- Visualizing data with Hans Rosling, founder of GapMinder.
- Republicans want to cut the National Science Foundation budget to
save moneystop scientists from contradicting their beliefs. Pathetic. Want to save money? The DoD + DHS = $600 billion (National Security Intelligence [wow -- triple oxymoron!] is secret). NSF's budget is $7 billion, or about 1.2 percent of those other agencies. U.S. military now has more people in its marching bands than the State Department has in its foreign service. Need to reset priorities here.
- Speaking of academics, Arnold Kling points out that academics may restrain competition via their guild business model of limiting the supply of positions. The Economist covers the demand side -- too many spend too much time and money to get bad jobs, but there are other benefits.
- "Being sane in insane places" -- people are not objective and rational as much as biased and myopic. That leads us to...
- The scientific guide to global warming skeptics. Skeptics should read this, of course, by they may be too biased to either click, read or understand. OTOH, People who want to limit environmental pollution, you will want to see this comic explaining how green taxes work.
- If taxes go up, then people will want to know that they can save energy by turning down the thermostat at night (vs. leaving it on, to avoid a morning surge). Same logic applies to idling your car...
27 December 2010
Anything but water
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2 comments:
Re: Explaining How Green Taxes Work
Here is how they work in California. The Global Warming Solutions Act (AB 32) mandates up to 30% of electricity must come from Green Power. Wind and solar farms are being built to meet this mandate. But wind and solar energy will not reduce air pollution in California's smog traps of its coastal urban air basins. It will reduce air pollution in Utah, Nevada and Arizona where California gets it imported power. Neither will wind and solar farms located in windy high deserts of California reduce smog in California's congested urban areas (see David Caryle, Air in California).
And the California Air Resources Board's (CARB) cap and trade program also will not reduce air pollution. This is because it is prone to having polluting industries buy pollution credits from industries and power plants already located in areas that are not smog traps. So the reduction in air pollution will be mainly symbolic.
Cleaning the air in Nazi Germany was also accomplished mainly for aesthetic and political purposes (see the book The Power of Nazi Aesthetics). This does not mean that CARB are Nazis. But the taxes imposed by Green Power and Cap and Trade will result in no real improvement in air quality or beneficial effects on health but will be enforced in a near-totalitarian manner. So a pollution tax is money that vanishes into thin air.
And you thought that Wall Street was the only entity that could vaporize your money? Money is being rendered useless by hollow environmental bureaucratization that is of no benefit.
This is how pollution taxes work in the real world, not the closed world of some economics comic book.
@PP -- Stuart McMillan (the cartoonist http://www.stuartmcmillen.net/about/) is not an economist. He's also not an American. Thus he is not the straw man you are looking for. As an economist from California, I fully approve of your vision of the dysfunctional outcome from CA32. Oh, and most of the disaster can be laid at the feet of politicians, not economists.
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