Those kinds of donors usually cover all their bases. They give to both Republican and Democrats.
When you check the lobbies, one can see better where the efforts are going.
After the Pharma/health, the lobbies that spend the most do have a beef against having to follow regulations that the science recommends we should be doing regarding the control of CO2 emissions.
Just look at what the Republicans did with the EPA.
This has been happening a good bit it seems recently and I’m trying to be fair in assessing my feeling that it isn’t so prevalent the other way around – do we see a lot of conservative threads along the lines of “Liberals say they don’t like X because Y, but what’s the real reason for it?” Maybe I’m missing it. When someone tells me they are pro-abortion-rights, I assume it’s because they place high values on individual options and freedom for people/women to have a wide range of sexual and lifestyle options. I may prioritize or value those “goods” differently, but I would never have the kneejerk impulse to say “well those self-evidently could never be things any rational person would think important, what’s the hidden agenda?” It’s not an uncommon form of illiberal liberalism, I know – people in flyover country have never exhibited to me the gobsmacked disbelief that coastal liberals believed or practiced (as a factual matter), and thought themselves right to do so, the things that were common/dear to those coastal liberals, as vice versa.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but don’t oil companies currently receive huge amounts in government subsidies.
The price mechanism is already distorted. None of the negative externalities of oil based energy are accounted for in the price of the product and as such it is (in my opinion) vastly under priced. Subsidizing renewable clean energy would correct this imbalance and, you know, prevent the earth from turning into a giant ball of fire :D.
History is still not your best subject I see.
The basics of global warming were more formally established in the 50’s with scientists like Plass that actually looked first to improve the then new heat seeking missiles to allow the Eisenhower administration to kill Commies. So I like Ike :), now if you still want to make the point that AGW is still a left wing invention just go ahead and demonstrate more ignorance.
Alternatives have been mentioned before, and they do not include the destruction of civilization. The problem now is that the current Republican leadership is certain that there are none or not needed.
As RickG intimated, doing a cost-benefit analysis is worthless if all the costs and all the benefits, present and future, aren’t properly taken into account. Things like technical know-how, required equipment, labor costs, efficiency percentages are rather easily quantifiable in the here-and-now, but other things like the cost, 30 years into the future, of a cubic meter of CO2 being pumped into the atmosphere now are much less easy to estimate (but they can be if you do your homework and are not biased by ideology). The “traditional” modus operandi of passing those fuzzy yet undeniably real future costs onto future generations (i.e. completely ignoring them now) absolutely needs to be taken into account by a rational energy policy. If that is done, renewables start to look much better, and subsidies might be a way of recognizing and rewarding that (along with jump starting said future market).
Most conservatives don’t think AGW is happening, or at least they don’t accept the “A” part of it even if they do accept the “GW” part of it. So right there, you’re losing a big part of the equation.
We all grew up in a fossil fuel based economy, and most of us don’t have any real understanding of the way that economy is subsidized by the government. Mainly that’s going to be oil (we have all the coal we need, I think), and I suspect the subsidy is largely in what it costs us militarily to make sure the ME doesn’t implode or explode. But conservatives like a strong military, so I don’t think this is a big deal for them.
But on a purely economic basis, I don’t think conservatives have any issue with renewable energy, per se. I mean, look at GW Bush. He’s as conservative as they come and certainly has his share ties to the oil industry, but he’s got one of the greenest homes around. And there is a small, but hopefully growing, contingent of conservatives who see (as was mentioned above) energy independence as a national security issue. Of course, let’s not forget all the rare earth metals needed for car batteries that come from… China!
Let’s just hope that algae thing pans out.
If I may, for a moment, play the devil’s advocate righty as well as you play the analogous lefty, I’d say that there’s a lot more agreement among those who know on what might happen when you do x with the market than what might happen when you do y with the planet.
I.e., conservatives are a lot more at home with economy than with ecology, and would prefer decisions involving both to favor the former.
“Such a pity; at any moment then you will surely sink through the unreal planetary surface and be flung to a suffocating death in the vacuum of space.”
With apologies to Haviland Tuf
See, I knew there was a reason I edited that out.
Fortunately, this probably won’t last for long. According to this Wikipedia article, while China currently produces 97% of the world’s rare earths, they actually only have 37% of the reserves. Mines in a number of other countries (including the US) will start producing (again, in some cases) very soon. The price mechanism at work.
Both coal and oil receive gigantic amounts of government subsidies, tax breaks, etc.
And they are aren’t required to take care of most of the damage they do, and tend to get breaks in things like safety regulations; unlike, say, nuclear. Let’s see how cheap oil and coal are if it’s decided that all the wastes produced by them need to be entombed beneath the Earth for essentially forever.
That’s because the damage they do is in fact pretty inconsequential, in the overall scheme of things. Blown way out of proportion. Tempest in a tea pot.
Melting glaciers in an ocean, not a tempest in a tea pot.
Turd in a punch bowl.
Yeah, I was reading an article (I think it was on PopScience though I can’t remember now) talking about a guy looking to open a plant here in the US that will start off just processing the tailings from an old iron mine (IIRC). After that he plans to start up the mine again because it’s got quite a high concentration of REMs. The downside is there is some type of radioactive material in the mix, but he’s hopeful that he can get a twofer out of it…if he can get power plants built using the radioactive materials it would really put the company in the black.
I have no idea how feasible his plan actually is (it was a PopSci article after all so grain of salt), but it underscored the fact that REMs aren’t actually all that rare…and that the US actually has quite a bit. Right now the environmental impact is too high to make it worthwhile, but we DO have quite a bit if it comes down to the crunch.
-XT
Unlike most liberals, I actually study history, not emrely pretend it supports whatever political positions I happen to hold.
More self-serving pablum which is ultimately irrelevant to the issue of actually getting energy.
Wait - which party has pushed several times (and been shot down time and time again) for nuclear, a power source which is known to be scalable to our energy needs, far cleaner and probably better overall than either solar or wind (both of which are silly toys for the rich)?
Y’know, I don’t really care what you do or support or want. You either have a practical engineering solution, or you can fiddle around with minor sidelines. Whether you persuade yourself that pie-in-the-sky projects work or not, go ahead. But don’t pretend that this is about the environment, because there are far better ways. We know what some of these ways are and are developing the more.
Sorry, we found in the past that you need to take remedial courses.
It has to be taken into account, when the people in power just make laws doing the equivalent of telling the sea to stop, one has to notice were the problem is.
As I mentioned before I’m not one of those liberals or democrats, I support Nuclear energy. And Obama is in favor of it.
It is about the environment, and preserving free enterprise for the future. The reality is that by postponing any efforts to control the use of fossil fuels what we are doing is just setting a future where coming governments will react to the more serious effects with desperation instead of calm planning. I know enough history to know that we are bound to get less freedom when acting in desperation.
Based on my experience of the Religious Right, it’s all of these* except the first sentence.* Economic self-interest has nothing to do with right-wing thinking, despite the attempts of those of us outside it to try to find a rational basis for their positions.
Right wing thought on the environment is steeped in recklessness and irrationality, & when you try to talk sense about it, you get shut out. The standard excuse is that they want to burn up the earth just to piss the liberals off.
Seriously, a rightie on environmental issues is prima facie a madman on the level of a man who thinks he is a biscuit.
Oh, as a conservationist, I know that renewable energy isn’t as easy as it looks. Rechargeable batteries to store solar power require rare earths, & that can become the new scarcity. But the rightie habit of insisting on not conserving fossil fuels nor developing replacements & just hoping that alternatives will magically appear when we’re desperate enough is hardly smart, & it’s shored up by a base of dirt-ignorant raving loons.
That said, the Democratic base is dirt-ignorant too, it just feels to me like the GOP base is further round the bend. That may just be my extensive experience with religious voters in the central US, or even that the lead pollution in my old mining town has made most people here dumber than average somehow. I may be working from a flawed sample.