Yesterday, president Obama announced emission standards which he said would raise the cost of automobiles by $1300.
While the new fuel and emission standards for cars and trucks will save billions of barrels of oil, they are expected to cost consumers an extra 1,300 US dollars per vehicle by the time the plan is complete in 2016. Mr Obama said the fuel cost savings would offset the higher price of vehicles in three years.
His remarkable comment caught my attention, because one of the primary purposes of Obama’s “cap and trade” plan is to massively raise the cost of fuel. There aren’t going to be any fuel cost savings. In fact, Mr. Obama told the San Francisco Chronicle last year that he actually intends to bankrupt coal fired power plants using cap and trade:
You know, when I was asked earlier about the issue of coal, uh, you know — Under my plan of a cap and trade system, electricity rates would necessarily skyrocket. Even regardless of what I say about whether coal is good or bad. Because I’m capping greenhouse gases, coal power plants, you know, natural gas, you name it — whatever the plants were, whatever the industry was, uh, they would have to retrofit their operations. That will cost money. They will pass that money on to consumers.
Two automobile companies are already going bankrupt, so I think we should take Mr. Obama’s words seriously.
I can make a firm pledge. Under my plan no family making less than $250,000 a year will see any form of tax increase. Not your income tax, not your payroll tax, not your capital gains tax, not any of your taxes.
WASHINGTON – Democrat Barack Obama said Sunday that if elected he will push to increase the amount of income that is taxed to provide monthly Social Security benefits.
Audacity indeed. The assumption seems to be that no one remembers what was said last week.
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jon (09:30:34) : I don’t put much faith in the role of AGW with respect to climate but I DO believe in conservation … oil supplies are rapidly dwindling … it is crazy and totally irresponsible to treat oil as if it were a renewable resource! I think Obama is on the right track here. It seems a shame that some people on this site are more concerned about the cost of gas than they are about future generations!
Jon, we care a great deal about future generations. I have kids, and would die before letting them suffer deprivation. It’s just that we know that the “running out” belief is broken. We “rapidly dwindle” out of oil in about 100+ years, maybe longer, but have all the energy the planet could ever need, forever. See:
iefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
BTW, we also don’t have to worry about using up the “stuff” of the planet either (metals, cement, etc.):
iefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Once you get past that, it’s much easier to make reality grounded decisions about how best to bring prosperity to every single person on the planet. Forever…
Stephen, regarding your post at 17:22, that’s a weak card to pull. There are plenty of taxes that have been implemented that drive behavior change, like cigarette taxes. Which I’m sure you hate. But those taxes have the dual effect of reducing smoking, which reduces the price YOU pay for insurance (and increases lifespan and worker productivity), while at the same time raising gov’t revenues so we can have things like clean water, an interstate system, and a standing army.
I’m sure your response is that people should be free to choose to smoke or not, but I hope you’ll admit that there are times when people don’t make rational decisions (because they don’t consider the long term consequences) that impact others. To me, that’s when government intervention is not only appropriate, but necessary. And although its clear that I disagree with the majority of the posters here about the negative implications of GHG emissions, THAT is why I’m writing in defense of cap and trade (or some sort of action), and THAT is why Obama supports it, not because he gets his jollies from increasing taxes.
rob
It’s actually very debatable if decreasing smoking causes any savings in health care costs. Everyone dies, putting off the costs so that a person lives longer and is constantly fighting the diseases of the elderly, prolonging the health costs over many extra years is not likely to result in a net savings and far more likely to create a much greater drain on the health care system. There are lots of truisms like this that people rarely think critically about. For example, the increased drain on the social security fund from prolonging the life of people no longer contributing to it after retirement.
Does this mean that prolonging life is bad? Of course not, but we shouldn’t let poorly thought out arguments about societal costs enter into the discussion.
rob, I’m waiting for your next paragraph .
That’s it? Haven’t you been outside since 1998?
Sure was hot in ’98.
Lets try that with working links…
jon (09:30:34) : I don’t put much faith in the role of AGW with respect to climate but I DO believe in conservation … oil supplies are rapidly dwindling … it is crazy and totally irresponsible to treat oil as if it were a renewable resource! I think Obama is on the right track here. It seems a shame that some people on this site are more concerned about the cost of gas than they are about future generations!
Jon, we care a great deal about future generations. I have kids, and would die before letting them suffer deprivation. It’s just that we know that the “running out” belief is broken. We “rapidly dwindle” out of oil in about 100+ years, maybe longer, but have all the energy the planet could ever need, forever. See:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/03/20/there-is-no-energy-shortage/
BTW, we also don’t have to worry about using up the “stuff” of the planet either (metals, cement, etc.):
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/05/08/there-is-no-shortage-of-stuff/
Once you get past that, it’s much easier to make reality grounded decisions about how best to bring prosperity to every single person on the planet. Forever…
“geoff pohanka (10:20:22) :
They keep asking why isnt the united states like Europe, their cars get a lot better gas mileage than the USA.
There are two important differences. In Europe, people are encouraged to buy cars with diesel engines. The fuel tax is much less on diesel so it costs much less to the consumer, to make up the difference in higher diesel car purchase expenses. Diesels save gas in Europe. Also in Europe, the engines are so small, they must use manual transmissions to get enough torque from them.”
The tax on diesel is less in central Europe, which does the “encouraging” and a lot of people use agricultural (Called red diesel in the UK) diesel too. In Ireland and the UK (And New Zealand and Australia too) for instance, diesel is considerably more expensive because of the better mileage that is usual. It’s illegal to use red diesel on a road going vehicle in the UK with significant penaties if caught.
“In the USA, the govt does not like diesel engines, they think particulate from diesel engines cause cancer. In Europe diesel soot is just soot. Here it causes cancer. Americans also do not like to drive manual transmissions.”
PM10 particles in fact, very cancerous, but very few people actually know this. It’s a bit like the “lead poisoning” scare which lead to removing lead from petrol and replacing it with benzine. Most poeple are blissfully unaware what the real reason were behind that little con.
Diesels, and in particular turbo charged diesel engines, do in fact work very well with automatic transmissions because of their tourqe and the tourqe multiplying effect of the tourqe converter (TC). A TC and valve pack in the transmission can be modified to provide better response and shift than what is delivered out of the factory.
Just for giggles…
Lets add in the unintended consequences
1) More families will be priced out of the New Car Market, this will reduce the market by the equivilent number of units leading to higher per unit cost due to the economy of scale.
2) Cap and trade will impact aluminum and Steel pricing, energy pricing for the factories all adding to overall input costs
3) Additional costs of ownership like repairs which can be more costly for hybrids than having your buddy do a tune up, Insurance higher price for the vehicle equals more premium
4) Less model options especially in drive train and engines will lead to lower owner satisfaction
5) 2 of 3 top selling vehicles thru April 2009 are full-size pickup trucks, there will be power issues reaching the 30MPG guidline Know your consumer then design a car
6) Fleet replacement turnover for passenger cars is 18.6 Years and miles driven are nbased on previous patterns so his number for 2016 saved fuel is suspect
7) Cost to taxpayers in form of incentives and rebates, or subsidized credit
I have many more but that is enough for day one.
The end result is this, the 2 Car Makers will require approx. 30 Billion to re-tool and upgrade assembly lines for the new cars. They do not have it, nor will they get it from current sales, that means taxpayers will need to invest again as no private equity will touch these companies after Obama inverted the capital and debt structures via the Chrysler Bailout.
I predect that both companies fail within 2 years, less if we can stop Tiny Tim from recycling the TARP money as that is a violation of legislation, but since Obama cares not for the law they have about 360 Billion or so they can pour into the new “O” line of cars inspired by the President “Looks and Sounds Great, picks your pocket during purchase, Pretty crappy Real world Performance and Requires a great deal of Hope to Operate”… before then.
“I hated the products, so I bought the whole Industry” – Barack Obama – President – Auto Club for Men
Then there’s the Chinese middle and upper class, who can’t get enough of large American cars. GM can’t keep up with the demand. So while their home country is sort of demanding more fuel-efficient cars, one of their biggest collective customers demands the opposite.
rob,
My cigarrete taxes are paying for “clean water, an interstate system, and a standing army”? What are they using my income taxes for?
John Boy (09:38:58) : manufacturing evidence to support it! (making sausage as some refer to it)
SIR! How dare you insult sausages like that! Sausages contain some small amount of actual meat and substance…
Steven Goddard (18:42:40) :
jeez,
Science and politics are inseparable. Galileo and Hansen being good examples.
—
Steven,
Thanks for hitting the nail on the head in two brief sentences. I’m going to let it all out in this post – the moderator may snip my comments if they are deemed too uncomfortable.
With Global Warming, we have moved well beyond journal papers, computer models, and theoretical speculation. The AGW proponents have themselves moved into the public policy arena (witness Jim Hansen’s recent antics) and are attempting to introduce MASSIVE changes to our society through fraudulent schemes like cap and trade. It is becoming more obvious to me every day that the cabal that is the AGW “industry” – which is funded to the tune of billions of dollars in government research grants and private money from radical interest groups – will never admit their errors or give up on bogus catastrophic forecasts regardless of the evidence that is all around us. Where is the crisis? Where? The 3mm/yr sea level rise? Temperatures too high? Too little ice at the polar caps?
When we have the President of the United States (whose is supposedly a smart man) claiming that there will be “no ice in the arctic” in the summer in a few years, despite obvious evidence to the contrary, something is very seriously wrong! And the very people who should be setting the record straight, the scientists and researchers at places like the NSIDC and Cryosphere today, say NOTHING!! NOTHING!! Yet, let George Will say anything about the polar ice caps and they issue press release after press release. This is total insanity.
Like Smokey, I too would like to know what the “cost” is for generating CO2? What is it? We obviously have people in Washington (and visitors here at this humble blog) who are so smart that they can divine a cost for the very gas that they emit continuously on a daily basis? So Rob and others – what is the cost? How can you know this cost? Are relying on computer models – personal opinion – the latest hysterical “news” release? Please explain this to us all?
And, finally, when we eventually get government-run healthcare, using the CO2 costs developed by people like Rob, we can then begin to place a price tag on the carbon footprint of inconvenient people – you know, the old, the physically and mentally disabled, the terminally sick…
My friends, the complete control of every aspect of your life, from what car you can drive to what food you can eat and how many kids you can have, is exactly where policies like cap-and-trade are going to lead us.
I just hope that there are enough people here in the US, like myself, who intend to vigorously fight this madness before it is too late…
Frank K.
LOL… Speaking of Cigarette Taxes…
I was going to quit smoking but then Obama funded children’s healthcare with a tobacco tax, so I cannot quit now and have on my conscience that I denied a child healthcare.
Damn you Liberal Social Safety Net Funded off my life threatening addiction, what torment you hath wrought on my soul!
Mike Bryant (19:05:35) :
Thanks Mike – Much appreciated. Cheers G
Recently, on a Military (Ex and Active) Blog site, I saw this comment:
“When we get a Socialized Government Health Care System, and I get a disease that puts me on the Suicide-Assist List, I’m not going alone”.
hareynolds (19:16:05) :
…
The central issue for the eco-left is Malthusian, that is, THERE ARE TOO MANY PEOPLE. Every other left-wing initiative springs from the Malthusian underpinnings. Facts have nothing to do with it. Further, very few eco-leftists will admit to this Malthusian prejudice, unless of course you get them VERY angry, as which point they tend to play it like some sort of perverse Trump Card; “but you have to agree that there are too many people!!”. Don’t ask me how I know this; however, I will reveal that the correct retort is “So you hate Catholics and Mormons, then?”
….
I would suggest loudly proclaiming that the world is very “underpopulated” and would benefit from massive economic development and could easily support 20B humans living a modern lifestyle. That should “tease” out any hidden Malthusian prejudices.
“Frank K. (20:18:39) :
My friends, the complete control of every aspect of your life, from what car you can drive to what food you can eat and how many kids you can have, is exactly where policies like cap-and-trade are going to lead us.”
Whenever I read statements like this I always think of the film “Soylent Green” (Not for the story line in the film, but for the elite people who could afford hot water, food, aircon and strawberry jam, ie, Obama, Gore, Brown, Putin etc etc etc).
rob:
Don’t be so melodramatic. We’re looking for honest answers here. You can either back up your assertions, or you can’t.
The Administration is proposing a Cap & Trade scheme based entirely on the alarming notion that CO2 will cause runaway global warming if $trillions aren’t spent immediately.
We’re not even asking for proof. We’re just asking for a little verifiable, real world evidence that there is actually a problem. So far, that empirical evidence is non-existent.
There is no real world evidence showing that CO2 is, or will ever be a problem. I will go farther: CO2 is a beneficial trace gas. More is better. Doubling of CO2 levels would be beneficial, not harmful. And all the evidence we have indicates that the planet may possibly warm by only a fraction of a degree over the next century from a doubling of CO2. If we spend the $trillions proposed, it will, at most, make only a fraction of a degree difference. What is your opinion about that proposed cost/benefit analysis?
I specifically asked for citations. In response, you gave your opinion. Anyone could get the same unsupported opinion on a nightly news sound bite. Regarding CO2 residence times that you mentioned, what is your belief in the CO2 persistence number? Five years? Ten years? Fifty years? Is the persistence static, or does it change due to increased biological activity in the presence of the additional plant food?
Are you aware of how little atmospheric CO2 human activities are responsible for? Here’s what the UN/IPCC says: click. [Note that IPCC estimates are generally on the high side]. Natural year-to-year CO2 fluctuations by the planet are greater than total human emissions. Does that help put our puny efforts into perspective?
Are you aware of how very small the quantity of the trace gas CO2 is, compared with the rest of the atmosphere? [You might have to squint]: click
Next, you can see here and here and here that there is no cause and effect between rising CO2 and temperature. None. But CO2-caused global warming is the entire basis for Cap & Trade. That being the case, how can you argue that we need Cap & Trade? There is zero empirical evidence of CO2-caused global warming. So why are you asking taxpayers to buy a pig in a poke?
There is no “greenhouse gas” signature to be found. If you can credibly refute that statement, you win the debate. The planet’s temperature is not rising — but CO2 is steadily rising, thus falsifying the CO2=AGW hypothesis. Therefore, Cap & Trade is completely unnecessary. The climate is well within its normal historical variation. There is no problem.
I recommend The Skeptics Handbook for anyone wishing to understand these issues: click.
And I look forward to those citations, rob.
John Egan (15:53:57) :
Of course, if you are saving roughly $650 per year in gasoline (gas at $3/gallon) – then you pay off the difference in two years and everything after that is savings for you – plus less consumption for the environment and less dependence on foreign oil.
I don’t see the savings. Let’s say I trade my 20 MPG, very fun to drive Mustang V-8, for a 40 MPG Pius and gas is $4 per gallon instead of $2 per gallon because of cap and trade. Doing the maths I find that my annual gas bill is the same (half as much fuel for twice the price). I guess I can take solace in the fact that I’ll be driving one butt ugly, gutless car to make up for it. Regardless of the fuel mileage, the depreciation on a new car for the first three or four years is more than the annual fuel cost. Since the Mustang is paid for, I think I’ll just keep it instead.
Andy
If you don’t think GHG emissions should be addressed, that’s one thing, but if you are just attacking on the grounds of politics that’s another.
I do think GHG emissions should be addressed. We need more of those emissions for people and for plants. Cause I love people and I love trees.
But you know. Even if Mr. Obama rebates the direct costs of Cap ‘n Tax the price of everything made with electricity is going up. And you know everything is made with electricity. The poor of course will be hurt the most. Just as with the tobacco tax. Who will be hurt the very worst? The group that gave him 95% of their vote. I call that justice.
And what happens if we actually get off carbon fuels? The government is going to require a lot of money from somewhere else.
And what else? We are going to be shipping a LOT of jobs to China and India. And what else? It will likely cause a double dip recession possibly leading to a depression.
I predict this will turn out so badly that in four years a Democrat will not be able to get elected as dogcatcher in the vast majority of America. San Fracisco possibly excepted.
rob (19:26:51) :
“We know the greenhouse effect is responsible for the atmosphere that is key to life on this planet. We know the chemical compounds that make up the atmosphere, and we have a pretty good idea about their residence times and their relative heat-trapping potencies. We know that through human activity, we are increasing the concentration of some of the key GHGs. We know that increasing these concentrations will increase temperatures. Therefore we know that we are increasing temperatures.”
How does this theory square with:
* the four main global temperature measurements show flat to cooling over the past decade and more.
* NSIDC reports unprecedented arctic sea ice rebuild over the past two years.
* NSIDC reports Antarctica is an example of regional cooling, ice thickening and expansion.
* The largest oceanic oscillations, the AMO and PDO, have shifted into multi-decadal cooling phases.
* There also doesn’t seem to be any debate that the sun is quieter than it has been for almost a century, after having gone through an extremely active period in the latter part of the 20th century.
* Atmospheric CO2 levels continue to rise per measurements at Mauna Loa.
John Egan (17:18:44) :
“For example – If you put in $1000 of insulation in your uninsulated house, you might save $500 per year in heating costs. Both $1000 and $500 are large positive, non-zero numbers,……”
I’d be insecure about my academic accomplishments as well, if I made a blunder like the above.
That $500 you’re talking about is a non-zero NEGATIVE number. i.e. it is $500 you will avoid spending. My bill was $1500 but I save $500 and so only spend $1000.
1500-500=1000
Maybe you are over educated?
Quite so Anthony but if Jeremy Imagines that climate science is all about statistics, physics etc. then he might like to consider:
The Great English Chimney Puzzle. (if not please snip).
So what is the puzzle?
Well from modern records dating from a bit before 1000 A.D. even the wealthy English were happy to live in their hovels, a one storey timber framed wattle and daub building with a thatched roof and a central hearth and a smoke hole in the roof.
Some time around 1200 A.D. the hall house, the Macmansion of its day, became popular and divided the hovel into two lengthways with the hall at the bottom as it were and the private quarters at t’other. It still kept the central hearth but the smoke hole was replaced by a side vent in the wall in the form of a grille, usually over the entry porch.
The English knew about chimneys but they need to be built of stone or brick and were rare except in very grand stone and brick houses.
But chimneys started to become popular sometime around 1300 A.D. and by the 1400’s the hall house replaced the central hearth with twin hearths one each side of a central chimney.
Historians long thought this was a mixture of growing wealth and fashion: so that by about 1500 A.D. you were a social nobody if you didn’t have a chimney: and with brick becoming commonplace chimneys became very elaborate works of art: see Hampton Court.
But by 1600 A.D. the date is arguable, another change had become established: the Great Rebuilding. Suddenly single storey hovels started to grow an extra storey by the simple process of putting rafters over the original wooden frame with another wooden frame on top so that the upper storey projects outwards slightly above the lower: a method called jetting. Many thousands of such houses still exist today all over England.
Why? well one again historians surmise it was wealth and fashion.
But the records of population and fuel consumption, wood, charcoal and coal tell another story.
More or less until the Black Death, 1350 A.D, the English burned firewood and some charcoal which was expensive. The firewood they burnt on their hearths for cooking and the charcoal in braziers for space heating when it was needed. They didn’t need chimneys.
But if you have to burn lots of wood for space heating it makes lots of smoke and you do need a chimney to carry it away.
And if it gets very cold you can use the heat of the warm chimney to heat an upper storey without burning more wood.
Please remember that the Black Death killed somewhere between one third and two thirds of the population within two years: and numbers did not fully recover for over three hundred years.
Moreover it caused the collapse of the feudal system which tied men to the land so the towns and cities grew apace whilst the rural population declined.
Yet within fifty years of the Black Death the managed woodland, chiefly by coppicing, could no longer support the demand for firewood and charcoal that had once supplied a much more numerous population. And the rise in price of these fuels had made coal economical in those town and cities which had waterborne transport: notably London where it was called sea coal because it came down on the colliers from Newcastle.
But burning coal makes for very black smoke, why do you think London got called the Big Smoke or Edinburgh Auld Reekie? And why do you think all sorts of laws were passed to try and deal with the problem: none worked of course.
The demand for fuel to keep warm in winter grew apace, and at what a pace as the records show. The first local controls on firewood and charcoal making are those of the manor courts which controlled the Commons and the Lord’s Waste and started to appear in the early 1400’s: by the 1500’s Parliament itself was involved and by 1600 with the demand for wood for paper making even stricter laws were passed: then made even stricter still as the manufacture of iron grew steadily and of course demanded ever more wood for charcoal.
Similarly the cities began to try to regulate coal burning and noxious smokes with regulations about, amongst other things, hearth sizes, licences for selling coal and so forth: the latter more for revenue than smog control one imagines.
In one way the records are remarkably complete, although some such as the coal imports at London were partially destroyed in WW 2.
But overall the picture is within its limits more or less clear. Allowing for the various changes; in distribution of population, the ways of living, alterations in housing and so on fuel consumption for space heating alone, increased by some five times per head between around 1300 and 1700.
After that of course industrial demand for fuel began to grow ever more rapidly and coal became king and still is.
So you see climate change is not just written in direct measurements, or proxies for them, nor by much discounted eye witness reports of the weather, or glaciers or such like but exists in many forms inluding detailed written records of such simple things as how people built their houses and what and how much fuel they had to burn.
And that is why a blog like this covers so many things and why so many read it: because they know they that real scientific knowledge of something as complex and so little understood as the earth’s climate is not the sole writ and wisdom of high priests in ivory towers but the slow synthesis of a vast knowledge of which any individual, however talented, can only know a very small part.
It is not the vast amount amount of comment, speculation, abuse and sheer eccentricity that appears here, however entertaining, that is of any importance: it is the little nuggets of gold amongst the dross that are of value.
And the ability, because of the wide readership, of one or another to spot them when many scholars would fail. And then telling the world about it.
Kindest Regards
My smoking related medial costs are covered every time that I light up. Six or eight years ago the state sued the tobacco co’s and settled out of court for billions. At that point they took away my right to litigate, but took money for my future health care. The price of cigs went up about 50 cents a pack. I am directly paying additional money to fund my future health care every time I puff.
More on topic, there is a fundamental difference between the conservative view and that of the AGW folks. I believe that the market should not be manipulated to artificially raise enery prices to make alternatives seem viable. The warmers want to do just that.
The problem is, if you need to manipulate the market to make your alternative energy schemes seem practical, obviously your alternative is not viable. There are good reasons that fossil fuels are so widely used.
Energy is the very source of our prosperity and the AGW crowd wants to impede it. That will not go well with the voters. As cap n defraud, carbon taxes, and other anti-energy schemes hurt families and ship jobs overseas at a record pace, the population will arise and unseat who is responsible ala 1994.
Albert Einstein said some important things about science. There are some who pretend science is about obfuscation with numbers and words, when in fact true science is about condensing the truths of the universe to an understandable form.
I’ve been in the scientific community my entire life, and have come to understand that the very few great minds in science are the ones who do not need to hide behind numbers and jargon. Science can be as simple as an apple falling off a tree, water going down a drain, flying a kite, or observing pox on a milk maids hands – which led to four of the greatest discoveries in science.
Did you ever wonder as a child why the continents across the Atlantic fit together like a jigsaw puzzle? The answer is obvious, but Alfred Wegener was ridiculed his entire life for upsetting the scientific apple cart – by stating the obvious.
Jeremy (18:26:55) :
You could click for hours here in this blog and find plenty of science. I think you are smart enough to scroll and click around. But then I’m not sure of your intentions in saying what you said.
Global warming is the hottest scientific topic in the world. How is it that global warming can be separated from politics seeing that it was put in to the main stream of all human life on earth by a politician. And I do mean all of human life on earth because of it’s effects on the use of electricity in poor countries.
Global warming and taxes are conjoint—haven’t you deduced that yet?
John Egan (17:18:44) :
Steve Goddard –
I don’t know what the “New Obama Math” is – –
But as for my math skills –
I got an 800 on my SATs and an 800 twice on my GREs in math.
Plus a B.S. in stats – although my advanced degrees are in history.
Now, I realize that I don’t have a PhD in nonlinear systems,
but I have fingers and toes enough to figure out that savings will exceed costs.
For example – If you put in $1000 of insulation in your uninsulated house, you might save $500 per year in heating costs. Both $1000 and $500 are large positive, non-zero numbers, but I can guarantee you that five years down the road (especially with rising utility costs) putting the $1000 into insulating is the wiser option. Is either free? No, but few things in life are – – except for hot air on the blogosphere.
I recognize that many people at this website have an inchoate hatred of all things Obama, but when your right-wing slip is showing as much as it does, you are likely to trip on it.
PS – If you believe that gasoline will stay in the $2.50 range for the next ten years, then it isn’t your math skills I am worried about.
And? Where is your proof that cap and trade ( even if CO2 were the most dangerous gas, which is complete piffle) will do anything in the future other than enrich the Al Gore types that have their hand on the honey laddle ( as we say in Greece)?
LInks would be good. I can give you a Jevons paradox link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox
The law of unintended consequences. Point me to a link please that has studied the certain possibility that such a paradox will not work for cap and trade too, and how to avoid it. In the EU, the whole scheme has just enriched the likes of al Gore and did not stop the craze of increasing energy usage ( until this economic downturn).
In any case, I am of the people whose bones say that an ice age is coming, maybe sooner than any cap and trader can think. The glaciers in Alaska are creaking: http://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/fs-001-03/