Blogito

...on which we still remember Pearl Harbor. I had turned 7 not that long before and we were working for the government. I remember them taking Tony away on this date four years ago. In neither case did I understand what was about to happen to my life as a result.

Here’s the end-around play in the battle to control the climate change money, which won’t be chump change:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Monday will finalize its determination that greenhouse gases pose a danger to human health and the environment, paving the way for regulation of carbon dioxide emissions from vehicles, power plants, factories refineries and other major sources.

The move gives President Obama a significant tool to combat the gases blamed for the heating of the planet even while Congress remains stalled on economy-wide global warming legislation.

The E.P.A. finding also will allow Mr. Obama to tell delegates at the United Nations climate change conference that began today in Copenhagen that the United States is moving aggressively to address the problem.

E.P.A. Administrator Lisa P. Jackson is expected to announce the step at a news conference this afternoon in Washington. ...

The administration has wielded the finding as a prod to Congress to act on legislation, saying in effect that if lawmakers do not act to control greenhouse gas pollution they will use their rule-making power to do so.

So much for any false worries about any imperial presidency or the separation of powers. See how cute they are about it, though? Congress will have the opportunity to act as the president directs, first of all, giving them the appearance of independence, but if they don’t do as directed it still won’t affect the outcome.

Paul Krugman says cap-and-trade will make companies more profitable...somehow:

The truth, however, is that cutting greenhouse gas emissions is affordable as well as essential. Serious studies say that we can achieve sharp reductions in emissions with only a small impact on the economy’s growth. And the depressed economy is no reason to wait — on the contrary, an agreement in Copenhagen would probably help the economy recover.

Why should you believe that cutting emissions is affordable? First, because financial incentives work.

Action on climate, if it happens, will take the form of “cap and trade”: businesses won’t be told what to produce or how, but they will have to buy permits to cover their emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. So they’ll be able to increase their profits if they can burn less carbon — and there’s every reason to believe that they’ll be clever and creative about finding ways to do just that. ...

And you can be sure that given the right incentives, people would find many tricks the study missed.

See how that works? They haven’t been maximizing their profits presently because, well, they haven’t decided to be clever and creative. Once they learn they can increase their profits by burning less carbon, well, Shazam! It will take a gigantic program to enable them to see this simple solution, however.

The acid rain controversy of the 1980s was in many respects a dress rehearsal for today’s fight over climate change. Then as now, right-wing ideologues denied the science. Then as now, industry groups claimed that any attempt to limit emissions would inflict grievous economic harm.

But in 1990 the United States went ahead anyway with a cap-and-trade system for sulfur dioxide. And guess what. It worked, delivering a sharp reduction in pollution at lower-than-predicted cost.

Curbing greenhouse gases will be a much bigger and more complex task — but we’re likely to be surprised at how easy it is once we get started.

One big difference, however. Sulfur dioxide, unlike carbon dioxide, is not essential to plant life but actually harmful. We can accurately predict what happens to sulfur dioxide in the atmosphere precipitating out as ‘acid rain’. And despite what you are being told today, carbon dioxide concentrations have always notably increased during previous periods of global warming, periods we believe had the earth even warmer than it is today, but many scientists think that was an effect, not a cause.

The people who claim the science is settled when it comes to carbon dioxide were recently revealed as having settled the matter by actively preventing the other side from being heard, firing unfavorable editors, changing the rules for peer review, etc.

And after stalling off FOIA requests for years, now they discover they can’t produce all of the original data because, well, somehow they managed to throw it away. Not lose or misplace it, you understand, but actually chucked it. Lack of space, don’t you know? Why is it there are never enough closets?

Meanwhile, in one of those happy contretemps which reassures you there really is a God, NASA’s Dr James Hansen tell us, in the very next NYTimes Op-ed:

AT the international climate talks in Copenhagen, President Obama is expected to announce that the United States wants to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions to about 17 percent below 2005 levels by 2020 and 83 percent by 2050. But at the heart of his plan is cap and trade, a market-based approach that has been widely praised but does little to slow global warming or reduce our dependence on fossil fuels. It merely allows polluters and Wall Street traders to fleece the public out of billions of dollars. ...

Because cap and trade is enforced through the selling and trading of permits, it actually perpetuates the pollution it is supposed to eliminate.

One left hand doesn’t know what the other left hand is doing, it seems. How sweet it is.

I love it when scientists write, because occasionally they come out with a truth even as they avoid others, which we can see as Hansen continues:

Supporters of cap and trade point to the 1990 Clean Air Act amendments that capped sulfur dioxide and nitrogen oxide emissions from coal-burning power plants — the main pollutants in acid rain... ...

Cap and trade also did little to improve public health. Coal emissions are still significant contributing factors in four of the five leading causes of mortality in the United States — and mercury, arsenic and various coal pollutants also cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

The truth? Sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, mercury, arsenic, and various other coal pollutants actually ARE bad for people’s health. That’s a fact. They do cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

The part left out? Carbon dioxide, unlike the others, is absolutely essential for life on earth as we know it. It does NOT cause birth defects, asthma and other ailments.

Dr Hansen, who has had to, ah, readjust his published temperature graph at the NASA website on more than one occasion as the result of errors in methodology pointed out to him by outsiders, apparently understands economics better than Krugman does:

Under the proposed law, some permits to pollute would be handed out free; and much of the money actually collected from permits would be used to pay for boondoggles like “clean coal” research. The House and Senate energy bills would only assure continued coal use, making it implausible that carbon dioxide emissions would decline sharply.

If that isn’t bad enough, Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade. The market for trading permits to emit carbon appears likely to be loosely regulated, to be open to speculators and to include derivatives. All the profits of this pollution trading system would be extracted from the public via increased energy prices.

As amusing as it is watching Krugman and Hansen dueling over science and economics, the humor doesn’t end there. Hansen, you see, has his own pet solution, a fee-and-dividend scheme. Here’s his clinching argument:

Consider the perverse effect cap and trade has on altruistic actions. Say you decide to buy a small, high-efficiency car. That reduces your emissions, but not your country’s. Instead it allows somebody else to buy a bigger S.U.V. — because the total emissions are set by the cap.

In a fee-and-dividend system, every action to reduce emissions — and to keep reducing emissions — would be rewarded. Indeed, knowing that you were saving money by buying a small car might inspire your neighbor to follow suit. Popular demand for efficient vehicles could drive gas guzzlers off the market. Such snowballing effects could speed us toward a pollution-free world.

Life in the ivory tower. Altruistic actions are not based upon cost/reward calculations, in the first place, nor are they influenced by the behavior or actions of others.

Altruism: 1: unselfish regard for or devotion to the welfare of others 2: behavior by an animal that is not beneficial to or may be harmful to itself but that benefits others of its species.

And how about the impressive naiveté displayed by the notion that if your neighbors knew that you were saving money by buying a small car this might inspire them to follow suit? See, this is your liberal scientific mind at work: those SUV-owning neighbors wouldn’t be smart enough to figure that out on their own, without benefit of your exemplary example which was also profitable. You, of course, would possess innate understanding as a result of being a liberal.

I plan on buying a bicycle. When my neighbors see how much money I am saving the snowballing effects of popular demand would speed us toward a pollution-free world.

And here I thought we were worried about the WARMING effect of carbon dioxide, not a pollution-free world.

Some people seem to think they’re the same thing, a two-fer. Of course, if we eliminate carbon dioxide we’ll all die so it won’t matter if we eliminate pollution...maybe we should eliminate just some of the carbon dioxide. Good idea...how much, do you think? Obama says 83% below 2005 emissions by 2050.

Wait...doesn’t that mean we’d still be emitting 17% of what we were in 2005, a record year up to that point? So carbon dioxide concentrations would still be growing? And therefore the world would still be getting hotter, day by day?

Even if it isn’t, uh, actually doing that right at the moment, an observation for which Dr Trenberth describes our inability to explain “a travesty”?

I’ll just have to content myself with the fact that the expert Drs Hansen and Krugman provided me with such enjoyment and enlightenment this morning by appearing together on the same page.

Dr Krugman taught me that “financial incentives work” and Dr Hansen taught me that my neighbor will be favorably influenced by witnessing that in application at my house. About cap-and-trade, on the other hand...

Hansen has long portrayed the climate battle in stark, urgent terms. He raised a fuss in 2007 by equating coal freight trains to Nazi trains carrying people to "crematoria." He apologized and no longer uses the Nazi analogy, but he told Nature last month that his new book still refers to the trains as "death trains."

It’s a good thing he isn’t a Republican woman talking about “death panels” is all I can say.

I scanned this item wondering what the hell the point was really all about, starting off with Woods as the hook and ending up with McCain as the slice, and then I got to the final part:

Actually, though, the Post has better pundits than the NYTimes. Maybe they’re trying to catch down.

Afghanistan will not be transformed by that date. It will not look like France, with a strong and effective central government. The gains that will have been made will be fragile. The situation will still be somewhat unstable. But that should still be the moment to begin the transition to Afghan rule. We can find ways to secure American interests in that region more manageably. By the end of 2011, the United States will have spent 10 years, thousands of lives and $2 trillion trying to create stable, democratic governments in Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the most difficult, divided countries in the world. It will be time to move on.

"Recent statements by Special Envoy for Climate Change Todd Stern indicate that negotiators may be intending to commit the United States to a nationwide emission-reduction program," Mr. Webb wrote in a letter to the president.

"As you well know from your time in the Senate, only specific legislation agreed upon in the Congress, or a treaty ratified by the Senate, could actually create such a commitment on behalf of our country."

Obama chuckled. This dimwit doesn’t know that I control the EPA, obviously. About time the Senate learned its place.

Just as if I was planning for it—and I was not—comes this American Spectator article:

During the first year of the Obama administration, conservatives have directed much of their fire on the major legislation the president is pushing through Congress. This concern is justifiable, as Democrats are moving bills aimed at taking over the nation's health care system, creating a national energy tax to limit carbon emissions, and enabling unions to rapidly add members by denying workers a secret ballot on unionization.

But as critical as it is for the right to expose the damaging consequences of such major legislation, conservatives must not lose sight of the fact that there is more than one way for the president to impose his vision on the country. Each day, throughout the executive branch, presidentially appointed bureaucrats who remain unknown to most Americans make decisions that have consequences for the entire nation. And in President Obama's case, his appointments serve as a plan B, allowing him to realize the parts of his agenda that he is unable to enact through the legislative process.