It's hugely complex, but so is the rest of the tax code. We deal with that every day. The governments sole purpose is to deal with large and complex issues.

It's just a tax. There is already cap and trade system on sulfur emissions. It's proven mostly functional (no ongoing incentive to cut emissions).



You're imposing them on imports too. What is the effect you're talking about?

Try Ireland then - same heavy reduction, same much higher quality of life - using oil and gas and a very minor hydro contribution.

The free market doesn't need your stupid environment-friendly policies to destroy the economy!

Anyway, I'm no moderator but:

Oh, I would be all for the expansion of hydro power in the US. The problem is that there isn't really anywhere left to dam up for power generation.

--



Perhaps in your country, but in the US were have an explicitly enumerated Constitution that dictates what our government CAN do. No where in that document does the Constitution state that it is the US Federal government has the power do deal with large and complex issues just because the issue is large and complex.

While it may seem logical that the Federal government should handle such issues, by ignoring the laws set forth for lawmakers by the supreme law, the lawmakers themselves lack the moral high ground to require the rest of the citizenry to follow the laws they make.

Learn your constitution. Regulation of interstate commerce includes* pollutants that may travel across state lines; as well as any business that exists in two or more states; or sells products across state lines.

that clause is front and center in Article I (which outlines the powers of the federal legislation.

Expecting legislators to somehow be paragons of virtue and yet also 'of the people' (as required by the so-called "supreme law") is also disingenuous in the extreme. (if not outright hypocritical..)


*per Supreme Court decisions on the scope of Article I, section 8 clause 3. which is also constitutionally based; per Article III Section II and legislation endowing the court with this specific power, pursuant to the same article.

Some US states are more populous and complex than entire countries elsewhere. I do not think I made reference to a specific level of government, and indeed if I did I did not mean to do so.

But anyway yes your commerce clause enables the federal government to regulate all production and aerosol pollutants would easily be covered by that.

I am quite aware of that clause. I'm also quite aware that people like to read more into the clause than is truly there. The clause explicitly states that it allows Congress to regulate commerce, not production. Pollution is a product of production, not commerce.



The regulation of trade is to prevent one State from punishing another state in order to favor its own products in its own or other states. In other words, Virginia couldn't impose taxes on North Carolina tobacco traveling to Virginia or to a more northern state just because North Carolina's tobacco is cheaper than Virginia's.

Congress has no power to to regulate production, which is what most of these taxes are designed to do.

You're splitting hairs; and you're doing it in a way that flies in the face of decisions made under color of law. I'll point you to Gibbons v. Ogden 22 U.S. 1,75. (1824) specifically Marshall's Opinion. This is where the court affirms AIS8 to be "complete in itself.. exercised to the utmost extent, and.. no limitations other than are prescribed in the constitution."

Production itself is viewed as being including in the commerce clause, as demonstrated in e.g., United States v. Darby 312 U.S. 100 (1941) and e.g. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. 301 U.S. 4,48-50 (1937) which upheld the Fair Labor Standards Act and the NLRA, respectively.

the pollution vectors (water particularly) are themselves squarely ruled to be articles of commerce, and as such any such things that are carried by them through state lines, are considered to be commerce and subject to federal regulation. (Sporhase v. Nebraska ex. rel. Douglas 458 U.S. at 954 (1982).)


Taxes are also permitted to be levied by the federal government, generally without restriction, provided they are applied uniformly (e.g. "IF you Pollute; you pay the pollution tax. &c.) IF the government chooses to set an excise tax on products produced in a manner which damage interstate property (or even intrastate property) that is their prerogative. (U.S. Constitution, Article I, Section 8, Para 1: “The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States; but all duties, imposts and excises shall be uniform throughout the United States")

Yes, rigid literal interpretation of a document designed to regulate 18th-century pre-industrial commerce is *precisely* what we need at this moment in history. Since I can't stop myself from replying to this nonsense, I'll push this topic further into ban territory in the hope that a moderator shuts it down. If this were a religious argument, you'd be right in line with the "shellfish and mixed-fiber garments are an abomination unto God" crowd. That sort of doctrinaire attitude is equivalent to sticking your fingers in your ears and repeating "nah, nah, nah" over and over again. Failing to re-interpret our founding documents to rise to the challenge of a new century is cowardice and shows a distressing lack of confidence in the government institutions those very founding documents put in place to deal with unforeseen challenges. The FF knew they could not see all ends, else they wouldn't have created a legislative branch.

To bring this tenuously back to SR, I find it curious that the forum for a game featuring a near-future with corporate capitalism gone (even further) awry and environmental devastation commonplace features a number of people in favor of policies that take us closer to that dystopic future. Perhaps some people are playing SR because it serves as a form of wish-fulfillment rather than a dystopia?

You mean you don't want a computer in your brain and televisions in your eyes?

I'm already suspect of the cases you cited based on the year and the court in question. I've read the Marshall opinion and as far as I can tell, that only states that Congress has exclusive power to regulate interstate trade and that the states cannot pass laws that interfere or usurp that power. Hardly relevant. National Labor Relations Board v. Jones & Laughlin Steel Corp. in particular was only a 5-4 ruling with the dissenters commenting that Congress was overstepping its bounds. The decisions of SCOTUS during the New Deal era are of dubious quality at best. It is no secret that Congress and FDR put forth legislation that would have crippled SCOTUS's ability to strike down unconstitutional New Deal legislation by increasing the size of the court so that it could be padded with justices who were partial to FDR's and Congress's goals. Many of those rulings during that era were in order for the court to save itself from destruction rather than any adherence to Constitutionality. You can see the effects of this by looking at SCOTUS's initial ruling on the Railroad Retirement Act then their ruling on the Social Security Act. Both laws behave identically, though one only accounted for one particular business while the other encompassed everyone. It is no secret either that the explosive growth of government has been solely done under the guise of the Commerce Clause to which I point United States v. Lopez 514 U.S. 549 (1995).

Sporhase v. Nebraska ex. rel. Douglas I'm not sure what relevance this has to pollution. Nebraska passed a law that prevented exporting water from Nebraska to other states. Nebraska was interfering with trade by establishing protectionist laws. Certainly a violation by Nebraska by overstepping their boundary.

Here's the flip side of the coin, if we include regulating production as part of the commerce clause then by the Marshall opinion that interstate commerce regulation is the sole discretion of Congress. Then most of California's regulations regarding products in violation since they dictate standards which force companies in other states to adjust in order to sell their product there. For example, I believe California enacted legislation to limit the power consumption of televisions sold in the state. Unless all TV manufacturers are located in California, this is a prime example of California violating the Commerce clause by dictating to other state's manufactures how they must produce their televisions.



The general welfare clause is not a grant of power, though many like to read it as such. Federalist No41 penned by Madison confirms as much by saying that the enumeration after the general welfare clause establishes what constitutes the general welfare. To put in other words, if the general welfare clause itself was a grant of power, it would effectively be a grant of unlimited power since practically anything would fall under the guise of the general welfare.

--



Oh certainly. The Founding Fathers did anticipate that in the future the Constitution may not meet certain needs and they planned for that with the Amendment process which could be used to give the Legislative branch the power to legislate more than they could. They were not fools, the obvious danger of the majority oppressing the minor was a concern. That's why the Amendment process requires two-thirds of the Legislature and two-thirds of the states to ratify any changes to the Constitution. It ensures that 50% + 1 cannot dictate to the 50% - 1 what to do. However, people of the "living document" interpretation persuasion don't seem to like how difficult it is to change things.

Surely you don't believe that these limited and streamlined games are suitable proof for any argument about the realities of the global environment.

On the contrary, that little "slip" unintentionally but concisely summarizes the depth of analysis being used by several posters in this topic.

Let me guess- any of the posters that disagree with you? Stop being an elitist snob. Not everyone who disagrees with you is stupid.

that's the attitude a lot of global warming/environmentalists have though - if you aren't with them you're against them. That comes through very clearly in that data archive.

Exactly. Its nothing but a comfortable way to disregard skeptics.

The other disturbing thing that is coming to light is how the climate change establishment has hi-jacked the peer-review system. They ACTIVELY exclude dissenting opinions and contrary data from the "peer-reviewed" journals they control and then claim that those researchers should be disregarded because they aren't published in "peer-reviewed" journals. Isn't that convenient.

I think the most fascinating aspect to this story is the reaction from global warming activists. those archives show a VERY clear pattern of abuse. it does not paint these influential scientists in a very good light at all. But the activists adamantly refuse to even acknowledge the existence of the archive, let alone consider the public relations implications of those emails being released to the public.

Bah.

You mistake my purpose. I'm conducting an experiment regarding moderation of this forum. Thank you for assisting me with that personal attack and strawman demolition.

The strawman is, of course, that I said nothing of the sort. Still, let's take your strawman for a little walk. Go ahead and tell me that everyone posting in this topic is well-informed and not just parroting what some blog or radio host has told them, and I do mean on both sides of the issue. Not all opinions are equal. I am a researcher in atmospheric science. I submit that my opinion in this matter is of marginally more value than that of someone who is not in the field. That does *not* make my opinions the be-all, end-all on this issue. I am not stating credentials in an attempt to discredit all other posters, just the few posters who offered "drive-by" opinions suspiciously similar to the most prevalent memes on both sides of the climate change debate. You, for instance, seem to put a little too much stock in that video you linked. Frankly, I don't know where to start with the problems in that analysis, but I'll just suffice to say that it's amazing what you can do with statistics, some quotes, and an agenda. If I hadn't the benefit of experience running climate models and having taken a number of courses on climate, climate modeling, remote sensing and climate statistics, I probably wouldn't have been able to spot the erroneous assumptions and other sleights of hand that go into that flawed analysis. I'm not saying you're stupid, I'm saying that you're not as well-informed as you seem to think you are. You can be the smartest person in the room and still be led astray by misleading information outside your area of expertise.

Edit: To prevent further strawman construction, I feel compelled to preemptively note once again that I am *not* an alarmist on climate change. Just because I disagree with the analysis in that video (and with the views of the most ardent skeptics) does not automatically place me on the opposite end of the issue.

First, don't try to take some moral high ground. In your last 3 posts alone you have implied that climate change skeptics:
-- are akin to backward religious fanatics who believe "shellfish and mixed-fiber garments are an abomination unto God"
-- want to advance "corporate capitalism" and "environmental devastation" so that we can speed a dystopian future
-- are incapable of in depth analysis and take all our cues from video games, internet "blogs or radio hosts".

If your intent was to cast these aspersions on climate change believers I must have missed the "subtlety" of your approach. At any rate, to cry ad hominem is disingenuous at best. If at this point I said "Some people posting in this thread are pompous, smug, self-righteous douche bags." would there be any doubt about who I'm referring to?


Seriously? My "straw man" is arguing that everyone's beliefs and opinions are valid and shouldn't be dismissed outright because they don't have the same education you do? Hello, elitism. You couldn't make my point any better if you tried.

(emphasis mine.)

this is what Semerkhet is referring to when he references his experiment concerning forum moderation.

do try to keep up

So he's just trolling in an attempt to get the thread shut down? Well that makes it all better. Pardon my defense of free thought and open exchange of ideas.

And that of course leads to the old saying, there's lies, damend lies and statistics.

Summation:

1. The proponents of global warming may have excluded data they felt skewed the results (legitimately or not).
2. The reason for the excluded data is it was faulty, inaccurate, or basically "trust us, we know what we are doing".
3. All those who question global warming are essentially labeled flat eathers or stooges for the man by the enviromentalist movement.
4. We only have been studying climatology for less than a century (hmmm--is it man made or natural, at certain points in earth's history the earth was almost all ice-other times almost all tropical).
5. Global warming or not, getting the gunk out of the air is not a bad thing. Pollutants cause all sorts of medical conditions.
6. We have gone completely off topic, as the OP wanted this as an example of a policlub publicity stunt, that may have involved shadowrunners.
7. The drop bears are attacking. Cover your heads.

And please pardon my attempt to demonstrate the pointlessness of a bunch of lay people arguing a highly complex and technical topic on a forum dedicated to a roleplaying game. This has been my primary, though not sole, aim since the biased opening post.

The opening post wasn't designed to delve into a 'highly complex and technical topic'.

no, it was designed to troll people who might be interested in discussing a highly complex and technical topic; whether qualified or not.

It may have been a subtle doublethink to get us all thinking about how Horizon might operate....

All good points. In particular:

I would like to throttle a goodly portion of the far left "environmentalist" movement. They're not helping. Cries of "Doomsday!" drum up equally vociferous calls of "It's a hoax!" and you end up with such a polarizing chaos of misinformation that a bunch of people who should be discussing Shadowrun are instead playing out a microcosm of the larger political Kabuki theater, accomplishing nothing other than getting momentarily "internet offended."


I, for one, can guarantee that I would not have given this topic a second look if it weren't for the obvious bias of the OP. Had the OP been phrased as you indicate, i.e. simply calling our attention to the event and its similarity to events in Shadowrun, perhaps this chain of reactions might have been averted. I claim no moral high ground; I let myself be provoked and dove into the muck and mire as much as anyone.

So, trolling now. K, gotcha. I'm biting.



You're right, IF you're atmospheric science researcher then your opinions on the topic that you have researched, studied, or otherwise have had data to validate and confirm would be more weighted. I also don't know that you are an atmospheric science researcher. Hell, you could be an undergrad and it would still be a true statement. Then again, there's no verification as to your credentials. I could say I'm a FBI Special Agent in computer forensics and thus can state that the emails in question are authentic and haven't been tampered with. That doesn't make it so. That also happens to be precisely how you started in this thread. It is the argument from authority fallacy.

I'll admit my first sentence qualifies as "argument from authority." However, I would counter that my first sentence did not make an extraordinary claim that would depend heavily on my supposed and unverifiable authority. On the contrary, I made absolutely sure to state as given only the most settled portion of the science, that the climate is changing and that anthropogenic emissions play *a* role. I made no claim regarding magnitude or speed of the change nor the relative magnitude of the anthropogenic component. If that much cannot be agreed upon, then we have no basis to begin a dialogue. Throughout this topic I have been arguing for the middle path, the agnostic position, if you will. I have no control over the filters with which others view my statements.

I look forward to the day when we have an integrated VR Matrix so I could set this thread on fire and summarily end it.

You don't need that. A moderator would work just fine. This topic proves that no one has been minding the store lately. Not that it's gotten terribly ugly, just terribly inappropriate for Dumpshock.

The mods are not omnipresent. But if you really want to summon one, just rub the little green button on the left.

I'll take the fact that no one has yet pressed that button as a sign that no one ever got that offended. No real harm done. It's not like all other discussions on DS ground to a halt because of this topic.

and I could tell you that there's no way to verify authenticity of emails* once they've left the SMTP server.** (appeal to authority: In a former life I was a computer engineer ) and anyone who tries to tell you otherwise is either lying with an agenda or grossly misinformed.


*encrypted contents can be verified independently using commonly understood encryption/decryption algorithms. if a previously encrypted message is however posted 'post-decryption' it is no longer verifiable as authentic.

**as a matter of fact, there's precious little way to verify the authenticity of emails on the SMTP server, as it is relatively easy to 'fake' routing information (via renaming a sufficient number of systems) to look authentic to a lay-person or hobbyist. if it's off the SMTP server, it's just text and is so easy to fake your grandmother could probably do it.

So, is there any idea how much the guys who dumped the data onto the internet got paid for their heist?

Dude, we didn't even know about plate tectonics until the 1950/60s. We didn't know the earth had a core until more recently than that. We still don't know how thick the crust is, because when we actually checked the theories we discovered it didn't line up. We only accepted the ice age thing in 1870!

So yes, we do actually know more about the climate than we do the earth. Are you now going to dispute plate techtonics or the fact that the earth has a core on the basis that we've been studying it for less than a century?

And here I was trying to wind this thing down.

Correct, you can spoof all that information using computer processes, and likewise you cannot verify a decrypted email is authentic via computer processes, but using only computer processes to validate the authenticity is narrow sighted at best when there are multiple ways to validate something. You still have over 60 megabytes of what amounts to mostly text data. That is a huge amount of data to fake, and frankly it would be an undertaking that would require multiple people to perform. The fact that the data is congruous within itself lends credence to its authenticity, and it's further supported by the reactions of individuals who were hacked. The statement "out of context" means its more likely authentic data rather than faked data.

Just to compare the data....

I have a PDF of the reference manual for MySQL 5.0 on my PC at this very moment. It is about 13.5MB in size. This document is 1929 pages long, however there are some images, numerous links, and various formatting styles within the document which likely inflate it. I would say that 10MB is a reasonable assessment of the text data, possible even less, however that is neither here nor there. There is at least 4x as much data contained within the emails as the MySQL PDF. 7500 pages worth emails would be a conservative estimate. The claim that the data is fake is far-fetched and bordering on conspiracy theory if not already across that line. I'd be more inclined to believe the data real, but the email headers faked so that it appeared to be from the institute and the names of the authors having been substituted through the email set.

This is where it was my mistake for not indicating that I wasn't talking at all about the authenticity of these emails. (in fact, if you read through my posts I don't believe I ever address them.) the simple matter is that the graph that was constructed by the scientists in question at the time was already discredited for other (less sensational) reasons and that all any email dump from an institution is going to show is that office politics is alive and well in the Sciences.*

I happen to believe that these emails are entirely legitimate**. I happen to disagree that they're damaging to climate science as a whole or that they discredit current climate change theories ("current" being theories seeing work post ~2005 or so.) At most these emails will be damaging to the scientists implicated within their contents.

I was mostly just making the point to be facetious (hence the ) although the broader point that you shouldn't trust what's written in an email presented to you by a third party without doing some digging to get corroborating evidence is an important one.


*same goes for squashed data in peer-reviewed journals. I take it most of the people finding this surprising have never tried to have something published in one of these before.

**lest this be misunderstood from vague wording: I mean the dump is legit; the emails are probably being taken somewhat out of context, my understanding is this is not the complete dump (and for good reason - pulling a full server is an absurd amount of largely redundant data) and the person who dumped them presumably has an agenda of some sort, so given the opportunity I fully expect some reasonable amount of pruning to have taken place; nevertheless I expect that these were not faked simply because it was not necessary to fake them - enough people are involved for a long enough time and scientists are human too. (Well, most of them.)

Or maybe I just like to knock over a vase and see what kind of reaction I get.

One thing is for sure - this story has some very blatant shadowrun connotations. It's also continuing to grow in scope, and it's got people thinking about the implications of unethical scientists and policy decisions on a global scale. Not a bad thing in my book. I kinda like it when we shake things up a bit.

Rather than looking at this discussion as an excuse to be offended, try instead to ponder the implications for your next SR campaign. this is as real as it gets - we've got actual corporations and political leaders all out in the open doing their thing on this issue. And all this because of one unknown hacker who dumped his data into the public domain....

Ah so you where posting it for a political purpose, and then you lied about not doing so. Awesome! That's a great way to start a discussion that isn't polarised in any way.

I didn't say it was political. I said that I like to shake things up a bit and see what falls out.

With a political statement, yes.

if it makes you feel better to believe that, then by all means - go right ahead with your bad self.

Well, how else is one supposed to take

Maybe I could have said it was a lie? A non factual statement? A stupid conspiracy theory? But you know, I went with political.

those guys DID do some very unethical things. everything I've said was accurate. you may take that as you will.

hahaha.

When quoted out of context, they may look like they did some unethical things, but turning over the rocks soon reveals that they didn't.

there's a whole lotta context in that archive. its up on wikileaks if you want to see it for yourself.

Basically, the defense has resorted to two main strategies:

1. flat out denial. the emails are fake, it didn't happen, it never happened, OMG IT DIDN'T HAPPEN MAKE IT STOP...*ahem*. sorry. As I was saying, this is one of the two main defensive memes propagated right now. As more people read the archive and realize just how highly improbable it is to have crafted such a hoax, this meme is dying a slow death.

2. it's a conspiracy. this one has started roughly over the past 24-48 hours. As I understand it, the current popular strain of this meme pins the blame on a vague collection of gas and oil companies. It varies as to the size and scope of the conspiracy (everything from them planning the hack to merely taking advantage of it once they learned about it), but this one tends to incorporate X-files levels of paranoia regarding the ability to 'the man' to infiltrate and expose the inner workings of the global warming scientific crowd. I think this meme is gonna stick around a while - it's got a lot of the usual tropes in all the right places.

No, the scientists have responded directly to most of the stuff brought up in articles by the times of london and others, including stating exactly what they did with the 'trick' to the results for example.

actually, their explanations have been fairly limited. And that's just ONE of the allegations made against them. For example - I haven't heard them get close to explaining how they corrupted the peer review process. And believe me, they did their level best to do just that.