Reinventing the wheel.

Roger Pielke and David Roberts are going back and forth about the issue of "non-skeptic heretics." David:

Guess what, though? Some folks have figured it out that the media will valorize the in-between. So they deliberately lie. They deliberately push one extreme, dragging the middle in their direction. Knee-jerk "balance" unwittingly serves the side that's willing to lie the most.

This is not to denigrate independent thinking. But everybody thinks they're thinking independently.

I hereby decree: "both sides disagree with me" no longer counts as a stand-in for "I'm right." It's possible, and frequently true, that one side's right and the other is wrong, even if many of the correct people argue poorly or are otherwise annoying. It's simply empirically fantastical to think that partisanship is automatically disqualifying. Gregg Easterbrook (and John Tierney, and Ronald Bailey, and Michael Shermer) have struggled for so long not to be "on the side" of "global warming alarmists" that they have clung to false beliefs. Is that somehow preferable to "tribal thinking"?

Not believing something because a "tribe" believes it is just as fallacious as the converse.

And Roger:

From an empirical perspective I am confident that the current approaches to climate policy advocated by both the climate skeptics and alarmists fail according to all three criteria. (To be glib, for "current approaches" simply assume (a) "do nothing" for the skeptics and (b) the approach favored by the FCCC for the alarmists.) I don’t know if the proposals that are frequently advocated here at Prometheus are "in between" or "outside" the current debate and I’m not sure that I care or that such partisan-relative-geography even matters. What matters is that there are basically two approaches to climate policy that take up all the air in the debate under a shared assumption that arguing about science is the appropriate battle ground for the debate. In my view significant progress on climate mitigation or adaptation won’t be made until new options are considered beyond those at the focus of the skeptic-alarmist debate. If that view makes me a temperamental third wayer, then I am guilty as charged.

This vague concept of a third way "NSHers" are trying to advocate sounds a lot like reinventing the wheel. We know what works: predictable cap-and-trade goals coupled with a revenue-neutral carbon tax that rises predicatbly over the years; those coupled with similar standards throughout the big developed economies will bring about results without hurting industry.

The Bush administration and "NSHers" want to tackle methane emissions first. Fine, but voluntary measures aren't going to produce results. Figure out a way to more accurately measure methane emissions and do something about it. But even if methane reduction is implemented well, eventually there will be an administration in this country that will do something about carbon dioxide emissions since this problem isn't going away on its own. The uncertainty as to when and how future politicians will act I would argue is far more injurious to industry than knowing how much to cut when.

We also know what doesn't work: it's what we've been doing for the past 15-20 years, sitting around saying to ourselves "there must be another reason for why it's getting warmer" and now the modified "there must be another way to do something about it now that it is happening." Maybe if we all sit around and stare at the sky, the answer we can all agree on will magically appear in the heavens.

But what those who want to avoid action want most of all is for those who are looking for a third way to continue to look and hold out an unrealistic promise that there will be a third way that is ideal both scientifically and politically. They know that stalling by doubting the science won't work anymore, otherwise the managing editor of National Review wouldn't feel the need to defend himself to accusations from a liberal blog, so now they will do anything to prop up this fantasy for as long as possible.