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RE: My Family Fled Communism When I Was 6. Now We Fear Our Nightmare Has Followed Us Here
omg what a bullshit.
Okay, no problem. Just include the price of dealing with your "meats" CO2 and methane and see if you are still "self-sufficient".
But that try has been torpedoed for all the time. Even the rudimentary CO2 trade does not work because the price is only 1/10 of what it whould be if you take real, scientific numbers.
Why? Because lobbied politicians said that this would destroy industries (like meat), if they have to pay the real price!
There are no "real" meaningful scientific numbers in terms of the "cost" of CO2 as the methods of determining "cost" are highly subjective. We are talking about market costs here, not what prognosticators think some future cost may be. What is the economic cost of having more people in poverty? How does that affect the environment? There are millions of variables here beyond the ones that you want to selectively pick.
What this article is talking about here is the government manipulating the economy by trying to pick winners and losers. They shouldn't be doing it. Even if their motives were pure they wouldn't get it right and when has the motives of a government ever been described as "pure"?
You've entirely missed the point of the article if you are making an argument about CO2. This isn't about climate change.
This was about subsidzed and non subsidzed parts of the economy. We are subsidizing for example the coal industry, and that (in this case) has nothing to do with climate change, just with costs that the companies do not have to pay.
There are numbers, the same way that other economic calucations are done. Are they highly dependend on a lot of things?
Yes. But so is investing in every new product. Or, for that case, a coal power plant, because the government might start to put all the costs of coal on you (pollution, health...)
The government is always "trying to pick winners and losers". And that is especially true if the government does nothing. Because then we would still have 10 year old children working 14 hours a day in deadly factories, as it used to be before it was forbidden (amid cries of "this would destroy the wool indutry" and "interference in the free market!!").
The government doesn't pick anything by doing nothing. That's nonsensical.
While the government does have a role to play in regards to protecting its citizens, it has gotten way out of hand. Taking taxpayer money and giving it to a company that makes solar panels for instance (or any other company) is way beyond laws protecting children from exploitation. Companies should be responsible for damage they do but that should be handled via private property rights and civil court for the most part (and yes, there needs to be tort reform).
The problem is that the government enforces limited liability laws and other protection mechanisms for corporations and then turns around and tries to "fix" the damage caused by companies in other ways. They should just stop protecting corporations so much instead. The government does not have the ability to accurately predict indirect costs to society and any such implementations to recover those inaccurately predicted costs are invariably corrupted by politicians with other motives anyway. I don't see that "cost to society" or whatever you want to call it is a big factor in these types of decisions anyway.