Carbon tax whining??

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Solar Max
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Jason Jiménez wrote:I think this quote best applies to what you've said:

"By the skillful and sustained use of propaganda, one can make a people see even heaven as hell or an extremely wretched life as paradise." - Adolf Hitler
Very appropriate, Lion 60. If ones hears something often enough, it becomes the truth. Pity that we as a society choose to have others form our opinions for us, rather than investigate the world for ourselves.
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I've discovered the BEST possible way to help with this Carbon tax and Global Warming <TM> (or is that Climate change <patent pending>).

We can scratch the Carbon tax altogether with my new plan.

So the first step. Stop all road construction. We want people to drive less, so why make more roads for them to travel on or to allow for more cars. It seems kind of hypocritical to allow road construction to go on to build new roads and bigger roadways, when we really want to reduce the number of drivers on the road. So quit building new roads and put the money that would be saved into whatever environmental program is the end-all be-all this week.

Second step. No more money for road maintenance. Similar concept to the one above. We want people off the roads, so make it such that the roads are not where people want to be anymore. Why put money into improving and maintaining the roads, when the goal is to reduce the number of people using them? This goes for everything. No need to work on that Sea to Sky highway, no sense paying for plowing of the roads in winter (if we see winter again with Global Warming<tm>), save money and don't bother fixing potholes (although with less plowing in the winter, there should be less potholes - initially). Take the money that would be saved from not doing anything to the existing roadways and put into the environmental program du jour. We could put more money through that idea alone into environmental programs than the Carbon tax quite quickly!

Third step. Cut back on medical programs. Do away with universal healthcare. If man is the #1 cause of the carbon, it's quite simple - Reduce the # of people. Let more people get sick and die. To quote Ebenezer Scrooge "...cut down on the surplus population." Not only that, this simple measure could help the government with the #1 complaint of most Canadians - if people aren't expecting to get medical help, then they can't complain when there aren't enough Doctors or when beds have to close in the hospitals. Take the savings there and put it into environmental programs as well. You get twice the benefit - the savings of money not being spent on medical items, and a reduction in the number of causers of Carbon emittance (at least according to Gore and Suzuki, whereas science has other ideas). Heck you could even take it one step more morbid - plant a tree everytime someone dies.

Fourth step. No more research grants. We have to reduce carbon emissions. Everyone knows it. It's a done deal. End of discussion. It's bad and we are the cause of it. No questions asked. So we don't need to research it or look into it further, so why bother with any other monies being put into said research. Unless it is research on how to reduce the current levels of carbon in the atmosphere, the research is useless and meaningless, so don't put money into it.

I'm sure we can come up with more wonderful ideas to help put money towards the all important end to Global Warming<tm> if we just put our minds to it! And we don't need no stinking Carbon Tax to do it!
Now that I don't live in Quesnel do I need to change my handle??
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Soundy
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^Ahahahaha! Between this and jcalhoun's contribution to the gameday-presentation thread, this is a night of epic rants!
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Jason Jiménez
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http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news ... f0ca61&p=2

Oil shortage will become a local issue
Barbara Yaffe, Vancouver Sun
Published: Saturday, July 12, 2008

Here are a few excerpts that I think are worth debating:

Higher shipping costs will force globalized jobs to return to North America.

While this might be true, I see it differently. Higher shipping costs will be passed on to consumers to offset high shipping costs along with every other aspect that will affect businesses – production, resources, operating costs labor, etc. The only way to offset the offsetting…would be to raise wages, but that would prove difficult if it costs too much for everything else.
Also, I’m willing to bet that if a company decided to move its operations overseas, it was due to the cost-effectiveness that was proposed in the company’s business model, which accounted for shipping costs. Notwithstanding higher shipping costs, which I argue would be passed onto consumers, if it costs less to operate and do business in general overseas in addition to lower tax burdens, the author’s argument would be hard to make. Lets say that the author’s argument is a valid one, the underlying reason of cutting labor costs would inadvertently be raised once again if moved back into North America where organized labor unions wouldn’t allow for slave wage earnings the way that some countries allow. It would essentially be a struggle between our way of life and profit margins, imo.

Companies, colleges and governments will move to four-day work weeks to save energy. Utah has just announced such a regime for state employees.
Also south of the border, traffic dropped by more than two per cent in the first quarter of 2008. In Canada, fuel consumption between May 2007 and 2008 dropped by three per cent, suggesting traffic must be down here too.


I don’t know about Canada, but I’m almost certain that less traffic in the States is due to more roads and highways being built easing congested roadways.

Cities will be less polluted, leading to health benefits. Wasteful fuel use will be reduced; drivers will junk their SUVs. Car insurance rates will decline by 10 to 15 per cent. Car accident deaths are expected to drop by one third annually.

I see this point as well as the following point as huge overgeneralizations. Even if we took every car off of the road, major urban centers would remain polluted, perhaps not in terms of air quality, but polluted nonetheless. Since this won’t happen anytime soon, we’d still continue to use oil by-products and continue to consume oil-based goods. Food, clothes, household items, you name it – it probably has its origin from oil. As for car accidents bit, it's too premature to forecast the driving abilities of motorists. Since the author overgeneralizes, I will too. If things went as doom and gloom as forecasted, people might consider drinking alcohol on a regular basis to ease the pain at the pump, their wallets and at home. We're all aware of the dangers of drinking and driving...

Urban sprawl will be curtailed. Police will walk the beat leading to potentially better community relations. More cycling and walking could reduce obesity.

While urban sprawl is allegedly linked to obesity in a peripheral sense, the global population is ever increasing and despite what some may think, land and resources have to be used in order to meet the demands of those that need them. There are only so many high-rises you can build. City/urban planners should reconsider their plans to allow for more cycling and walking routes.
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Soundy
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Jason Jiménez wrote:I don’t know about Canada, but I’m almost certain that less traffic in the States is due to more roads and highways being built easing congested roadways.
Interesting... if I may take things on a small tangent, this brings to mind one of the things that really bugs me about those who are opposing road-building projects like Gateway, and particularly the twinning of the Port Mann Bridge.

They like to spout, "If you build it, they will come - adding road capacity will just lead to more cars on the road, and thus more pollution." Alright, Buckwheat... what do you suppose will happen if they DON'T build it? Right: they will come anyway. And they will sit and idle, all the way back to 200th St. on a mildly-bad day... and sometime back to 176th all day, not just during the morning rush.

And I really don't understand the thinking that cars being able to move easily and quickly to their destinations is somehow more emissions-generating (they've been arguing this since long before "carbon footprint" was an accepted term) that those cars being stuck sitting idling for upwards of an hour solid. Sure, the higher you rev your engine, the more emissions you pump out... but 15 minutes to get from the 200th St. onramp into Burnaby is going to put a LOT less junk in the air than taking over an hour to cover the same distance.

And by the same token of "if you build it, they will come"... if you build it, they can also leave. Increasing freeway capacity out of town is not just about getting cars INTO the urban areas more efficiently, it's about allowing them to GET OUT of those areas more efficiently as well.

The one problem I have with the Hwy.1 expansion is that it doesn't go far enough: there's a lot of traffic there heading downtown, or into Vancouver City itself... yet the freeway just skirts the city limits. It doesn't do any good to funnel traffic through the suburbs faster if you're just going to jam them all up at a stop light, and then make them go through a dozen more lights in an attempt to get downtown.

Hwy.99 has the same problem: it's a (THE) MAJOR route from the border through to Whistler, and yet they again funnel all that traffic, not just down to a long series of stop lights and surface streets enroute to that destination (and others in between), but make it jog across from Oak to either Granville or Cambie before it can even get into downtown... and don't forget the traffic mess trying to get THROUGH downtown! And then of course, you get over the bridge, and you have to detour AGAIN just to get up the hill and via one of two different routes to get to the Upper Levels.

Taking the Second Narrows instead is hardly a suitable alternative, because it means an even more challenging and confusing re-routing along surface streets, most of it shared with heavy truck traffic to the port. If you're giving a US visitor directions to get from the border to Horseshoe Bay or through to Whistler, they'll have a hard enough time not getting lost if you tell them just to "follow Highway 99, and be warned that it can get pretty confusing", nevermind trying to route them off to Knight Street and then get them somehow from there over to the Second Narrows - NONE of these router offer a direct connection through the city!

Unfortunately, they'll never do what's really necessary: a freeway all the way through with Hwy. 99, either over or under downtown with limited-access ramps for those who actually need to GO downtown, connecting across to the Upper Levels highway... and ideally, another connecting Hwy. 1 through to, then over or under downtown as well, again with limited-access ramps into the core. As it stands, traffic DESTINED for downtown, and traffic just trying to get THROUGH downtown to somewhere past the other side of it, have to fight each other through several short blocks of thick car *and pedestrian* traffic, and everyone yet again sits and idles and spews crap into the air while not actually going anywhere.

[/rant]
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LFITQ
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Second step. No more money for road maintenance. Similar concept to the one above. We want people off the roads, so make it such that the roads are not where people want to be anymore. Why put money into improving and maintaining the roads, when the goal is to reduce the number of people using them? This goes for everything. No need to work on that Sea to Sky highway, no sense paying for plowing of the roads in winter (if we see winter again with Global Warming<tm>), save money and don't bother fixing potholes (although with less plowing in the winter, there should be less potholes - initially). Take the money that would be saved from not doing anything to the existing roadways and put into the environmental program du jour. We could put more money through that idea alone into environmental programs than the Carbon tax quite quickly!
hmmm and now with the problems on the Sea to Sky highway today .....
Now that I don't live in Quesnel do I need to change my handle??
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LFITQ wrote:
Second step. No more money for road maintenance. Similar concept to the one above. We want people off the roads, so make it such that the roads are not where people want to be anymore. Why put money into improving and maintaining the roads, when the goal is to reduce the number of people using them? This goes for everything. No need to work on that Sea to Sky highway, no sense paying for plowing of the roads in winter (if we see winter again with Global Warming<tm>), save money and don't bother fixing potholes (although with less plowing in the winter, there should be less potholes - initially). Take the money that would be saved from not doing anything to the existing roadways and put into the environmental program du jour. We could put more money through that idea alone into environmental programs than the Carbon tax quite quickly!
hmmm and now with the problems on the Sea to Sky highway today .....
One caller to the radio today (and there have been many - it's been the nearly-exclusive topic of discussion on CKNW *and* CBC all day) pointed out that in the 70s and 80s there used to be *regular* closures of the highway due to slides, washouts, and so on. These days, they're very rare... which to a degree makes them just seem that much worse when they do happen.

Another caller pointed out that a lot of blasting was done on those same bluffs in the 70s or 80s, and postulated that today's rockfall may have been exacerbated by fractures in the rock created back then... it's quite possible, since it's doubtful the engineering and preparation were done then to the extent they are today.

And as someone else pointed out (I think it was the mayor of Lillooet they were talking to), it's something that's to be expected with a road through that kind of terrain - no matter what you do, Mother Nature still gets the last word.

While I think it's a good thing that the highway is getting necessary upgrades, though, I think it would have been a more prudent plan to push through a different route, because no matter how well-engineered you make the road, you still only have the single "efficient" route in and out of the area (there's the Duffy Lake Road, but that's a REALLY long way around for, say, someone in Squamish, and even more susceptible to seasonal closures). A secondary "escape route" would have been a much better idea long-term.

For a fun exercise sometime, fire up Google Earth and follow the river valleys up from the top end of Indian Arm (Deep Cove), Pitt Lake, or Harrison Lake - all three make relatively direct passages to Sea-to-Sky county, and all the routes have existing logging roads that are passable in a truck. In fact, I have a friend who once did the Pemberton-Harrison trek in a *coff* '86 Dodge Daytona... wasn't much left of the car afterward, but he made it through ;) The top end of Harrison Lake to the bottom end of Lillooet Lake is barely 30 miles following the Lillooet River. The north end of Indian Arm empties a valley that takes you almost directly into Brackendale, on the north side of Squamish (25 miles, as the crow flies).

Suffice to say, there are plenty of alternative routes available that COULD have roads developed... or could have, a decade or so ago, before construction costs started spiraling ridiculously.
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LFITQ
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soundy wrote:While I think it's a good thing that the highway is getting necessary upgrades, though, I think it would have been a more prudent plan to push through a different route, because no matter how well-engineered you make the road, you still only have the single "efficient" route in and out of the area (there's the Duffy Lake Road, but that's a REALLY long way around for, say, someone in Squamish, and even more susceptible to seasonal closures). A secondary "escape route" would have been a much better idea long-term.
Having lived in Merritt during the construction of the Coquihalla Highway, one of the reasons given for the expenditure on that highway was because they believed the Canyon route wasn't going to be with us for much longer, and there was a secondary route required.
Now that I don't live in Quesnel do I need to change my handle??
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Hwy.1 through the Fraser Canyon "suffers" from a lot of the same kind of terrain that hampers progress on the Sea-to-Sky. A lot of it has been widened and improved over the years (just look at some of the old road segments that are bypassed by tunnels are now) but there are some sections that there's just no room to do anything with them (Jackass Mountain), where a significant detour would be required. On the bright side, the Canyon's geology seems to be significantly more stable than Howe Sound's, since there haven't been any major rockslides there in ages - at least none within my memory. Then again, it's a lot drier in that country, so maybe there's not as much damage to the rock from runoff and seeping water.

Of course, another advantage to building a new route "from scratch", is that you can design and build it better from the start, rather than having to continually slap band-aids on existing poor roads.
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Soundy wrote:One caller to the radio today (and there have been many - it's been the nearly-exclusive topic of discussion on CKNW *and* CBC all day) pointed out that in the 70s and 80s there used to be *regular* closures of the highway due to slides, washouts, and so on. These days, they're very rare... which to a degree makes them just seem that much worse when they do happen.
I agree that it was mostly Mother Nature's fault, but in Vaughn Palmer's column the other day he mentioned the options Victoria had for the Sea-to-Sky. One option was spend $1.7B to build some tunnels over the rough spots..of course one of the tunnels would've been where the slide was.

Campbell chose to slim that one down to $800M, and now we have the 5-day closure.

As long as the highway remains open during the Olympics that's all that really matters, IMO.
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MacNews wrote:
Soundy wrote:One caller to the radio today (and there have been many - it's been the nearly-exclusive topic of discussion on CKNW *and* CBC all day) pointed out that in the 70s and 80s there used to be *regular* closures of the highway due to slides, washouts, and so on. These days, they're very rare... which to a degree makes them just seem that much worse when they do happen.
I agree that it was mostly Mother Nature's fault, but in Vaughn Palmer's column the other day he mentioned the options Victoria had for the Sea-to-Sky. One option was spend $1.7B to build some tunnels over the rough spots..of course one of the tunnels would've been where the slide was.

Campbell chose to slim that one down to $800M, and now we have the 5-day closure.

As long as the highway remains open during the Olympics that's all that really matters, IMO.
Well to be fair, it's a fine line between "chose to" and "was forced to". $1.7B to $0.8B is less than half the cost, and even at $800M there are people who think it's too much money. If it comes down to a choice of either cutting it back to <$1B, or having it not happen at all...
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Ancient moss, insects found in Antarctica

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Mon Aug 4, 5:14 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Mosses once grew and insects crawled in what are now barren valleys in Antarctica, according to scientists who have recovered remains of life from that frozen continent. Fourteen million years ago the now lifeless valleys were tundra, similar to parts of Alaska, Canada and Siberia — cold but able to support life, researchers report.

Geoscientist Adam Lewis of North Dakota State University was studying the ice cover of the continent when he and co-workers came across the remains of moss on a valley floor.

"We knew we shouldn't expect to see something like that," Lewis said in a telephone interview.

The moss was essentially freeze dried, he said. Unlike fossils, where minerals replace soft materials, the moss tissues were still there, he said.

"The really cool thing is that all the details are still there," even though the plant has been dead for 14 million years. "These are actually the plant tissues themselves."

Lewis' findings are reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While some mosses have been found near the coast of Antarctica, as well as insects living on sea birds, this site is well inland.

Further study uncovered remains of tiny crustaceans known as ostracodes, small midges and beetles, and pollen from southern beech trees and pink plants.

"The existence of wet-based glaciers, proglacial lakes, tundra vegetation and insect remains all indicate that the climate of the western Olympus range ... was warmer and wetter that that of today" about 14 million years ago, the researchers report.

It's important to know that because it adds to the understanding of the Earth's climate system, Lewis explained.

For 50 million years the Earth has been cooling, he said. "As it cools it crosses thresholds. This is one, when Antarctica became permanently frozen and locked up."

"You have to understand where these thresholds are," he added, "Because, if human beings are unfortunate enough to push climate over one of these thresholds, it could be a total catastrophe."

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

___

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PNAS: http://www.pnas.org
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Lions4ever
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Then there's this angle:

http://www.alternet.org/environment/940 ... e_climate/

Maybe the carbon tax should be on cheeseburgers instead.
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Jason Jiménez wrote:Ancient moss, insects found in Antarctica

By RANDOLPH E. SCHMID, AP Science Writer
Mon Aug 4, 5:14 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Mosses once grew and insects crawled in what are now barren valleys in Antarctica, according to scientists who have recovered remains of life from that frozen continent. Fourteen million years ago the now lifeless valleys were tundra, similar to parts of Alaska, Canada and Siberia — cold but able to support life, researchers report.

Geoscientist Adam Lewis of North Dakota State University was studying the ice cover of the continent when he and co-workers came across the remains of moss on a valley floor.

"We knew we shouldn't expect to see something like that," Lewis said in a telephone interview.

The moss was essentially freeze dried, he said. Unlike fossils, where minerals replace soft materials, the moss tissues were still there, he said.

"The really cool thing is that all the details are still there," even though the plant has been dead for 14 million years. "These are actually the plant tissues themselves."

Lewis' findings are reported in Tuesday's edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

While some mosses have been found near the coast of Antarctica, as well as insects living on sea birds, this site is well inland.

Further study uncovered remains of tiny crustaceans known as ostracodes, small midges and beetles, and pollen from southern beech trees and pink plants.

"The existence of wet-based glaciers, proglacial lakes, tundra vegetation and insect remains all indicate that the climate of the western Olympus range ... was warmer and wetter that that of today" about 14 million years ago, the researchers report.

It's important to know that because it adds to the understanding of the Earth's climate system, Lewis explained.

For 50 million years the Earth has been cooling, he said. "As it cools it crosses thresholds. This is one, when Antarctica became permanently frozen and locked up."

"You have to understand where these thresholds are," he added, "Because, if human beings are unfortunate enough to push climate over one of these thresholds, it could be a total catastrophe."

The research was supported by the National Science Foundation.

___

On the Net:

PNAS: http://www.pnas.org

There was a discovery recently of a settlement further north in Greenland then ever before , dating back 1000 years . The place has an arctic climate now , yet it was hospital enough of a place for the vikings to live there for relatively long time .Then the " climate changed " again going back to a mini ice age and froze them out at approximately the year 1400 AD .
Fact is the climate has always been changing and will always keep doing so . I suspect distant future generations will be getting a good laugh at this generation's foolishness thinking they could control the climate.
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Hold the phone.

I have firm and solid evidence that we need to do something about the climate change in our world. There is no denying this evidence that I will now post before you all. I may even have to change my opinion on the carbon tax in light of this new evidence...

[youtube][/youtube]

It is really hard to believe! Quite shocking!
Now that I don't live in Quesnel do I need to change my handle??
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