Hmmm, let's leave global warming aside for a few moments and consider the other reasons to stop polluting:
* We're running out of oil.
* Oil costs too much.
* The oil we do have comes from unstable parts of the world with political regimes we might prefer to avoid providing money to.
* We face increased competition for fuel from developing nations like India and China.
* There are other environmental effects of pollution in addition to global warming.
* Our current reliance on "dirty fuels" is (quite probably) leading to an increase in respiratory diseases like asthma in developed countries.
* Our activities in general are leading to species and habitat loss at an unprecedented rate -- effectively, we are an extinction event.
I think too many "global warming sceptics" are motivated either by a desire to carry on as normal, or (as Homer Simpson put it) not letting "the environmentalists win". But clearly, we need to find alternative energy sources regardless of global warming, and we need to do it now.
All (mostly) true. I don't think any sensible person could deny that we need to be finding better alternatives to fossil fuels as soon as as possible.
There is, however, room for some disagreement on exactly how large and how urgent the problem is. If the only problems are as you suggest, then we can pretty much afford to sit back and let research progress as normal, safe in the knowledge that market forces and the natural advancement of technology will mean that renewable CO2-neutral energy sources will become economical in the coming decades.
On the other hand if, as some of the more alarmist global warming advocates would have us believe, a few more years of current CO2 emissions will suddenly put us over some kind of tipping point causing the melting of Antarctica, the stopping of the gulf stream, a neverending drought and the end of all life on Earth (and I'm only exaggerating their predictions slightly) then we'd need to take more severe actions -- like severely cutting energy consumption right now instead of waiting to develop better energy sources.
Right now we have all sorts of people using scenarios on the Al Gore doomsday end of the scale in order to justify policies such as cap-and-trade and carbon taxes. In the end these sorts of policies, as well as causing hardship to everybody, might wind up being counterproductive, since they'd slow down the economy and hold up the development of the alternative energy sources which are the real long-term solution.
It doesn't help that most of the people who are pushing for, say, increasing taxes on CO2 are exactly the same sort of people who are always calling for increasing taxes on something.
Like I've been saying for years, global warming is a technological problem, and we should always beware of people trying to push sociological solutions to technological problems.
"we should always beware of people trying to push sociological solutions to technological problems"
I'd go along with that. I think ideas like carbon trading are clearly designed to subsidise poorer nations, without actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Someone eloquently described such trading systems as "carbon indulgences", in that it makes people feel better about the pollution they produce while actually doing precious little about it in real terms.
My main point is that arguing about global warming is a big waste of time, and we should concentrate on finding efficient, clean and sustainable ways to live as we want to.
Reducing the amount of CO2 is - strictly speaking - not the immediate goal of carbon trading, the goal is to keep the annual emissions below a certain threshold, and that part is what carbon trading clearly is designed to do. Carbon trading is also called cap-and-trade and the 'cap' part refers to the limitation in emissions. Since, due to the artificially enforced limitations, emissions become just another scarce commodity like wheat or oil, the same trade mechanisms can be applied to it.
Aren't those all things that will cause us to stop polluting, not reasons to stop polluting? If the price of a polluting fuel goes up, because it's scarce, it acts as a tax on pollution.
And the density of dangerous particles in the air has gone way, way down over the last few hundred years in large cities. So that seems like less of a concern.
I agree that recent events have caused people to look for alternative fuel sources, but there's no guarantee we'll end up with clean alternative fuel sources. That should be made a priority. Biofuels, for example, have clearly been a disaster in broad terms (food supply and expense, etc) and there's been some doubt about how clean they really are.
Re. your second point: we don't have smogs in most western nations today, but there are other effects specifically from motor fuels, particularly diesel, which creates more particulate matter than petroleum. This has been implicated in the increased incidence of asthma in western nations, and is also thought to exacerbate hay fever.
Biofuels aren't a disaster in general. It's only corn-based ethanol that's a disaster. Ethanol from sugarcane is significantly less of a disaster, though unfortunately not much sugarcane is grown in the US. Ethanol from switchgrass or other random biomass is an even better idea, if we can get it working.
* We're running out of oil.
* Oil costs too much.
* The oil we do have comes from unstable parts of the world with political regimes we might prefer to avoid providing money to.
* We face increased competition for fuel from developing nations like India and China.
* There are other environmental effects of pollution in addition to global warming.
* Our current reliance on "dirty fuels" is (quite probably) leading to an increase in respiratory diseases like asthma in developed countries.
* Our activities in general are leading to species and habitat loss at an unprecedented rate -- effectively, we are an extinction event.
I think too many "global warming sceptics" are motivated either by a desire to carry on as normal, or (as Homer Simpson put it) not letting "the environmentalists win". But clearly, we need to find alternative energy sources regardless of global warming, and we need to do it now.