However, that's why you start from an extreme plan, so that when it's moderated, it's still good. Starting from a moderate plan means that you get a weaksauce plan after all the horse trading is done.
Also, don't forget executive orders.
There has been no horse trading on any significant legislation between the parties for more than a decade. There are some executive orders that can be made, but a future president can just reverse them. And the president can't do an executive order for any subject where Congress has passed an actual law.
That's been a saving grace with this administration. Donald Trump has been limited in what whackadoodle things he can make executive orders about because there are a lot of EOs he wants to do, but previous Congresses passed a law about it.
And I believe it was SCOTUS that ruled that CO2 was a pollutant, but from a scientific point of view it isn't. A natural component of the atmosphere is higher than we would like. The Earth gets by fine with CO2 levels this high. When modern humans came on the scene CO2 levels were the lowest in Earth's history. The problem is we evolved in that environment, we built our cities based on the climate environment we evolved under, and it's our fault the levels went up.
We have made a massive mess of the environment with real pollutants. Plastics are a man made thing and they are beginning to cause many problem in the environment. Industrial chemicals and other component gases from car tailpipes were either not present or only in tiny traces before we started burning fossil fuels.
I think there is a good chance we're on the verge of a new period of glaciation. Over the last 2 million years the Earth has been about 6 C colder than it was during the era of human civilization. Looking at the ice core records, warm periods often have a spike up in global temperatures just before they crash. The amount of water that leaves the oceans and ends up locked up on the continents during a glaciation period is staggering.
We know from the geologic record that during the last period of glaciation Lake Bonneville covered most of the state of Utah and was close to 1000 feet deep at its deepest point. A temporary lake called Lake Missoula was created by an ice dam in Idaho. It covered close to half of Montana. When the ice dam broke, it created the largest flood in the entire geologic record down the Columbia River and cut the Columbia Gorge into its current shape. Rocks from the Rocky Mountains have been found 1000 feet up in the Gorge (Oregon/Washington border) and the wall of water was 1500 feet high. The Mediterranean was a lake and there was a giant inland lake in Africa covering the southern part of the Sahara and the norther part of sub-Saharan Africa. The oceans dropped 390 feet from where they are today.
97% of modern day Canada was covered with an ice sheet that got up to 2 miles thick in places. The weight of the ice was so great it tilted the entire North American continent to the north and it's still settling today (northern part rising slightly and the southern part settling slightly).
To pump out that kind of moisture the oceans need to be very warm and they need to stay warm for some time after the ice begins to form. Something has to heat them up. And we aren't really sure how ice ages begin. There are some theories. The movie The Day After Tomorrow was about one of the more fringe theories. I personally think the Arctic warming up and the normal polar vortex becoming unstable and drifting south more often and for longer times may be a contributing factor. The extra CO2 may just be supercharging a natural process that was already taking place.
The Earth has had ice ages with the CO2 levels much higher than they are today. The worst ice age is called Snowball Earth where the polar ice caps reached the equator. Most life on land was wiped out and sea life had to repopulate the land when the ice finally receded. We don't know what the solar and cosmic conditions were at that time. Something may have happened to the sun to reduce output for a long period, or a cosmic dust cloud our solar system was passing through may have reduced the amount of solar radiation reaching Earth.
In any case, it would be a good idea to reduce our CO2 output. The extra CO2 is probably not helping our civilization all that much and there is evidence it's causing harm.
There is a very strong lobby that wants to sow every ounce of doubt that burning fossil fuels is any kind of problem and they completely control one political party in this country and buy off a fair number of Democrats to at least waver on any major policy changes. We can't even get political agreement to phase out coal. Economically it's a dead industry walking. It still has some economic necessity in some countries that don't have large amounts of natural gas and don't have the economics to vastly expand renewables yet, but in North America the only reason to keep a coal plant running is the replacement isn't finished yet. Renewables are growing, but natural gas is vastly cheaper and environmentally more friendly than coal as a stop gap.
