Apolitical Staples

On the other hand:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20070108.COHUSTON08/TPStory/Business

That is as bad a push story I’ve seen in a while. Based on a poll by David “Ken Dryden win will the leadership” Herle’s Gandalf group. Did he ask his Liberal buddies on Bay Street?

No surprises. It is to be expected that if all jurisdictions are regulated under emissions cap-and-trade schemes, some economic activity will move to wherever emissions currently fall short of caps; and it’s point-blank obvious that some activity will move to any exempt jurisdictions. As mentioned in the article and attributed to Wurth, the solution is to tax imports (sufficiently punitively) to force compliance abroad or to effectively render the domestic activity competitive. All that is without any regard for eventual costs to consumers, of course, but the idea is basically to convert externalities to real costs.

When the CEOs of companies which don’t primarily deal in paper and brainpower get behind “green”, then it might be worth a preliminary cheer.

That is as bad a push story I’ve seen in a while.

Watch it Greg, you are getting almost as cynical as me. ;)

We need facts; not propaganda.

We need initiatives that will make progress towards sustaining the environment without decimating the economy.

We need initiatives that will make progress towards sustaining the environment without decimating the economy.

Two things are certain: expanding government will not help the environment, and it will damage the economy.

A wealthy country, whose citizens are least impeded by government, is one which will be the cleanest and nicest to live in. People with money and leisure time have the will, the time and especially the money to make their lives and jobs run clean and efficiently. A country whose citizens are hampered at every turn by government will be both poorer and will have a severely degraded environment. When people are squashed by crooked parasites pretending that they are stealing and controlling the nation’s wealth “because they care”, they end up stripping the countryside of trees so that they can cook their food, plundering the lakes and rivers for fish, driving the crappiest, most inefficient cars and scooters and burning the cheapest, lowest-grade fuels in their factories and power plants. That’s why in the “dirty” developed countries you can breathe fresh air in and around most of the big cities most of the time, but spend a month in any large city in “green” Mexico or China, the countries whose butts we are supposed to be kissing according to Moe Strong and the Kyoto Warriors, and you’ll be lucky not to come down with bronchitis, asthma, or worse. This is what they will do to your own country, “because they care” (allegedly).

But of course the people that are pushing the hardest on the “green” buttons have no intention of living in a tiny, stuffy apartment in a big city and working like a dog outside in the pollution like the average person does in the “green” third world. Most of them are probably angling to get a swishy job telecommuting from ‘way out in the Kawarthas, or tucked away up in the mountains somewhere near a nice ski hill, with vineyards and lots of latte bars. Or, they’re truly delusional and they live in a dream universe where everyone has a huge, shiny, white windmill in their yard and they ride to work on hydrogen-powered monorails, winding through pleasant fields of corn-ethanol plants, waving at the happy farmers sitting on their electric tractors. They imagine themselves living a life so high off the hog, that they don’t mind telling the odd whopper and scaring the shit out of little old ladies like my mom with fairy tales whose moral is “let us tax you or else!” Or scaring my kid, whose grade 6 teacher down at the publicly funded illiteracy factory told them today, “You’re probably all going to die by age 50”, and “Global warming is so important that we really shouldn’t be teaching any other subjects all day!” I ain’t joking - this is the kind of stuff I have to deal with every single day from my kids and my mom.

Thanks, socialists.

We need initiatives that will make progress towards sustaining the environment without decimating the economy.

“We need things that will deliver good things without delivering bad things” is sort of the algorithm of life, isn’t it?