Cap-and-Trade Ignorance

Hello all…I have been educating my “liberal” friends on the toxic Cap & Trade legislation. I got this response from one of my environmentalist friends. It’s absurd. This is what we are up against…to wit:

Be careful. Don’t become a Republican nationalist.

Ron Paul’s people are good for some things, but purely reactionary in others.

The bottom line is that real change (in policy, government, the environment, etc) has historically always come from the people, at the bottom of the “get fucked” pile. So think about it this way: What’s the possibility that the customers of all these companies (that are going to be taxed) will stand idly by and accept having there prices increased? I bet that there will be companies out there that keep their prices lower to beat the others, even with the tax increase. There’s your free market at work. Obama isn’t ignorant. He knows the costs will be passed along. But he also knows that when things cost more, people use them less - look at the price of petrol in EuropeUSA are some of the worst wasters of energy and materials, because it’s all so damn cheap. What if that changed? What if the convenience wasn’t so convenient anymore? compared to here. So maybe the plan is at least two-fold. We in the
Also, even though the economy sucks, Obama realizes that this kind of regulation has to happen now, no matter what. The environment is too far gone. My only concern with this is that it’s not enough. Too little, too late.
So, to the people who think only about what it’s going to cost them on a monthly/yearly basis, I would ask “What about your great grandkids? What will they have to pay if we don’t do this now?” It sucks that we’re having to pay for the last one hundred years of industrialization, but that’s our task if we want the human race to continue.
And as far as the solar panels in Nevada are concerned, this was a pilot project. It costs more to do that one project than it would if we built similar facilities across the country at every governmental institution. Just like a TV pilot, invest a bigger chunk of change in showing the prototype. It’s an investment. And with this project, 3000 are off the grid completely. I did cost $100 million, but in 100 years that’ll be pocket change… If we’re still around.

And as far as money is concerned, you know as well as I do, it’s more of an idea than anything solid. It only has the power and weight that we give it.

I’ve been having a good time picking apart the flawed logic in this response. I figured I let you guys help this guy out. It’s good practice!

Just found this gem. If anyone has been reading too many of the articles here, and needs to lower their IQ a little, I promise reading this will knock it down a few points.

If the OP ever returns - yea your friend is incredibly ignorant, sorry about that.

So they basically think that the costs of cap&trade will be absorbed by energy companies, and then they say higher prices are a good thing anyway. If you really want to argue with fools, it would be worth taking real life examples of how C&T “works” in Europe; see what they have to say about that.

I wrote a post on “cap and trade”. The “carbon tax” or “carbon credit” law is nearly 100% corporate welfare.

It is pretty pointless to argue with a die hard environmentalist. They think the human race should be exterminated.

Apparently we can will a good to be less useful with our opinions! Of course our current money doesn’t have value because of our opinions, it has value because someone is shoving a gun in everyones face saying it does.

I think it would be hilarious to get this person here for conversation.

I’m kind of on the fence about “arguing with fools” , on one hand, if you don’t talk to them they’ll probably never be exposed to different views. But on the other, best you can hope for is to plant a seed of doubt into the person’s mind, so it’s hard to know if you’ve just wasted your time or if you’ve actually opened up someone’s mind to different ideas.