Bound to Burn

Like medieval priests, today’s carbon brokers will sell you an indulgence that forgives your carbon sins. It will run you about $500 for 5 tons of forgiveness—about how much the typical American needs every year. Or about $2,000 a year for a typical four-person household. Your broker will spend the money on such things as reducing methane emissions from hog farms in Brazil.

But if you really want to make a difference, you must send a check large enough to forgive the carbon emitted by four poor Brazilian households, too—because they’re not going to do it themselves.

To cover all five households, then, send $4,000. And you probably forgot to send in a check last year, and you might forget again in the future, so you’d best make it an even $40,000, to take care of a decade right now. If you decline to write your own check while insisting that to save the world we must ditch the carbon, you are just burdening your already sooty soul with another ton of self-righteous hypocrisy. And you can’t possibly afford what it will cost to forgive that.

I like the term “Carbon Zealots”, LOL.

The article writer dances around the question of whether or not Anthropogenic Global Warming is a real problem (it isn’t), but he does a good job of skewering the disastrous way Carbon trading currently works.

Good article all the way through, except at end where he unfortunately gives credence to the “CO2 is bad” argument by proposing agricultural carbon sinks. Good energy and economics comparisons.

[nuke probabilistic risk assessment (PRA) models said meltdown could be handled. I think he discounts that too readily as a ‘detail.’ IPCC AGW models really ARE fraudulent and could be proven as such in a court of law-where the EPA edangerment finding may end up (a la “State of Fear” novel by Crichton. Nuke PRAs could model a physical event and take defense in depth steps to simply remove heat]

Thirty years ago, the case against nuclear power was framed as the “Zero-Infinity Dilemma.” The risks of a meltdown might be vanishingly small, but if it happened, the costs would be infinitely large, so we should forget about uranium. Computer models demonstrated that meltdowns were highly unlikely and that the costs of a meltdown, should one occur, would be manageable—but greens scoffed: huge computer models couldn’t be trusted. So we ended up burning much more coal. The software shoe is on the other foot now; the machines that said nukes wouldn’t melt now say that the ice caps will. Warming skeptics scoff in turn, and can quite plausibly argue that a planet is harder to model than a nuclear reactor. But that’s a detail. From a rhetorical perspective, any claim that the infinite, the apocalypse, or the Almighty supports your side of the argument shuts down all further discussion.

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