I’m sure that if they thought there was money in it, they would be at the front of the pack.
The problem is that both Houses of Parliament operate to a large extent under rules that were antiquated in 1867, much less almost 150 years later. While this can (usually) be justified for legislation and other procedures in debates and committees, it is indefensible for the administrative side of running Parliament. The system needs to be updated to be open and accountable, with clear directives and enforcement for anything open to abuse. I don’t see any problem with doing this in a way that still maintains the independence of the Commons and the Senate and the individual members.
Because burning fossil fuels is part of the problem, not part of the solution, that’s why not.
And count me firmly in the camp that says we don’t have another 50 years, let alone 100. 2047 is the most recent prediction for the tipping point.
I’m in the camp that thinks we should spend a ton of money on carbon reclamation research. If we can pull it out of the sky faster and better than trees, then coupled with synthetic gasoline, we have a completed carbon cycle to guide us for centuries. Chances are it will still make fuel prohibitively expensive in our lifetimes, but it would buy us time to make the infrastructure changes necessary.
Oh, for crying in my sink - here’s the link I meant to attach - Scientists identify 2047 as global climate change tipping point. (Though if any of you want to donate to Movember through the Canadian Opera Company’s Movember team, please do!)
Yeah, OK, sure. I’m not convinced of the chicken little predictions, but even if I was we have no other options right now. There are no other options. What do you propose we do? What’s the immediate solution? There aren’t any. So, we continue to rely on fossil fuels, because that’s all there is.
Do you fly on airplanes, drive a car, use plastic, take public transportation, eat food and buy products from other regions and countries? As much as I’d like to believe that we should just stop pumping oil out of the ground, we can’t. In the short term we might be able to switch to a slightly more environmentally friendly natural gas alternative, but of course the anti-fracking crowd hates that option too.
It’s unbelievable to me how people who obviously participate in modern society and all of its benefits are totally against oil and natural gas production. Do you know what would happen to our way of life if we put a moratorium of fossil fuels? It would be completely and absolutely disastrous. Billions of people would die within decades.
We are slowly making inroads on all of this, but that’s all we can do. There’s no magic solution in the short term. So build the pipelines, pump the oil, frack the gas and keep looking into alternative energy in the meantime.
So, lets shutdown local (to Canada) production so that the Saudis can benefit instead of us. Makes perfect sense.
He’s the second in rank within the civii service. That doesn’t mean he has any direct authority over Senators. A civil servant has only the power that the members of the Parliament give to him.
What power does the Clerk of the Senate have over the Senators? Note that the link says he is “accountable to the Senate.”
There was a job posting awhile ago for one of the clerks whose job it is to scrutinise Senate expenses:
Senate financial clerk job posting comes with a warning about ‘unpleasant interactions’
Yes, though I can’t help thinking that in the short term, reforestation and urban agriculture are more realistic stopgap measures. Every bit of land space that we can get something growing contributes to the task of converting CO2 to oxygen.
And when I see images like this, I realize how painful far behind we are in developing green technologies. It’s one of the hopes I hold out over the undefined EU/Canada free trade deal - because Europe is so much further ahead than we are, we could end up benefiting from their advancement.
Or we could keep burning fossil fuels and desertify the prairies …
A “theory” doesn’t have a control group. An experiment has a control group. So we aren’t off to a great start here on what constitutes science, because you’re using terms of art in ways that don’t make any sense.
The funny part here is that in the course of this thread we now have a vaguely cited claim that the year 2047 is a tipping point in climate change. Let me ask you this; is that a verifiable claim? Is there a control group associated with any experiment that could possibly exist to support this theory? And what happens if it’s wrong, and there is no tipping point in 2047, or the tipping point happens in 2042? ** Will that mean physics and chemistry aren’t sciences?**
Or would it mean that science is - you know - hard?
Of course there’s also the second point; science is always misreported by the media. Anything you read about “what economists say” in the media is probably wrong and at the very least simplified to the point of incoherence. Or any other scientist… indeed,the “Climate change tipping point by 2047” is absolutely not what those scientists are saying; they predict a range of climate change tipping points from 2020 to 2071, with 2047 merely being a rough average. The range of years makes it a completely different story, actually increasing the urgency of the findings, but it’s easier to just put “2047” in the headline.
While this is technically true, consider for a moment the potential CO2 usage in trying to use “every bit of land space” to grow something. You’re talking about the expenditure of large amounts of energy, and therefore carbon, to cart around plants, soil, tools, water, and the like, in order to increase the amount of green growing things by a percentage that is almost absurdly small. It’s entirely possible you’d burn more carbon that you’d extract, and as a stopgap measure it’s nothing.
Suppose we were to embark on a place to cover 25% of the City of Toronto in trees and other significant amount of carbon-consuming foliage. That would be a HUGE undertaking, one involving the burning of a lot of carbon; landscaper’s trucks don’t run on unicorn dust. And at the end of that you would have planted 160 square kilometres of new trees - you aren’t any further ahead in the short term if you take mature trees from elsewhere - so there is little short term effect, and in the long run you’d increased Canada’s total amount of green growing things by, let’s see… .002% or so.
If we want to do something about pollution, which is what CO2 emissions are, there is a proven, absolutely workable solution; tax the pollution. (And get realistic about the best alternative, which is nuclear energy.)
Absolutely. Large-scale polluters are all industrial and such, and they’ll adopt alternate energy sources and the like when it improves their bottom line and not a moment before. A carbon tax (or however else one might implement this sort of thing) will make energy conservation/efficiency/etc improve the bottom line sooner rather than later.
Most household energy use will change when it makes economic sense as well.
While one can’t rely on the invisible hand of the market to improve energy usage so long as long-term and external costs of pollution aren’t borne by energy users, one can impose those costs through taxation and then the market absolutely will find the best solution, and faster than government mandates to do x, y, or z.
This is where I start to get hives - the people who want us all to stop driving today also don’t want us using nuclear energy. I think we should be using the hell out of nuclear energy - we should be working on these technologies and developing them and making them safer and cleaner all the time, instead of being afraid of them. I believe that there will come a time when we need nuclear energy, and we’re going to be kicking ourselves for wasting decades of development time.
Then they pass the costs on to consumers and we all go to Walmart and buy cheap Chinese crap from a country that doesn’t give a shit about global warming. I’m not saying passing the costs on is a bad thing, but it is one reason why manufacturers don’t want to pay a carbon tax and governments are reluctant to impose one.
This is another aspect of the arguments I don’t understand; we set our house thermostat to a lower temperature, and it saves us money. We walk instead of taking the car a lot, and it saves us money. We live in a smaller house, closer in, and it saves us money. We take our bottles back, and get money back from them. Is the disconnect people are still having that they just don’t think about these things in these terms?
Well, nobody wants to pay taxes. I don’t like paying taxes. I wish everything was free. That’d be great.
But having government impose taxes to make up for the true cost of an externality is quite literally one of the things we have governments FOR. And there’s nothing stopping us from passing more favourable trade deals with places that will go along with taxing carbon usage - like, you know, the EU,m with whom we just passed a free trade agreement that the people who don’t like pollution are so commonly and bizarrely scared of.
Not at all.
What it is, simply put, is that people respond to incentives in accordance with the size of the incentive. Turning your thermostat down does save you money, but it doesn’t save you a LOT of money. Walking instead of taking your car saves you money, but not that much, and it costs you time.
If you want more people turning their thermostat down, make it worth more money. If turning the heat down is worth a $12 saving a month some people will choose to save that and some won’t. Make it worth $24 and more people will turn the thermostat down. There is a point at which the savings is too low for someone to give up the utility of having a nice, toasty house. There’s also a point at which it isn’t even worth the bother. I went out of my way to buy a fuel efficient car because I drive a great deal for my job and so the difference between driving a fuel efficient car and a gas guzzler is a LOT of money. I don’t really worry when my AC is or isn’t on because I live in a small place and the difference in my bill is smaller than my love of having a cool home in the summer.
The classic example of this is Ontario, where people were for years quite literally paid to use electricity. So of course, conservation efforts were never as effective as they should have been, because electricity was too cheap. (This has been fixed, maybe; prices are higher but I’m not sure if they’re yet high enough.) Allow the prices to reflect actual cost and people will conserve electricity.
High electricity rates are already driving manufacturers out of Ontario. A carbon tax would be the nail in the coffin for manufacturing in Ontario. All to solve a problem that may not even exist.
That depends entirely on how it’s implemented. If you impose a carbon tax but decrease, say, income tax by an amount commensurate with the total collected in carbon tax, then everyone will still pay roughly the same amount in taxes but their incentive structure will be modified to prefer cutting down on carbon emissions.
A carbon tax is the best way to put a value on clean air - I’m all for it!
Nuclear power is the cleanest, most environmentally friendly source there is, until something goes wrong, and then it’s the dirtiest. I don’t want governments building nuke plants without extreme long range safeguards.
No matter what your politics, I’m kind of glad that we in Canada have a head of government who isn’t afraid to do this:
Stephen Harper performs in rare nightclub gig following convention speech in Calgary.
Somehow, I just cannot imagine Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin, or David Cameron doing the same.