Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Coyne's Ghastly Car Metaphor Totally Fucking Collapses!

In a last ditch attempt to save his tortured simile between reducing GHG emissions and braking a motor vehicle, Andrew Coyne offered the following:

My point wasn't that intensity reductions necessarily imply absolute reductions. My point was that absolute reductions necessarily imply intensity reductions.

To which the brave Canuckistan responded:

except they don't. you could just mandate an absolute reduction forcing companies to reduce production. however, no sensible people are arguing for that.

Exactly. And Andrew, dude, leave the poetry to Shakespeare.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Total GONG SHOW!

Anonymous said...

its a gong show for sure . . because it is based on a socialist money sucking UN scheme to squeeze hard earned money from us and shower it on screwed up 3rd world countries that don't deserve a penny.

Sounds like they took a page out of the Canadian equalization program.

canuckistanian said...

i like coyne, but he hasn't been doing too well on the metaphor front this week. thanks for the honourable mention ;-).

Anonymous said...

Yeah, Coyne doesn't understand his own metaphor. Absolute limits would be like saying your car would not be able to drive any farther than x distance. Intensity-based targets would mean you could travel as far as you wanted, you'd just have to go a little slower. In other words, efficieny (intensity) based targets do not in any way ensure absolute pollution is reduced. In fact, they can lead to more total pollution in the long run because they can make it cheaper to pollute in the long run (in the case of the car distance metaphor, you can drive further if you go slower). Real life examples are the Jevon's coal paradox and the Ontario beer fridge fiasco.

Anonymous said...

ti-guy, you are the classiest guy here, aren't you.

Here's a new age Zen question; if the Auditor General can't track the money stolen by Liberals, then is it really gone?

What happens when fantasy and reality collide in Liberal-world? Nothing. It was a trick question - there is no reality in Liberal-world.