Karol:

I've never understood the belief of many on the Right that commerce must continue unabated even if it means damaging or destroying the very setting in which that commerce takes place. What's the thinking there?

There isn't any.

The thinking is that the quickest way to the luxury of a cleaner environment is through commerce, via wealth creation and new technologies. On global warming, limiting growth -- carbon caps and the like -- prolongs the arrival of a post-fossil fuel future.

Michael,

Maybe he has some experience with central planning. By far the world's biggest environmental disasters were produced by planned economies.

You have it backwards. Commerce produces wealth, and wealth allows you the luxury of a clean environment. The reason China is building giant, unfiltered coal plants by the dozens is the Chinese can't afford to use the latest "clean coal" technology.

If anthropogenic global warming actually turns out to be real, the only hope of tackling it is to bring India and China into the first world, where they can afford advanced carbon sequestration technologies or (better) clean nuclear power.

The subtext of his argument is that freedom and democracy are mitigated by market economies and prosperity. Unfortunately, markets are myopic, and are really only concerned with the next quarterly earnings reports (for example).

A libertarian would probably argue environmental decline presents new market opportunities for environmental remediation, but that is humanistic vanity. People, individually, aren't smart enough to figure out big problems, and collectively their performance is even worse.

We can afford cleaner power. We could, as a nation, cover Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and the California desert with photovoltaics, and stop burning stuff completely. Argonne National Lab developed a prototype fast breeder reactor that has a very long fuel lifetime, and leaves no radioactive waste (uses plutonium, makes the military nervous). The Germans have developed a no-meltdown nuclear core that can be scaled down to small metro-sized reactors (still have a radioactive leftover problem, but disposal is much easier given a suitable disposal site). We don't build these things because there are market barriers to entry.

This is a non sequiture, but at the end of it all, governments can specify regulations that retain market-like dynamics and also protect the long term good of people. Vaclav doesn't seem to get that. That is the challenge of governance. If governing were easy any monkey could do it.

Of course Vaclav gets it. But that's not what they're proposing. We'll know the statists actually believe in anthropogenic global warming when they support nuclear power.

Islamic Jihad has the right idea; we should murder everyone as Stalin and Mao did---then there won't be any first world industrialists around to "pollute" the environment !