Quarter of a century ago I suggested [to my boss] that a solution to The Greenhouse Effect problem, if there was actually a problem, would be a carbon tax with an offsetting cut in other taxes which would encourage "good" things [not a cut in tobacco or booze taxes or other "bad" things].
<waiting to take on the warming emissions problem is just going to make things much worse so it would seem, logically, the safe to do would be to start to implement measures the Green side recommends gradually and monitor the hell out of them--all without busting our budgets. >
Heck, even if there isn't a problem with CO2, carbon tax might be a convenient way to collect lots of money rather than nickel and diming little things with high collection costs and easy avoidance. Governments do that already with petrol taxes [which are high in NZ and higher in Europe]. But they could get into coal, and imported crude oil too.
Better still would be to cut government spending which is largely waste.
Unfortunately, the "Green side" comes up with some bad ideas. They are in favour of cap and trade for example, which will be a huge swindle with insiders getting favours and Enron or Goldman Sachs or some other crowd making a fortune in transaction fees, contracts and financial finangling. Surely there has been enough of that recently.
I don't see why incumbents should get rights to pollute which I can't have.
If there is a problem with The Greenhouse Effect, it's such a long term problem that there's no apparent reason to start doing much about it yet. So far, the extra CO2 has been a good thing, not a bad thing, namely improved plant growth, drought resistance and less irrigation needed.
It might turn out that there is no problem whatsoever and in fact we are heading into reglaciation. We'd look really stupid if in 50 years CO2 levels have dropped a lot but the northern hemisphere is buried in 50 metres of ice from Vladivostok to Vancouver in summer.
Some things have to be done immediately, urgently, like now, such as fleeing a tsunami, dodging an incoming bolide or moving out of the way of a volcano. Others such as dodging sea level rise due to global warming can be done in a decade or six. Even the slowest moving person won't drown due to global warming sea level rise.
Mqurice |
