Saturday, July 13, 2013

It Would Help If ...

"Then came the Tea Party midterms and a savage backlash against climate legislation and clean-energy policy. The events in The Climate War now read less like a breakthrough than a breaking wave in the tidal cycle of high hopes and bitter disappointment that have characterized climate-change advocacy for decades.

"What's going wrong? Why can't the United States and the international community start seriously reducing climate pollution? Is history just waiting for another Jim Rogers to be in the right conference room at the right moment?"
http://prospect.org/article/way-win-climate-fight

What went wrong? Well, it would help if the poster children for anthropogenic climate change weren't lying assholes. It would help if they would stop uttering inanities about how many "scientists" agree with their advocacy, as if science was a matter for democracy to settle. It would help if they had any idea whatsoever how to stop the production of the "pollution" they say is causing AGW without impoverishing the wealthy and arresting the pursuit of wealth by the poor. In other words, it would help if the AGW crowd were not completely out of their league.
But thank whatever is holy that they are in fact out of their league.
This was their unholy quest:
"The quest for a grand solution follows a three-step process. First, scientists determine how much warming is too much and draw a "red line." Today, that line is typically presented as 2 degrees Celsius warming above pre-industrial levels, the official target of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the G-8. Second, they determine the level of emission reductions necessary to avoid the red line. Third, diplomats bring the world's countries together to sign a collective treaty pledging to achieve those reductions."

What did they forget? Politicians are only good at getting elected, that's their raison d'etre. They don't serve causes or think ahead of the next election cycle; people who do that are called "former politicians" or "would be politicians."

In other words: "By requiring unanimous consent among 193 participating countries, the UNFCCC process effectively guarantees treaties that reflect the lowest bid of its least ambitious members."

Or, ""The basic logic of good economic design is fungibility and transparency," Victor notes ruefully. "The basic logic of politics encourages the hiding and channeling of costs and benefits." Politically powerful constituencies will organize to capture more than their share of benefits and avoid their share of the costs."

It's just so touching the way leftists think and talk about government as if any outcome can be made into gold by government's touch, but there's so much evidence that everything government touches turns to lead. Government has the reverse midas touch.

This bit was interesting:
"Crafting an innovation system that drives technologies from basic-science research and development through early-stage funding and sustainable business enterprise will require smart, active government and lots of money."
In other words, the author is wishing for unicorns. Because government takes money by force, it does not have to be smart and empirically is not and never has been. But hey, unicorns may yet appear.

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