March 09, 2020

A conservative Climate Change policy?

The article below is a proposal that we do not need to confront the Green/Left head-on.  There is a hope that conservatives might be better accepted if they acknowledged the need for CO2 reduction and offered some proposals for action in that direction.  How well-founded Greenie scares are is not addressed. The proposals are understandable but overlook two things:

1) There is no such thing as a happy Greenie. No matter how much we lean in their direction, they will still criticize  and reject us.  There is no get out of jail card other than complete surrender

2). Most of the political spectrum already has a much better way of dealing with Green/Left antagonism:  They fudge.  Even the ecologically holy Europeans do it.  Germany is building new coal-fired power stations, for instance.  They talk the Greenie talk but they don't walk the walk. It is precisely that which Greta Thunberg has noticed.  She is the "fool" who speaks the truth than nobody wants to hear.  She is too young to pretend that black is white.

Just about everyone in politics knows it is all a sham but very few see fit to say so.  They don't want to risk breaking ranks.  Only Donald Trump is a big enough man for that.

What an embarrassment that autistic girl is!  We live in a world where it helps to be half-mad to speak the truth. A lot of politics is like that.  Crenshaw is well-meaning but naive


It’s called the New Energy Frontier, and it’s a joint plan by Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX) and House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), who propose a free-market strategy to address the challenges posed by climate change. Crenshaw cogently observes that conservatives have all too often allowed leftists to put them on the defensive. Since conservatives reject leftists’ extreme solutions to a problem leftists artificially inflate into a crisis — a problem such as rising global CO2 levels — conservatives, Crenshaw says, are effectively labeled as “being too heartless or too stupid to solve the original problem.”

The plan “focuses specifically on carbon capture, a field in which there is already promising innovation,” Crenshaw explains. “For instance, the company NET Power, located near my district in Houston, has developed a natural-gas electricity plant that has the capacity to power 5,000 homes, while capturing and recirculating CO2 back through the plant via an innovative thermodynamic cycle. As a result, the system produces zero net emissions.”

Furthermore, the House GOP’s plan rejects the Democrats’ often-promoted carbon tax in favor of a carbon-capture tax credit that incentivizes technological development rather than penalizing industry. The U.S. leads the world in CO2 emissions reduction due in large part to the development of fracking technology that has led to our nation’s natural-gas boom. Leftists always resort to taxes, which suppress innovation. Crenshaw argues it’s time for a carrot instead of a stick.

Crenshaw asserts that “conservatives can either tackle the issue of carbon emissions sensibly by proposing workable solutions, or run the risk of allowing the Democrats to do it for us — with policies that would offer marginal environmental benefits at a devastating cost to the economy.” The Crenshaw-McCarthy bill is a welcome proactive approach.

SOURCE




Go to John Ray's Main academic menu
Go to Menu of longer writings
Go to John Ray's basic home page
Go to John Ray's pictorial Home Page
Go to Selected pictures from John Ray's blogs