding the point or you are simply dishonest in continuing to repeat a discredited claim with no evidence to back it.

To quote the point for your benefit again:

Sceptic view: NERC only funds research that will agree with government policy

NERC is independent from the government (although it receives its resources from them) and determines which science to fund entirely by itself – the so-called Haldane principle. It funds projects based on the quality of the science proposals received rather than their anticipated results. NERC is deliberately set up in this manner to remove any possible bias.

The NERC receives its resources from the government. If there's a big sensational problem with global warming the NERC might get a bigger budget to self direct. Hence even it is not secure. The fact that the government spends billions on global warming research specifically still remains as well.

Here's a clue, asshole: simply restating your own argument ad-infinitum does NOT make it true by weight of repetition. No matter how much you delude yourself into thinking otherwise.

If the community were to say "there's no problem here" the money would go away. Is that the sole reason that there is so much pro-man made warming hype? No. Does it have some effect? I hardly see any way for it to not have an effect. People follow the money. Science may be a matter of cold hard fact, but people are political, they have opinions, and there's no reason to accept their word for what science says when they have ideological, financial, and power incentives to say one thing over another.

Except the problem would not go away, stupid —the reason for what you dismiss as "hype". Which is why scientific decisions are not best left to democratic choice the same way as political opinions are.

Science isn't immune from politics.

Your evidence that this is the case in the issue of global warming studies, shitwit. Right now. Either put up or shut up.

People obviously desired to purchase those products or else manufactures would not have produced them. If you lifted the bans now no one would want to buy those products thus no manufacturer would produce them even if they were technically cheaper to produce (a cheap product that doesn't sell is still worthless).

Wrong, asswipe —people purchased the products because for a long time they were made only one way and that was with lead as a base component because it was the cheaper method. The companies resisted the bans against lead because of their desire to avoid expense in reformulating their product. Those bans are kept in force today because lead in gasoline and paints has been demonstrated to be dangerous to the environment and to human beings.

They were made that way because no one knew better. Now that people know better even if the bans were removed no one would buy those dangerous products.

Once more, asshole: simply restating your own argument ad-infinitum does NOT make it true by weight of repetition. No matter how much you delude yourself into thinking otherwise. Whereas, unlike you, I can actually back my arguments with fact:

In the 1920s, a new and eventually much larger-scale use of lead emerged: as an anti-knock additive to gasoline. Tetraethyl lead was the invention of General Motors and produced by contract by DuPont and Standard Oil of New Jersey (which later became Exxon). In 1924, GM and DuPont created a joint venture, Ethyl Gasoline, to produce and market the substance.

Workers at a Standard Oil of New Jersey plant making ethyl soon showed severe neurological evidence of lead poisoning. They began hallucinating, and many died. The plant became known as the "House of Butterflies," for the workers' frequent hallucinations of insects. The workers' extreme conditions became front page stories in the New York Times and other major media, and New York and Philadelphia moved to ban leaded gas.

The lead products industries faced a crisis. A combination of accumulated scientific information and high-profile incidents showed the dangers of lead to humans, and the particular hazards of the key uses in paint and gasoline.

The industry response, Deceit and Denial shows, was despicable, and continued for decades. First, the lead product companies moved to cast doubt on the science surrounding lead poisoning. Both the leaded gas and paint companies hired their own researchers, and challenged the findings of independent scientists on the nature of the harms of lead and lead products.

Heavily funded by industry, University of Cincinnati Professor Robert Kehoe for decades was the most prominent researcher in the field. He had the greatest resources and access to industry information. Through numerous testimonies and interventions, he deflected regulatory efforts. In Ethyl's commissioned history, a company official said Kehoe "bought us time."

Key scientists who discovered the harms of lead, and tried to advocate for lead controls or bans, faced enormous pressure. Herbert Needleman, a physician who did breakthrough research on the effect of lead on children beginning in the 1970s and on through today, was subjected to concerted attacks in the early 1980s by industry-allied scientists who charged him with scientific misconduct. It took years for Needleman to clear his name and for his work to receive credit.

Second, to shift blame in the cases of high-profile, acute lead poisoning in leaded gas factories, the auto and oil companies said workers were responsible for the ills befalling them. "The essential thing necessary to safely handle [tetraethyl lead] was careful discipline of our men," said Thomas Midgely, the inventor of the product at GM. Tetraethyl lead "becomes dangerous due to carelessness of the men in handling it."

Third, the companies aggressively advertised and marketed their product, including for use by children. In 1918, National Lead's trade magazine, Dutch Boy Painter, described an advertising campaign —which would last decades— to "cater to children" while convincing the general population that lead "helps to guard your health." The lead paint companies advertised their white paint with images of purity and sanitary beneficence, including for use in hospitals. National Lead advertised toys and sporting equipment with lead. National Lead used the Dutch Boy —a child— to market its paints: the figure of the Dutch Boy, the company said, "is the guarantee of exceptional purity."

Finally, to the extent they conceded some risk of public health impacts from lead exposure, the companies described this as the inevitable cost of doing business and the drive of progress. "Our continued development of motor fuels is essential in our civilization," said Frank Howard, the first vice president of Ethyl. "What is our duty under the circumstances? Should we say, 'No, we will not use a material that is a certain means of saving petroleum?' Because some animals die and some do not die in some experiments, shall we give this thing up entirely?"

This argument related to a broader industry framework of risk assessment and abatement. The industry downplayed the risks while touting the benefits of lead with evangelical fervor. Together, the conclusion was that the risks were worth accepting. To the extent there might be problems, industry contended, these concerns could and should be addressed through controls on the use of the product.

Against this risk assessment framework stood a competing public health paradigm, articulated first by Alice Hamilton and colleagues, and then later, in the 1960s onward, by environmental health experts who identified as part of a social movement. Not only did this framework assess the risks and benefits differently, it relied on a totally different set of presumptions. Uncertainty about the hazards of lead, or other substances, suggested that humans should not be exposed to them until they were proven safe. Lives should not simply be sacrificed as the statistical cost of doing business. Given this different approach to risk, lead products and similarly hazardous substances should be banned, not simply subjected to regulatory controls.

Eventually, and millions of lead-affected lives later, this perspective prevailed.

Get it, asshole? Industry's response to the campaigns against lead additives in paint and gasoline, even after its harmful effects were demonstrated, was to stonewall the public and outright lie about the "purity" of their product. The only thing that stopped them was by banning lead-based paints and gasoline altogether because they were not going to volunteer to do so and actively resisted regulatory efforts to curb lead levels. Same modus-operandi is presently observable in the actions of the tobacco companies and the automakers.

The Constitution doesn't empower the government to become a nanny state.

Too bad for your little fantasies that it does. Evidently you flunked Civics in high school.

The government has assumed that power to itself, but you'll struggle in vain to find that power bestowed upon it in the Constitution.

No, shitwit, you'll struggle in vain to demonstrate how the government's actions are specifically prohibited by the Constitution. They're not, no matter what the voices in your head tell you otherwise.

The people can't consent to extra-Constitutional means without altering the Constitution.

Except they're doing no such thing you endlessly dissembling moron. There is nothing in the Constitution which prohibits the Congress from acting as a national legislature nor from establishing the agencies to carry its laws into effect.

They're a legislature of limited and enumerated powers. No where in those powers can you find justification for what they're now doing according to the intent of the Constitution when it was written. The government has merely assumed those powers and because the people went along with it there were no reprecussions (other than lost liberty).

The same tired "original intent" argument trotted out by doctrinaire types like you. Nowhere in the Constitution is Congress prohibited from establishing regulatory agencies by legislation to oversee the actions of industry. That power is granted them by virtue of Article 1.8: to provide for the common defence and general welfare of the United States, and to make all laws necessary and proper for carrying into execution those powers. The only things Congress is prohibited from doing specifically are laid down in Article 1.9:

• The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it.

• No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

• No tax or duty shall be laid on articles exported from any state.

• No preference shall be given by any regulation of commerce or revenue to the ports of one state over those of another: nor shall vessels bound to, or from, one state, be obliged to enter, clear or pay duties in another.

• No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.

• No title of nobility shall be granted by the United States: and no person holding any office of profit or trust under them, shall, without the consent of the Congress, accept of any present, emolument, office, or title, of any kind whatever, from any king, prince, or foreign state.

NOWHERE in Article 1 is there even the merest hint of the prohibition you yammer on about. Congress is empowered to act as a national legislature with broad scope to its powers, and whether you personally like the idea or not is of no relevance to the matter.

Corporations can't ignore the wishes of the consumers who purchase their products because no matter how powerful they are the people can destroy them at a whim by refusing to purchase their products. Government has jails and guns to bring to bear against the population, corporations do not.

Corporations often ignore the wishes of the people and more so the greater good and use advertising to gull them into buying what they put out. The main American car manufacturers are at present resisting legislation mandating increased fuel efficiency standards and have been for years and keep pushing large inefficient vehicles on a gullible public —which is one reason why the marketplace is a piss-poor decisionmaker for the society at large. THAT —and not your endless ideological wankage— is the reality.

The people have access to all the information, they have a right to be as gullible as they want and it isn't your place to substitute your judgment for theirs.

The actions of the paint and oil industries in suppressing as far as possible information on the effects of lead poisoning from their products puts the lie to your assertion. And while the public may have the "right" to be gullible, the corporations do not have the right to exploit that gullibility to the point of risking the lives of millions of people simply to make a quarterly profit.

[Patrick Degan]

What's truly amusing about the spectacle of Falcon the Imbecile and so many like him is how they bleat "personal freedom" while actually acting as the slaveys of the companies. As the Doctor would say: stupid little sheep who'll willingly trot into the slaughterhouse if they think it's made of gold.

[Stark]

He honestly thinks corporations should be able to take advantage of 'gullible' public... does this mean things like prohibiting the sale of dangerous children's toys is bad? It's government interfering in the public's right to be gullible and blind their children, after all, and it's not our place to make that judgement for them.