Do or die...

David, could you clarify that do or die statement please.

While we should not dispute that carbon emmisions are contributing to the problem we need to connect the dots with other activities that have also contributed harmful effects. Below the surface of climate change are still unanswered questions. Human impact on lanscapes could be as big or bigger contributors to climate change. While emmisions are harmful, they may be but a drop in the bucket compared to urbanization and agricultural development. Dams, water diversion, and overdevelopment have caused serious damage to natural cycles including how nutrients find there way to the sea. Most of the worlds large rivers now deposit more chemicals than needed nutrients and damage can now be seen in places like the great barrier reef, and the decline of fish stocks worldwide. Also the rising level of toxins in the sediments and wildlife that inhabit these once diverse and importnat delta environments. While nations debate allowable catch and farms turn into factories, we are not promoting an environment for these over taxed systems to recover from the abuse. It has been said that the worlds 5,000 or so dams may be as big a factor in climate change as carbon emmisions. Clearly human development must alter it's path if we are to lower our collective foot print. Carbon credits sound like something an acountant dreamed up while he was daydreaming about becoming a lion tamer...

Debits and Credits

Debits and credits? Doing the math, when it comes to our survival, is in my opinion ridiculous. Doing what is right, as far as polluting goes, shouldn't require a PHD or a super computer.
The only two obstacles standing in humanity's way are politics and monetary greed.
Doing some research on this I ran into a little story which has huge repercussions.

BEIJING-- China's attempts to project a new "green" image suffered a serious blow yesterday when it was revealed that an attempt to estimate the environmental cost of its runaway economic growth has been put on HOLD INDEFINITELY. Scientists given the task of making the calculations said the project had been killed off by political opposition.

You see one of the most important disciplines taught in China is Math, and the numbers didn't add up as you can see.
Politics and greed,,Need I say more?

Jim Van Rassel
604-328-5398

Club of Rome

You asked me to clarify the 'do or die' statement. I'm noting that the scientific consensus is that if greenhouse gas-driven global warming continues at its current rate, the result will be an acceleration of global warming's effects. The challenge, as I read the reports, is to curtail emissions -- and any other contributors to global warming under human control -- as fast as possible. In which case, why would you encourage citizens to invest in 'carbon credits' that underwrite a forest industry that is wastefully ADDING to emissions rather than planting more trees than it harvests, and turning what trees it does harvest into materials that store carbon? Hope that helps.

A ponsie scheme

Carbon credits and trading of carbon credits must e one of the greatest ponsie schemes ever created. Good God, anyone with a modicum of intelligence can see how easy it would be to fiddle these.

If you want to reduce carbon emissions, you must stop using oil. Simple old chums. All this nonsense of trading carbon credits will help no one except the masses of bureaucrats needed to run such an operation.

Want to cut carbon emissions? Drive less; eat less; stop buying Mickey D's; demand a proper regional transit system from your politicians, etc.

Why am I not holding my breath for any real change?

What is a Micky D?

Just so I don't accidentally buy one, Grumpy.

As Usual

As usual the whiners and blamers spout their standard fare.

Try making it part of the solution.

That being said there are numerous ways to approach the solution that will help but tradeable or saleable carbon credits are not and should not be among them. Just plain smoke and mirrors.

If you have an industry with high energy consumption give it a better incentive in the form of tax breaks or research grants to reduce it's consumption. At the same time protect these industries against unfair competition from companies that do participate in carbon trading.

Inertia

The snowball of western civilization has been rolling down the mountain, gathering size (and further momentum) for a considerable time now. Asking it to stop, especially of its own accord, is almost laughable.

As a species, our forte has been to find strategies and behaviors that improve our short-term survival at the expense of EVERYTHING ELSE, including our own future. Abandoning one's own strategic advantage is the last action to expect of any competitor (species or otherwise).

It's difficult to imagine ANY proposal put forward by anti-"girlyman" Schwarzenegger and our own Gordo that wouldn't fall right into the business-as-usual formats that have ruled our societies since their inceptions.

If there are trees to cut, we'll cut them. If we can get away with waste, however monumental, we'll waste. If so-called "free" markets can be unleashed with all their objective power, to save the planet AND MAKE MONEY at the same time, we'll buy in. Besides, there are suckers born every minute, ain't that so??

Good luck to us all.

Au contraire

Tax breaks and research grants got us here they won't solve the problem - in fact, the masters of the universe will just find more ways to fiddle the system and feed the bottom line. What's needed is exactly the opposite - tax the polluters until they can't afford to pollute anymore and use the proceeds (until they cry uncle and get out of business or get their act in order) to build reliable mass transit and affordable housing close to where people work.

How anyone thinks carbon credits and economic flim-flam will solve these problems just hasn't been paying attention. China is one of the main exhibits for the prosecution – businesses there are more than prepared to put lead paint on children’s toys and to sweeten medicine and toothpaste with antifreeze…don’t look for any leadership from China…Oh and India’s supposed ‘green revolution’ – better have another close look at that too my friend.

If anyone tells you they're going to turn green practices into more profits for their shareholders, it's time to check your wallet. This is going to cost a lot of money and we’re all going to have to take a hit if we want to survive. Oh, and about Gordon’s friend Arnold, don’t listen to anyone with more than 4 ‘Hummers’ either.

Just Greed - that's all that's necessary

As long as the kind of accounting procedures and management attitudes that get all kinds of businesses in trouble now are the rule and not the exception, there is absolutely no reason to believe that any measures of performance provided by the firms involved will be accurate and truthful.

Consequently, the necessity for an army of independent government appointed monitors.

We can't rely on the beef industry to police food inspections; the poultry industry not to take advantage of cruelty laws, the car industry to produce safe vehicles...in fact, you can't rely on commerce to do anything BUT cheat and cut corners. Therefore, tax the polluters and keep taxing them until they clean up their act. Incentives are simply a way for management to skim the cream off the top.

They won't work and in fact will simply make things worse. The coming crisis is the moral equivalent of war and must be fought accordingly.

I trust you’re following the mortgage meltdown in the United States and are aware of the facts surrounding the extension of the crisis into ordinary mortgages and not just the sub-prime category.

If you give more "tax

If you give more "tax incentives" to the forest industry, they'll just account it as bigger profits. I live in the midst of this devastation and can see what's going on.

What nobody mentions is that all this worldwide devastation is caused by the deregulated money creation powers of banks.

That imaginary, junk money, created from the air, demands conversion into resources, transferring the responsibility of maintaining its perceived value on the public, with the governments lying on their backs, begging the masters of the world to scratch their bellies.

The coming SPP summit will be the prime example of governments handing over democracy into the hands of big business fascism.

When banks were deregulated, money became a licence to control energy, issued by a special interest sector for its own benefit.

Until this power is removed and taken back under strict, democratic control, with full accountability to the public, the situation will only worsen, because every day more of this licence is "created" to destroy Earth.

Ed Deak.

It's really simple people.

No pain, no gain.

If you cannot show the results you don't get the break. Nothing complicated about it. If your competition gets results and you don't too bad.

That being said if the competitions process can be licensed it must be made available for a price of course.

These tax breaks can cover reductions in greenhouse gases and/or a reduction in energy consumption.

These changes are going to have a cost no matter which way they are they are done. I think you can still catch more flies with honey though?

Clarity

Thanks for the clarification David Beers. I think we're saying the same thing, but I will also add, as I have before, that the term global warming is one that ought to be redefined. I like climate change. Or environmental change, or better still ECOLOGICAL COLLAPSE! Global warming and carbon emissions now walk hand in hand forever married in the public eye. Just like progress = growth, and we vote, ergo we live in a democracy. It's hard enough to get issues like this in front of the MSM, and then they only want the visuals of polar bears and melting glaciers crashing into the ocean. As with most issues you get to see the symptoms not the illness or the problem. Tying carbon emissions to the solution of glogal warming will not solve the problem. In some cases in will worsen with the manufacture of ethanol from corn. This translates to less food to eat but fortunately only for those who can't afford delicious farm fresh salmon....

Birch sums it up nicely. We don't plan for the future. When you fail to plan... you plan to fail. EOFS. So while not expected, it would be ..."refreshing" to see some truth in the media. Old fashioned journalism, facts and then opinions for and against. Fact 1: Carbon emissions are not the driving force behind climate change and global warming. They are a factor and the rest of the story needs to be told. We need to understand that this obvious challenge to man is more attributed to our overdevelopment, building in flood plains, below sea level and then expecting not to move ever again. By altering the natural flow of water we change the ecology that we depend on. I'm also talking about the scale of global development as it sits today, not 500 years ago when you could just sail away and discover a new continent. We're out of room to run. We need to define sustainability and put a number to it, Human numbers, at a reasonable level of comfort and commerce. The fact it's getting warmer is a problem because it changes our ecomomy. It will mean mass evacuation of low lying area's. It will cost money! So when will this aharp as a tack type accountants start to admit that there is no such thing as economy without ecology. Those are two things that do walk hand in hand. Right now they're strolling arm and arm, over on extinction alley... Fact 2: We passed sustainable for this type of economic behavior almost 100 years ago. Fact 3: Collapse will happen only the timeline is TBA.

Now if these facts were taught in school, along with Ed'd economics, then maybe we'd start to see a change in behavior. But as my buddy G West, has said so many times before, you can forget any leadership from big business or government. So might as well park your tax incentive idea's along with your carbon credits style solutions. We want the truth! Can we handle the truth?

Eliminate GST on new cars

From the glob & mire

Baloney

Just more Neil Reynolds Pro-business bumpf. Exactly the opposite of what should happen - double the GST on all cars that get poorer than 6 litres/100 km and if that doesn't change peoples' buying choices double it again.

You think the people driving the old clunkers are doing it to save the GST? Give me a break - the working and the working poor can't afford new vehicles - they can barely afford the ones they have now.

Eliminate accelerated depreciation on vehicles while you're at it and don't allow lease payments as business expenses and then you'd be doing something to get gas guzzlers and wasteful drivers off the roads.

Pandering to business and commercial interests has gotten us into the mess - continuing to do it won't help get the country and the environment out of it.

Time to wake up and place responsibility where it belongs.

We could do a lot of things.

Like make it so everyone has to walk to work. That'll put the responsibility where it belongs as well.

BTW What useful proposals do you have for all the extra money you have the government collecting? And further, how do you think they will waste it?

Walking to work

Walking to work is an excellent idea. So is the revolutionary concept of affordable communities and small, local businesses.

Working together with a government that cared for change and not its friends on Howe Street and in Pt Grey a lot could still be done.

Soon though, especially given the attitudes of a lot of people who don't realize they are victims too, it will be too late.

Affordable communities.

G West

I live in an 'affordable community' of single family homes on nice sized lots. You won't catch me moving in to some rabbit warren of a community just so I can walk to work, not in this lifetime anyhow.

I'm not surprised

Your more or less complete lack of understanding of the magnitude of the real problems you 'think' can be solved by tax effects carrots shows it.

And your characterization of a livable community for the people who frequently can't afford to pay rent for decent accommodation as a 'rabbit warren' speaks volumes about your disconnect from a reality the majority of people and about 80% of today’s young families actually contend with.

You might try to show a little empathy for those who aren't as fortunate to live as 'affordably' as you are apparently able to do: Often times accidents of birth and geography separate people in ways that tend to disguise our shared humanity.

In fact, that's precisely what's wrong with the Campbell Government's approach.

Rabbit warrens

G West

So you admit that all you are concerned with is low income 'affordable communities'. I'm afraid I wasn't referring to them at all. Any apartment building, condo, etc. is a rabbit warren in my opinion.

Did you not see the 80% reference

Did you not see the 80%?

Your attitude toward most of your fellow human beings - based on your own words - is, I'm afraid, hard to call anything but sad.

If you don't realize that 80% of the population includes an enormous chunk (if not all) of the so-called middle class and that my remarks have never just addressed so called 'low income' people then you haven't been reading very carefully.

I suggest you do that instead of trying to drop bon mots and other snide remarks into conversations and debates you have obviously made no sincere attempt to understand.

Have you ever wondered why so many of your interlocutors respond with animosity to your 'contributions'?

It is hardly surprising that someone with no better fortune than to be forced to live in accommodation you find to be only appropriate as a home for rabbits might be angered by your purblindness and apparent contempt for the lives and problems hopes and dreams of others.

Especially since the proceeds of this government's irresponsibility inures to a few friends and foreign investors rather than the citizens of the province.

You, by your own words, are condemned as a believer in the 'I'm all right Jack' school of political analysis practiced at the Fraser Institute and by Neil Reynolds and Marcus Gee at the Globe and Mail, among other places. I can think of several sites where you'd be right at home. Here, sadly, you are doomed to be the object of derision – not all of it as polite and carefully crafted as I’ve tried to make this.