Facing the abyss

The Financial Times elicited a comment from Myron Ebell yesterday in a short article about the choice between carbon taxes and carbon trading as painless economic mechanisms for saving future generations from dire consequences for life on this planet. And if you don't think these mechanisms are painless, try authoritarianism. A bullet in your head feels a lot hotter than paying a tax into public funds, no matter what these wing-nuts say.

While we, at the Climate, are all for social justice, there are more important matters, such as survival. Carbon taxes are undoubtedly fairer, more efficient, and more likely to get the job done than carbon trading, which is likely to be a massive corrupt unloading of public wealth into the hands of the super-rich on the scale of Enron and the banking industry. However, if that's what it takes to buy these unimaginably greedy bastards out, then that's what's got to happen. What we worry about is that they take the money and still insist on feeding some of it back into the political system in ways which destroy all hope.

In the public mind, Myron Ebell and his friends have already laid down the lies for public taxation to be unpopular -- even when it applies only to the richest 0.01%. So, sticking with his strategy of doing whatever it takes to turn this planet into a hell-hole, he says:

"We are fairly confident that we can defeat a carbon tax in the US. Cap-and-trade is going to be harder to defeat if the Democrats gain more House and Senate seats in the next election and win the White House so, again, I would much rather fight a carbon tax than a cap-and-trade. I hope that the debate here moves towards a tax."

For Myron it's all a game. On one side there's life, and on his side it's death. But then death always wins in the end, so we shouldn't be completely sad.