House hearings on Climate Science and CO2 regs

Little off topic...

I think the average citizen is conditioned to believe that nothing really bad comes out of the tailpipe of gas cars. After all, with cleaner cars, we can't see or smell anything. We see what goes into them at the station, gas.

But, I'll bet an astoundingly low % percentage of Americans know a car sucks in 21 lbs of oxygen and belches out 20 lbs of CO2 per gallon of gas.

Electrifying vehicles will help. Glad that is ramping up.

 

Yeah, what a hoot: a denier's site run by three guys with the same last name, none of whom have degrees in atmospheric physics or climatology.

Don't worry overmuch about the root canal. It's no fun but done correctly it doesn't hurt; a tooth that needs a root canal hurts a lot more than the procedure itself.

 

It's not like you don't see that elsewhere. It's just a little clearer when its in the natural sciences.

I once had the task of trying to convince a few Members of Congress that people will use more health care if it is free (to them). Trust me, this is true, at least in the context of Medicare acute-care spending.

To a man, they agreed that the uninsured are a problem, because they don't get the care they need, due to the high out-of-pocket cost. To a man, they denied that making health care free increased its use. Clearly illogical. One of them did have the courtesy to state that the elderly liked having secondary insurance (e.g., Medigap) and no one was going to try to change that.

Bottom line: What they could and could not say in public was determined entirely by what they were willing to act upon. Helping the uninsured, OK; changing Medicare secondary insurance, not OK. Hence, cost reduced use for the uninsured, but lack of cost did not increase use for Medicare beneficiaries. There was never a willingness to have the honest, adult conversation in public, i.e., yeah, it costs the taxpayers a bundle, but the elderly like it so we are unwilling to change it.

By analogy, you're never going to hear the Republicans say, yeah, this may be a problem, but Joe Sixpack likes cheap gas, nobody wants to pay more for electricity, and our financial backers want to be able to continue to sell their products, so no, we're not going to act at this time. Instead, because they won't act on it, by convention, they only thing they can do in public hearings is to say, this isn't a problem.

So that's what we just saw, I think.

My only point is to get the causality right. Maybe for some, they truly believe what they're saying. For most, the causality runs strictly from what they are willing to do, to what they are willing to acknowledge as fact in public. They aren't unwilling to act because they believe it's not a problem, they publicly must disbelieve that it's a problem, because they are unwilling to act. Or, at least, you can't infer that they believe, based on what was presented.

FWIW, the Congress did eventually change the law w.r.t. Medicare, in response to research. They've asked the National Association of Insurance Commissioners to restructure the standard Medigap policies.

So, if we get desperate enough, and can do it quietly enough, the Congress may yet attempt to do the right thing. By 2020, we've got better-than-breakeven chance of a routinely ice-free summer Arctic ocean, and a fair chance of at least one real crop-damaging US Midwest drought. With no ice cap and a poor corn crop, maybe they'll rethink this. I mean, it's one thing to watch Ivan lose a crop, it's another thing entirely when its us.