At the very least we can say, more coal is not the answer. It is not being kept around for economic reasons, but because of politics.

How much is a seawall around Miami or New York going to cost? How much will it cost us if farmers can't grow crops on their farmland anymore? Neither of those are going to be good for economical growth. Don't be so precious of not hurting economic growth now, because the hurt to the economy is coming. It will be much worse in the future, but people in charge like trump won't be around to deal with the economic pain that will come.

Funny how it always ends up that way. Somehow they always benefit more than the rest.

To show you how much power can be gained by these hypocritical Global warming saviors, look no further than California.

They started a cap n trade thing here in Calif. Where big CO2 emitters had to buy credits to do so. This money was supposed to go to reducing greenhouse gas and other forms of producing green energy.

This has become a Christmas gift of spending, it is like modern art. politicians and their boards can interpret the bill and decide any way they want to look at it to spend this windfall of money. And of course, they will always come out on top.

For example, instead of using CnT money to help subsides green energy like solar panels on private home rooftops (nonunion solar installer). Our government took $958 million of it and put it to the high-speed rail boondoggle and an additional amount into of $698 million to affordable housing. By far the two biggest portions of the money.

Was it any surprise that The Calif. Labor Federation with 2.1 million union member endorsed across the board the politicians that got them these contracts? These big players in last months elections helped give Calif, Dem. a super-majority.

I like your response. We often get sidetracked from things that are important. Both the energy and environmentalism policies are taking hits because this President and Congress are short term thinkers. What we need are some long term national goals embedded in stone that must be met. I want my kids to have a better place to live and while we can project what we are doing to ruin their futures the madness continues.

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"The great pleasure in life is doing what people say you cannot do."

What's needed for carbon tax viability is a transparent mechanism to lower our commensurate income tax rates because of the additional revenues. I suppose that, initially, those carbon tax revenues could go towards reducing the out-sized deficits that the Trump "don't tax but still spend like a liberal" fiscal plan is producing.

I don't think the debt is a taxing problem as much as a spending problem. Giving them more money (like here in Calf.) to solve a problem only gave them more money to grab power.

If one is saying that an answer is incorrect, it must be presumed that they have enough information to suggest (not prove) what a successful answer would be. Otherwise the anti viewpoint is merely unsupported opinions and worth less than the air it took to state them (or the electrons used to post said opinion).

You're absolutely right. The details matter. You and I and all the people who love to look up things on the internet don't know the details. The people who have been educated on the science, who then went on to learn as much as they can about the science, and who spend every waking hour of their day trying to tease out the smallest bit of additional knowledge about the subject - they're the ones who know the details.

There's no way you can look up a "problem" with climate models that is somehow news to the thousands of people who spend their lives trying to build those models in the first place. Do you think they don't have access to the same internet you do?

And that's way down from a few decades ago. So thanks for pointing that out. The trend is pretty clear.

Coal is becoming more expensive relative to the alternatives every year that goes by.

Several things: 1) If you go back and look at what I said repeatedly is that: we are not at the stage where all sides agree that there is man made climate change. Most in the GOP seem to not even agree with scientist.

2) Recognizing a problem is vastly different than being able to solve the problem.

I can watch the Washington Wizards play basketball and realize that they are not a very good basketball team without having a strategy of how to fix them.

Actually the % is more like 30% and in states like California where most of the EVs are being purchased, the amount of power generated by coal is only 0.2%.

Ironically, the deregulation of natural gas fracking has probably led to most of the decline of coal. However, solar generation has been steadily improving due to technology and economy of scale and will put further price pressure on carbon fuels.

The fact of the matter is that solar technology has seen its price decline steadily over decades and there is no reason for that to stop. If you just follow that trend to the logical conclusion, then it will be the cheapest form of energy in the future unless fusion makes significant progress.

There are better decisions and worse decisions here. And we need to flesh those out. I'm not sure it's reasonable to put ruining our children's futures as a projected outcome.

I understand that the recent multi-agency federal report showed that the cost of mitigating climate change is far outweighed by the cost of not acting. So, yes it is pretty reasonable.

Just because an agency came out with a report showing some costs being outweighed by others doesn't mean it's reasonable to predict our children's lives will be ruined. What's the latin expression for "it does not follow"?

People try to use that same pathetic anti-wind/solar argument in my area in defense of the hydro industry complex too... Yeah, wind & solar power generation are not fully mature industries yet, so the technology still relies on subsidies to compete. That's exactly how it works, just like the Feds subsidized all these massive hydro projects over the past century; we didn't suddenly become dependent on them overnight, as if all those dams simply fell from the sky whole (and continue to operate on a purely market basis, without continued operating & maintenance expenses borne by the Feds still).

How much do we actually spend subsidizing the petro industry even now? Yet the myopic GOP drones continue to hold alternative energy development to some false imaginary pure market standard.