Say, What Would A Real Climate Plan Look Like Or Something

I’m sure you’ve heard of the term “tell” before. It’s often used when playing poker, and one definition is “an unconscious action that is thought to betray an attempted deception.” There’s a big tell in this Mother Jones screed by Excitable Kevin Drum

What Should a Climate Change “Plan” Look Like?

David Roberts has a point here:

Adding to this: a list of your favored policies is not a “plan.” A plan involves a way of inspiring thousands of people to organize & take action & drive your policies onto the national political agenda & scare politicians who dare to vote against it. https://t.co/S2PQO740a2

— David Roberts (@drvox) February 17, 2019

Anyone with a 3-digit IQ can do a bit of googling and come up with a set of policies to reduce carbon emissions. But a plan—now that’s a different thing. A plan has to be an actual course of action with both a goal and a chance of success. We should be able to line up your plan with all the others and extract two numbers about each one: (1) emission levels in 2050 if the plan works, and (b) consensus probability that the plan will work.

My plan would include measures that force anyone how has shown belief in anthropogenic climate change, ie, they think it is at at least 55% caused by Mankind (most think it is almost all caused by Mankind) to give up their own use of fossil fuels, except for taking public transportation. No more cars, no more minivans, no more trucks, no more airplane flights. They wouldn’t be allowed to live in a home of more than 500 square feet. They would have to be sterilized so that they do not bring any more “world killing” kids into the world. They wouldn’t be allowed to eat meat more than once a week. Their paychecks would have large garnishments to cover their carbon taxes. That’s good for a start.

Kevin has other ideas. He wants us to “think international”, “focus on getting the biggest bang for the buck”, and “lots of shared R&D”. That last one I agree with, even though I think mankind is causing less than 25% of the minor temperature increase during the Modern Warm Period, as it would lead to better and lower priced clean energy, which is never a bad thing, and could help with many other things.

Regardless, it was his other one that is the “tell”

Forget the free market. There’s no profit in addressing climate change. In fact, the profit is almost entirely on the other side. This means that any plausible plan has to include lots of government subsidies: subsidies for solar, subsidies for wind, subsidies for electric cars, subsidies for reforestation, etc. Basically, you should accept that virtually every policy you support will happen only to the extent that the government subsidizes it.

In other words, what you really have here is a takeover of the economy by the government. And how to pay for it? A massive carbon tax, though Kevin admits it wouldn’t work. And

There are plenty of other possibilities. The main thing is to be rigidly realistic at all times. If you ask too much of people, they won’t support your ideas no matter how great they are. And even if they do, they aren’t likely to respond appropriately to the scale of the problem on their own. I haven’t, after all. Neither have you. But that’s OK: climate change won’t be affected much by personal action anyway. It’s too big. Like a war, it requires action on a governmental scale. Unlike a war, however, it has no human enemy to spur citizens to accept the sacrifice it takes to win. It’s up to us to come up with an alternative.

So, it’s all about Government. There’s an old saying which Warmists should always keep in mind: Be careful what you wish for. You might actually get it.