kurtster wrote: 
ATFAB

Weather Channel Founder John Coleman:

There is no significant man-made global warming at this time

When a Species Poisoned an Entire Planet

 haresfur wrote: 
I think Nebraska is doing some good things with wind and solar with regard to usage with buyback of the electricity.  The Power Districts are working with the producers pretty well, if I am not mistaken.

 kurtster wrote: 
Carbon trading isn't a tax - it's an attempt to structure the economy to allow market forces achieve desirable outcomes. The requirement is that companies offset their negative impacts through markets or change their operations to decrease the impacts. In theory this might be ok but I don't think the markets are understood well and there are lots of ways that the outcomes won't be the best.  I actually think a tax would be better if only because it is simpler and less likely to crash.  That and because the revenue could be directed towards improved efficiency.  The other thing that could work would be for companies to have incentives to encourage efficiency. Rather than allowing the electric transmission companies make profit by overbuilding, the rates could be restructured so they make more money by giving breaks to people who cut peak usage through things like rolling shutdown of air conditioning (that can usually be done with no obvious effect on your comfort levels) or by subsidizing purchase of insulation that will lower and spread peak demand. All things that have been successfully implemented. 

 haresfur wrote: 
This is what happens when you try to tax a problem instead of fixing the problem.  Taxing a problem just creates a new constituency that becomes dependent on the problem continuing.  Fixing the problem frees up money to address other problems or to simply raise the standard of living by the old adage of a rising tide lifts all boats.  This is the bassackwards approach of taxing a consumption to inhibit its consumption.  What then of the other programs that depend on the tax revenue ?  

About 5 or 6 years ago, the call rang out in California to conserve gasoline, for a host of good reasons.  The public responded.  The response was so great that it worked too well.  Gas tax revenues dropped so much that it had to be raised to deal with the overall decline of gross revenues.

My position has been deal with the efficiency or demand side of the equation with proven solutions first.  As your article illustrated, the amount of work generated from retro insulating buildings will be tremendous.  Then it permanently lowers demand, not temporarily.  The individual benefits two ways.  Comfort is improved and less money is spent on one need freeing it up for spending on other needs.  The best and quickest way for the individual to improve their standard of living is to lower their personal needs to spend on basics such as energy.  Then regardless of how the climate changes, the individual is better equipped to endure these changes.  I'll add on that real social change is accomplished as well in the rising standard of living.  Isn't that the real purpose of social change, to improve, not substitute or rearrange the deck chairs for a better view of the same disaster ?

The survival of a career politician is dependent on managing problems, not fixing problems.  The carbon tax is dependent on managing a problem, not fixing it.  Everything has a life cycle.  The retro fit insulation business will not last forever.  It will eventually run out of things to fix and thus will end its life cycle.  These businesses meet temporary needs and will go the way of the buggy whip maker.  But in the end, many people benefit by immediately solving a real problem.  The EU carbon tax conundrum proves this.

 

And while I'm at it - How to stifle science and free discourse:

Journal pulls paper due to “legal context” created by climate contrarians

A WTF? for you, Kurt, Europe doesn't want too much energy efficiency because it would hurt emissions trading :

Dispute over 'bonkers' EU energy savings plan

 kurtster wrote: 
Taxes aren't really the cause of the high prices.  They killed the carbon tax and the mining tax was so poorly implemented it is about useless and will be repealed. The previous government gave coal energy companies a huge amount of money to adapt as their plants phased out with a promise to essentially buy out the plants for a price to be determined. But when it came time to determine the price, the previous grants made the companies worth so much more that the government couldn't afford to buy out the plants. And you think the US government is inept?

My State split up and sold off the electricity system decades ago. Foreign companies (I'm pretty sure China) bought the distribution system part. They have to provide sufficient capacity to handle the loads nearly all the time. Their rates are regulated since they are necessarily a monopoly so they get a guaranteed return on their capital infrastructure. So no worries, they gold plate the system because anything they invest just makes them more money. I was told buy a state person who works with the coal industries that the mines themselves aren't that profitable but they are steady. The third part of the privatization is the consumer electric companies.  They are suppose to provide competition by making deals to purchase energy at good prices.  They are essentially billing companies that provide no actual value. The first thing they do is set up their rate structures in such a way it is impossible to compare one to another. Then they tweak the structure to their advantage. Time of day pricing is set up so off-peak is usually around 2:00 to 7:00 AM. Yeah, I'm going to set my alarm so I can get up and start the dishwasher then. So the delivery companies set the prices based on peak demand and claim that's the late afternoon when everyone goes home and turns on the cooling.  The billing companies set the peak times so broadly that there is no way you can practically avoid peak rates so there is no incentive to do anything to reduce your use during the actual peak.

There is a tax effect, though, in that all the taxes are pushed down to the consumer level through the GST. We would be better off with a proper energy/mining tax because most of the coal is exported to SE Asia.  So, yeah that would be a place to cut internal taxes and tweak the economics to encourage alternative energy in China (not that they really need encouragement, they see the writing on the wall and are researching and investing heavily in alternative sources). 

Meanwhile policies are being put into place that discourage cleaner sources like wind (like you can't put a turbine within a km of a house since you might give them an imaginary disease). And the renewable energy credits may go.  My opinion is that government should have a role in directing the economy to account for externalities like environmental harm.  There is only so much they can do and they need to do it with slow changes and long-term policies.

With respect, I want to use your cancer analogy. There probably is no way we can keep the temperature from rising for the next 50 years or more. But there are things we can do to slow the rise and give ourselves time to adapt and mitigate the impacts. Even if the major cause of the rise were natural cycles (I'm convinced it is not) our greenhouse gas emissions decrease the amount of energy radiated out to space. So if we want to keep the patient alive, we need to invest in doing so. If we allow only narrow economic forces to govern things then progress will not happen or at minimum be delayed. There is an initial cost for new technology and that has to be dealt with rather than waiting and assuming something will come along. New cancer treatments wouldn't come along without government funded research. Companies fund the tail end of the development where the financial risks are low. 

There are lots of ways to frame the argument about who should do what in a global agreement.  Any small country or even any one person could say my contribution is small so I don't matter.  China can say they are playing catch up to increase their standard of living.  The US can say they don't need to do anything except hold steady.  It's easy to point the finger at someone else but it is far more effective if you are actually improving things where you have an influence.

Well, I think that's more than enough for now. 

 haresfur wrote: 
 You guys can help the environment by switching over to sheep dung as a primary fuel source.

 The USA could do the same with our cow dung, but then we wouldn't have a government left.

BBC To Cut Air Time For Climate Change Skeptics

 

 haresfur wrote: 
There are 23 million people in Australia, right ?  Y'all have a right to live and do more than exist.  Energy is life.  

I have no idea what cost drivers make your electricity cost as much as it does, when cheap domestic coal is the primary fuel.  Taxes ?

While your per capita output is high, how much can 23 million produce to the point where it does more than impact locally as opposed to globally ?  We all have to work with what we have, right ?  Who can legitimately hold it against y'all ?  It would be arrogant to keep using your dirty local coal if there was something cleaner and cheaper available, but there isn't any better alternative, yet.  

One thing that I have learned by surviving cancer ... While the action taken now may not be the cure, its about keeping the patient alive as long as possible hoping that the cure or something that works a little bit better is just around the next corner.  That is how I view hydrocarbon fuels.  Something better will come.  And it will come in its due time and not before.  Until then we have to use what we have that does work to keep us around for the next breakthrough. 

 kurtster wrote: 
Funny thing though, the mining magnate in the senate made them keep the tax cuts that were put in place to mitigate the impacts of the carbon tax to certain industries.  That's ok, though, they put in a rule that the savings from the repeal of the carbon tax have to be passed on to the consumers.  Totally impossible to enforce but a nice thought.  Meanwhile, the nation with the highest per capita GHG emissions continues to generate almost all of it's electricity by burning crappy brown coal with the promise that we want to do our bit but only after faffing around until some sort of new world-wide agreement is in place. We use about the cheapest energy source going and electricity costs are many times higher than in the US.

But you think that's all good, right? 

Politician keeps campaign promise and repeals national carbon tax !

 Australia Becomes First Developed Nation to Repeal Carbon Tax

 kurtster wrote:

A follow up to the previous video below the new one.

Its either getting real deep or very shallow.  Comes out the same, either way.
 

 kurtster wrote: 
I posted about that a few days ago, I guess EPA is following the IRS's lead on cover ups.

More fun with hard drives !  This time at the EPA who is in charge of administering Climate Chaos ...

Just another silly coincidence  

 Another agency tells Congress: File not found
 The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the IRS share a problem: officials say they cannot provide the emails a congressional committee has requested because an employee’s hard drive crashed.

 DaveInVA wrote: 
If this is true, and I have little doubt that it is true, then the wisest course would be to invest in technology that will allow man to cope with and prepare for these coming changes instead of bankrupting ourselves on a lost cause trying to prevent the widely accepted inevitable.

From the article ...

 My observation is that actual climate mitigation has nothing to do with why this administration is imposing these new regulations, just like improving health outcomes, insuring the uninsured, or reducing health care costs had nothing to do with the Affordable Care Act. In both cases the ultimate goal is to put industries that are essential to the US economy, energy and healthcare, under government control. If the government can control these two industries, it can control every aspect of our lives.

.
And this is exactly what it is all about, control ...

 islander wrote: 
I blame humanity's lifestyle choice made several thousand years ago. You know, the one that started them deforesting the planet and breeding like cockroaches?

 ScottN wrote: 
Great, now they can't blame us for it. They might get a little traction blaming us for inaction though, but we can just wait them out - we're practicing now.