Excuse me...no circular argument here. You posted this:<quoted text>
You deniers keep trying to make circular arguments that never address the real issue. It's always some sideline comment that has no relevance. Putting a price on excess carbon emissions into clean air is no different than demanding clean water. Science has taught you by now that if we drink polluted water we die!
We have millions of years of that so called carbon pollution buried in the ground or locked in forests and we start releasing it all into the atmosphere in less than a couple of hundred years. At the same time reducing our planets natural resources by almost 40% to absorb that carbon back that we emit. You deniers keep saying that none of these cold hard facts would make any difference to our environment and even without any science involved plain and simple logic would tell you otherwise.
The idea of pricing carbon was to bring it into the capitalist system so that its traded like any other commodity. But if you only give it a token value then it is useless. Yes it involves pain in the economy but that is only until a new economy based on clean flourishes. Thats how we evolved from the horse n cart days into mechanisation. The blacksmiths, saddle makers, & wagon builders had to evolve into gas station owners, car makers or parts suppliers. It's exactly the same with green energy. Only the plus side vastly outweighs the negatives.
If you really stood hand on heart and swear that you want to base your entire denial process on the fact that science can't tell you that in 2yrs time on this day it will be raining in Washington as reason to dismiss all the other facts is a farce.
"You might also want to look at the Wikipedia feature on climate change and agriculture. For instance one example like Pakistan might lose 50% of its cropping. I guess you guys would welcome these climate refugees with open arms considering they could not produce the food to feed themselves. It goes a lot further than just the weather."
I responded to your statement about "climate refugees." Bad climate policies are contributing more emissions and reducing our food supply. Bad climate policies should not be enacted just to look like we are doing something. Do you seriously think governments will take the extra revenue and use it wisely? In the UK, they charge an environmental tax to curb emissions. Now green research centers are having a hard time paying their bill to the government.
"Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, a facility for research into almost limitless carbon-free energy. The lab faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that."
So, tell me how there can be any kind of innovation in any sector if technology and research has to be cut in order to send in a tax payment. This tax trickles down to the entire economy and you want a global tax. How is that a good policy? And if you start exempting businesses it defeats the whole purpose and then it just becomes a political game of money changing hands. Cap and trade over in Europe is filled with fraud and waste.