Yes there is a lot of posturing by politicians. I liked "Ozone Al" when he
was brash enough to even talk in public about the issues of human induced
climate change. During the US elections I was reading the results of exit
polls in Oregon and the majority who voted for Bush were only concerned
about 'taxes', actually it was startling because 90 % of the person who
voted for Bush wanted only lower taxes.
Here in Canada the CIBC [Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce] actually warned
Canadians indirectly not to vote for a political party that will cut taxes
heavily since this would create 'hyper-inflation' and then the central bank
would have to raise interest rates by hundreds of basis points and this
would cause a serious recession and deficit budgets at the Federal and
Provincial level.
Neoconservatism often does not make an rational sense unless 'fraud',
'luxury consumption' and so on make sense.
Releasing money into the economy obviously would become a dis-incentive to
reduce consumption of fossil fuels. So the impression, at least from and
environmentally ethical stance, is that liberal taxation policies which
attempt to constrain consumption indirectly by paying off the Federal debts
and providing incentives for investors to invest in 'clean energy'
technologies is really much more fulfilling of the national aspirations of
the most developed nations. Relatively high cost fossil fuels is itself an
incentive for the consumer to reduce consumption of gas, coal, and oil. So
the Federal governments need to adjust their priorities now rather than
later in the decade when supplies become even tighter.
The Bush proposal to open up new reserves in the Arctic are especially
worrisome. The fragility of the Arctic to this kind of development could
really impact the ecology for a long time, and what is that supply amount
to? About 1 % of the current daily useage of oil. The largest industrial
project in the world is the Alberta tar sands. This project extracts oil out
of 'oil sands' and produces from one sight about 600,000 barrels per day.
Currently there is estimate to be in reserve at least 1 thousand years of
natural gas, and maybe more in coal reserves here in North America. It was
estimated that if half of all geological coal, gas and oil were consumed
that the C02 concentration in the troposphere would increase by 300 times,
and that would be enough to melt all the ice in the Antarctic, and the sea
would rise by over 200 meters. That would easily flood about 60 million
hectares of land in the US. There would be no winter in the Arctic.
chao,
john foster
At 01:44 PM 11/22/00 EST, [log in to unmask] wrote:
> The better one was on the 20th, the OA group and Greenpeace
>from the US-- had students walking around wearing bags
>over their head. (bags of shame) And the best one of all is the main part of
>
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