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Arbeit Macht … Warm?

By: Steve Maley (Diary)  |  April 11th, 2010 at 07:50 PM  | 

RESIZE: AAA

In a single Huffington Post column, NASA’s famous warmist-alarmist Dr. James Hansen invokes Godwin’s Law on climate change, criticizes President Obama for his lack of stalwart leadership in that area, and offers a climate change solution that would also discourage illegal immigration.

Seriously.

Obama’s Second Chance on the Predominant Moral Issue of This Century

The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children and grandchildren, and most species on the planet.

So the Cadillac Escalade enjoys the same moral standing as West African slave ships and Bergen-Belsen’s crematoria. Got it.

Yet the president, addressing climate in the State of the Union, was at his good-guy worst, leading with “I know that there are those who disagree…” with the scientific evidence. This weak entrée, almost legitimizing denialists, was predictably greeted by cheers and hoots from well-oiled coal-fired Congressmen. The president was embarrassed and his supporters cringed….

Why face the difficult truth presented by the climate science? Why not use the president’s tack: just talk about the need for clean energy and energy independence? Because that approach leads to wrong policies, ineffectual legislation larded with giveaways to special interests, such as the Waxman-Markey bill in the House and the bills being considered now in the Senate.

What prescription is offered our President? Hansen has only one: We must tax the bejeezus out of carbon-based energy consumption.

An essential corollary to the rising carbon price is 100 percent redistribution of collected fees to the public — otherwise the public will never allow the fee to be high enough to affect lifestyles and energy choices. The fee must be collected from fossil fuel companies across-the-board at the mine, wellhead, or port of entry. Revenues should be divided equally among all legal adult residents, with half-shares for children up to two per family, distributed monthly as a “green check”. …

The fee-and-green-check approach is transparent, fair and effective. … Economic modeling shows that carbon emissions would decline 30 percent by 2020. The annual dividend would be $2000-3000 per legal adult resident, $6000-9000 per family with two or more children.

About sixty percent of the public would receive more in the green check than they pay in added energy costs. …

[Emphasis added.]

Oh, and the cost to administer such a program? Dr. Hansen doesn’t say, so I guess it’s fair to assume it will be negligible…

Let’s look at the numbers of this proposal. Something like 4% of the population is, um, suboptimally documented. About 28% of women have more than two children. Allowing for some overlap, that leaves 10-15% of us energy hogs (you, me, and Al Gore) to pay the freight so that 60% can get their “green check”.

But notice that Hansen mentions twice that you have to be “legal” to be a green check recipient. So an family of illegals will have a heavy monetary incentive to go home. Was this Hansen’s intended result? It’s certainly not liberal dogma; surely we’ll have to grant blanket amnesty before imposing this solution.

Perhaps most grating of all is Dr. Hansen’s invoking of the name of Galileo:

This is not the 17th century, when “beliefs” trumped science, forcing Galileo to recant his understanding of the solar system. The president should unequivocally support the climate science community, which is under politically orchestrated assault on the legitimacy of its scientific assessments.

On the contrary, the Climategate memos paint a picture of a community of scientists who were more driven by “beliefs” than by a quest for the truth. The skeptics have confronted the putative “consensus” of the climate change political/scientific establishment just as Galileo was at odds with the political/scientific establishment of his day. It is Hansen and other representatives of the establishment who would have the skeptic community recant.

Cross-posted at VladEnBlog.

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COMMENTS

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  • Tbone

    they would commit suicide and do the rest of us a favor.

    • Next93

      Lets see how much energy they have for activism when they live the lifestyle most people experienced prior to the industrial revolution, when every task was done with muscle power (yours or an animals), and you could afford at best a new pair of (hand made) shoes every other year.

      Until I see them living that way, they’ve got zero credibility.

  • earlgrey

    Nt

  • hungarianfalcon

    the preliminary and final rules from the EPA on GHG and had to provide guidance to my supervisors on its impact to our site (1000+ FTEs), I can attest to the fact that the compliance costs would be significant. Our upper mgmt estimated that by 2020 it would mean ~$20-40M. This translates to 10-30% of our workforce expenses (assume ~$150k/employee year by 2020 (salary, benefits, overhead, etc.). Now, obviously all the expense wouldn’t be made up via headcount, but the calculations do provide some context.

    Additionally, the rules and compliance testing were an absolute mess. I told my supervisors that I’d be ashamed to have my name associated w/ the authorship of the testing protocols it was so sophomoric.

    Full disclosure- I have a Ph.D. in analytical chemistry specializing in instrumentation from a school that was rated #3 in that discipline at the time.

    Hungarian Falcon

  • 4life

    The rug has been pulled out from under ‘climate science’ and the public is turning its back on the whole hype mess.

  • ss396

    Having gone through his laughably utopian description, we are lastly treated to

    Products made by nations that do not have a carbon price can be charged an equivalent duty under existing rules of the World Trade Organization. That will convince most nations to join, so they can collect the tax themselves.

    This is generally known as “a trade war”, and such things have always ended badly.

    It is clear that Dr. Hansen is not an economist. On the record to date, it is clear that he is not even a scientist.

    Nor is he a humanist, considering how many people will starve and die in the attempt to achieve his utopia.

    Nor is he a politician if he thinks that President Obama merely needs to explain how sensible this all is for it to be enacted. [Guy must've been living a cave for the past year or sumpin'.]

    But he is real smart. So there.

  • http://fairfaxgardener.blogspot.com ddstrain

    stop exhaling.

  • Dirt Winston

    scientist were supposed to be this involved in setting national policy. Real scientist need to step up and expose the “climate” scientists for the frauds they really are, before all scientists have as much credibility as Ufologist.

  • aesthete

    Even if climate change were occurring, the cost to fix it would be on the magnitude of an economic depression. If anyone thinks that any political group or party wants to be caught espousing an idea that would kill and regress economic growth long-term, they’re not thinking straight. The proof is in the pudding: none of the ideas (including this ridiculous redistribution scheme) put on the table would put a dent in global warming. They do, however, give government access to a couple more levers in the economic world, and when nothing happens, could be heralded as the reason for the lack of global warming.

    Any global warming acolyte not willing to incur Great Depression-level costs for policy is a fraud, ignorant, or both.

  • tadams1138

    Am I the only person who thinks that the likely outcome of govt regulation combined with the concept of a “personal carbon footprint” is a lot more comparable to Nazism?

  • dennism

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8DEoOdcYKbc

    • http://vladenblog.tumblr.com Vladimir

      I remember the tune from the Tiny Tim album, which IIRC I got as a gag gift for birthday #11.

      Recommended as required viewing for all RedStaters.

      • CincoSolas_del_Bronx

        Maybe somebody gave it to Al Gore at an impressionable age as well.

        And as brilliant, scholarly, witty, self-deprecating and iconic as the man was, it’s probably a good thing that we’ll never again see anyone like him in such close proximity to children on stage.

  • jackbenimble

    Climate science is a bad joke. Therefore Hanson’s proposal is a solution addressing a non-existent problem.

    But, if CO2 actually were a problem, I like Hanson’s solution better than Al Gore’s Cap ‘n Tax. At least it is somewhat transparent and might actually be effective. Cap’n Tax is a recipe for massive fraud that would do little to reduce CO2 and would primarily be a massive wealth transfer from the rest of us to the GEs and the Al Gore’s of the world.

  • kyoufuu

    Seriously. The guy stopped being a scientist the second he started engaging in propaganda and setting national policy. His air conditioning stunt in front of congress 20 years ago (or more) should have barred him from being identifiable as a rational disinterested observer as the scientific method requires.

  • theBlur

    Does that $2~3K annual payment to adults represent enough to cover the increased cost to the consumer of the energy we use? Thought not. This is the problem with utopian leftists – they have no clue where the money those evil corporate enterprises with be taxed out of comes from. Hint – can you say $8/gallon gas?

  • pburton

    Dumbfounding and scary.

    Dumbfounding that the Dr. (?) will publicly claim, at this point, that “Global Warming” is real, ignoring the fact that the “science” supporting such global-warming was revealed to be a hoax intended to serve political ends.

    It seems clear that the intent of Al Gore’s Left was to instill fear, expecting the People to surrender liberty and opportunity for the state’s promise of care and security.

    The Doctor’s (?) presentation — just who are the intended recipients? I mean, are there really people out there completely uninformed regarding the global-warming hoax?

    Was this simply a shore-up document intended for certain muddled masses? The Dr. (?) doesn’t really believe his crap, does he?

    Certainly dumbfounding, and although this is scary of itself (the ignorance/laziness that entice the unscrupulous), the fact that the Dr. (?) finds it perfectly reasonable that our president should sign-on to the hoax — well, think about it:

    We have reached the point where political operatives believe that their leaders are presently willing to accept that any lie, no matter how ridiculous, can be made useful to political ends.

    A Free People at siege.

  • wayneepalmer

    Look campers, honestly these twadiots are going to get more and more shrill and more and more desperate the more that they don’t get their way.

    This poses a CLEAR AND PRESENT DANGER to everyone. Look at the incidents of insanity already caused by ALF and ELF – far more actual attacks than those by any Islamist group. Most of these morons are college students or professors.

    How long is it going to be until some nutcase working in a gene-nginering lab or a bio-germ operation – OR A COLLEGE CAMPUS RESEARCH FACILITY – is going to decide that if folks aren’t willing to turn off the power and freeze to death in January or walk into gas chambers to save Gaia, they are going to have to take matters into their own hands and dose themselves and a bunch of their like-minded Enviroqaeda (with some really nasty and virulent bug that makes Ebola look like a mild cold for which there is NO cure) and go out and dive into humanity like a swarm of suicide pilots.

    They could wipe out half the human population before the bug was brought to heel – which is their goal anyway. I hope somebody is watching for this little issue.

  • JHancock

    …Which they would then use to buy Escalades??? The argument is obviously based on redistribution rather than “greenness”–redistributing money to 60% plus of the population means fewer bus and subway passes, more cars, more air conditioning, bigger houses, and bigger footprint. If these greenies were anything but REDS they would want the rich to have 32 cylinder 1 gallon per mile Bentley SUV’s and everyone else to be priced out of the SUV market (Thus forced to buy econo-cars with moped motors)….Instead they want to soak the rich with energy taxes and “spread the wealth around”-which will just mean more people on average will consume more carbon——-the whole green movement is a crock!!

  • talgus

    The religion of AGW has so rewired Hansen’s brain, he is sure that all deniers have NO science behind their claims. To everyone else, he is a left wing KOOK.