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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Lane3 who wrote (60771)	4/22/2008 3:50:50 PM
From: Sam	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 541761

Please connect the dots between Siberian methane traps and US taxes. The connection isn't exactly intuitively obvious. Not just taxes, but also regulation. And, most generally, the view that in all things (except defense of course) the least government is the best government. My point simply was that scientists have been studying this issue for about 3 decades now and have been piecing together slowly but surely what greenhouse gases (which include methane, the most potent of the GHGs, but one that has a shorter life than CO2, only about 12-14 years before breaking down, in part to CO2) do to the climate. If we don't stop the warming, the tundra will melt, releasing the methane that has been stored there for millions of years, and will start a feedback loop that will be impossible for humans to stop. If you bothered to read either of the two articles I posted, you will see that the Permian extinction was caused by the release of methane into the atmosphere, which occurred due to a feedback loop initiated by volcanic basalt flows. Over millions of years, the carbon that was released into the atmosphere back then was effectively buried back into the earth and the oceans, and we are now digging it all back up and putting it back into the atmosphere, except that we are doing it in a couple of hundred years instead of tens of thousands, which will effectively make everything happen much more quickly than it did before. The connection to taxes is simple enough for you to get if you wanted to: the only way to effectively stop the process that has been put into motion by our extensive use of fossil fuels is to transform the way we get energy. And the only way to do that is to (1) stop giving the O&G companies tax subsidies, as we have been doing for many decades now; and (2) to subsidize clean energy processes like wind, solar and geothermal so that they will be developed more agressively and used more frequently. Yeah, I know, subsidies, yuck--but of course, nevermind the subsidies that the O&G companies have gotten over the years, in good times and bad. And nevermind the subsidies that all sorts of sectors have gotten over the years, including but not limited to railroads, airlines, autos, medical devices, pharmaceuticals, electronics, the Internet, and the list goes on. It is only when a heavy duty sector like the O&G guys have subsidies being given to potential competitors that subsidies get a dirty name. But of course if you believe that dozen or so scientists like Gray and friends (and of course politicians like Imhoff) who get trotted out every month to claim that the 95-98% of the scientific community has been corrupted to go along with the climate change thesis so that they can keep grant money flowing and fulfill a socialist political agenda--well, then ignore the above. As far as I am concerned, such people are worse than flat-earthers--they are the ones who have been corrupted by money from people like Exxon and the American Petroleum Institute (actually pretty much one and the same group).