From the Wikipedia link: "many claims are expected to be met administratively from the fund set up for that purpose under the Oil Pollution Act of 1990"

The Oil Pollution Act set up funds to prevent civil liability for spills. It capped BP's maximum liability for the spill at $75M. So I ask, what lawsuit risk? The government already set up a system such that BP knew exactly what it was liable for - a total risk of $75M.

But we need those regulators, right? I mean, they obviously kept the spill from happening, or at least knew it was going to occur... U.S. exempted BP's Gulf of Mexico drilling from environmental impact study

No, the reality is regulatory capture. The only people with enough expertise to oversee something as complex as oil drilling are largely people who have worked in the industry, who have friends in the industry, and often benefit financially from the very companies they have to regulate. BP gets a pass, regardless of how many regulations are on the books, because the guy that's regulating went to college and worked for 15 years with the guy he's trying to regulate.

But really, keep calling people that disagree with you anti-science, or anti-evidence. It makes it easy to tell you're being partisan instead of rational.

Honestly, do you believe the parent to my original post "points out the clear and obvious holes in my ideology". Or is it just a worthless, throw-away straw man argument? Do you want to tell me about those "flaws that any five year old can identify", or is that your equally worthless straw man argument?

I mean, how could I ever hope to attain a level of argument with the nuance of "Somalia = Libertarian government, therefore Libertarianism is wrong"?

Oh look, it's the new Godwin's Law - As an online discussion of libertarianism grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Somalia approaches 1.

Will be waiting for your next response, maybe something regarding privatized roads or police departments.

http://www.thedaily.com/page/2011/07/21/072111-opinions-column-cafe-dalmia-1-2/

"But to the extent that carmakers have complied with CAFE, it is less through radical innovation and more by simply slashing vehicle weight. In the 15 years after CAFE standards were first introduced in 1974, vehicle weight diminished by 23 percent. But every 100-pound weight reduction results in a 4.7 to 5.6 percent increase in the fatality rate. A 2002 National Academy of Sciences study concluded that CAFE's downsizing effect contributed to between 1,300 and 2,600 deaths in a single representative year, and to 10 times that many serious injuries."

I totally agree that the cars will have to be made incredibly light in order to meet the new standards. I don't agree that so many additional deaths are worth the savings in fuel. Given a choice, you could make a decision as to whether the increased risk of dying or being seriously injured in a car accident was worth the savings to your pocketbook and the environment. Here, there is no choice, the government has decided for you - you will increase your likelihood of dying in a car wreck because we say cars have to follow these standards.

Another important point, imo, from the same article:

"Sean McAlinden, chief economist at the Center for Automotive Research, notes that it is technologically impossible to squeeze anything beyond 45 mpg in fuel economy from current vehicles. That’s why Europe’s fuel economy has plateaued at that level, despite $8 per gallon gas. The 56-mpg-mandate will require a total, top-to-bottom overhaul of cars. Every part of a vehicle from its transmission to its engine would have to be replaced."

So, even with the large taxation on fuel in Europe, they can't seem to get current technology to perform at the levels needed by these standards. Now, what costs less for these companies (ie, better for the bottom line): To completely top-to-bottom overhaul their entire manufacturing systems and pour immense amounts of money into R&D, or to lobby the government to reduce the new standards? Want to guess which one will happen?

Where will your civilization be then?

It will have moved on to the next cheapest source of energy, through the nature of global supply and demand.

When I read your comment, I hear "I don't think the third-world should get to increase their standard of living, I'm OK with keeping them perpetually poor by artificially restricting their sources of energy." It's the same argument as "Walmart makes cheap goods that end up in landfills" - what you want is for everyone to have the nice things that you can afford or to go without.

Environmentalism is a first-world priority. Everyone else is too busy trying to feed themselves and stay alive.

You can complain all you want about Republicans voting like Republicans. I want to know about these supposed guardians of civil liberties on the left that voted for more Patriot Act.

http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/57169/#ixzz17eM23WmL

Despite the widespread and increasing availability of sexually explicit materials, according to national FBI Department of Justice statistics, the incidence of rape declined markedly from 1975 to 1995. This was particularly seen in the age categories 20–24 and 25–34, the people most likely to use the Internet. The best known of these national studies are those of Berl Kutchinsky, who studied Denmark, Sweden, West Germany, and the United States in the 1970s and 1980s. He showed that for the years from approximately 1964 to 1984, as the amount of pornography increasingly became available, the rate of rapes in these countries either decreased or remained relatively level. Later research has shown parallel findings in every other country examined, including Japan, Croatia, China, Poland, Finland, and the Czech Republic. In the United States there has been a consistent decline in rape over the last 2 decades, and in those countries that allowed for the possession of child pornography, child sex abuse has declined.

Nice straw man. At no point did OP say anything about it being OK to double the level of atmospheric CO2. OPs point IMHO is that there are significant things we can do today to solve this problem without legislation, but even some of the staunchest advocates of CC refuse to do those things. These people are showing that they don't really care to do what's necessary to fix the problem; instead they'd rather use government to force others to do things they won't willingly do themselves.

But, to OP, I would say: since when did anyone seem to care about being hypocritical? I'd venture that a large majority of people hold 2 or more opinions that are logically inconsistent. Being fully principled is extremely rare.

Any person that believes banking is a "free market" has no understanding of the concept of fractional reserve banking.

Fractional reserve banking increases the money supply through lending, literally creating money from thin air. In order to maintain the money supply and keep inflation from spiraling out of control, the Central Bank must both manipulate the currency through the prime rate, and regulate the banks through reserve requirements. So, core to the concept of banking under fractional reserve is the necessity of the government to regulate banks in order to keep the money supply safe.

This doesn't even include the volumes of laws on what types of products banks can sell, or who they can sell them to. It doesn't include the thousands of pages of regulations on their employees and their facilities. It doesn't count all the tax regulations they must abide by.

It doesn't take more than a few minutes of research to find out that the "free market" line is not an argument, but some sort of uneducated attack that tries to dismiss the problem as easily as possible - just blame some mythical "free market" that doesn't exist, and move on rather than consider the reality of things.

Behold, the Twitter dualism:

1. All tweets are mindless drivel about what someone ate, the weather, and other trivialities.
2. Your potential employer will mine this deeply personal information and use it against you.