Why a carbon tax when carbon dioxide isn't a pollutant?
This red herring of a strawman argument has been debunked countless times. Please don't ever use it in a serious debate, because it makes you look like an infantile moron...
The periods of greatest bio-diversity on the planet were also the periods of greatest carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere.
That was quite literally millions of years ago, when life on this planet was adapted to high CO2 levels. Also, when the energy output of our sun was markedly lower than it is today.
There has been no conclusive proof that an increase in carbon dioxide is in any way harmful to life on earth.
Nonsense. Simple example why: pull a hose from the exhaust pipe of an ICE car to the air intake of the engine. What happens?
Anyhow, greenhouse gas properties of CO2 are more than well established in any way you care to mention. There's also ocean acidification to consider.
And when the proponents of AGW use "consensus" as their proof, that raises a lot of red flags.
This ludicrous nonsense has also been debunked countless times. You got hit on the head recently, or what the hell happened to you?
Consensus is built upon quite literally mountains of peer-reviewed research. That's why they call it "science", laddie!
Petrol is a vastly more efficient storage medium for energy than any battery in existence.
Yeah, so what? Petrol will also run out at some point. Petrol engines are inefficient, heavy, noisy, complex and expensive, maintenance-heavy, and polluting. The point is to GET AWAY from them, not find ridiculously contorted reasons to cling onto them.
Btw, turbines are costly, extremely noisy, hot-running, polluting and inefficient. You really don't want them as a powerplant in a car. The only reason they're used at all is that they're very light compared to their power output and comparatively reliable/low maintenance to any other alternative - piston engine would be the only one, realistically, as the idea of nuclear reactor-powered aircraft never really caught on, for whatever ridiculous reason...
Btw, very high-power piston engines were abandoned in the 1950s due to them being unreliable, thirsty and incredibly heavy for their power output.
The political backlash means that R&D into an ICE driven electric vehicle isn't encouraged.
It's not encouraged because it would be stupid. Again, the point is to get rid of burning petroleum, not invent more ways to continue doing it.
In many ways similar to how R&D into hydrogen powered vehicles are currently Politically discouraged.
I'm unaware of any such political discouragement. Anyway, hydrogen is not much of an improvement on energy density compared to batteries (if at all really), and also rather volatile. Fuelling millions of vehicles daily with a wildly explosive gas would be problematic from a safety point of view, as would distributing hydrogen across entire nations for the sake of powering automobiles be. Trrrsts for example could hijack a hydrogen tanker truck and effectively turn it into a very large bomb on wheels. Armed escorts for all transports would be financially unfeasible, as would armed guards at all gas stations be to prevent them getting blown up.
But the currently administration will not tolerate anything except R&D into full EV.
Citation Needed...
Btw, tinfoil hat alert here, but you really don't need Obama's permission to further research into whatever kind of automotive fuel you care to choose.
Well, for antimatter, you might. I dunno. But other than that...
