Okay, went and educated myself on cap and trade and climate changes. You being the big business supporter would naturally take this positions, that polluters should not have to change because it would ruin the US economy.
That is not even close to my position.
I being the Earth Day hippy, feel that polluters should cut down on pollution because if we kill off the Earth, everyone's economy will be ruined.
I generally don't pay attention to these back and forth's because it makes sense to me not to poisin our environment.
Actually, that is incorrect. My position against cap and trade is due to:
1) It doesn't do much to reduce global emissions. It simply makes those industries that produce more CO2 emissions give money to industries that do not. Which can lead to the redistribution of wealth from firm to firm, state to state, or country to country.
2) I think the cap and trade schemes are going to be massively abused by Wall Street. They already trade the emissions.
I am all for reducing pollution and coming up with ways to do so that have the least impact economically. But I agree it needs to be done. One way, algae, it consumes many of the pollutants. Put algae plants adjacent to the big coal plants. It is obviously a cost that the coal plants would have to pay, but it can partially be recouped through the oil the algae produces and the food biproduct that is left over.
Get rid of grain based ethanol. It is not efficient use of our water or our food.
Convert more to nat gas (vs. coal plants or gasoline in transportation) consumption.
Build nuclear facilities.
Continue investing in alt energy R&D
There are many things that we can do that don't involve political/wall street schemes.