[palmer]

Rural areas once needed wires for 2-way communication, that point has long since passed and would have passed sooner had it not been for bad spectrum policy, subsidies and other government boondoggles. I just finished reading an article on Swiss farm subsidies. It is probably one of the reasons that Switzerland has per-GDP CO2 emissions that are 4 times ours. It takes a lot of energy to farm above 2000 meters but they want it for its appearance and the farmers have a lot of political clout.

The "public good" is an overgeneralization of several rights and a lot of socialist junk. I have the right to clean air, CO2 doesn't make it dirty. I'm sure we've argued this before, but AGW is based on models that primarily use water vapor to warm the earth, CO2 only contributes a degree or two. If you insist on defining a "public good" then define it as a function of model output, then I can pay to have SO2 injected into the upper atmosphere or some other equally cheap solution to warming (if it is indeed a problem).

[Einigkeit_Recht_Freiheit]

My guess is that in a face to face conversation we would find we agree on most points. Our mild areas of disagreement is what makes this interesting.

In terms of the anti climate change water vapour argument, I have posted about this before.

If you view the atmosphere (the greenhouse gasses that is) as a glass that is 99.99 water vapour, then it does make logical sense the .001% is irrelevant.

However, the reality is that it a glass is not the correct analogy, but rather a sensitive (yet sometimes self-correcting) balance. If you add too much is one direction you will get a signficant shift. We don't know how much that is and could be less than .001%. If you combine human emissions with what might be a normal cyclical warming, the shift could be very, very great and the self-balancing mechanism will take a time-period longer than is relevant for human beings.

Ultimately it is quite obvious from the time that I have been posting at FR that the climate change debate is moving in my direction and not the other way.

Even if you don't believe in it personally, it is simply time to start advocating reasonable measures based on conservative market mechanisms. Otherwise we are going to get something much, much worse, more costly and more destructive.

By the way, have you ever been to Switzerland? I have and I understand why they pay the price they do to keep their country looking like it does. Actually this is the first time I have ever, ever heard anyone criticize the way the Swiss run things. Very odd Palmer, very odd.