You know what? I’m now convinced we can stop worrying.
We’re talking about such a complex, dynamic system, with so many unknown and practically unknowable forces and feedbacks, that to simply assume only negative consequences from our current actions is nothing but hysterical doom-mongering. My prediction is now wholly optimistic, and will continue to be so in future whatever data reported by the scare story du jour.
That’s right. You heard me.
The economy will be fine, no matter how draconian our measures to reduce emissions!
Friends, join me in laughing loudly at the naked emperor called Kyotogenic Economic Cooling. Think about it: the whole scam is funded by a fossil-fuel lobby designed to silence dissent, and you really don’t want to piss off big business. There’s nothing in their alarmist doomsday book which isn’t already with us today. Their message is “a dollar spent is a dollar lost”, rather than a dollar invested. It is, pure and simple, junk economics through and through.
Emission-reducing measures actually make enterprises more efficient. These twisted-pantied attention whores bang on about Russia’s emissions decreasing as their economy tanked. Carts and horses, dipshits! If some poor schmuck can’t afford to turn on the air-conditioning, it doesn’t mean that a rich dude will lose money by turning his off. And even if the adoption of some emission-reducing measure did undeniably precede an economic slowdown, I challenge anyone to prove that the slowdown couldn’t have been caused by something else. Heck, you couldn’t even prove that the economy wouldn’t be even worse without such economically beneficial measures.
You see, there’s almost literally nothing which is unequivocally bad for everyone, economically speaking. One person’s loss is always another’s gain in such an inter-related and unpredictable system – even literally burning all your money in the back yard raises the value of everyone else’s money slightly. Pacific island nations with nothing to lose might act in their national interests by secretly sending covert special operatives to regularly bomb the world’s 50 busiest airports, and even this is economically beneficial according to Broken Window Economics. (Note also that there is simply no consensus among the world’s leading economists that BWE is demonstrably fallacious – that’s just the opinion of some of them).
So hey, let’s get this party started! We can tax the holy living shit out of everything emission-intensive and use the revenue to subsidise greener alternatives, and nobody can definitively prove that it won’t all work out economically peachy. We can also institute sanctions against anyone who doesn’t do likewise – after all, trade with India and China was much, much smaller in the past and we weren’t reduced to abject poverty then, so we can clearly manage just fine without them. (In fact, I’m very suspicious of people who want their economy to depend upon someone else’s – unpatriotic, traitorous scum if you ask me.)
Here in the UK, gas is disgracefully cheap at $9 per gallon, so let’s do what we can to ramp this baby up, all around the world. And triple that, at least, for aviation fuel – if the Pacific special-ops boys don’t cripple air travel, we can do it economically instead. Bricking the windscreens of sports utility vehicles will, again, be economically beneficial a la Bastiat, and the police can simply pull over any SUV owner who continues to drive with a defective windscreen and force them to publicly fellate passing cyclists. Even one’s own, personal bodily emissions can come within the ambit of new legislation: methane is a more powerful greenhousing gas than carbon dioxide, and so an on the spot fine could be levied on anyone who doesn’t light their own farts.
So thank you, all of those Dopers who have continually told me to stop worrying about the future. You’re quite right, it is a load off my mind not having to care about these consequences any more. Now, if you’ll kindly quit your fucking whining, you shrill and misanthropic friends of misery and Mobil, I’ve got metaphorical windows to break while wearing a cheery, carefree smile.
Relax. It’ll be fine. Seriously.