The "let them eat cake" progressive extremists

The "let them eat cake" progressive extremists

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/05/what-if-we-never-run-out-of-oil/309294/

"On a broader level still, cheap, plentiful natural gas throws a wrench into efforts to combat climate change. Avoiding the worst effects of climate change, scientists increasingly believe, will require "a complete phase-out of carbon emissions … over 50 years," in the words of one widely touted scientific estimate that appeared in January. A big, necessary step toward that goal is moving away from coal, still the second-most-important energy source worldwide. Natural gas burns so much cleaner than coal that converting power plants from coal to gas—a switch promoted by the deluge of gas from fracking—has already reduced U.S. greenhouse-gas emissions to their lowest levels since Newt Gingrich's heyday."

"""Yet natural gas isn't that clean; burning it produces carbon dioxide. Researchers view it as a temporary "bridge fuel," something that can power nations while they make the transition away from oil and coal. But if societies do not take advantage of that bridge to enact anti-carbon policies, says Michael Levi, the director of the Program on Energy Security and Climate Change at the Council on Foreign Relations, natural gas could be "a bridge from the coal-fired past to the coal-fired future." """

""" "Methane hydrate could be a new energy revolution," Christopher Knittel, a professor of energy economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, told me. "It could help the world while we reduce greenhouse gases. Or it could undermine the economic rationale for investing in renewable, carbon-free energy around the world"—just as abundant shale gas from fracking has already begun to undermine it in the United States. "The one path is a boon. The other—I've used words like catastrophe." He paused; I thought I detected a sigh. "I wouldn't bet on us making the right decisions." """

Cheap energy is good for the worlds poor. That some environmentalists worry about the unintended consequences is good, that they want the poor to suffer to mediate This worry, is not. The imperial self appointed ruling class is more concerned about maintaining centralized control than the good of the poor that they claim to champion means they are the problem. Centralized control is a sure looser. Concern that the free actions of individuals aren't assured of immediate success does not concern me as I believe the problem is the solution might not be what the central planner would want.

It is time to neuter the progressive left. That is done by reducing the power of the federal government. The laboratory of the states will vet the various ideas and the consequences of failure will be the diminishing of the state, but all other states will be watching.

It is time to return to federalism.

I must appologize to the authors of this article, since I took the first page as representitive of the whole article.  It just repeated the view of others.  The analyses of that first page and the views represented are as intended.  I would recogmend the balance of the article.