Usually articles mentioning Climate Change are filled with FUD, especially pro-AGW ones. So I was pleased to read this article on the MIT Technology Review website that actually used some common sense and temperance in regard to our (Earth’s) future energy usages. Although the thought of John Kerry going around a making deals with the IPCC crowd it is encouraging to see this printed in a mainstream website.
Before we commit to binding emissions goals or other climate change treaties, and ask other countries to do so as well, we need to confront the fact that dealing with climate change will come at a cost. Fossil fuels have significant drawbacks, but the availability of cheap energy has helped bring clean water, lighting, medicine, and many other benefits to the poor. Raising the price of fossil fuels will directly hurt people. It’s essential to take that into account when figuring out what to do about the effects of climate change.
These are the people who are pushing the global warming agenda that the media and government is now eating up. And they want to cripple our economy? We are supposed to listen to people who want to do us harm? And apparently they will sign just about anything as long as it’s a petition. Maybe someone should give these “scientists” a chemistry lesson. This is why we have to watch out for our own interests and not be as concerned about what everyone else (money hungry globalists) thinks.
Tesla Motors was fined $275,000 by the EPA for failing to get a Certificate of Conformity certifying that the cars comply with the Clean Air Act. They got one in 2008 but did not for the 2009 & 2010 model year cars. I doubt the cars changed much between MY 2008 and MY 2010. So it is a little stupid of the EPA to make them go through retesting every year. Well that and the fact that the car makes no pollution since it is 100% battery powered. That’s bureaucracy at it’s finest.
But that is not what I want to focus on. The real smoking gun in my mind is a little gem from Tesla’s Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) 10Q filing where they must disclose risks to the company for the benefit of potential stock buyers. In that risks section they admit that:
the imposition of a carbon tax or the introduction of a cap-and-trade system on electric utilities could increase the cost of electricity;
That’s right. Cap and trade would raise electricity prices and hurt their business. This isn’t some right wing rhetoric. This is a serious government filing by a company that we have to assume is smart and is a darling of the left and AGW crowd saying this. If that is not a smoking gun and reason enough to reject cap and trade and carbon taxes I don’t know what is.