Boorish wrote:

As you might notice from the link you provided, I’m not afraid of getting into with people who have some ability to discuss the issues

You didn’t “get into it,” as you say. Please don’t flatter yourself. You were simply very cocky at first, and then you were thoroughly beclowned. And you never did answer the question. Also, after you were called out, you certainly did seem afraid. Obviously, you were afraid to answer the question directly, and that, I presume, is why you never did.

Boorish wrote:

As for centralized power being able to solve the problem, do you need to be reminded of the success of the Montreal protocol and the SO2 cap and trade system?

You beclown yourself again. To be honest, I’d prefer discussing this with someone who understood the issue. Montreal and SO2 cap-and-trade are completely inapplicable to HR-2454, for obvious reasons. As Rob Shapiro, of the US Climate Task Force, notes:

Since that technology was already in existence, the trading system was not the cause of this technological advance. For SO2, it really was a question of creating the price incentives to invest in known technology, which turned out to be even cheaper than expected. With C02, it will be a matter of developing new technologies and bringing them to market (Dr. Robert Shapiro, “Markey’s skewed comparisons,” read more here).

Montreal wasn’t true cap-and-trade (a fund was created that paid producers to restrict output — also called a “fee” — please see Rob’s article in the link above), and acid rain can hardly be compared with carbon dioxide. In fact, William Reilly, the EPA Administrator, got semi-famous for his opening remarks at Montreal’s second meeting:

On January 1, 1990, a new tax went into effect in the United States, a tax on the manufacture of CFCs. This tax exceeds in value the cost of CFCs themselves and it will rise steeply in the years ahead, raising 400 million in new revenues this year, and raising 5 billion over the next five years. This added cost of CFCs sends a powerful signal: it says bring on the substitutes fast. And it reduces the comparative economic advantage CFCs would otherwise enjoy over the more expensive substitutes.

It’s endearing that you think you understand the economics enough to weigh in on this subject, but a direct tax (or fee, if you prefer) on the manufacture of CFCs is hardly the same as Waxman-Markey. I would note also, even more importantly, that the EPA has long acknowledged that “from 1950 until 1970, the amount of volatile organic compounds and carbon monoxide in the air fell by more than 20 percent, even though total vehicle-miles traveled in this country rose by 120 percent, from 458 billion to 1.1 trillion. The level of sulfur dioxide in the air began falling as far back as 1920, and the total amount of airborne particulate matter has been reduced by 79 percent since 1940″ — all of which obviously occurred before the Clean Air Act of 1970 took hold — and that to this day, the EPA is, by its own admission, “unable to produce evidence that efforts have independently improved air quality” (emphasis mine).

Don’t you realize either that cap-and-trade by definition raises prices, which thereby drains (in carbon offsets) resources by the profits and costs of brokers and traders and certifiers and licensers and lawyers (ad infinitum), all of whom have vested financial interests in maintaining the program?

We notice also that you don’t mention anywhere in your remarks the Los Angeles cap-and-trade program, called the Regional Clean Air Incentives Market (RECLAIM), which was a true cap-and-trade, and which not only failed but failed stupendously.

We notice furthermore that there’s no mention in your remarks of Kyoto, in which utility companies and other sources have “underreported their emissions, purchased flawed offsets, driven up prices, reaped billions in undeserved profits and generally failed to produce promised emission reductions or any significant scale-up of clean energy.”

Why no mention of those, Boorish? They were actual cap-and-trade regulations, much like what you advocate here in this country, and it certainly is centralized power in the ultimate purport, which is what you’re explicitly defending, yes? No? Did Natasha not tell you what an arrant waste Kyoto has turned out to be? Did news not reach Memphis that RECLAIM was a plenary failure? Have you really been reduced to citing (repeatedly) Montreal and acid rain legislation, despite that fact HR-2454 wouldn’t provide a competitive price advantage for so-called clean energy over fossil fuel energy — in other words, wouldn’t create incentives for investment?

No one is denying that centralized power can “solve” the problem — if by “solve” you mean “quash.” The phrase I used was “better equipped.” Government is by definition an agency of force, and centralized power, as its very name implies, entails that government has the power to restrict all industry, if it chooses. That would certainly “solve” CO2. That doesn’t make it right. The real question, of course, is: at what cost? This is called what is seen and what is not seen. “There is only one difference between a bad economist and a good one: the bad economist confines himself to the visible effect; the good economist takes into account both the effect that can be seen and those effects that must be foreseen. In the economic sphere an act, a habit, an institution, a law produces not only one effect, but a series of effects. Of these effects, the first alone is immediate; it appears simultaneously with its cause; it is seen. The other effects emerge only subsequently; they are not seen” (Bastiat, What is Seen and What is not Seen).

The tragedy of the commons, which was a term coined and popularized by a defender of laissez fair named Garret Garret (who, incidentally, in 1918, wrote a book called The Driver in which the main character’s name is Henry Galt, a mysterious and capable fellow who saves an economically collapsing America through his brilliance and productiveness, and of whom it is several times asked “Who is Henry Galt?”), occurs, as Garret Garret points out, precisely because of the lack of private property rights.

We can’t help noticing either that you don’t once mention the fact that cap-and-trade legislation represents a massive infringement of privately owned property, on a number of levels, beginning with the fact that government (as opposed to supply and demand) determines straightway how much energy these industries are allowed produce. That’s called government control of energy, sir, plain and simple, and it’s not only anti-freedom; it’s sheer madness.

Nor do you anywhere address the fact that savings and capital breeds newer and ever newer technologies. Nor do you once broach the fact that the centralized powers which you have so much confidence in have taken the cleanest energy option completely off the table: nuclear energy. Nor, for obvious reasons, do you bring up the fact that nuclear power, the cleanest, most abundant, and most ingenious form of energy we’ve yet discovered, has for decades been forbidden by environmentalists and your lobby groups; so that over a thirty-year time-span, you folks have brought the world 400 million more tons of coal used per year, because for thirty years now, since 1979, following the Three Mile Island accident, we’ve been using more coal.

Nor do you bother mentioning that the meltdown of the uranium core in 1979 at Three Mile Island was so overblown by antinuclear groups that it went virtually unnoticed how the containment vessel at Three Mile Island had done its job and prevented any significant release of radioactivity; nor the fact that despite years of government subsidies (regulators, for instance, have forced utility companies to buy “renewables”), these same renewables still only generate about 0.9 percent of our total electricity. Quoting one Alan P. Loeb, former attorney of the Environmental Protection Agency, reviewing Indur Goklany’s book:

Over the long term, emissions of a pollutant will increase to the point at which its harmfulness becomes recognized, then the problem is addressed and the pollutant starts to decline. Goklany explains this phenomenon to be a function principally of wealth and technology: as affluence and technological sophistication increase, the human desire to improve living standards causes pollution problems to be addressed.

Nor, finally, do you anywhere bring up the utter unconstitutionality of your cap-and-trade legilsation, and indeed you are very wise not to bring it up, since it will disclose in full your stance on inalienable private property rights.