Not sure how GW ended up as the pros and cons of nuclear proliferation...but what say we get back on topic...

He's got two on the last page...

Quoting this because I think this post pretty much sums up the perfect response to AGW proponents.  Excellent post.  

The only alternative that is ever acceptable is some vague plan to give a bunch of non-elected geniuses at some global organization (the IPCC, perhaps?) the authority to make changes to a set of global rules that we must all abide by as they see fit until they think the problem is solved.  It's never as openly expressed as that, but it is what it boils down to.  

And for their opening salvo they'll start out with a carbon tax system (which they control entirely, of course) where companies are charged based on their carbon footprint.  Somehow, this magically solves the problem.  And as a plus, they tell us, it even GENERATES economic activity in the form of a carbon allowance exchange!  Woo hoo!

It's a tax that would cost more in compliance than it would in actual tax.  It's a tax that would come with exemptions for this or that country, this or that company, this or that person.  It's a tax that would make Al Gore, as a major investor in the market they were going to use, the richest man on the planet.

Questionable motives, questionable outcomes, horrific compliance costs.  Who cares should be anyone breathing, it will get a lot more expensive.

The first thing to consider when determining a method of taxation is how much will it cost to comply with the tax.  Our idiot income tax fails horribly on this count because the tax code is thousands of pages long.  The inventory tax fails because a business has to count their damned inventory.

Taxes are just like any other regulation, except theirs is regarding money being collected.  The more complicated or onerous the collection, the more wasteful it is.  Cap and Trade is a nightmare con job.

What's the "something" to which you are referring?  We never seem to be able to get that from ANY of the AGW proponents here.  How do you fix this problem (stipulating that it exists for argument sake)?  

People have offered several options here. Nuclear, being one.  Managing the problem until the evolution of technology solves it for us being another.  But neither is good enough in your mind.  

So what's the deal?  What is the grand solution that fixes all of this?  It's easy to shoot down other people's solutions when you never pin yourself down by proposing one of your own. 

So it's a tax that is collected and applied to... what, exactly?  Nothing specific.  Nothing tangible that you could evaluate for success or failure.  

The idea behind cap & trade or carbon taxes or whatever regulatory scheme you come up with relating to carbon footprint is to modify behavior. It's a behavioral tax designed to push people (or in this case corporations and governments) in a particular direction.  Some behavioral taxes work, but most don't.  

In order for a behavioral tax to even have a chance of success you have do a few things.  

• You have to have a non-taxed option that is viable.  
• The tax has to be onerous enough that the taxed entity is willing to consider switching to the less desirable non-taxed behavior that the tax's designers had in mind.  
• The tax designers have to understand their market well enough to ensure that the tax system incentivizes the behavior they are looking for (and not just a switch to some alternative undesired behavior).  

Any of the AGW carbon tax structures fail at least two of these.  

That's by design because the carbon-tax scheme isn't really about changing behavior.  It's about money.  It's about making the carbon tax onerous enough to look like a real attempt at a solution but not so onerous as to doom it to failure in the world's legislative bodies.  They want it to look real, but more importantly they want it to become law and take affect.  

At the end of the day it's all really about finding new ways for unelected goons to legally get their hands on citizens' money to give it to their friends.    

Fair enough.  I shouldn't have been so broad in my declaration that no one offered solutions, because I think you've mentioned those before (though going back through 29 pages of posts to verify scares me).  

To go on record with these two solutions though:  Thank god neither is viable.  The enforcement mechanism for either one would be unpleasant.  

Yes...and option 1 is the lesser of 2 evils.

Neutering much of the world's population to enforce global ZPG would be relatively 'easy'.

Forcing civilization into 'clean alternatives' [for everything] or ELSE would be 'mildly difficult'...as Consumerist Capitalism would simply say 'no' and the poor old 'cannon fodder' third world would simply say 'no can do'.... so the solution would be liberal use of ....um .....'force' [aimed at both ends of the economic scale, and everyone in between].

And who would 'do' that?

Probably some bunch of little green men with a book titled 'To serve mankind' ....

Maybe we can at least agree on the music we listen to on the ride down?

What happens when "other people" run out of money?  Flows between source and sink can only exist when the source has something to contribute to the flow.  

Or, more succinctly, eventually you run out of other people's money.   

But 1% a year, sure, that sounds great and doable.  Easy even. Unless you realize that despite all of the money going into solar over the last two decades we've only gotten world energy supply from solar up to less than 0.5% of total energy consumed.  And that ignores the fact that energy consumption is essentially expected to double in the next 30 years.  

I'm on board.  Let's take this immature, supremely expensive technology and force the entire world economy onto it.  What could go wrong?  

You still never bothered to explain HOW you are going to force the rest of the world to adopt your unicorns and rainbows solution.  Forget the developing world for a moment and just tell me how you get the BRIC countries on board, because without them the whole exercise is pointless.  The US and the EU generate roughly 1/3 of all CO2.  BRIC generates roughly 1/3 of all CO2.   The rest of the world makes up the last 3rd.  BRIC is the low hanging fruit in that you can get the most bang from the least amount of countries going along.  And really it's RIC, because Brazil doesn't generate all that much yet.  How do you get RIC to go along?  After that we can talk about forcing compliance to the 200 or so other countries in the world.   

This is completely untrue.  Western economies run on the investment of capital flows which generate new projects and ultimately new capital.  Basic economics shows that you are shrinking the flow of capital towards new projects and shifting it into a government bureaucracy.  Even die-hard leftists generally admit that government management of capital and projects is less efficient than private sector management.  They simply believe that the government projects are a necessity worth damaging the economy over.  

That change in capital flow is damage to the economy in, ultimately, lost jobs, profits and eventually in whole lost projects.  Even if you account for the supposed "Economic benefit" of this government bureaucracy, you will still end up with a net loss on economic output and government programs are never as efficient or productive as their backers claim when they are trying to sell the idea of those programs.  

Do-gooderism again.  Let's do something so we feel good.  

Let's stipulate that the fact at the top of the Germany & Solar Power Wikipedia page is accurate and that Germany will produce 25% of its energy from solar by 2050.  Let's further stipulate that the US and the rest of the EU decided to follow this shining beacon of leadership and match Germany photovoltaic for photovoltaic (which is likely impossible to do for the US, but we'll ignore that for now).  Finally lets stipulate that shifting from any other energy source to solar creates a linear reduction in CO2 generation (it doesn't but for argument's sake we'll say it does).  

Ignoring growth for the moment (using current day CO2 emissions by country data) that essentially means that a massively expensive and disruptive 25% shift to solar would save us.... ~8% of our current day levels.  Using rough math:  1/3 of CO2 generation comes from EU & US combined.  1/3 * .25 = .083 or 8.3%.  

Now, without getting into numbers and predictions of CO2 levels in 2050 we can use some deductive reasoning to see the effectiveness of this plan.  The fastest growing producer of CO2 is China.  Currently China's CO2 per capita sits at ~1/4 of that of the US and 1/5 to 1/4 that of the rest of the developed world.  This means there is a ton of growth still to occur in China's CO2 production as Chinese energy consumption per capita catches the rest of the world.  As this growth occurs, it will outpace growth from the EU and US (which have actually flatlined their CO2 production over the last few years).  That means that BRIC 1/3 of global CO2 generation will grow to closer to 2/5 or 1/2 at the expense of the "Rest of the world"'s 1/3 and at the expense of the US/EU 1/3.  

What's all this mean?  That our 25% best-case-scenario linear reduction from getting all of the US and EU onto solar by 2050 actually nets us LESS THAN 8% decreased emissions (probably something closer than 6.25%, but that's a guess).  So you are economically disadvantaging and hurting the quality of life potential for ~850 million people for a marginal decrease in CO2 production.  And that's the best case scenario. 

And all of this is in response to a problem that we have been repeatedly told over the last decade we have X years to solve where X is anything from 7 (Hi, Prince Charles) to 20 to 100.  Even the best case you pushed above gets us no net savings (that is, there is still overall growth) and only an 8% decrease in US/EU output.  

So again, I ask, what's your solution?  How do you get the BRIC countries on board?  I'm sorry, but "counting on the common sense of people" isn't a viable plan.  

No one has said GW doesn't exist.  We have said we're not convinced that humans are the major cause behind it.  Big difference. 

And my point wasn't to say "it's too expensive to solve".  My point was to show that your best case scenario wouldn't actually solve the problem that you believe exists.  Doing something isn't always better than doing nothing.  If we really are in the end of days because of AGW and you can't actually solve the problem maybe it behooves you to NOT damage the biggest economies in the world because they, at least, have a chance of coming up with a solution.  You're solution is no solution at all and its expensive and burdensome.  

A simpler, less "pulling all kinds of crap arguments from my ass" question for you.  If the problem is so immediate and so end-of-the-world bad and given that you've already admitted that your "Get everyone on solar" won't work because you're modeling after Germany who won't be there for 100 years and because you're relying on national common sense (which won't work, obviously) then why isn't nuclear an option?  

Sure it has downsides that can be huge, but it combats AGW which is apparently our generations biggest existential threat and it's viable NOW.  

Either AGW is a pull-out-all-the-stops problem that we need to solve ASAP or its not.  If it is then nuclear is far and away your best option, but for some reason AGW proponents never want to go with nuclear power despite the fact that ALL other alternatives are no where near viability. 

Any idea why?  I have a thought why AGW as an industry is against nuclear, but I'm curious about your opinion since you've been in the AGW is the end-times camp in this thread and you've also expressed opinions against nuclear as an option.