re: #444 Charles

That’s silly, and it’s not even true. The EPA did not classify CO2 as a “pollutant” — they ruled that greenhouse gases are a threat to public health.

They ARE. The amount of denial you have to sustain to try to pretend otherwise is prodigious.

That kind of ruling is outside the proper limits of EPA authority. The chain of causation that makes CO2 a threat to public health is no more direct than the chain of causation that makes a nuclear Iran a threat to public health, for example. But no one argues with a straight face that the decision on what to do about Iran is a regulatory matter. Big decisions on fundamental questions are properly reserved for the Congress.

The EPA cannot take the nation to war with Iran on its own say-so. It ought not to be able to issue regulations on just any matter that tangentially affects human health, because by that standard, there isn’t anything anywhere that they cannot regulate.

Process matters. Getting the right decision by the wrong means is attractive, but it tends to backfire. Pretty soon society finds itself getting wrong decisions by wrong means and no way to revoke the ill advised grants of authority it made to ‘get things done’. As well, economists have long noted that taxation is economically more effective than regulation as a way to reduce harmful emissions. Since the EPA’s logic is that economic harm equals harm to human health, by their own standard, their regulatory step itself is a threat to human health, and the EPA must therefore ban the EPA.

Jeffrey Sachs makes the point in the current issue of Scientific American that taxing CO2 is the least disruptive path to reduced emissions. But reducing carbon emissions can only be carried so far without abandoning industrial civilization, unless we have alternative energy sources up and running, and on a massive scale. Getting there will be a project for our whole society.

The real solution to AGW is going to require massive efforts. We’re going to have to build a new infrastructure. It will serve us well in the long run, even if we didn’t have AGW to worry about. But such an effort requires public support. Obama’s decision to authorize and support the construction of new nuclear plants is the right kind of step. It’s a proper exercise of authority, it’s a teaching moment, and it promises sweat, rather than just blood and tears. That is, it gives us hope that we can have our climate and industrial civilization too.