re: #9 lawhawk

Those who are attacking Tapscott for trying to maintain civility in the political discourse aren’t going to stop there even with his argument to authority (Ronald Reagan - apparently the last one that the right wing considers their own). That will hardly be sufficient, but the fact is that cap and trade is a disastrous policy that wont do what its proponents claim and will significantly increase costs, creating a drag on the economy when it can least afford it.

You can argue the politics without making it personal. Some people just wont.

If you just had to reduce CO2 emissions, it would be far less damaging to the economy and to the general level of honesty in society to have a plain old tax on fossil fuels, indexed to their carbon content.

You’d have to tax imports based on the implicit fossil fuel content of the import, naturally. It wouldn’t do to ban burning coal in the U.S. to fire generators, but permit generators just across the border in Canada or Mexico to export electricity, untaxed. That would merely serve to hollow out our industry while wasting electricity (and coal) because of longer transmission distances. The same would go for any commodity that had large implicit fossil fuel content.

But now, what if the exporting nation levies its own tax on fossil fuels? You’d have to call off your double taxation. But what if they don’t really collect the tax, but just put it on the books to get around our own rules? And on and on. No matter how you work it, it’s a bonanza for lawyers.

The root difficulty is that it is ultimately politically and technically impossible to sharply cut CO2 emissions by mere thrift.

Wouldn’t it be better to concentrate on developing wind, solar, and nuclear power, and to sweep away the current rat’s nest of regulatory difficulties? Take a nuclear design, say one from France with a long track record, and make the rules so that plants of that design are automatically cleared for immediate construction. Eminent domain, national security, etc.

Same for solar power plants, transmission lines, and so forth. If Life On Earth is imperiled, perhaps the endless round of Luddite obstructions to every real effort at alternative energy will have to be overridden.