Lets’ be honest, with people like you they couldn’t have won no matter what they did. Really, you already had them painted as evil and that’s it. So this is just sour grapes. You went after them and they defended themselves so now they are an evil conspiracy for defending themselves from you.
Not something anyone loses much sleep over I imagine. You hated them enough to threaten legal action, and when they mounted a strong defence you still hated them, but no more threats of legal action. Seems like the won.
Wow, Blake, you’re just all over the place, aren’t you? And wherever you are, you’re attacking. It’s pretty clear that you don’t really care about any of the arguments we’re presenting- no, for you, it’s all about painting AGW proponents as maliciously misguided.
It’s actually quite difficult for me to follow your arguments, because most of your posts appear to be nothing more than dismissals of any dissenting viewpoint and then rabidly painting the person you’re arguing with as a strawman-abuser or just plain stupid.
As near as I can tell, though, you claim that the situation has become so politicized that none of the research can be trusted. Oh, and that any money spent fighting AGW is wasted, stolen money, since none of the research can be trusted. That about cover it?
This is completely false and stems from your failure to understand the difference between the debt and the deficit. That lack of understanding casts a deep shadow over your other arguments.
True, I got my terminology messed up, which did indeed make my assessment incorrect as stated. The US national debt is still there and alive and kicking. It was the year-to-year balance of loss/surplus that Clinton stabilized.
But…you’ll still have to inform me how this affects my statement in any particular way? The central point was that if the federal government’s yearly spending has gone from anything from a $500 billion per year deficit to $300 billion surplus within my lifetime, and yet I’d be hard pressed to say where that particularly affected my lifestyle at any point through that, it seems odd to say all of a sudden that spending large quantities of money is somehow going to magically make my life hell. It’s never done so before, and this would be the first case where that money would actually be being spent on something that’s maximizing the efficiency of the economy, rather than something which just gets blown up, blasted to the moon, or otherwise destroyed.
Within the timeframe we care about (up to about 2050), power consumption should either double or triple from modern day. Currently, nuclear energy contributes 19.3% of the nation’s power, and that 19.3% is costing us $1.3 billion in subsidies per year (PDF). If we go nuke to build all the rest of our energy to meet 2050 power usage, we’ll have to have 5-10 times as many nuclear power plants, meaning $6.5 to $13 billion (unadjusted for future inflation) in subsidies per year.
$13 billion dollars a year is not a staggering amount. NASA’s yearly budget is more than that ($17 billion). Which do we need more to live luxurious lives, power to our house or NASA?
Overall, adding these things up, you’re probably looking at something no more than $100 billion a year. Where on the other hand, the CBO is saying that the Iraq war will have costed $2.4 trillion by 2017, or an average of $171 billion per year, with no clear advantage to having spent it.
