The changes advocated at Copenhagen only make sense if your financial future is tied to either green tech or carbon trading. If the stuff was economically viable or offered
an attractive alternative (e.g. Tankless water heaters never run out of hot water. Plugging in a car should be much cheaper and easier than visiting
a gas station.) it wouldn't require legislation.
If the stuff was economically viable ... it wouldn't require legislation
I think you're missing the point if what I said. Lots of things are economically viable to a corporation if it can externalise the downsides (either by dumping the wastes or getting a bailout when it make mistakes) or simply get the legislation that favours it (google "oil industry tax breaks" for an example).
You can't get away from legislation. Bailouts are legislation. But making polluters pay requires legislation. There is no mythical free, unlegislated market that will magically do the right thing. There's only good legislation and bad legislation.
Don't polluters already pay? The proposed measures are designed to curtail carbon emissions, aren't there already supply side taxes on carbon generating fuel sources like oil and natural gas. Has carbon actually been scientifically proven to be the sole driver of global warming? By scientifically, I don't mean using a computer model with fudged numbers generated by interested parties with poor programming skills. If it isn't testable and repeatable it also isn't science. The models have made predictions that haven't matched reality thus far, why would we believe they are going to start matching reality in the future?
Aren't there other more pressing forms of pollution than CO2 emmisions? What about strip mining, particulate emissions, and methane? Is this really about curtailing emissions, or creating a lucrative secondary trading market and taxation system to benefit people like Al Gore who are both heavily invested in carbon trading, and part of the legislature.
