re: #27 OldLineTexan

I saw a commercial on TV just now.

It ended in a website. It’s like The Onion, except I have a sneaking suspicion these people believe their satire:

thisisreality.org

Kiss your easily-available electricity at (somewhat) affordable rates goodbye. Obama’s insane leftist kook base is on the march.

Ah, er, actually it’s true that coal-fired generators produce the most CO2 per Kwh of electricity. This isn’t insanity. It’s reality. Reality really is real, both when we’re talking evolution, and when we’re talking CO2.

What to do about it is a good question. Bjorn Lomborg suggests we just ride it out and pay the price of mitigation. With plenty of coal-fired electricity, we can just run the air conditioners ever more.

I’ve got my doubts. Lomborg is an economist, and economists don’t take the long view. They make a mistake to think that the discount rate for future wealth is 7%, or 5%, or 2%. It’s actually almost zero. Seen through the lens of centuries, that is, it’s almost zero. A one percent growth rate in food production per capita, sustained over the past thousand years, would have seen us each eating sixteen thousand times as much as the peasants of 1009. We haven’t had that much of an improvement in standards of living. For all of those centuries being times of amazing progress, one percent is a staggering rate of change.

We should be wary of thinking that super-insane humongously rich future people will easily be able to pay the cost of global warming out of pocket change, should it come to pass.

Even if you grant that global warming is a problem and that we need to curb carbon emissions, Obama’s Cap and Trade scheme invites corruption, maximizes disruptive side effects, and must end in failure. It will be much more expensive than an open, honest plain old tax on fossil CO2 emissions would be. Because of its cost and its disruptive effects, it will fail. Either it will be rescinded, or it will fail as loopholes are put in place, one after the other, for all the friends of O, until the scheme leaks like a sieve that has had all its wire rust out.