Circling the drain in the Carbon Sink

The USA is finished, and the countdown to final collapse began Dec 7 2009 with the EPA ruling that CO2 is a pollutant meaning that it will have the power to regulate it.  The link I chose for that sentence is one from what is left of the U.S. industrial belt.  This will beat down their remaining industry with regulations, while jacking up energy costs in a country (like many others) that still gets much of it's power (49% or so in 2006) from coal plants.

So, to take this new announcement to it's logical conclusion, we have to eliminate everything that emits CO2, or regulate it.  How do you regulate forests?  Cut them down?  Crops?  Volcanoes?  In fact, this is bundled with some other gases, one being methane.  This covers all of our personal gaseous byproducts, and the cracks that are currently circulating are along the lines of "tax the air you breathe".

That's not far off, though for the time being they wouldn't try to impose personal exhalation limits.  I'm not sure it matters too much as the cost of EVERYTHING is tied to energy costs.  It will amount to a huge tax, and Obama has stated in the recent past that he intends to bankrupt anyone who wants to use coal.  Even now I'm not certain what all of these people think the end result of their plans to hobble Western industry will be.  It 's not like we can live on the beach all year; we need technology to support our large populations in sub-optimal climatic zones. Wrecking our industrial base will cripple our economy further, and there goes the financial surplus that feeds innovation.

The anarchists et al are crowing about the failure of Capitalism which brought much of the world (and especially the USA) to the current Great Recession.  They'll jump on any bandwagon that will crash the current political and economic systems, and they form the most radical wedge of the "green" movement.  In fact it was not a failure of capitalism that brought things here, but an excess of regulation and individual capitalists behaving badly.

Capitalism needs regulation for sure, but a light hand (safe labour practices, sensible environmental rules, not much else) gets the best results.  Making it more difficult to do business in North America will simply drive what is left of our wealth-producing (e.g. manufacturing) businesses overseas.   We need ideas that can work, and money to be spent to make them work.  Space-based solar power is inching closer to reality, and that is the direction things need to go.  This all takes money, and people need to remember that governments don't make any of it themselves.

While this is happening, the environmental intelligencia are in Copenhagen trying to reach agreements on how to rape the taxpayers of developed countries more with climate legislation.  The only sign of hope on that front is that they seem to be squabbling.  In this case doing nothing is the best possible thing, so the more of that that goes on the better for us.