BridgeSmith said:
This is where I diverge from your approach. Yes, regulations on actual pollution are a good thing. the rest will take care of itself. If fossil fuels become more scarce and more expensive, they will be replaced with less expensive alternatives. There's no reason to hamstring our economy and make everyone pay more for other sources of energy by imposing artificial scarcity.
So, the root cause of our differences is the definition on what "pollution" is. Right?
If some corporation is dumping toxic waste into our water supply, that will kill people, animals fish and such... Then we will impose tremendous punishments against them so that they can never do that again. That's obvious. We all agree on that.
We might have lesser punishments for a plant that emits gasses into the air that cause the rain to be corrosive and acidic. We can easily measure the change in the rain. Then we'd want to demonstrate that there is a problem with the rain's acidity that can harm crops or such. This is why our government would force that plant to clean up it's emissions. Right?
The tricky thing is that C02 isn't a pollutant by it's nature. It's inherently natural. But, the amount of it that's being released into the air still affects the environment. It's like when processed waste water is released into rivers and streams. The processed water becomes a problem because of the AMOUNT of processed water that is being released. But, in this case the environmental effect of the released water is immediate. Therefore, we more and more stringent requirements for how the waste water must be treated before it can be released.
For CO2, the idea is very similar to the waste water case. We're releasing a lot of CO2. We've been doing it for awhile and we're just now beginning to understand that it is having an effect on our environment. Therefore, we want to take steps to prevent environmental damage from this gas. But, the effects are local, so passing requirements on a plant next door does next to nothing to solve the problem. We could just ignore the problem because there's no easy solution. But, if we want to come up with a solution, the ONLY option is to skew the system (i.e. free market) in a way that accounts for the extra environmental cost that isn't currently accounted for. This is a very, very challenging thing to do. Nearly impossible. But, it needs to be done GLOBALLY in order for it to be a true long term solution.
