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Thanks Mike, I'm interested in promoting the idea of a carbon budget - a limited amount of carbon that can be added to the atmosphere as CO2 - but I'd qualify it by taking into account the greenhouse forcing of other greenhouse gases, especially methane, so there'd be an even tighter budget. The original carbon budget idea comes from the Potsdam Institute. The tar sands article refers to the carbon budget idea thus: [quote] Over 1 billion tons of equivalent CO2 emissions is a substantial chunk of emissions. We recently discussed /The Critical Decade/ report produced by the Climate Commission established by the Australian government. Their report concluded <http://www.skepticalscience.com/the-critical-decade-part-3-emissions-reductions.html> that humanity can emit not more than 1 trillion tonnes of CO2 between 2000 and 2050 to have a probability of about 75% of limiting temperature rise to 2°C or less. According to the latest data <http://www.skepticalscience.com/iea-co2-emissions-update-2010.html>, between 2000 and 2010 we emitted approximately 300 billion tons of CO2, so after 20% of the allotted timeframe, we're already over 30% of the way through the allotted emissions. [end quote] The implications are enormous, if you are an investor in fossil fuels - or your pension provider is - because only about 20% of the reserves are usable! Read about it here: http://priceofoil.org/2011/07/13/what-if-the-carbon-bubble-bursts/ It makes tar sands seem even more luny! Especially when they cost so much carbon in the well-to-tank process. Cheers, John --- On 23/08/2011 18:44, Mike Maybury wrote: > > Not everyone will want to protest about this, but at least they are > protesting in an ethical way. > Viiolent protests seem to do more harm than good. > http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/aug/23/tar-sands-keystone-xl-climate > Best wishes, > Mike >