AL, what would it take for you to not vote for Trump again? And does AGW play a role in how you vote?
Second question first and maybe only.
First of all, I'm not convinced AGW is real, but it seems like it is. I can grant CO2 is a greenhouse gas because I'm not equipped to challenge it. And Venus being warmer than Mercury seems to support it. In upstate NY weather has been too warm, not enough snow for my liking, though some places are colder. And we had a period this spring where it rained 8-9 days out of ten for something like 6 weeks. It was weird. Not a lot of rain, but it rained some amount almost every single day. So weather has been less "normal". But that's not enough to convince me its true. The least likely coincidence would be stranger than the total absence of coincidence. So weird weather isn't enough. And I don't have the time to study all the data that would be required to come to an understanding that would justify a high degree of confidence that GW is true in all its causes and implications. I'm also turned off by the very propagandish way people talk about it. Many people say it's as obvious as the Earth being round. NO. It isn't. I can see the Earth is round with my eyes by looking at literally one picture or seeing one event, like a lunar eclipse, or just look at any other planet through my own telescope. and gravity means things like to be spheres. KNOWING AGW is real requires many hours of study. Most people who say it's just obvious have no idea what they are talking about and are generally not scientifically literate. They just take it on faith because they're supposed to and it's consistent with their political ideology.
That being said, I can tentatively grant it's true. And we shouldn't ignore the environment, obviously. And generally, the less our impact on it, the better.
However AGW plays no role in my vote and probably never will. I'm fairly capitalist at heart. Capitalism is the almost a perfect economic analogy of evolution. In evolution if something works better than others, it will replace things that occupy the same niche but don't work as well. Conversely, if something doesn't work, evolution doesn't care how much the species wants to live. It's doomed. If the environment changes in a way the species cannot adapt to, it will die. The same behavior exists in capitalism, except you can transmit the equivalent of genes across the equivalent of species.
Additionally, if you place excess arbitrary burdens on a species that will also kill it. The same applies to business.
Basically, evolution works and it's impossible to overpower it. It's less about biology than it is about probability. Capitalism works and it's hard to prevent it from working. If we try to hard to control the process we will kill the process. So I'm very wary of exerting excess control on business because it's unnatural. Along those lines, I think either we will solve AGW with technology or it can't be solved. If we put excess control on industry we could prevent the solution.
Take for instance the price of hydrocarbons. Say decades ago we put price controls on them to raised the prices to discourage use and raise money for taxes to fund research. But the increase price makes it more expensive to experiment, because all experiments require energy. And decreased consumer use means less consumption, a smaller market for advanced technologies. A lot of incentives for technological development are removed.
As a result, the slowdown may prevent the technology necessary to address AGW from ever being created. Instead of advancement, we stagnate. So emissions may stay lower than they have grown to now, but we prolong them, and possibly impose stagnation that prevents a solution from ever being created, because you need an excess capacity in order to do research. If everyone is just subsisting we just keep emitting, but never learning anything that will help us wean ourselves off hydrocarbons. So the net result may be worse than just letting capitalism take care of it, and may actually doom us to a very dystopian outcome.
So I think we need very gentle controls on capitalism to solve the problem. Too much control and we upset the evolutionary process and might actually prevent progress.
That's why I don't care much about policy as it relates to AGW. We'll solve it without upending business and culture. If it can't be solved without that, we need massive disruption to solve it, and that would likely get messy, and possibly lead to war, and if a major war broke out billions could easily die along with the environment getting totally trashed along the way.
