Re: Re: EPA to lable CO2 health hazard.

[Guest guest]

We have been cleaning up the environment a lot. As a child, I remember seeing a brown band around the horizon, one that would reach a quarter or more of the way up the sky. That was the pollution in the sky. Its gone now, at least around here. Not a trace of it. The water is cleaner, too.

The thing is that we are at a point now where the cost-benefit curve of cleaning up that bit more is very steep. By that I mean if we spend $1 to clean one more unit of pollution, we might get 80 cents of benefit. If we spend $2, we might get $1.10 in return, so the result gets less and less. I think what we should do is put bounties out for new technology that rather than being a penalty or a tax will make a profit for the company or whoever owns the clean up device. A purely private venture, aside from the bounty, that would not reduce or harm the power industry but make it more profitable. I'm absolutely certain technologies would be developed in short order, a few years at most, under this system.

Cap and Trade has never worked anywhere it has been applied. Parts of Europe and other places have tried it and all that happens is energy gets more expensive and a few get obscenely rich by playing the market. Many carbon shares won't be needed by companies and they will be sold and traded just like other commodities. What happens is they are traded around, the prices keep going up, so they became more expensive for other companies that might come to need them. What we are seeing is companies like GE already predicting many billions of profit from trading their credits and individuals like Al Gore who are likewise predicted to got from being a mere $100 millionaire to a billionaire in short order. Both classes are already positioning themselves to loot the system and they will.

Its not going to work and we are all going to bear the cost of it.

Don't forget also that England is close to passing an "individual carbon allowance" card to all of its citizens. Essentially this will be a carbon credit for each person per year and if you exceed it you pay fines and maybe jail time. The program will allow home inspections, monitoring power usage and other things. I can see that happening here as well and I don't think the Democrats in particular will have any compunction against passing such a monstrosity.

In a message dated 12/6/2009 2:36:10 A.M. Eastern Standard Time, no_reply writes:

If it seems that the cost benefit analysis works in favor of a clean-up, then I would opt for that. But I cannot really see how any study could accurately determine a real number either. Administrator

[Guest guest]

Pretty much. The X-prize was a modern example of such a bounty. The British also offered bounties for a very long time for solutions to problems. What the British government would do would be if it saw a problem, rather than have a bunch of government scientists hanging around, they would post a bounty and let tinkerers solve the problem for them. One major problem was finding a pendulum clock that could work on an ocean going vessel, since to determine latitude you needed an accurate clock. The government did eventually pay the bounty, though the committee did drag it out for a long time.

As the X-prize showed, the bounty system could work very well again.

: Basically another X-prize?

[Guest guest]

: Basically another X-prize?