indocuration . The USA is not a Prisoner Village
There is no silver bullet. You will need to use both plus more. Taxation along is not enough. Taxation is just a tool to encourage the free market to develop alternatives that allow for tax avoidance - thus reducing emissions.. Education alone is not enough. Education can help you make better choices in relation to your impact on the earth's energy balance, but at the end of the day, you need energy to survive. You will use if that is your best (or only) alternative. Technological changes alone are not enough. We can build sea walls, desalination systems, wind and solar farms, invest in more hydroelectric and nuclear power, develop alternative fuels from algae (or what ever), better batteries, ways to sequester CO2 from the air and store it, etc, but it takes time for anything that ultimately proves useful to work. And, we can only address what we understand and foresee. There can be unexpected impacts we don't plan for and develop technological alternatives for. We obviously need a combined approach to reduce emissions, but eliminating the impact humans have on climate is not possible. The best we can really do is reduce our impact so that changes more slowly.
If there were a silver bullet that would solve the problem, it would not be an issue. As it is, the issues that arise are ecological, biological, economic (political), and change from country to country, and even place to place within a country. The impacts are also multigenerational - how many generations in 150 or 200 years? In economics, impacts on future generations are discounted to account for uncertainty. For climate, 100 to 200 years is an instant change, but for people, 200 years is many generations. How do you reconcile the two with a threat that is potentially as severe as climate change?
One thing is for certain, denying the problem is useless and does not make it go away. All it can do is make responding more difficult (or impossible) and more expensive (the discount thing - a.k.a interest - also works against you the more you delay actions).
Your question is actually a non question. What you have done is made your own self enforced assumptions and then used your assumptions to form an invalid question.
"...conscious awareness that although the theory of AGW is twisted and all over the place and 90% BS..." - This is a flat out lie. Not a lie that you have formed on your own, but a lie that you have seen fit to propagate.
"we still have a responsiblity to take care of the planet as we are only borrowing it from our children's children." - Exactly! Now I only wished that you behaved in such a manner. The climate that we are now changing is also something that will be inherited by our future generations. How you so easily make this disconnect is rather astonishing to me.
"Or do you need the government to hold your hand and wipe your backside on this one?" - What is sad is that the merchants of doubt have formed a very large legion of marionettes. These marionettes do their utmost to see to it the masses are mislead, misdirected and lied to. An education that is filled with fallacies. One of the motives of these marionettes is one that use here. Political ideology is your only understanding of the subject and you have blocked any information that would show the fallacies of your ideology. When it comes to global climate change it is too large of an issue for any individual to resolve of their own. "Global" is a strong indication that it is the responsibility of all people and this involves governments.
Both. Since we need to pay for those things we want, from armies to education, to social services, I think that a tax in order to correct market costs [1] is preferable over a tax on labor, others might disagree.
For example. Australia implemented a carbon tax [2] and reduced income tax [3]. It will be interesting to see how the new government is going to balance the budget when they remove the carbon tax. [4]
Regardless of what happens there, fossil fuel prices are likely to rise as the global economy is slowly improving and demand goes up. Renewable energy will become more attractive as wind power is already cheaper then coal. [5] I doubt natural gas will get any cheaper as natural gas is so cheap companies are flaring it off rather then trying to sell it. [6] (regulators are having to force them to sell the product, it is nuts....)
Now some speculation on my part...
The energy market is rather predictable on a month to month basis, prices do fluctuate but wind is going to seriously disrupt the market. Wind is unreliable, but it will make the current sources of electricity even more expensive, because when the wind does blow, they can undercut even gas fired plants, since the wind turbines have no fuel costs. However those gas plants will try to recover their cost by increasing their prices during periods of low wind. These higher prices in turn will result in even more wind turbines and the result of more wind turbines during high wind days we will end have an overcapacity. Interesting times...
"Jealousy is what feeds the left" Pathetic.
Education is the main way to solve AGW. Even if we did need the government to "hold our hands" people would have to understand AGW in order to get voters to put up with any government action.
We also need the government to stop people from robbing banks.
Education about taxation.
"Taxes are the price we pay for a civilized society."
- Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oliver_Wend...
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Oliver_Wend...
http://thinkprogress.org/economy/2013/04...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pigovian_ta...
Both stem from public revenue, public-vs-private. But advocating awareness is certainly the lesser of two evils.
Jealousy is what feeds the left. The leftists of history, Marx, Fascists, Mao, Pelosi, Obama, Reid, etc all tried to make people jealous of what others have. They try to make the masses resent the 1 percent to make it easier for them to confiscate their money and it unfortunately is an effective technique for pushing the most ignorant and gullible among us to forgo our freedoms and give the government sovereignty over more and more our lives. If we could educate those people, we certainly wouldn't be having to worry so much about AGW which is just another excuse to grow government.
By education I mean conscious awareness that although the theory of AGW is twisted and all over the place and 90% BS we still have a responsiblity to take care of the planet as we are only borrowing it from our children's children.
Or do you need the government to hold your hand and wipe your backside on this one?
