Comments s5 has made

  • David Roberts is exactly right

    Cap-and-trade is politically viable, and a carbon tax is not. "Carbon tax" even sounds like a phrase tailor made for Republicans to whip the media into a frenzy. You think the public doesn't care about global warming now, just wait until there's a crazy new tax for it. Forget it. Non-starter.

    Let's try a thought experiment.

    First, imagine Republicans demagoguing against a carbon tax. For good measure, imagine them going one further, by calling it a "green tax" and taking down the whole green movement in the process. They'll fill cable news with scare stories of working families going broke at the pump, all thanks to Al Gore's new green tax.

    Now imagine Republicans on cable news, trying to argue against cap-and-trade. First they would have to explain it, and hope that the public will have a visceral response against the arcane technical details of an emissions trading regime. It's just not going to happen. The public will yawn, and the bill will pass.

    A cap-and-trade plan would be highly effective, our president supports it (and even campaigned on it), and Congress won't run screaming like they would with a carbon tax.

    Heck, as a bonus, McCain supports cap-and-trade; he campaigned on it too. Which means we're virtually guaranteed a filibuster proof majority on any bill that reaches the Senate.

    Let's get 'er done.
    On There's a reason Republicans stump for a carbon tax, and it ain't to reduce emissions posted 10 months ago 37 Responses

  • Biden and rail

    Another interesting point is that Biden has been a champion of Amtrak for years, pushing back against right wing efforts to defund it. He commutes by rail every morning to Washington from Delaware, and his son is on Amtrak's board.

    All in all, we can expect a pro-environment administration, one that understands global warming in a national security context, and understands that going green is good for jobs and good for the economy. And we should expect a greater emphasis on rail and public transit.

    I have to a say, for enviros, this is shaping up to be a pretty hot ticket.On Enviros generally pleased with Biden's record on environmental issues posted 1 year, 3 months ago 6 Responses

  • ugh.

    Nader is a lightweight on this issue. The cap-and-trade plan (with 80% CO2 emissions reduction and a 100% credit auction) proposed by both major Democrats is far superior to a carbon tax. What's worse is that he buys the "offsets are indulgences" frame, rather than using critical thinking to analyze their benefits and deficiencies.

    And with today's speech from Obama linking foreign policy and the Iraq war with global warming, we're seeing that the Democrats understand both the stakes and the best strategy in far more depth than cranky uncle Nader. It's time to give up the illusion that he's relevant.On An interview with Ralph Nader about his presidential platform on energy and the environment posted 1 year, 8 months ago 9 Responses

  • Speaking as an ex-Green

    I've realized the complete pointlessness of their party. If both the voters and the government they elect keep reinforcing the two party system, then the only conclusion is that we're stuck with it. And is it really such a terrible thing? Even in countries with multi-party systems, you end up with a left coalition and a right coalition, essentially the same result as a two party system. Considering the problems we have in the world right now, changing a flawed political system to a different but still flawed political system seems frivolous to me.

    The bottom line is that the Green party fails to understand that in order to enact an agenda, you need (a) a coherent agenda and (b) a path to obtaining powering. Whether or not the Greens have (a) is arguable, but it's clear that they lack (b).

    The best mechanism for bringing "third party" issues to center stage is during the party primaries. Dennis Kucinich has been successful at this, acting as the default "Green" candidate in the Democratic primary. Even though I don't vote for Kucinich, candidates like him help include other points of view into the debate and into the party platform, but without acting as a spoiler.

    It's the whole "crashing the gate" strategy. If you don't like the dominant power structure, take it over from within. You'll never get anywhere by sitting on the margins and grousing. Which is exactly what the Green party does.

    So in that sense, the Green party does not participate in democracy; it heckles democracy, from a safe distance. If we had a different political system, like a parliamentary system, then fine, vote Green till the cows come home. But that's not the system we have. So use the primary process to get your candidates and ideas into power, or at the very least, get them into the debate. On What is the Green Party up to, exactly? posted 1 year, 10 months ago 23 Responses

  • Way to miss the point

    KevinMichael, you're dead wrong, and I'm going to have to assume you're trolling.

    You see, there's this little thing called "policy" that decides what choices are even available in the first place to the 1-2 billion people who you think should look in the mirror.

    And guess who decides what that policy is? That's right, our elected officials in government, like George W. Bush. Elected officials who make bad policy absolutely deserve to be blamed, for the simple reason that it's their fault.

    Blame everyone else all you want, but right now the choices for most people in America are either (1) drive to work and heat their homes or (2) lose their jobs and freeze to death in the dark.

    And that's why we have government. To recognize problems and provide a better set of choices. Something which George W. Bush has utterly failed at doing. Hence, he gets the blame. He deserves it. When you suck at your job, people tend to blame you for stuff that goes wrong on your watch.On Vote for the most villainous eco-villain of 2007 posted 1 year, 11 months ago 21 Responses

  • Whatever happened to "up'r down"

    When the Republicans controlled the Senate, all we heard were endless diatribes about how the filibuster is a radical procedural move that shouldn't be used except in extraordinary circumstances, and that requiring 60 votes to make any decision was anti-Constitutional. And now that they're in minority and using the filibuster to block every. single. bill. -- absolute silence. The media, including the bloggers, are asleep on this one, even though we heard about the evils of filibuster at no end when Republicans were in power.

    I wish the Democrats had allowed the Republicans to kill the filibuster (the "nuclear option") instead of brokering the deal that got us Alito and Roberts anyway. And really, why should the minority party get any say? They were voted out of power for a reason. If want their agenda to be considered, they can do it the old fashioned way: by trying to persuade their colleagues on the other side of the aisle and by making their case to the public. Otherwise, if their bad ideas have been rejected by the electorate, then tough turnips for them.On Senate Republicans vow to filibuster energy bill posted 1 year, 12 months ago 9 Responses

  • This is why we have governments

    People very clearly will spread out and use more, the easier and cheaper it is to do so. That's why things like sprawl need to be heavily regulated.On Energy efficiency just leaves more money to squander, says study posted 2 years ago 9 Responses

  • How does this compare to Obama's plan?

    They're both good and very close. I think this plan might be a bit better, which matches a prediction I made that the Democratic candidates will be competing with each other to be better on the environment. It's a nice position to be in for a change. You have to assume that only half of these plans will ever get implemented, and it's better to get half of a large pie than half of a small pie.

    I'm thinking Hillary is better than Obama on nuclear energy, though. Hillary seems to say that we should fix the nuclear we have and make sure it doesn't blow up in our faces / pollute our land, while Obama seems to say that even though we don't like nuclear we should build more of it.On The full text of Clinton's plan posted 2 years ago 18 Responses

  • Both are fine

    Plug-in hybrids for people who need range, all-electrics for people who don't. I live in a city, so I'm fine with renting or using a car share program for the rare occasions that need I drive somewhere far. Suburbanites could leave their hybrids plugged in and run off electricity for errands and picking the kids up at little league, and then run off partial fuel for the daily commute.

    I'm not so sure it's a good idea for all-electrics to be held up waiting for a 350 mile range. Plenty of drivers would be fine with 100 or even 50, as long as the daily recharge is easy.

    An car company producing an all-electric would be really smart to team up with a car share program and offer free or discounted membership for the first N months or years of ownership. Then you wouldn't feel compelled to buy more car than you need.On Automakers debate skipping directly to full-electric cars posted 2 years, 1 month ago 18 Responses

  • Setting standards

    "The Federal government does not hold (or should not hold) a monopoly on setting laws nor standards."

    This is inherently contradictory. In order to have a standard, there must be a single body who sets the standard, and that body must have the authority and legitimacy to enforce it. If the market is full of a zillion competing "standards", then it's not a standard - it's a mish-mash of individuals doing what they want, which is the opposite of a standard. No monopoly, no standard.

    The alternative is exactly what we have now: everyone deciding for themselves what constitutes "green" or "responsible" behavior, forcing individuals to do endless legwork to decipher what the claims mean in reality. We already have that system today. So if you want to see how effective it would be, look no further than the present.

    And yes, the EPA is less effective than it could be precisely because it has been crippled by Reaganism. A government agency can't do its job when its own leadership believes that government can't / shouldn't solve problems. Well no wonder it fails to do its job - it's designed to fail, to "prove" that it shouldn't exist.On An interview with Ron Paul about his presidential platform on energy and the environment posted 2 years, 1 month ago 55 Responses

  • Ron Paul is stuck in the 1800s

    It's nice to hear a candidate who is on board with the concept of "don't subsidize pollution", but mostly he's stuck in the mindset that environmentalism = clean lakes at the campground.

    And partly this is the fault of libertarianism in general, which balks at anything that has the appearance of collectivism. Global warming is a collective problem. If my neighbor emits more than their fair share of CO2, it's not going to affect my land or my property in any way. The harm caused by CO2 emissions is not one individual harming another; it's the collective actions of civilization harming itself.On An interview with Ron Paul about his presidential platform on energy and the environment posted 2 years, 1 month ago 55 Responses

  • So by making global warming worse,

    He made it better!

    It sounds suspiciously like, Fight them over there so we don't have to fight them over here!On Spike in gasoline prices is partially due to Bush's weak energy policy posted 2 years, 2 months ago 3 Responses

  • But you don't fly everyday.

    Flying contributes about 2-3% in total to global CO2 emissions. This is because people don't fly everyday - with the exception of the very rich and frequent business commuters, the rest of us are flying a handful of times each year at the most.

    On the other hand, the daily electricity usage and the daily commute of everyone in total vastly overshadows the occasional flying of your average person. So yes, a single flight is worse than a single queue of traffic, but we're making hundreds of those queues and only one of those flights.

    So to directly contradict you, if humanity as a whole continued flying at the roughly same rate as we do now while changing all our lightbulbs to CFLs and driving hybrids, we would be doing a order of magnitude better than we could ever do by eliminating ALL flying.

    Consider that for a second. Just making the bare minimum changes to lighting and transportation helps the environment more than completely eliminating flying. That would mean no more going to your mother's funeral. No more shipping. No more IPCC conferences. No more studying abroad. Not without many of those things requiring a month of transit time. You would lose all of that, yet the environment would only gain a fraction of the benefit of changing some light bulbs.

    At the moment, there is no replacement technology for flying. The best we can do is encourage fuel efficiency, more efficient routing, and offsets. Airlines like EasyJet even allow you to add carbon offsets to your flight when you purchase your tickets. (They should do it for everyone automatically but it's a start at least.)

    Flying and travel in general has a direct benefit to society, and it's not something we can stop doing. People need rest and relaxation, they need to be exposed to different places and different cultures, and they need to visit different people and exchange ideas. There's no getting around it.On Travel site sends out eco-themed newsletter posted 2 years, 3 months ago 9 Responses

  • China's pollution is America's pollution

    Why is China spewing out more pollution than ever? To build cheap, throwaway products for Americans. If we don't like what they're doing, then it's up to us to change our trade policies, to link environment protection with trade status. I'm fine with giving them aid to do the expensive work of cleaning up and upgrading, but we have to realize that we've not just outsourced manufacturing - we've outsourced pollution, too.On Developed world scolds China for doing what it does posted 2 years, 3 months ago 6 Responses

  • right wingers = hypocrisy hypocrites

    This is same crowd that

    • shouts for the death penalty for drug dealers (yet are addicted to painkillers)
    • preaches about protecting the children (while trying to diddle a few they seduce on Myspace)
    • waxes poetic about family values (while cheating on their wives)
    • hates gays (while working their side jobs as male prostitutes)
    • screeches about Mexican immigrants (yet hires them as maids and nannies)
    On Don't pretend to write about this stuff out of concern, please posted 2 years, 3 months ago 21 Responses

  • hardly wimping out

    The fact is, Representative Dingell from Michigan is the roadblock here (pun intended). As you noted, the CAFE standards are in the Senate version of the bill, and the strategy is to insert them back in on conference. The end result will be the same, and will avoid a protracted fight.

    It's interesting that Dingell gets praise in another post linked on Grist's front page without acknowledging that he's the problem here. I think Pelosi's strategy is actually quite crafty.

    Unfortunately, this is getting misreported as "Dems sell out" rather than actually looking at the facts and assigning blame where it belongs.On Sadly posted 2 years, 3 months ago 3 Responses

  • Conservatism has no principles

    Conservatism is only about "state's rights" when the federal government is trying to solve problems like pollution or slavery. When the states try to get in the act, they immediately shift to "syncing up state regulations to reduce the cost of compliance".

    The only "principle" conservatives have is to create a permanent feudal state run by favored corporations. On Whatever happened to local control is good? posted 2 years, 6 months ago 4 Responses

  • Borat would be proud.

    Kazakhstan beats us by 1!On Snow says Bush has made climate a priority. Yeah, right. posted 3 years ago 4 Responses

  • Not as different as you think

    I can't agree here. Protecting indigenous species from introduced species (like cats) is a mainstream value among animal rights advocates. An animal rights advocate wouldn't say "mass slaughter cats so they don't eat the native birds" but they would advocate for rounding them up, sterilizing them, or taking other steps to undo the damage caused. A bit more creativity is required than just pulling out a gun, but ultimately it's the right thing to do.

    For that matter, there are plenty of animal rights advocates who view society's obsession with "cute" and charismatic animals (like cats and dogs) as harmful, as it pulls the focus away from protecting other species.

    At their core, animal rights advocates want the same thing as environmentalists: to allow animals and the natural world to exist with minimal harm and interference from human civilization. Of course there will always be differences of opinion on various individual issues and on methods, but don't assume that PETA press releases define the alpha and the omega of animal rights.On Animal rights and environmentalism should stay separate posted 3 years ago 12 Responses