The Indifference Point on global warming: $18.75 a month
For the first time, someone has put a price on what Americans are willing to pay to protect their children and grandchildren from the effects of global warming: $18.75 a month.
The effort began with a Washington Post/ABC News poll last week that found that 62 percent of Americans think the government should regulate greenhouse gases even if regulation raises the costs of things they buy. The pollsters then briefly described the cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House on Friday. Fifty-two percent of those polled said they would support it.
The poll then asked if respondents would be willing to pay $10 a month extra on their electric bills to cover higher costs if cap-and-trade significantly reduced greenhouses gases. Fifty-six percent said they would; 42 percent said they wouldn’t.
Then the pollsters asked if respondents would be willing to pay $25 a month extra. Support dropped to 44 percent and opposition increased to 54 percent.
Nate Silver, a respected poll analyst who runs the numbers-crunching website FiveThirtyEight.com, then plotted the poll results on a graph and came up with what he called the “environmental indifference point,” the price point at which the majority of Americans no longer feel the effort is worth it: $18.75 a month.
The Congressional Budget Office estimated the cap-and-trade bill would raise the average annual household electric bill $14.58 a month by 2020, well below the indifference point. Electricity would cost more because utility companies that burn coal and other fossil fuel would have to buy pollution permits if they exceed their emissions caps.
The CBO’s numbers, too, are squishy. They don’t include the impact that higher energy prices would have on the rest of the economy. Nor do they extend beyond the year 2020, when the cost of emission permits is expected to be much higher. By 2020, the House-passed bill mandates a 17 percent reduction in greenhouse gases, rising to 83 percent by the year 2050. It’s entirely likely that the cost of meeting those goals will exceed the indifference point.
On the other hand, what’s the alternative?
The consensus among climate scientists is that greenhouse gas emissions have caused, are causing and will continue to cause dangerous changes to the planet. Indeed, many climatologists believe the cap-and-trade bill is a Band-aid on a sucking chest wound. NASA scientist James Hansen, often called the “father of global warming,” calls the bill a “monstrous absurdity.”
But it is what is politically possible now — if only barely. If four House members had changed their votes, it would have failed, and there’s no guarantee it will pass the Senate. It is just the first step on a long road, and it’s going to cost all of us more than we’re comfortable with.
To pretend that it will not is disingenuous. But to ignore the threat — even for the noble goal of promoting economic growth — is suicidal. Sooner or later, if you put off repairs on your roof, it will come crashing down on your children’s heads.
Last paragraph could equally (scratch that - definately) applies to the collection of debts that will crush us, our children and their children. Try paying that debt down w/o power 1-day per week (no cars, no lights, no TV, no internet [anywhere], no cell-phones, no beef, no shopping, no [pumped] water supply, no heating / cooling, no mowing, no cooking, no nothing - 1 day out of every seven). It’ll be just like the sabbath.
Well, we’ve got a destroyed American car industry that won’t be able to point its filthy factory smokestacks at the beautiful sky like giant sawed off shotguns much longer and we are sending any other capital producing manufacturing overseas as fast as we can to where they run cleaner operations. Lots of people out of work not bothering to drive their cars to jobs that don’t exist anymore. I’d say we’re really starting to do our part, in a small way, to save Mother Earth. But there is so much more to be done to ensure our standard of living goes down at a greater rate than those evil greenhouse gases. Let’s hope Congress keeps passing bills. Is there anyway to call them back into session to pass some more climate change stuff?
Well at least the American people are showing some sense, while the political and media leadership of the country has gone around the bend.
There is no evidence of man-caused global warming. In fact, there is mounting evidence that the warming and cool of the earth (which has happened repeatedly through both recorded and geological history), is caused by fluctations of the sun. Please show me how paying more for energy and more for everything that requires an energy input, will affect the cycles of the sun?
And even if there were proof of man-caused global warming, the thing is, even if we did everything in these wonder, unread bills being passed in the Congress, the effect on the climate would be so miniscule as to really make no difference.
Global warming, or climate change as some call it, is a cash grab plain and simple.
“The pollsters then briefly described the cap-and-trade legislation that passed the House on Friday. Fifty-two percent of those polled said they would support it.”
I have no confidence whatsoever that the “pollsters” didn’t frame the question to get the answer the wanted.
“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 taxes, not any of your taxes….Barack Obama”
How is this climate cash grab not a tax?
“The consensus among climate scientists is that greenhouse gas emissions have caused, are causing and will continue to cause dangerous changes to the planet.”
Please quit lying to your readers. This is blatant propaganda foisted on a gullible public by the socialist, tyrants-in-waiting. First off, if it is merely a scientific consensus, then why do you and the rest of the liberal press publish so little about the dissenters? Who are they? What is their view? Why do they think man-made, global warming is bunk? Can the PD at least try to uphold its journalistic standards and present both sides of the argument? Given your history, I doubt it.
Dear Post Editorial Board,
I have a few suggestions that could help the Post reduce its carbon footprint and save the company some money:
1) Run the same editorial page each day. After all, the Post’s editorials are simply the same drumbeat (Obama-worship, global warming alarmism, health care alarmism, abortion cheerleading, liberals=good, conservatives=bad, etc, etc) over and over, unaffected by the facts. 2) Merge the paper’s website with another, similar site, like the Daily Kos or the Huffington Post.
3) Layoff any veteran employees and hire more interns. At least when an intern makes naive observations, you can excuse it due to their youth and inexperience.
4) Put the TV listings back in the Sunday paper for non-subscribers. It would give people a reason to buy the Post at least one day a week.
5) Make Kevin Horrigan the editor of the Editorial/Commentary section. He has the same liberal bias as the current editors, but he’s just one guy and is at least mildly amusing.
“The consensus among climate scientists is that greenhouse gas emissions have caused, are causing and will continue to cause dangerous changes to the planet.” - Apparently the EPA only asks the scientists that are willing to give the answer the EPA desires. What a LIE.
If economic growth becomes extinct in our country, will the Post-Dispatch Editorial Board exhort India, China and the mud huts at crossroads in Africa, “Keep it down guys, it aint healthy?”
Unaware that ever increasing breathing population consumes oxygen and produces the dreaded greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. It also goes over their head that if burning fossil fuels and even forest by products or buffalo chips is the problem, it also creates carbon monoxide, a truly deadly gas in equal proportion.
And, why do only those who deny a Creator and have devoted their soul to the continuing development of a lizard crawling from a primordial swamp, fear our ability to use that same evolution to overcome a slowly warming earth?
Was evolution halted at the Editorial Board level when our planet started a cooling cycle 11 years ago?
Is the EB trying to tell us we can stop global warming for 18.75 a month? Great!! Now if this paper had just one sliver of credibility I’d alomost sign on for that. Something tells me your Cap & Trade will be adding a few zeros behind that number before it’s all said and done.
http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10783