28-December-2008, 03:00 PM
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Established Member
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Join Date: May 2002
Posts: 710
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Originally Posted by Tesarra
Whoah, those are some pretty tall leaps! Who said anything about increasing power over citizens or "seizing" taxes? Who proposed taking away private property or making beaurocracies more powerful?
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Tesarra
Let's dial down the drama one or two notches, ok? As I understand them, most of the proposals on the table use existing governmental powers, tax bases and beaureaus to implement policies that would encourage reductions or offsets to CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions.
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You may be reading in the wrong sort of drama. True, my post was in response to the comments about throwing "trillions of dollars at a problem." We are on the verge of formally classifying carbon dioxide (or even worse, "carbon") as a pollutant precisely so that the world's governments can redirect trillions of dollars in an attempt to reduce that pollutant. The drama is not so much that we are empowering big bad evil governments, but that this is being offered as a necessary course of action without anything approaching the scientific rigor that supports global warming claims.
There is plenty of science in support of global warming. Just look at the posts between ArgoNavis and dmr81 above. As science does, it continually refines itself amidst a sea of critical review. The solutions being offered to global warming, however, are stated as a given. It is just assumed that government action is the right course of action or even a necessary course of action. Science provides for itself many feedback mechanisms so that it can detect and correct its errors as quickly as possible. When the discussion turns to problem solving, however, the solutions offered seem to be based more on intuition and gut feeling with no real guidance apparent. Has Kyoto been a net benefit or a net loss to us? Is science even capable of answering such a question?
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I believe market mechanisms will select which products and services "win" rather than some heavy-handed government intervention. Let me illustrate with an over-simplified example of the SUV. It's easily conceivable that licensing and operating a Hummer or other "gas guzzler" would be more expensive if these ideas were implemented, but folks will then be directly, economically, encouraged to make "greener" and smarter decisions about what kind of vehicle they can afford to drive. All of the decision making authority is left exactly where it belongs: in the hands of the individual consumer.
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Do you see what I mean? It is assumed as a given that governmental policies that encourage "greener" decisions by the consumer will lead to a healthier environment. Such policies may be intuitive, but science was developed, of course, partly to overcome intuition. The US did not sign Kyoto, but as I remember, our rate of CO2 emissions growth was lower than about 75% of the nations that ratified it.
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Science is not some body of people who are attempting a coup. Science is a method of problem solving and thinking about the physical world around us.
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Then where is the science that shows us that rising sea levels are problem to begin with, that shows us that such-and-such a governmental policy will solve the problem, that shows us what we will have to sacrifice to attain it, and that shows us the result will be a net benefit? This is a far more difficult area of study because it involves human behavior. It is not clear that turning control of resources over to politicians will lead to benefits that are equal to or better than the benefits that would have come about if those resources remained the private property of those who developed or produced them.
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Scientists have discovered strong evidence that we may be harming our planet (and, by the way, it's the only one we've got), and are acting as concerned citizens in an attempt to bring government attention to a threat with potential to drastically alter all of our lives and livelihoods. There may be a cost for taking action on this threat, but there are rewards for doing so even if the threat is later demonstrated not to be of human origin.
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Notice again how it starts out with science making a case and just grades right on over into politics as if the same basis applied. I am dialing up the drama a bit to draw that distinction, which I think is not always appreciated enough in these discussions. Freedom deserves an avid defense.
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