No, that'll just send the Chinese economy into the crapper. And the American one as well. And the European one...

And you base that on what? Free-market sloganeering or an understanding of economics?

Actually, the House bill (or, at least, one version of it - I haven't kept up) does impose trade penalties on countries that don't limit greenhouse gas emissions. Economists who have studied this argue that this is not only sound economics but that the WTO would consider this to be fine under international trade laws.

No, I don't believe the CBO numbers, but they are, at least, numbers, not scary claims about "useful to society jobs that we will destroy" that have no basis in any kind of analysis.

The point is that economic analyses, like the CBO's and the MIT study's, are much more speculative than the climate science that you attack.

And yet you dismiss both economic analysis and climate science in favor of, I guess, your vague feeling that doing anything will be really, really hard and will cost about a jillion dollars. Oh, and reducing CO2 will hurt the carnation industry.

This is a really good point. We should be at least as skeptical of economic models as of climate models. But if you do want to pay attention to economic models, you should know that they don't always predict that serious action on climate will cause "severe economic consequences." The CBO, for example, predicts that the cost of Waxman-Markey are fairly modest.. A study by MIT also found that cap-and-trade would not be very expensive

Nice anecdote. But if you read the article I linked, you'd know:

Last year customer satisfaction with the veterans' health system, as measured by an annual survey conducted by the National Quality Research Center, exceeded that for private health care for the sixth year in a row. This high level of quality (which is also verified by objective measures of performance) was achieved without big budget increases. In fact, the veterans' system has managed to avoid much of the huge cost surge that has plagued the rest of U.S. medicine.