Climate Change

Unlike the Devil I am perfectly happy to accept that anthropogenic climate change is happening. What I am not willing to go along with are the standard big government socialist schemes rolled out as solutions. These are not something I can go along with as I don't want loads of people harmed, therefore the socialist claptrap normally spouted is simply not an option. These would be things like:

1. Shrink the economy
Because the Great Depression was soooo good for human welfare.

2. Back to nature
When the kind of happy-clappy live with nature substance farming ideas are tried on a large scale (or rather forced on people as it is never voluntary) then thousands die. When farm collectivization happens millions die. There is a reason that whenever it is possible people tend to move away from working the land, despite what the water melons would have us believe, urbanization is not some great conspiracy where the happy free range peasants are hunted down to be transported to the cities and put to work in the dark satanic mills. Urbanization happens voluntarily because the peasants do not want to have to work from dawn till dusk to eek out a living and actually find the mills are an easier way of making a living. Even when there are harsh penalties for coming to the cities in an effort to slow down urbanization it still happens, even under the communists in China it is better to live in the cities than off the land.

3. Kyoto
The Kyoto protocol which so many greens fetishise as the solution was signed in 1998. So far nobody is going to reach their agreed targets for cutting greenhouse gases.

from 2000 to 2004, Europe managed to increase its emissions by 2.3 percentage points over 1995 to 2000

Which isn't really surprising since most of the EU states are just using this as one big game to screw those that do take climate change seriously, which would be us, for even more money. Where as those nasty Americans who did not bow down before the carbon idol and decided to grow their way out of trouble had rather different results.

U.S. emissions from 2000 to 2004 were eight percentage points lower than in the prior period.

We cannot morally stop the third world from raising itself to our standard of living, nor can we expect the first world to lower its standard of living to compensate. A way of producing enough reliable carbon free energy to power the industrial societies of the future. The best option that we currently have for this is Nuclear power, but this is anathema to the traditional green world view. Nuclear currently has problems (mainly an image problem thanks to decades of anti-nuclear campaigning) but only way we are going to over come them is by allowing the technology to progress, not hobbling the economy and trying to squeeze everything into the confines of some government Plan.

UPDATE

oops, I didn't make it clear that I was talking about anthropogenic climate change rather than the natural climatic changes that have always, and will always, be around.