I DO give a damn about them as they will have a say in how the U.S. is run insofar as environmental issues through the U.N. (Useless Nations), and the fact that they will use current climate bills (Cap and Trade) to neuter the U.S. economy and gain windfalls for their own economies.

(Did you know that the majority of the Rare Earth Minerals for magnets used in "Green Tech" come from the notoriously dangerous Chinese mines? China, who refuses to export most of those same Rare Earth Minerals to the U.S. or other western nations in order to keep the manufacturing jobs there, where work is often substandard and almost never up to environmental standards? Just thought I'd mention that little fact.)

Beyond that, we don't seem to disagree much (except that I'm a drunken conservative nut-job). I want clear air, clean water, and clean land, and responsible stewardship of same. The problem is letting others dictate how (the "how" gives them leverage over the U.S. via the BS bills, which once signed, make them punishable U.S. LAW under foreign control, this is how the modern trans-national progressive undermines our national Independence.) I however, don't intend to let them destroy us to get what they want by using round-a-bout methods. READ THE TEXT of the bills the world wants to impose here.

I realize this makes me sound like one of the "nuts", but you may want to check the wording of some of the proposed bills. I WANT A CLEAN ENVIRONMENT. But this is not the way, it is intended to subsume our government to the New World Order^TM, and no matter how crazy that may sound, it's the truth as I see it. YMMV. I will not allow this to happen. (<read into that sentence whatever you like, you may be closer to the militant truth than you think.) If the U.S. economy and government tanks in the next 25 years because of this (the stated objective of many left-wing nuts, thereby allowing them to re-build the U.S. into a "Socialist Utopia", the real reason they don't care if thier political life ends abruptly due to things like the bankrupting "Health-care" bills currently under discussion, of which only 38% of the U.S. population approve, yet they push forward, ignoring the people's opinions because it will further thier goals of bringing the U.S. governemt to it's knees, think I'm nuts? Read the mission statement of the ACLU, learn a little about ACORN and the SEIU,) expect CIVIL WAR [/crazy, drunken conservative rant.]

Yeah, I'm nuts. Shit happens. I didn't become a gunsmith just to amuse myself, and I'm not studying Information Security in college just because... The tipping point has come. Socialist (100 year plan) vs. Capitalalism. Choose a side.

Edit: Oh, hey, I just finished a liter of whisky... Not alone though, a few others had, uh, a shot or two out of it...
Edit2: Wow, I seem to have totally derailed this thread... My bad... Sorry... Ignore the drunken conservative nut-job... carry on...

Then you won't need to respond to this sentence from the article you linked:


My involvement in this discussion has been to emphasize that what we do know for sure is that climate change is real and that man-made emissions are a part of the equation. What we do not know for sure muddies the waters significantly. We don't know for sure how much of an effect man-made emissions is having, or even exactly how much of what gases we're emitting. The oceans act as a giant carbon sink, but we don't know what the limit is or if the absorption of carbon will slow down as the ocean saturates. We don't know for sure what effect all this carbon will have on ocean chemistry. We do suspect that a whole lot of small sea animals with shells are probably going to go extinct because the higher amount of Calcium Carbonate is dissolving their shells. We don't know if the upper layers of the oceans are going to warm just enough to start melting the huge reservoir of methane trapped in water ice in continental shelves all over the world. See this for more. Just for reference, a positive feedback loop of methane release from these deposits is the prime suspect in a massive warming episode 56 million years ago. We're talking crocodiles and palm trees in Greenland.

My point is that even though there is a lot of uncertainty, we know that climate shifts are going on all the time and have, in the past, happened extremely abruptly due to positive feedback loops in natural processes. I am not a chicken little on this topic, but it burns me when people deny anything is happening at all or cling to the absolute minimalist range of the possible consequences. We would all be better served if we picked a scenario more towards the middle of the range of possible outcomes and tried to create incentives for free-market solutions that do not cripple our economy. Speaking of which, it also burns me when people take the position that doing anything at all will destroy our economy.

Meanwhile, the common excuse to do nothing at all is that the developing world is polluting willy-nilly. True enough for the last fifteen years or so and will be true for some time to come. On the other hand, China is realizing the impact pollution is having on its own people (as we did in the 1960s and '70s) and are doing something about it. As fast as they're building coal-fired power plants, they are also embarking on a huge wind power initiative. Several of you keep tossing around the phrase "national interest" but that is a term that is subject to change for any country. China apparently thinks it's in their best interest to build coal power for the short term while investing massively in renewable energy for the longer term. What are we doing?

In SR, the Awakening seems to have short-circuited the warming trend. Huge ecological changes like massive magical reforestation in the Amazon and Central Africa, coupled with massive depopulation due to the VITAS plagues did for emissions control what politics could probably never do. We're expected to have 9.5 billion by 2050. What does the SR world have in 2072? 6 billion? Less?

One person is not going to make up 61.6MB of text data. That -would- have to be a conspiracy of NUMEROUS people making up data just to be able to acquire that much.

One doesn't even need raw numbers to make stolen data valuable. The value in this group of email, that I've read, isn't about any record of fudging numbers, interesting but not so much. It's in the emails where the individuals talk about those who are in opposition to them. They give an insight into how these people think which tarnishes their own reputability when it comes to the data they are presenting. The behavior they discussed is really no different than the way the Church treated Galileo by ostracizing him and attempting to condemn him because he expressed views that didn't conform with their world view.

Generally speaking people are more reserved about how the present themselves based on how public the medium is. People generally hold emails to be secure and private (usually erroneous) which leads to them being far more honest to their character. Forums on the other hand are significantly more public so many more people with be far more reserved about their opinions and stances.

When it comes to data stealing, emails contain a couple of valuable pieces data.

Description of processes.
Attached documents.
Raw data numbers.
Information on the character of employees.
Contacts (vendors/customers).

in the end it all looks like a bucket of crabs.

if one tries to climb out, the others will grab on and drag him back down...

Sorry for the confusion, my point was that currently the cost for green energy is more than the cost for other energy sources.

SEIU-Service employee industry union??

one start to wonder how much thats related to economies of scale, and also incumbent industries...

Semerkhet, when the rest of the world plays by EXACTLY the same rules (and I mean EXACTLY the same... no fudge factor, no loopholes, no ANYTHING) that the US is going to play under then come talk to me about Global Climate change. Until then it's just a scheme to get money from the US. I'm all for a clean Earth, but if the US has to take it in the ass so somebody else can make a buck... nope. No thank you.



Service Employee International Union

Quite a bit-there is also the effect of once you start building mass amounts of the stuff, you'll get better at it. There is also the start up cost of switching from the one technology to the other.


Using a coal electric plant and a windfarm as an example: You will still be using the coal plant while you install the new wind farm. You then need to account for the costs associated with delivering this power, as wind has to be from specific areas, that are not typically the same as the coal plant. Of course all this has to be built. Land has to be cleared and other infrastructure needs to be taken care of.


Think we've derailed the topic enough??

No, we haven't gotten around to antropomorphic cat girls yet.

huh? i thought those only came after the dicoated ally spirits.

*goes digging for the show schedule*

Your positions are contradictory. You can't be "all for a clean Earth" and yet set the bar for our nation to act to achieve that goal so high that it's effectively unreachable. You will never get 195 countries to agree on anything, much less something important. An earlier poster used a great analogy with WWII. I'll go a bit further. Post-WWII, the United States took on a huge and disproportionate share of the financial and military burden to defend the NATO alliance and fund the Marshall Plan redevelop and rebuild Europe. Between 1945 and 1952 the United States spent $650 billion in 2009 dollars (inflated via the nominal GDP method) on rebuilding Europe. The long-term results of this totally unfair financial outlay are generally agreed to have been positive and in the national interest of the United States. Did we wait to act until the rest of the NATO alliance was contributing exactly the same amount of money to the common defense? Of course not. The "do-nothing" crowd always insists that doing anything will bring economic ruin, never considering the potentially huge benefits of developing this technology ourselves rather than letting another country, like China, do it first.

Part of the problem with the climate change debate is this pervasive perception that if you don't agree with the global warming alarmists then you must not care about the environment. This is a common approach progressives use- take an idea that everyone agrees with in principle (like a cleaner environment or universal heathcare) and subvert it to advance a similar-appearing but different political agenda or economic policy. Then when people disagree it must be because they are shills for the rich corporate polluters or because we want old ladies to die in the street without healthcare. We are told that denying global warming is tantamount to believing the Earth is flat or denying the Holocaust. It basically just sets up one great big reductio ad Hitlerum argument so any opposition can be discounted as irrelevant. I see this nicely illustrated in this very thread. Well for the record, one of my issues with climate change alarmism is that it takes the emphasis off some very real environmental issues and posits that we should spend huge amounts of money and resources worrying about something like CO2 which may or may not even be problem.

No no it comes after the Dancing Platypii.

*Points to the schedule*

...and before the Drop bears.

I have to ask, since you didn't quote. Are you referring to my stated position or that of other posters in this topic? Because I agree with you that there are fanatic partisans on both sides of the issue that we would be better off without. As much as one can self-judge, I place myself as about a 65 on a scale of 0 = "Climate change is a hoax and any measures to combat it are a conspiracy to destroy America" and 100 = "Run! The climate apocalypse is nigh!"

actually, i'm finding this discussion to be very informative.

contributing briefly to the coal versus wind power hypothetical; Nuclear is currently a third rail in green-energy discussion; it shouldn't be.

Fission would be significantly more efficient in this nation if we did any sort of widescale civilian reprocessing effort (France would be a good guide here.) Fission* can pretty much substitute in place for any base load coal, natural gas, or oil power plant, transitioning the existing plant to cover the new running load slot that you would be building a plant for. (solar can do this too below about the 42nd parallel depending on average cloud cover.) The issue with this plan currently is DOE guidelines concerning the standards for requalifying existing plants for new purposes - it is literally cheaper to build a new plant than to re-purpose an existing one because the standards are higher for a retrofit than a new plant... (illogical? yes. byproduct of 1970's pollution scares? yes.) when you include the wrinkle that solar and nuclear fission plants don't meet the online-offline cycle time requirements for running load plants and you encounter a nasty catch-22.


Geo-Energy (Wind, Thermal, Wave, Solar) would be significantly more attractive if we transitioned to a High-Voltage Direct Current (HVDC) energy grid, this would be an expensive retrofit in the short term, but the grid that exists today needs to be replaced within the next twenty years or we'll be experiencing rolling brown-outs pretty much everywhere (as opposed to just in CA) as demand starts to exceed the maximum load the distribution stations can maintain. We *happen* to have several hundred billion allocated for (re)building federal infrastructure, I propose that an HVDC distribution system would be a better investment for a portion of those funds than adding even more highways to the interstate system.


*4th generation 100MW fission plants, even in meltdown scenarios, release less radiation than a typical clean-scrub stack 100MW coal plant over a fifty year period (fifty years being the standard operating envelope for a baseline powerplant without refit.) a meltdown scenario in a 4th generation plant results in an olympic swimming pool of heavy water and some melted lead casements. the heavy water can be reclaimed for military and/or scientific research purposes, or to harvest Deuterium for fusion research.

Jimmy Carter, the gift that just keeps on giving...

If someone comes up with efficient ways to store huge amounts of power for hours that helps a whole lot. Along with more efficient (lower losses - longer range) power transmission. The main issue with the current energy grid under current loads is that you can't effectively handle the peak loads that comes along a few times a year and a major base-load station going off-line on the wrong day is a disaster.

But long term, electric cars are going to require significantly more power production and that is a base load that you will see every night, Fusion is still 20 years away, just like it was in 1960, so that leaves coal, natural gas or nuclear. Or freezing in the dark, which is always an option.

Drop Bears.... DROP ATTACK!

A lot of people bring up the U235 shortage as a reason to not use fission. It's completely pointless though since they're essentially operating in the 1st generation power plant mentality. U238 is far more plentiful, I think estimated run around 150x as much U238 than U235. Later generation reactors are capable of using plutonium, thorium, and other fissionable materials.

The one thing I'm not certain of is how easy it is to increase the energy output of a nuclear power plant. That's one of the big advantages to coal plants. Let's say they have four furnaces that each equate to a smoke stack. The base load utilizes 2 of those furnaces and it's a fairly simple matter to turn on a 3rd or even 4th furnace to increase output. You really don't have that capability with wind or solar (unless your only taking power from 1/2 your panels). You can't just "flip a switch" and start increasing output.

Maybe I'm missing something. Are you saying that a coal plant having four furnaces could run only 2 until more are needed? I get that it takes longer to fire up a nuclear reactor, but I don't see how this is better than a solar plant capable of producing four coal furnaces worth of electricity.

With power plants you don't want to run at 100% output all the time. I believe it's around 50-75% of capacity is where you want to be. Also, the coal power plant will consume significantly less acreage than a solar plant that has the same output.

Using my coal example with four furnaces. If you need to do maintenance on the #1 furnace, you bring the #3 online then shut down the #1 and perform your maintenance. Or if the #2 furnace has a failure, you bring up the #4 furnace. It's the ability to minimize the impact of a failure at the generator. You can do the same thing with hydro, the damn always lets pass the same volume of water. This volume of water is always equal to or greater than the total volume that can pass through the turbines, though not all the turbines will have water passing through them.

Both of these plant designs allow for more controlled output, better ability to perform maintenance, and can easily increase output when needed. What you probably don't realize is that the hungriest power consumers are also less tolerant to interruptions (manufacturing and computer equipment). Power interruption can cause significant damage to electrical motors and computing equipment. Both these things require DC current, not AC, and the inverters and power supplies that convert from AC to DC are already violent as it is. In another fashion, interrupting the power of the devices too often will degrade the lifespan of the machines, cause the machines to require more maintenance, and in general increase the costs of operation for the electrical consumers.

Now wind obviously is very difficult if not impossible to control how many of the windmills are giving power to the grid. With solar, I suspect you could cut off a grid of panels from contributing. The problem with these, for industry and computing, is that they are entirely reliant on uncontrollable factors to produce electricity. This is a bad thing if you want to ensure that you are delivering power reliably to your customers that depend on reliable power.

The usefulness of alternative energy sources like solar, wind, geothermal, and hydro are highly variable and depend on geography, population density, wind patterns, mean cloud cover, and on and on. There are going to be some places where wind power is well-matched to meet energy demand and many places it won't. Same thing goes for the other means of energy production. We won't be relying on solar in Wisconsin anytime soon.

A carbon tax would provide incentive for the market to develop alternative energy sources. A carbon tax does not pick winners and losers among the alternative energy competitors. You let the market and the local/regional factors determine which mix of energy production is the right one. As an added bonus, a carbon tax provides a revenue stream that could be used to reduce income taxes or reduce the deficit. Emissions trading is the method favored by the U.S. A quick Google will get you pros and cons of each.

Of course, I may just have exploded the heads of any die-hard anti-tax advocates here. To them I say, your dream of tiny government is unattainable, so you'd best aim your efforts at making government less wasteful and less intrusive instead.

I'm curious, you do realize that any excise tax is intruding upon the market and interfering with it? The market really hasn't been allowed to take its own course since the Great Depression. There's been regulations, taxes, tax breaks, and other governmental interference and intrusion that has the current US economy acting like a bastardized abomination of the free market. This is typically why I facepalm whenever someone points at some US economic factor and says, "See the free market fails."

I am fully aware that a carbon tax would be intruding on the market. I do not have a problem with regulating the market, though I prefer it be done in the least constraining fashion possible. Smith's "invisible hand" is insufficient to promote the general welfare without supervision. However, I am far from a socialist. My views are best aligned, though not identical, with those of the editorial board of The Economist. I look to that UK publication to find the mixture of social liberalism and just right-of-centre fiscal conservatism to best fit my needs.

Here is a link to the blog of Peter Watts, writing in regard to the hacked email affair. For those unfamiliar, Peter Watts is a former marine biologist and current SF writer featured recently on the list of influences for the newly released Eclipse Phase RPG. His views pretty much mirror my own, but he writes far more eloquently.

The code comments from someone trying to work with the critical model and data set suggest that the entire code and data set should only be published in The Journal of Irreproducible Results. Piltdown Man was also the product of UK scientists around which an entire industry had been built....

Your point about reliance on external factors beyond human control is an important one. In that respect, I suspect multiple sources would be more secure. Of course, multiple means more, means more expensive, but so are four furnaces vs. two or three. I'm not sure how to compare the two expenses.

Regarding the acreage of the plants, the solar plant itself would take more space than the coal plant, but the coal plant also has attendant open pit mines and underground mines collapsing Pennsylvania homes. Those take up acreage too.

Much of the US that has really good sunlight also has lots of empty land. The main issue (Other than the fact that same people who love solar and wind also tend to refuse to allow you to "despoil the unspoiled desert habitat"...) is that you have to transport the power quite a distance to consumers and you really need as way to store the power for a few hours so you get more reliable output.

I've read that there a number of ways to handle the power storage, but they add a premium to the total energy cost that hurts its competitiveness. If we ever get mass production of high temperature superconductors this problem, and many others, are solved.

Oh, and I fully advocate filling up the deserts with solar farms.

Summarizing several comments concerning Transport and Storage (for both solar and nuclear): both are solved with HVDC power-grid, which allows load-leveling to occur on national scales instead of regional ones.

answering questions about plant loading: it takes about the same time to double the output of a gen 4 fission plant from 50% to 100% as it does to take a modern coal plant from 50 to 100%... the issue is you can't offline a fission plant entirely (you can with coal). base loads haven't been changing as quickly as peak loads have been - so while we're still building base load plants, we're not building them as fast as we're building standby plants (which are sometimes offlined entirely.)


The battery technology for moving to full-electric cars is already here. (recommend doing some research on tesla motors if you're curious for an in production example.)


last note on fusion; recommend reading up on polywell (it may be difficult to find information but I can provide more later) Navy is expecting to prove Unity by 2011 and, pending funding for the pilot plant if unity goes as expected (about 200m) would have a 100MW fusion reactor ready in 2020. (that's 11 years for anyone counting.)

Tokamak is 50 years away and has been since the 80s; which is why most people following fusion technology believe Tokamak (toroidal) fusion reactors are a dead-end.

It's a jobs program for Physicists.

Polywell and a few other shoestring concepts show some possibilities, but the Big Science version of fusion has been at least 20 years away since the program started in the 60s.

in the end, fossil fuel have been a kind of "free lunch" and now those termodynamics wants to have a talk with us humans...

For those who want to play around with rising ocean levels (which I'm going to consider as on-topic as anything around here), the Flood Maps.

Bah, they don't allow falling ocean levels.

That would be cool. It's also limited to +14m, which is not nearly enough for my Noah's Ark scenario.

A few years ago I was doing some worldbuilding for a far future game set on Earth in a "hothouse" phase where there was no ice and sea level had risen the theoretical max of 80 meters. I found some free software to manipulate GIS topographic maps to raise or lower sea level as much as you want. The software was a little futzy and not terribly intuitive, but it gave a lot of flexibility. I'll see if I can find the software hidden on my home PC and post some info, if anyone is interested.

If this was the case, you'd have left the cooking the books statement out of your first post, so I'm forced to conclude that your last sentence is a lie.

Lets face it, you tried to pick a fight with your opening statement.

If you actually believe this stuff you're saying here, I'd suggest editing the first post to remove any statements re: the veracity of the theories being advanced then getting the guy who replaced someone elses comment with 'The party line' which again is blatantly advancing a point that has nothing to do with SR4.



In the context of a discussion about the enviroment this statement is dumb. You have heard of the tragedy of the commons, which is a well established fact right.

Please outline to me how the atmosphere is in any way different from the commons in the tragedy of the commons.

There are a number of silly statements in this thread - the blatant americo-centrism in the '1934 was the warmest year ever' for example. Maybe you should all step back and take a bit of a perspective on the issue?



This is only the case if you don't do anything to regulate the tragedy of the commons problem above. Seriously, by this (dumb) arguement, we should reintroduce leaded petrol. I mean, it makes the cars and petrol cheaper - lets just ignore the fact that lead levels in kids was reaching the sort of level that would cause retardation of mental development.

What about CFCs? I mean, that makes refrigeration cheaper - let's ignore the fact that you're giving Australian's skin cancer and actually killing them. Your cheaper refridgeration means that it's perfectly acceptable for you to kill me.

Dumping shit into the atmosphere without MY permission is much the same as just stabbing me and stealing my stuff, because giving me skin cancer will save you a couple of hundred bucks.

This sort of anarcho-captalism is disgusting and should not be embraced by any right thinking human being, and yet we have people like Tachi saying that it's their INALIENABLE RIGHT to kill Australians! and any attempt to stop them from trying to kill me is a breach of their liberties. Screw you guys. What about my right not to have a bunch of libertarians try and murder me every frikken time I go outside?

Ozone damage has reached the point that in Australia you can only go outside without sun protection for 15 minutes without increasing your risk of cancer. I like going outside, but yet you think that you have an inalienable right to take away my ability to go outside, and me trying to protect my right to go outside is



Seriously. What the hell? We're not trying to undermine your national independence by banning leaded petrol or CFCs, we're trying not to die. People are having Melanomas removed are age 22 now. Twenty Two! Rates of which can be directly shown to be caused by increased UV exposure due to decreased ozone btw.

How can you guys be so crazy

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2009/1...mate-change.ars

It's interesting to claim that you don't like the US climate records considering that the CRU has admitted that they threw all the original climate data away and it's pretty clear that the massaged and resampled data left is hopelessly corrupted.

"Back to the gridding. I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps?
Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.0"

Are you talking to me?

Edit: Assuming you are, I didn't say I didn't like the data - the hottest year in America was probably 1934. What is blatant americo-centrism is that you're ignoring the rest of the world. Like, the hottest year in Australia was 2005.

I addressed this upthread but basically; yes. the 3 years often quoted (and often misquoted as being "wrong") are 2005, 2007 and 2009(on track to beat 2006). these are the three hottest years for global mean surface temperature, including oceanic surface temps.

the 1934, 1921, 1931 'are the hottest years on record' comes from the corrected figures released by Goddard, in 1998 when they were made aware of the systemic error in 1990s temperature measures by McIntyre (h/t realclimate.org) BUT they are specifically US 48-contiguous states, soil mean surface temperatures, and are not global figures.

even this is somewhat out of date (after correction, 1998 is now the second hottest year on record, 2006 is now tied with 1931 for 4th/5th; US contiguous-48 soil mean surface temps. the rest of the 1990s are now somewhere in the top 25 and except for 1998 are no longer notable.)


While this correction pokes significant holes in "An Inconvenient Truth" slideshows by Al Gore (which rely extensively on the so-called hockey-stick graph from inaccurate US temperatures - pre-correction) most of the climate data - and all of the data currently at data.giss.nasa.gov incorporates these corrections and the global picture is still pretty much what the majority opinion of climatologists say it is. (that is: the planet is warming at an increasing rate over the last 50 years or so, what portion of that warming is anthropogenic is still undetermined, but CO2 and CH4 are pollutants currently added to the atmosphere in significant* quantity by anthropogenic sources and they have a proven positive effect, so it is in our interest to curb their release to mitigate the short-term effects of climate change unless/until we adjust our civilization to operate smoothly outside of the current ~+/-3C global surface temp mean civilization is currently predicated on.)

*significant in a scientific/statistical sense

Sure, sure - all I was saying is that the position '1934 is the hottest year on record' in a discussion called "Global Warming" (i.e. a global discussion) on the basis of American soil temps is 100% disingenuous if not outright lying, and certainly extremely Americo-centric. Which is what people were doing, so I was calling them on it.

I agree re: rest of it.

church; choir; etc. upthread I basically said the same thing (although I credited it to confusion or poorly cited sources in whatever reference it was read out of and not malice)

I think perhaps another of the issues is that alot of people conflate the "climate-change-preventers"* with the "climate-change-adapters" in the sense of both proposed actions and general stance on the issues; which frustrates the adapters because the science they rely on isn't remotely controversial and their stance is ultimately that of the reasoned-skeptic; and frustrates the preventers because, while their science is more controversial than the adapters, the adapters don't really have a stance on GHGs per se and this results in preventers scientific contributions getting muddled, confounded and overwhelmed by all these people talking about Temperature and not about how we might be (probably are) poisoning the planet - and should be doing something about GHGs even if they aren't causing global warming...



*coined myself here as shortcuts for the two main stances of 'pro-green' policy, meaning basically that the former which to try to limit or reverse overall global warming trends and generally assign most if not all of warming to anthropogenic causes; the latter accept that global means are rising and would like to work primarily to insulate against the negative effects of possibly inevitable increase while also minimizing (but not necessarily eliminating) any human contributed acceleration to what could very well be an inevitable and non-anthropogenic process. - I am the latter.

I'm astonished.

Most of the people on this board have a fairly grounded view of the international system, due in no small part to our common bond; Shadowrun. Accordingly, I'm absolutely amazed that people in this thread have convinced themselves that international law = supranational regulation. If you want to posit that the United States should be the paragon of responsible environmental stewardship, how can you rationalize the loss of capability that it would suffer from walking the plank and upending a still-shaky economy? In fact, the repercussions that would hit the global system would be so wide-spread that you'd practically ensure that nobody would care about global warming in the least.

I know that some of you must have played Civ IV, or Alpha Centauri. Anybody recall what happens when you change your economic (or any other) civic? Yeah.

For the same reason we don't use leaded petrol any more? I'm not sure what is hard about this? You make this sound extremely complex, but it really boils down to the goverment passing a tax on emissions.

Of which there are many. Doesn't america have like a billion smog taxes on cars and stuff in various areas?

To rebutt the insane 'but we are uncompetitive vs other countries' you just make it like a VAT that doesn't apply on exported goods and slap it on all imports.

This isn't exactly the end of free markets or democracy. Polluter pays is a principle that has been around for a looonnnnggggg time, and last I checked it wasn't the clean air act that caused the great financial crisis, instead I think it was the free market. Just putting that out there.

Edit: The US even has a tradable pollution permits market for slupfur dioxide running right now. Where was the armageddon when that was introduced?

Well, it's really simple. Nobody pushing this stuff really believes it. That's why Al Gore lives in a mansion that uses as much power and natural gas as a small town and relaxes on his new 100 foot long houseboat when he's not flying by private jet. They intend for everyone else to take a huge hit to their standard of living while they get rich selling indulgences. When they actually start acting like they believe it's a real problem we can start the process to determine whether it is.

Oh, and the vast majority of the countries involved intend to cheat. You'll notice that essentially none of the European countries that formally set CO2 targets actually met them, because they unwilling to cripple their economy by doing that. They just didn't want to look like they were not being "good global citizens".

Norway has less than 1/3rd the US climate emissions on a per capita basis and an assessed high quality of living according to the UNDI.

Now you can dispute that, just pointing out that reduced carbon emissions =/= reduced quality of life.

And you make it sound very simple. It's no secret that U.S. manufacturing isn't in the best position. The main concern is employment right now. You're not going to generate jobs when you're slapping broad-spectrum taxes across the entire economy. To compare it against smog fees on personal auto, or the Clean Air Act is a crock; Cap & Trade is an economy-wide tax that is going to have serious effects, cross-sector.

I'm not trying to say that the world doesn't have to rethink its relationship with the environment. I'm trying to say that the units of interest - states - are important, and need to be realistically assessed if we're going to come up with a realistic plan of action. I also support emissions regulations. At the very least, we know we're outputting toxins, and that's a bad idea for a lot of reasons. I certainly don't support the more radical ideas I've seen proposed like solar shades and massive oceanic chemical additions (aluminum? can't remember) until we have a bullet-proof understanding of the science behind both climate change, and how the hell our climate cycles work to begin with.

Norway primarily produces it's electricity by hydroelectric plants. Some countries are plagued by "environmentalists" who hate dams, hate nuclear power and somehow don't see what this results in.

Oh, and this is the trendline of Norway's Co2 emissions. Do you think they are on track to reducing emissions to 1% above 1990 by 2012?