In the debt collection business, once I get a judgment for my client, the next step is trying to locate income or assets to apply to that judgment. One tool for that purpose is the proceeding supplemental, where the debtor is required to appear in court to testify as to their income and assets. It’s not uncommon during this process for a debtor to tell me: a) they don’t have the money; and b) they don’t think they owe the debt.
The presence of “a” by itself is unsurprising and creates absolutely no suspicion in me. After all, if they had enough money to pay the debt, my involvement probably never would have been necessary. But, when they mix it in with “b,” a red flag goes up immediately. In my mind, that’s code for “maybe I have the money, I just don’t want to use it on this debt.”
I have the same reaction when I hear people say something like, “global warming isn’t real, and besides we couldn’t pay for the solutions even if it was.” What that says to me is, “I’m denying that it’s real, not because of the evidence, but because I don’t like the consequences if I believed the evidence.”
In the debt collection scenario, when you have someone who is resigned to the judgment but doesn’t have enough money, you set up a payment plan and you start chipping away at the problem. If you ignore it entirely, the interest alone can be a monster, let alone having to deal with the principal. But, if they aren’t resigned to the judgment — to borrow a phrase from Cool Hand Luke — you have to get their mind right first. They’ll never make a credible effort otherwise.
In the Cool Hand Luke scenario, the Prison Captain did it by physically exhausting Luke. In the debt collection scenario, I try to do it by explaining and demonstrating the effect of a judgment. Luke was never going to agree that he should stay in prison. Some debtors will never agree to the validity of an underlying debt. Global warming deniers (who are more worried about the cost than neutrally assessing the evidence) will never do much more than seize on material that confirms their bias. I confess that I don’t know how you would go about getting their mind right.
But, when you hear someone who tells you global warming isn’t real and it would cost too much to fix or it’s arrogant of humans to think they can change nature or some such, you can be reasonably certain that knowledge of the cost is contributing to their denial of the problem. And even the interest can be a monster to deal with, let alone the principal.
When you cite the objection to the “cost” do you refer to the aggregate or the personal cost (inconvenience of recycling, driving a smaller car, being a little warmer in summer and a little less warm in winter, changing buying habits, etc.)? And, why do you think they can object to the “cost” of remediation but not to the price we will pay for doing nothing? Is it selfishness or ignorance of science? I realize it’s more complicated than this, but I have never been able to figure out how so many people are unpersuaded of the emergency nature of this problem.
I like to draw the example with being overweight (since I’m overweight).
It isn’t certain that I will gain weight by eating a doughnut. I *could* exercise later, eat a healthier lunch & supper, etc, and eating that doughnut in the morning won’t cause me to gain weight.
Gaining weight isn’t a single bad choice. It is one bad choice followed by another, and there is no immediate consequence for any *one* choice. It makes it very easy to keep making those single bad choices since you can’t point to one that caused the problem. Conversely, to stay in shape, you must make the harder choice every time. It isn’t one hard decision, but a string of them.
The planet will not overheat because I didn’t recycle a can of soda. In fact, this issue is even harder because I could be the worst person for the planet, driving around in my Hummer & cranking my A/C and *I* couldn’t affect the environment at all. However, if there were thousands of idiots like that working together, then yes, we know it hurts.
I guess my long-winded point is that if we notice that people have trouble staying healthy, which they CAN make a personal difference that can be observed over a long term, how can we expect everyone to keep the planet healthy when they don’t even know that their actions have helped or not?
I can’t speak for anyone else, but the one aspect of the global warming theory that I am skeptic of is the uncontroverted fact that global warming has “plateaued” or even slightly decreased, since the end of the 20st century. If global warming was man-made, wouldn’t the increase in temperature be multiplying as more and more greenhouse gases are being released into the atmosphere?
paul c: i’m fairly certain that your “uncontroverted fact” is false.
And when I hear a “warmista” talk about costs without talking about benefits, I know that they don’t even know the most basic tenets of economics, and their views are more of a religion for atheists than a well thought out plan.
My view is that climate is so complex that we couldn’t tell if the world were truly warming with the certainty needed to justify the cost/ benefit equation. Because the costs are real, and have significant unintended consequences that far exceed any possible benefits, we need to take the warmista stance with a serious grain of salt.
Gee, I was of the opinion that raking in profits without care or regard for consequenses was the true atheistic belief.
I assume these are the benefits to which you refer.
Buzzcut, the point I usually take with global warming deniers is to look at pollution.
I’m currently on vacation in the Smoky Mountains. On the way here, I saw two once beautiful mountaintops that had been turned to mud as they were mined for coal. Upon arrival, I could see smog. Not the “smoke” of the smoky mountains, but the combined pollution of the cars & coal burning nearby. I even checked online to make sure, and sure enough, those with breathing issues where ordered to stay inside that day.
I might be 100% wrong about global warming, but I think we can agree that pollution is real, and it is unhealthy. There is a reason we put the exhaust at the tail of the car instead of letting it come right out of the engine.
atAllio: Yes. It is uncontroverted fact.
“Global warming appears to have stalled. Climatologists are puzzled as to why average global temperatures have stopped rising over the last 10 years. Some attribute the trend to a lack of sunspots, while others explain it through ocean currents.”
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,662092,00.html
It is very clear to anyone that can read a graph that global warming in the 21st century has not increased at the same rate that occurred in the last decade of the 20th century.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Satellite_Temperatures.png
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Short_Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Instrumental_Temperature_Record.png
Jason, what’s your point?
I agree that pollution is an excellent example. What is the cost of that pollution?
While the public health monkeys will throw some very precise numbers at you in terms of deaths due to pollution, it is just educated guesses on their part. Thus, the benefit side of the equation for pollution is very murky, and that is with pollution that is in the here and now, not something that we are speculating to happen in the very far future, a scenario where net present value calculations break down anyway.
Not to mention that you example is very subjective. What was the value of those mountain peaks, in and of themselves? What is the value of a clear day in the mountains? Hard to say.
But the costs, those are very clear. Thanks to Obama, Stateline Power Plant in Hammond will be closing. That’s 120 good paying union jobs down the drain.
Are the benefits worth the cost? I don’t think that that calculation can be made with hard numbers. And when it comes to something as massive and complex as climate, with literally global economic implications over extremely long timeframes, it is damn near impossible to do.
So what do you do when you may have a problem that may be extremely bad, but could be no problem at all, when the costs to mitigate it are massive and clear?
Do nothing. Work on clearer, cheaper problems first. Like getting more of the earth’s population our of poverty through massive economic growth, the likes of which is incompatible with the warmista agenda.
Buzz, the value IS subjective. It can only be measured by what the public decides it is worth.
The problem is, I fear too many will wait to make that decision until it is too late.
However, if the public makes the decision to save some of these things at the expense of jobs, you must accept the majority decision on this & not call it some scam.
Ideology aside, gentlemen, nothing is EVER decided on in this country until it hits crisis point. Even then, the decision makers do nothing except sit around and argue amongst themselves about what should be done. Nobody ever actually gets around to actually doing anything until it is too late to avoid major consequences.
When will we make the decision that the benefits of a clean planet outweigh the costs of lost profits? I suspect not until those who currently run the show are choking on poisoned air and Planet Earth is turned into a ball of concrete. Maybe not even then.
Who will pay for the cleanup? The poor and working class.
Manfred James, considering that the top 10% of income earners pay 70% of all taxes, the poor and the middle class won’t be paying for anything.
Say what you want about Americans, when we FINALLY decide to solve a problem, we solve it. It might not be a solution forever (see the budget surpluses of the 1990s, for example), but we do solve problems… eventually (ending slavery, destroying the Nazis, beating Communism, removing Sadaam Hussein, killing Bin Laden, etc.)
Jason, when it comes to coal burning power plants, color me skeptical of the clean air folks. I work a mile or two from Stateline Power, which is allegedly one of the most polluting power plants in the country. It’s pretty darn clean! It’s not like 19th century London or anything. Is it really worth 120 jobs and millions in tax revenue (it’s the biggest property tax payer in the City of Hammond and the 4th biggest payer in Lake County) just to make the air slightly cleaner? I don’t think that it is.
Ok, I’ll jump in to state the position that hasn’t been stated yet: I accept that global warming is real, and I don’t believe it worth the cost to undertake the kinds of solutions being bandied about for the past 10 years or so.
Since we’re dealing in analogies here, I find the solutions for global warming remarkably similar to the solutions to global terrorism. The actual threats posed by either can be viewed a ‘x’, and the costs of the solutions seems to me to be 1,000,000 X. That is to say, vastly out of proportion to the good the ‘solutions’ would do in light of the collateral damage.
Besides, I believe in evolution. The world is not a static place. So much of the environmental effort seems bent on freezing the world in place at particular set points. That seems misguided at best, futile at worst, and arrogant somewhere inbetween.
Sorry, Buzz, I forgot that the term ‘pay for’ means only ‘shell out dollars’ to the all-business, all-the-time crowd. Those of us who have less money or care about those who have less, know better. Know that there’s more to life than maximizing profits.
Those 90% will pay for the cleanup with the loss of wages, jobs, social services, freedoms, quality of life in general. Of course they’ll pay for it anyway, but to allow the wealthiest among us to pick the Earth clean first only means a longer, harder slog for the common man. Assuming you’re right and the mess can be fixed.
Your arrogance is stunning…America is a great country, but other countries no longer jump when we snap our fingers. This is the kind of effort that will take a multinational effort, and we can’t afford to be the greedy stumbling block.
And you, Mike Kole, are you actually saying the solution would cost 1,000,000 x the damage from warming? Certainly that is the most short-sighted, quick-money assessment I have ever heard. Nice use of evolution to back up that line of blather, though.
No doubt the pair of you would be perfectly content firing particle accelerators at the dead Earth from your (privately-owned) space craft in order to break pieces off for sale. If anyone is still alive to buy, that is.
This scenario may seem like sci-fi, but it’s no more unlikely than the belief that we can stop global warming when it comes full-scale upon us.
I assume, then, that it has no smokestacks & you have no issue breathing the exhaust?
The damage isn’t theoretical. Take this PDF from the National Parks Service: http://www.nps.gov/grsm/naturescience/upload/air%20quality.pdf
For more actual evidence of how mankind can screw this up (in the same park), read about “Charlies Bunion”: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlies_Bunion
That is one caused almost 100 years ago that we still have not been able to fix, even if
Now, I know Buzz and Mike have talked about the theft of private money from people by the government, aka taxes. Since we all own the Smoky Mountains, aren’t you guys damaging my property? How do we decide how much of our shared property we get to destroy? Claiming that unless we put a price tag on a tree, we can’t save the tree can’t be the answer. Put a price tag on happiness & we’ll start talking that way.
Yeah, I call BS on that National Parks propaganda. That is an excellent example of what I talked about, nothing more than educated guesses that some folks are using as a battering ram against industry. The idea that the air is getting WORSE is preposterous. In fact, just in my little corner of Indiana, it has never been better. It is so good that we SHOULD and COULD be getting rid of our automotive testing stations, but the state isn’t letting us.
Buzz, I’ve seen the trees dying from acid rain there, with my own eyes. What I’m hearing from you is that you find that the facts conflict with your view, so you’re ignoring the facts.
I’m not one to take anything from the government without some skepticism. If you go through my posts on this site alone or ask others around here, you’ll find my views range from conservative to slightly liberal, but I’m not an extremist by any standard. I drive 120 miles a day, burning oil the whole way.
I’m trying to say that I’m not some tree-hugging liberal that just wants to hurt business. I’m saying that I’ve seen the damage first hand, and even though it conflicts with how I’d like to live my life, I have to accept that my actions are part of the problem. It isn’t something I enjoy, and I’m by no way there yet, but I’m trying to focus on how I can make the changes needed on my end instead of trying to find some way that the facts aren’t real so I don’t have to adapt.
Manfred- The point is that the solution is out of proportion to the damage. You latched on to the part I could care less about- the precision of the cost. Plus or minus, either way, I don’t care.
Consider if humans had happened to have evolved some 50,000 years sooner to where we had today’s technology and mindset in that period. Now THAT was a time of global warming, when the earth emerged from an ice age, and the glaciers shifted and then melted. What would we have done then, in such a scenario? Try to stop the shift of the glaciers?
It seems to me that we have this idyllic view of the world, as fixed in some time, as the absolute perfect. Well, bullshit. The earth changed. It isn’t good, and it isn’t bad. It just is.
And, the earth is bigger than us. So, our attempts to freeze time remain to me, misguided at best, futile at worst, and arrogant somewhere inbetween.
Jason, where I’m coming from is that industry has already made huge strides with respect to clean air, and it is progress that you can see with your own eyes, if you are willing to look. And if you have some other environmental indicator that appears to be negative, like what that propaganda paper linked to was, you really need to take it with a huge grain of salt.
Did they do this for a financial gain, or to be nice? You’re making the point that regulation works. I’ll concede that the smoke coming out of a coal plant is cleaner than it used to be if you’ll concede that we burn a lot more coal now as well.
If you have a study that debunks the “propaganda paper” I linked to & explains a totally non-manmade reason for all of those dead trees, I’d really like to see it.
No one says that regulation doesn’t work, or that anyone should be allowed to put anything out into the environment. But all need to understand diminishing returns as well as acknowledge that economic growth in and of itself results in an improving environment (contrast rich America with poor India for a good example).
Never forget that the air that leaves the US to the east is cleaner than the air that arrives here from the West. Wealth leads to an improving environment.
Also, I’d like to see alternatives to outright traditional regulation. If clean power is so great, why don’t companies market it to hippies like you and Doug? To a certain extent that is done, but not to the extent that it could be done. In many ways, the left is so regulation focused as the solution to every problem, that you have to think that it is more about control than fixing any one problem.
To some extent, that is the vibe that Toyota has connected with with the Prius. Remember that there was no government regulation that created the Prius, it was just good engineering and marketing on Toyota’s part, as well as being at the right place at the right time with the right product (remember that Honda invented the hybrid, yet has not been nearly as successful as Toyota).
I know you’re mostly having some fun, but I’d like to pause with some bemusement at the notion that I could be conflated with the hippies. They’ve done some good things, and I’m not a reflexive hippie basher, but when the right has moved so far over that the perspective shifts to where I’m more or less right next to the hippies, that’s impressive.
;)