Schmuck Talk Express™ talks climate change

Per his big climate-change speech, with excerpts courtesy Andrew Revkin’s New York Times blog, John McCain is not a global warming denialist. That said, he’s also not a catastrophist.

The question is, which he still hasn’t really answered, how far short of a catastrophist is he? While nobody would expect him to be as focused on this as Al Gore (Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton aren’t, after all), just where does it rank as a policy issue?

On a 10-point scale of importance, what is global warming for Schmuck Talk? I’ll safely say it’s no more than a 4. Quite possibly as low as 2, or at least 2.5 if we make finer gradations.

He uses empirical evidence to talk about the reality of global warming, no doubt.

But, he undercuts himself on the carbon cap issue:

For the market to do more, government must do more by opening new paths of invention and ingenuity. And we must do this in a way that gives American businesses new incentives and new rewards to seek, instead of just giving them new taxes to pay and new orders to follow. The most direct way to achieve this is through a system that sets clear limits on all greenhouse gases, while also allowing the sale of rights to excess emissions. And this is the proposal I will submit to the Congress if I am elected president — a cap-and-trade system to change the dynamic of our energy economy.

As a program under the Clean Air Act, the cap-and-trade system achieved enormous success in ridding the air of acid rain. And the same approach that brought a decline in sulfur dioxide emissions can have an equally dramatic and permanent effect on carbon emissions. Instantly, automakers, coal companies, power plants, and every other enterprise in America would have an incentive to reduce carbon emissions, because when they go under those limits they can sell the balance of permitted emissions for cash. As never before, the market would reward any person or company that seeks to invent, improve, or acquire alternatives to carbon-based energy. It is very hard to picture venture capitalists, corporate planners, small businesses and environmentalists all working to the same good purpose. But such cooperation is actually possible in the case of climate change, and this reform will set it in motion.

Well, a carbon cap-and-trade system has to have some sort of teeth, i.e., a carbon tax.

Note also the blank check homage to the power of “the market,” also attested here:

Yet for all the good work of entrepreneurs and inventors in finding cleaner and better technologies, the fundamental incentives of the market are still on the side of carbon-based energy. This has to change before we can make the decisive shift away from fossil fuels.

Well, excuuuuse me, but isn’t government intervention HOW you “change” this? What a putz.

More putzing hat-tipping to the market by a man trying to pretend something like the Manhattan Project never existed:

The people of this country have a genius for adapting, solving problems, and inventing new and better ways to accomplish our goals. But the federal government can’t just summon those talents by command — only the free market can draw them out.

The call for a new Manhattan Project, against global warming, Peak Oil, or both, has become a rallying cry among many environmentalists. Well, given the purpose and backdrop of the original Manhattan Project, why can’t we raise the stakes and call for a War on Climate Change?

Hell, it’s much better than the currently befuddled War on Terror, let alone the War on Drugs.

Schmuck Talk goes on with encomia for nuclear power (no talk of cost, let alone refusing to discuss that the nuclear industry is one of the “special interests” he decries) and clean less dirty than now coal (ditto on the caveats).

He also talks about giving needy industries “extensions” on carbon caps, without saying how much of an extension level, for how long, who would make the call, etc.

That said, near the end, he does go beyond George W(ingnut) Bush in another way — China and global warming:

If the efforts to negotiate an international solution that includes China and India do not succeed, we still have an obligation to act.

And, by noting that Chinese leaders can’t be ignorant of their country’s self-inflicted environmental degradation, he seems to indicate he expects they’ll come around to some sort of agreement without too much browbeating.

There, he’s not so much naïve as he is woefully misinformed about China.

The “central” government in Beijing has little control over its provincial governments in economic development matters, no matter how environmentally destructive. In fact, it’s arguable that the creation of Special Trade Zones or Special Enterprise Zones may, in the long term, wind up being one of Beijing’s most short-sighted moves, not only for the environment, but for the country’s political stability.