dayman

The market if left to itself would not be encouraging innovation in technology at this rate or adopt the mission until it makes absolute economic sense. Just look at how the rate of innovation responds to incentives placed in the marketplace by governments. The free market doesn't really deal w/ tragedy of the commons type situations all that well. It's a wonderful thing, the free market, but there are a few situations where it simply doesn't work that well...moving away from CO2 more quickly than we have to based on supply...for environmental reasons...is not something it is well suited to facilitate.

Oh 3rd you know what the deal is. You know what they are and you know what the deal is, and if you were smart you would see them as opportunity both to solve the CO2 problem, to gain our independence from foreign energy, and to take as stronger position in the world economically. If you weren't aware many of the various technologies are advancing very quickly but the rate of advancement is all about demand...the innovation curve follows the demand. Solar for one....solar actually is competitive now in areas of the US certainly for commercial users (residential as well in some instances though) who can take advantage of the federal and state/local tax subsidies. The increased demand improves the innovation rate ... of course China sort of flooded the market so the companies themselves will hurt for profit until the demand gets closer to industry capacity but the innovation of the technology will continue to march along so long as there are people buying them. And in any event you miss the point in asking the question to begin with. It's not about what magic clean energy source is perfect now, obviously if there was one we would all use it. It's about getting there. Hopefully the military plays a huge role in this, and they may well. Additionally there needs to be public incentives to spur all manner of clean energy commercially. None of this is some great revelation or beyond just basic common sense. Clean energy good, CO2 bad, get to clean energy sooner rather than later good, not do anything to work on that bad. And before some libertarian douche comes in here, no market forces alone won't do the trick well enough IMO there's cause for government to be involved through the military and incentive schemes so we just disagree there this is one area where smart government can help us collectively pursue this better IMO this is not an area where I'm on board with the anti-government movement.

In the immediate future fracking for natural gas that produces 1/3 the carbon emission of coal is the solution b/c it's about the only thing that developing countries...the countries where pollution will increase the most in coming years...can afford. The actual answer is not just fracking, but fracking is apart of it. And of course the voodoo "clean energy" efforts that conservatives on this board seem to hate in lockstep are actually the answer and a big part of the short term mitigation as well as the long term answer.

I think there is a Mitt interview to air on Fox news any moment on "on the record" if anyone is interested in knowing ahead of time.

Those liberals and that climate change talking point what a knee slapper. Every now and then the crying baby is just spot on hilarious.

Big Cat is convincing me climate change is real? I need to be convinced in 2012?

I'm all for supporting the global warming is real movement but God knows I need my air conditioning it was 100 degrees here a few days ago.

Oh ok. I'll stumble over there then. What's the Buzz is a terrible title. Big Cat needs to put down the crack pipe

The stimulus WAS a sugar high. That is what it was by design. Crisis...inject sugar high to avoid falling of a cliff if possible. Bad plan? Maybe. Fair enough. But if the idea is that we needed to do something short term b/c we were heading for quick disaster then what you get is a sugar high. Plain and simple. You can't sit here and blame the stimulus for not being a comprehensive structural fix to all the problems you have with the entire American economy. The stimulus was just what it was called, a stimulus.

My defense of the stimulus is simply to point out that impact studies show it saved us approximately 2% unemployment. That's not good enough b/c I guess it was sold to you guys as a fix for the greatest downturn since the great depression. I guess it wasn't, I'm not shocked. Sorry you guys are. The other point is that the stimulus is 3 things, the smallest of which is what is so often bashed and even that portion had good in it. The tax cuts obviously helped a large amount of people feel the impacts of the downturn less and the local government spending helped them avoid immediate massive layoffs which further helped us fall less. The stimulus wasn't perfect and it didn't fix the entire collapse I don't know why that is so shocking to everybody. But to vilify it when studies show it helped...doesn't make sense. To rage that it it didn't lower unemployment enough when studies showed it did lower unemployment is nothing more than an argument is should have done more.

Except the majority of the stimulus was NOT doing what you hate so much. 70% was giving money to local government and tax cuts.

You would be hard pressed to look at the current GOP agenda in the house and call them anything but anti-government. And I didn't realize liberals suck so much at governing b/c people's money is their private stash I must have missed the conservative money management over the last 30 years from the GOP

So what you are saying basically is we needed a bigger stimulus? Interesting...

http://www.csmonitor.com/Science/2012/0730/Prominent-climate-change-denier-now-admits-he-was-wrong-video Prominent anti-climate change scientist does a complete turnaround, and human activities are the main cause.

Studies on economic impact v. your gut feeling.

"We're moving in the wrong direction and it's b/c of the stimulus which independent and CBO stuides showed helps. We can't know what would have happened absent stimulus but I don't like what is going on now so the stimulus failed." That's basically what I'm hearing. It's pretty retarded.

So it's a failure b/c it did work, just not as well as we all hoped? And TARP is relevant b/c the entire anti-government movement vilifies government spending to help cope with the crisis...therefore the fact that TARP is largely paid back undercuts that notion. TARP was BUSH anyway...

The stimulus wasn't designed to fill enormous hole we were in, but it hoped to put a floor on it and most economic studies do show it worked in doing that including CBO studies. It worked to help us deal with the meltdown if you don't want to believe it nothing will change your mind that's fine. I disagree. And most of the TARP money has been paid back ... nobody is a fan of having to do any of this. All I'm saying is to point at the government and blame them for the meltdown is insane, all they did was help in some measure clean it up. But of course that's what the GOP does anyway. POint at the government and find a way to blame them for the meltdown and call the reaction to it as a failure. NEvermind that BEFORE the meltdown through tax cuts and increased spending the GOP doubled the national debt (before the meltdown mind you) and regularly voted to raise the debt ceiling to do so...it was only after the meltdown when we needed it most and Democrats were in power did this all become so out of style

What's pathetic to me is when conservative attack the stimulus as an example of big government gone wrong and use it to further their anti-government agenda. The stimulus worked plain and simple it put a floor under the recession to prevent it from spiraling into a complete depression and saved us an immediate 2% unemployment. The crash didn't happen b/c of the government spending the crash occurred b/c there was to little government oversight and no restraint on risky loans w/ out sufficient capital to back them up. The stimulus (which btw was mainly tax cuts and loan to local governments) only had about 1/3 of direct investment and most of that was in roads and bridges etc...not clean energy companies that everybody fixates on who watches FOx all day. The downturn hurt fewer people b/c of the stimulus which supplemented wages w/ tax cuts, saved public jobs, and created jobs through infrastructure projects and to some degree yes it did have incentives to create private sector jobs in clean energy manufacturing some of which failed. But on the whole, the stimulus worked and it was government doing it and the problem that made it necessary was created by the vaunted free market which apparently is infallible and requires not regulation, oversight, or government involvement at all. Anyway I'm really not here to argue that the government can pick the winners. Nobody will argue that. All I'm saying is that the stimulus itself worked, only a portion of it went to the things you so often criticize, and not every one of those companies failed anyway.

I don't have a link I read it in a book recently but I'm sure there is some stuff to google but there were quite a few successes. One I remember had to do with batteries. Apparently we are good battery makers now lol Ok I found the stat apparently we have gained 30 new battery plants and in 2 years went from producing 2% to 20% of the worlds batteries and are on track to supply 40% of the batteries by 2014. So there's one. For what it's worth. American made batteries.

Well there actually were some successes in there now

We have by far the most guns, and we have the most gun violence. We have the most mass shootings, and it's really easy to get weapons good for mass shootings. This isn't arbitrary abstraction. We're pretty safe right now relative to our past selves...but gun crimes have been increasing over the last decade the only such crime to do so...these stats are arbitrary?

birdog's point is some countries are proud of their system whether it would be ideal for us or not. Regardless of who you are you are a fool if you were proud of the old system and if you will be proud of the new one. I don't think the gov't needs to own most hospitals like in the UK, but a public payer is ideal either way. These are basically facts that cannot be argued against credibly.

I'm going to admit when Mitt brought up Norway as if he was a message board poster in the Morgan interview I almost threw up. You want to compare Norway to us in gun violence and mass murder? Lets do this Mitt. The lack of follow up was pathetic. No balls.