Climate Denier Hard To Refute

[Montegriffo]

It's unregulated profit motive which causes problems for the environment. There is nothing wrong with making profit in itself but if the environmental cost was added to the price of a product then high polluting ones would be less attractive and less popular. This is how the carbon tax would work if industrial nations could support it fully. Instead we have Trump prepared to rip up all the regulations agreed in the Paris accord in return for making himself more popular to the American working class electorate and keeping his friends in big business onside.

[Speaker to Animals]

It's unregulated profit motive which causes problems for the environment. There is nothing wrong with making profit in itself but if the environmental cost was added to the price of a product then high polluting ones would be less attractive and less popular. This is how the carbon tax would work if industrial nations could support it fully. Instead we have Trump prepared to rip up all the regulations agreed in the Paris accord in return for making himself more popular to the American working class electorate and keeping his friends in big business onside.

Change "unregulated profit motive" to "unaccounted for negative externalities", and you have a point. It's not the profit motive. I know that's a bogey man on the left these days, but the actual problem is that corporations are not paying some of the negative externalities of their industrial operations. If they actually had to pay those costs, instead of dumping the costs on society, then it might no longer be profitable to do things in that way. Right now, you need regulations to force utilities to incorporate all sorts of pollution trapping technologies into their power plants because it wouldn't 'be as profitable for them to do it on their own. Yet it's not profitable because they don't directly pay for some of the negative externalities of their industry. Make them pay for those externalities, as they should, and suddenly it becomes profitable for them to not make such a mess.

For instance, if instead of paying for garbage services, I decided to burn all my garbage in the backyard, and I do that every evening, causing pollution and health problems on my neighbor's property, the courts might step and make me pay for the negative externalities of my activities. Coal, as one example, is greatly more profitable than the other utility sources because utility corporations don't have to pay for the medical bills of the tens of thousands of Americans who come down with lung cancer every year because of coalfire plants. Those costs are sloughed on to the victims and society as a whole. They SHOULD have to pay for lung cancer treatment. If we know statistically that somewhere north of ten thousand people die each year from lung cancer caused by burning coal, then utilities who burn coal should have to pay that much money into some kind of lung cancer fund to help offset the costs of lung cancer for everybody (since we usually have no way to prove which individual case was caused by coal). Suddenly natural gas and other technologies would become a lot more profitable than they are now, and you wouldn't need draconian regulations to force them to convert their own power plants.

[apeman]

Change "unregulated profit motive" to "unaccounted for negative externalities", and you have a point. It's not the profit motive. I know that's a bogey man on the left these days, but the actual problem is that corporations are not paying some of the negative externalities of their industrial operations.

+1

I think ^ is proof that I could hash out an economic policy with an economic lefty.

Edit: because Putin hacked me

[LVH2]

Putin hacked me

I just had a vision of this becoming a catchphrase that everyone uses to bail when the screw up. Kind of like, "I didn't do it," on The Simpsons.

[Fife]

Unsustainable.

[DrYouth]

Some great discussion in this thread...
Economic policy requires parsing out externalities and perverse incentives.
Dumping waste into the environment is going to happen unless it is expensive to do so.

[Montegriffo]

Some great discussion in this thread...
Economic policy requires parsing out externalities and perverse incentives.
Dumping waste into the environment is going to happen unless it is expensive to do so.

All you need is a president prepared to drain the swamp of politicians with vested interests in oil and big business and one prepared to advance the Paris accord.....
.......Doh

[SuburbanFarmer]

[Fife]

Several good links at the link: https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/254893/

THE LEFT’S WAR ON SCIENCE: Climate activists step up campaign to cut funding to science museums. Today’s target is the American Museum of Natural History in New York, which is being denounced for taking money from Rebekah Mercer and allowing her to serve on its board of trustees. The activists want her removed because she has also donated to the Trump campaign and to think tanks skeptical of climate alarmism.
. . .

The chutzpah is astonishing. The only ones politicizing science at the museum are Brune and the other witch-hunters quoted in the Times. One of them is Michael Mann of Penn State, the researcher who produced the infamous hockey-stick graph and has done even more to discredit climate science with his unhinged activism. As usual, the threats to science come from one direction: the left.

[Fife]

FAKE NEWS alert

Why NYT Hid The Numbers For The ‘Hottest Year On Record’
When you read a science report claiming that 2016 was the hottest year on record, you might expect that you will get numbers. And you would be wrong.

Note to the New York Times: “trouncing” and “blown past” are phrases appropriate to sports reporting, not science reporting. Except that no sports reporter would dare write an article in which he never bothers to give you the score of the big game.

Yet that’s what passes for “science reporting” on the issue of global warming, where asking for numbers and margins of errors apparently makes you an enemy of science. Instead, it’s all qualitative and comparative descriptions. It’s science without numbers.