> They can't … afford heating when "carbon taxed"

You should be less certain about this: proposals going back decades had this working as a rebate mechanism — take the total collected, divide it by the number of citizens, and send them a check. The idea is that if you hit people with the cost up front they'll be incentivized to use less because they see the true cost of their decisions up front and if you use less energy you'll be getting free money from the people who use more.

It's also important to remember that in almost every country energy usage scales with income so this is less regressive than it might seem — poor people aren't commuting to work in Escalades or heating their 4,000 square foot houses to 75℉. See point number five here:

https://climate.mit.edu/posts/five-myths-about-carbon-pricin...

> And there has never been a scientific consensus.

There has been a consensus among qualified scientists since roughly 1980, and the predictions climate scientists were making that decade have held up quite well. For example, the first IPCC report from 1990 had estimates which were accurate:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2012/12/ipccs-climate-projec...

Similarly, Dr. James Hansen (director of NASA's Goddard Institute) testified before Congress based on his 1988 study predicting global warming and his numbers were very close to what we saw over the subsequent 3 decades:

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97...

If you believe that “ice age” talk was real, remember that the source of that was a couple of speculative papers which were never widely accepted and were refuted by the late 1970s. Here's what the National Academy of Sciences had to say in 1979:

> We believe, therefore, that the equilibrium surface global warming due to doubled CO2 will be in the range 1.5°C to 4.5°C, with the most probable value near 3°C.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2016/06/that-70s-myth-did-cl...

(Note that in both of the previous two cases there's a confound because some conservation efforts and especially the Montreal Protocol were effective enough to shift us to the lower end of those ranges. We do have the power to stop this.)

> Freeman Dyson, for example, which died in 2021, was the last remaining physicist from developing QED, a physicist I respect much more than the pop science scientists, thought the climate change religion is misguided and even called them religion.

Freeman Dyson was smart but he had no training or expertise in climate science — he even admitted that his position was largely emotional. Given that the people he was attacking made testable predictions which turned out to be correct, it's a regrettable tarnish on his legacy that he embarrassed himself acting unscientifically but it's hardly uncommon for famous elder scientists to start commenting well outside their area of expertise and expecting normal scientific standards not to apply to them.

> My objections to the global warming propaganda are not so much over the technical facts, about which I do not know much, but it’s rather against the way those people behave and the kind of intolerance to criticism that a lot of them have. I think that’s what upsets me.

https://web.archive.org/web/20090608114821/http://www.e360.y...