Yeah, OK, OK. Well, I think – I mean, I think Gore would have been a disaster as president. We’d have been living in the Dark Ages. I think he’s fundamentally hostile to human civilization. And a phony.
From Media Matters – Carlson: If Al Gore were president, “[w]e’d … be living in yurts in the dark”
This in a nutshell is what drives me crazy about the Climate Crisis debate. People like Tucker Carlson are allowed to keep this silly dichotomy between industry and ecology; between no regulations and living in yuts. This is simply not the case. It is as dishonest as it is logically flawed.
Our atmosphere is a commons in the traditional, ECON-101 sense of the word.
The position that Mr. Gore and many others are advocating is that of using market forces to limit C02 release. Requiring that industry purchase the right to dispose of C02 is a market based, capitalist solution. It rewards those who through hard work, efficiency and smart investments; limit their use of the C02 and punishes those who over-produce waste C02 by requiring that they pay for their waste. It is no different than requiring businesses to pay to have trash hauled away. Those that become more efficient produce less trash, pay less and therefore become more profitable. Those that figure out how to turn other peoples trash into their treasure also profit.
So how on earth can anyone imply that those who want to use market forces to promote more efficient and cleaner technologies are anti-industrial? That whole line of thinking is self-contradictory. No one is suggesting that we dismantle power plants and return to an agrarian economy. Let alone Mr. Gore. No one is suggesting that the government take over power production. In fact, the opposite is true. Those of us that accept the truth on global warming see that the economic boom that could be created in the post-fossil-fuel era will likely create the worlds first trillionaires as well as creating millions of new jobs in the private sector.
People like Tucker Carlson are Carbon Socialists. They defend a system where tax money is collected by scary Big-Government and is used to fund Big Government Bureaucracies to subsidize favored politically connected 18th century technology. And they rail against anything that would force those favored 18th century technologies to compete on a level playing field with modern technologies. They cling to the silly dichotomy of “Market Forces” versus “Carbon Regulation” and refuse to see that this is about “Carbon Regulation via Market Forces”.
We are the ones that are pro-industry. They are the ones that are anti-industry. We favor carbon markets. They favor carbon socialism.
