Newsgroups: alt.politics.socialism From: jos boersema Subject: Re: Geo-engineering against global warming: suicidal ... References: <27be1823-1d63-411f-b607-f70184057249@v5g2000prm.googlegroups.com> Organization: www.socialism.nl Reply-To: jos boersema Message-ID: Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit User-Agent: slrn/0.9.8.1 (Debian) Date: 28 Dec 2008 19:00:45 GMT Lines: 89 NNTP-Posting-Host: 80.127.14.129 X-Trace: 1230490845 news.xs4all.nl 182 [::ffff:80.127.14.129]:63231 X-Complaints-To: abuse@xs4all.nl Xref: news.xs4all.nl alt.politics.socialism:165964 On 2008-12-26, Ron Peterson wrote: > On Dec 26, 6:07 am, jos boersema wrote: >> Geo-engineering against global warming: suicidal risk taking >> by a failed species. > > The global warming scare is just warmed over Malthus. I'm not sure what that means. > Calling carbon > dioxide and water vapor pollutants is silly when pollution that can > harm people, animals, and plants is present in large amounts. I don't agree: drink enough water and it becomes a poison. I also think that whether there is or isn't "global warming," is a side-track to the known issue of pollution in general. We ought to know (by now) that pumping out all these toxins can't be good, whether or not the globe warms we ought to stop that either way. Secondly: if there is a 10% chance global warming is real, that is still a 10% chance of something of a total global catastrophe able to kill many billions of people. Only a failed species without responsibility would take on such odds. Thirdly: I don't believe global warming to be "a hoax," because why would environmentalist scientists push for that. Only as of late have the "global criminal elites" decided on how they where going to exploit the pollution problem, and only as of late have they tried instead of denouncing "global warming" (what happened to the pollution problem ?), to put themselves at the head of it using this "inconvenient truth" movie. My guess is rather then that it isn't happening, they are now thinking it is and that they should control this movement. Fourthly: I'd agree that the planet is big and can absorb a lot of poisons, but humanity is also big and our industry is also big. It can't be surprising if we have an impact on nature, it has already been proven we have. Fifth: what do we know, we ought to be very very careful with the Earth. If even 10% of scientists think something is wrong globally, that ought to concern us. By the way I agree with your taxation scheme. Unfortunately the world is not running out of fossil fuel: if the high grade oil is gone, there is still the low grade and the coal. > There are many greenhouse gases of which CO2 and H2O are the least > worrisome. > > The world is running out of fossil fuels limiting the the amount of > CO2 that will be present. In addition, higher CO2 concentrations > result in greater plant growth which helps keep CO2 concentrations > down. > > Alternative energy sources such as wind, solar, geothermal, and > nuclear will reduce the need to burn fossil fuels lowering the rate of > increase in CO2. In addition, hybrid and soon plug-hybrid motor > vehicles will reduce petroleum consumption. Yes, the billions now going toward army and so on should go to medical research and environmental research & development, etc. > The cap and trade policy being advocated by big business is just a way > to transfer wealth to corporatations. Trading, particularly internationally, is a bad scheme prone to corruption. Might even say: designed to foster corruption. > A better solution is to use a > moderate carbon tax with the money going to alternative energy > projects. The taxation could for instance be levied right at the point of mining. I haven't fully worked out how that could work, but it seems that the sooner in the chain you levy the taxes the easier it will be to control. For instance: put a gage on the mining tubes, that gives you the amount the mining company gets taxed even before sales, for instance in a worst-case-scenario use of the fuel (burning? plastics?). Then when something gets converted to less pollution intens use, at that point they could file for a refund for some of the taxation. The refund could then be given to mining company who payed the original taxation, who can then pass it on as a refund on the sale to the reworking factory (effectively lowering the price of the resource). It is easier to have a "refund" scheme, because factories will pull in the police etc to prove their case, rather then the police having to be pro-active to prove additionally pollution usage. I'm thinking this up right now, may need work or not be ideal. - - - - - - - PS Not true: I have been thinking for some time about this (pollution source taxation), but haven't really worked it out. If there is not taxation on a foreign source already, the taxation could be levied at the point of entrance into the country. This would induce a black market, therefore taxation at the source is better. A black market is not that much of a problem, because the bulk of trade would be taxed, and the fact that the black market is under legal pressure increases its prices. Increasing prices on heavy pollutors make greener alternatives more attractive: goal achieved. The refund can also be given to the re-working factory, instead of to the mining company. That means more money for the re-working factory to buy a larger share of materials compared to more pollution intens factories. If the refund goes to the mining companies, if the mining companies retain a percentage of that refund they might be more interested in doing business with less pollution intens re-working factories, because it yields a taxation refund for them. The refund could also be split between the two places. There will probably be some extremely pollution intense ways of using the fuel. Therefore it seems one might want to use as the benchmark for taxation the point where, say, the fuel is put to its 90%th-percentage-of-total-usage worst pollution production. or 70%th percentage. The cost of the taxation could be a computation of the damage done by the pollution, and/or the cost to take that pollution out of the system, or the cost of taking the excess pollution out of the system that nature can't absorb. This will also require some estimates etc, etc. The 10% worser pollution fuel use (or 30%), will then need a pro-active policing, these users will then have to be found and taxed actively. This is more labor intensive and fraud sensitive (IMHO), it is therefore useful not to make this percentage too large.