Nobody with any serious understanding of the whole subject is saying that CO2 is a pollutant, or is not a “wonderful” building block of nature, or even that the human-generated fraction of the stuff is more than an INCREMENTAL fraction of the “NATURAL” level.

Many seem to imagine that something that is “merely incremental” simply cannot be very significant. But try applying THAT sort of simplistic “thinking” to, say for instance, the example of a BOILER in which a temperature differential of just a FEW degrees (added on top of HUNDREDS) makes all the difference in the world as to whether or not the bolier BLOWS UP!)

The real problem sems to be that lots of ideological idiots of a “POLITICAL” stripe somehow seem to imagine that they have the freedom to “take or leave” the REAL substance of the whole subject based on mere dint of some sort of “consensus” pretense and wishful thinking — or that the supposed “free market” can be relied upon to resolve problems as big as the HUGE economic disruptions that will arise.

Carbon Dioxide is, to be sure, NOT a POLLUTANT — being, after all, in effect BREATHED IN BY PLANTS as the “other half” of the “Grand Balance of Nature” Carbon Cycle whereby plants and animals provide each other with oxygen and carbon dioxide. And over the eons, “Nature” has established an at least QUASI-stable “equilibrium” at about the current level. (Perhaps interestingly, if it were not for the level of CO2 that has been built up over the eons by LIVING THINGS, the average temperature of the whole planet would be barely above freezing. This planet has actually been “Terra-formed” — in the parlance of Star Trek — since time immemorial!)

But a LARGE POWER PLANT is NOT MERELY ANOTHER ANIMAL, and has, by comparison, a HUGE “METABOLISM”. And when the “natural balance” of things is MARKEDLY SHIFTED for ANY reason the excess of CO2, which is a “greenhouse gas”, acts to “TRAP” more of the sun’s easily-INcoming LIGHT energy that ends up being converted (by quantum-mechanical interactions with the atoms comprising the Earth’s surface) to HEAT — to which that gas is OPAQUE, so that the HEAT is “bottled up” and cannot re-radiate off freely back out into space! And so the Earth gets HOTTER — the infamous GLOBAL WARMING that drives more intense HURRICANES and other storms, and MELTS THE POLAR ICECAPS, which by some estimates could perhaps FLOOD OUT UP TO A THIRD OF ALL HUMANITY that tends to concentrate along seacoasts!

Now the magnitude of the “human activity” contribution to that whole balance shift is debated by some. But even if there ARE indeed other, NATURAL processes afoot that ALSO contribute to the same problem, “WE” HAVE NO BUSINESS ADDING TO IT — at ANY level! (What “we” ACTUALLY need to be doing is TO ASSUME INTELLIGENT MANAGERIAL CONTROL of the whole planetary energy input/output balance! Accomplishing THAT sort of thing would involve implementing TECHNOLOGICAL schemes to ADD “OUR” OWN OZONE to the ULTRAVIOLET shield layer (which actually consists of ONLY A FEW THOUSAND TONS OF MATERIAL world-wide) as might be needed, and/or perhaps more generally to contrive to increase the population of REFLECTIVE ICE CRYSTALS INJECTED INTO THE STRATOSPHERE by all those high-flying aircraft.)
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Please, folks — if you are going to form an opinion about the subject, at least UNDERSTAND the SUBSTANCE of what it is that those whose ideas you would discredit and reject are ACTUALLY SAYING!

More at halt-global-warming.blogspot.com. Keep up the good work!

In any case, good work and a couple of chuckles are good for the soul too.

Free markets and private investors are typically very bad at creating totally new technologies. They’re awesome at finding uses for established, proven technologies, but it takes the government to get new technologies to that point. You mentioned Dept of Energy studies in this very post. Of course, government also created the technologies that enable the internet and satellite communications, among countless other products that would not exist without government laying the groundwork for the technology. And that ultimately means tax dollars.

You can raise those tax dollars through an income tax (taxing productive labor and arguably reducing the incentive for it) or a carbon tax (taxing the burning of finite resources) or any number of different means of taxation that all have their downsides. To me, the carbon tax seems the most fair. As to it being regressive, I don’t understand why you think that’s the case. People who live in big houses and drive big cars will pay a lot more tax than people with modest houses and small cars or no cars at all. Personally, my wife and I live very modestly, spending less than $300 annually on home energy and less than $500 annually on gas. A 10% tax on that energy use would be a drop in the bucket for our finances. True, we’re not poor-we’re simply happier with a simpler lifestyle. And there probably are poor people who by necessity need to use more energy. But no tax can be perfect. I’d rather we have taxes on behaviors we’d like to discourage (energy use, which is often wasteful and can easily be cut back on in most cases) than behaviors we want to encourage (productive economic activity).

Oh, and by the way, manure is a basic building block of life, too, but I’m sure you would agree there should be limits on where and how much of this can be simply dumped into the environment

I like your site and wanted to know if you would be interested in exchanging blogroll links.

Thanks in advance