[dohboi]

Right, the last thing we should ever be is any kind of world leader, especially when it comes to issues of the greatest imaginable magnitude. The truly brave and worthy thing to do is to use everyone else as an excuse to bury our heads in the sand, even though we have been one of the main contributors in the past and continue to lead in per capita emissions.

[deMolay]

dohboy let us suppose for a moment that you are right. Not that you are, but how will tranferring wealth from the pockets of the citizenry/peasants end global warming and other such scams. Would it not make more sense to give all citizens huge tax breaks for all the energy saving, non polluting technology that they can afford to purchase and install? Versus extorting trillions via new taxes and in many cases just handing it over to the 3rd world. It has already been proven even with all these various schemes it will only reduce co2 by .04 percent and even if we continued as we are for 100 years the earths temp would rise .3 of a degree c. It sounds more like some kind of guilt money that must be paid. Especially when the earth seems to be getting colder. Not warmer.

[dohboi]

DeM, your post is so full of total absurdities, it is hard to know where to start. Presumably you would be against any tax under any circumstance, so why not just say that.

Since you choose not to answer my very basic questions, I will not further engage in your nonsense.

It is a bit cooler today than it was yesterday here, so I can now prove that all of this "summer gets warmer" scam is full of it.

This seems to be the level of your "earth is getting cooler" argument.

For anyone else that is interested, I happen to be against ff taxes, or to limiting just to those. We are way past that. We need to ration, curtail, contract...in short, rapidly power down. Rapidly phased in moratorium (more like permanent cessation) of all ff extraction, starting with tar sands and coal, then gas and oil.

You are right that none of this is likely to avert disaster, but the argument that we shouldn't try to slow down the car (or even take our foot off the pedal-to-the-metal gas) because it is surly going to hit the brick wall we are approaching lacks something in basic good sense.

[dohboi]

Again, for lurkers: AGW is based on very basic, incontrovertable facts--

1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas (established beyond question over 100 years ago)
2. We have dumped hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by burning ff
3. CO2 atmospheric concentrations have risen over the last 150 years
4. Global temps have increased over the last hundred years

No deniers can question the basic truth of any of these, and only a confirmed denialist would fail to connect these very clear dots.

But they will for ever cherry pick a year or decade, irrelevant in time scales of altering the global climate, and claim that a colder day, year or few years shows that the whole thing doesn't work. Again, these are equivalent to saying a cold day or week in summer disproves the claim that summer is warmer than winter.

But my favorite is that it's all the fault of cosmic rays from beyond the solar system. Could anything be more tin-foil-hat than that?

[odegaard]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', 'F')or anyone else that is interested, I happen to be against ff taxes, or to limiting just to those. We are way past that. We need to ration, curtail, contract...in short, rapidly power down. Rapidly phased in moratorium (more like permanent cessation) of all ff extraction, starting with tar sands and coal, then gas and oil.

[AlexdeLarge]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'A')gain, for lurkers: TPTB are using baseless claims about GW for one incontrovertable fact ..............they want to raise your taxes and control every aspect of your life. This is about Pure Politics and Power. Period, end of story!

[dohboi]

"What you just said can only be achieved in a dictatorship."

Umm, no, rationing happened in the UK and the US and many other non-dictatorships during WWII...

What real (not political) reality requires, and what seems politically feasible are of course two very different things. I prefer to start with what real reality requires. Political reality can change, as we have seen, very quickly.

[AlexdeLarge]

Here is your reality numbnuts.........the inmates are running the asylum!!!


$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he stink surrounding the Pelosi-Waxman-Markey cap-and-tax bill has become vomit-inducing overnight. Representative Waxman has decided to replace the 1091-page bill with a 300-page bill that will be debated for no longer than three hours today. So your elected representatives will have virtually no time to debate the merits of an economy-spanning bill they will not have had time to read. Speaker Pelosi and her sidekick Waxman are displaying nothing more than complete contempt for the democratic process.

If you’re as utterly disgusted by this as I am, you can send a message to Pelosi and her cronies by telling your Congressmen to vote against this bill. You can e-mail them, call them (202-225-3121), or text the National Taxpayers Union on 54608 and they will help.


This is not the “more open government” we were promised.

UPDATE: Email link was bad before; fixed now. Plus, Bill Allison of the Sunlight Foundation writes:


I think the Corner was a little off on what’s going on with Cap ‘n Trade. We’re not shrinking to a 300 page bill, we’re adding those 300 pages to the 1,201 page bill, ballooning up to a 1,501 page bill.

Here’s an excerpt from Paul Blumenthal’s latest:


1. The original bill, H.R. 2454, approximately 1,000 pages, was reported out of the Energy & Commerce Committee.
2. It was replaced this week by H.R. 2998, 1,201 pages, which will be voted on as an amendment in the form of a substitute.
3. The Rules Committee, last night, released a committee report that includes a 300-page amendment to H.R. 2998. This 300-page amendment, the Waxman amendment (#121), is considered as adopted upon an affirmative vote for H.R. 2998, the amendment in the form of the substitute.

This means that we are looking at 300 extra pages added to the bill overnight. Stay tuned for more and go to ReadTheBill.org to tell your congressman that we need time to read the bills.

[Plantagenet]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('dohboi', 'A')gain, for lurkers: AGW is based on very basic, incontrovertable facts--

1. CO2 is a greenhouse gas (established beyond question over 100 years ago)
2. We have dumped hundreds of billions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere by burning ff
3. CO2 atmospheric concentrations have risen over the last 150 years
4. Global temps have increased over the last hundred years

[mattduke]

300 pages added at 3 am this morning. An unmitigated disaster.

[AlexdeLarge]

Guess who will be in charge of trading these BS "carbon" derivatives............... the same arseholes on Wallstreet who brought us our current mess. (Goldman Sachs, JPM, AIG etc.) Who benefits other than wallstreet.........GE, Pelosi , Algor to name a few who stand to make huge profits if this scam is passed.

Who gets screwed?? WE DO !!! Not just screwed....ganged raped and left on the side of the road.
Its time for a revolution again.......... a real one like we had in 1776.

[ECM]

While I have seen far more than enough to know that we must deal with pollution I will not support this convoluted mess that is H.R. 2454. I support a carbon tax. I do not support a cap and trade system that drains even more money, creates more bureaucracy, and makes a small number of individuals wealthy from it.

I called my representative's office and told them that as a constituent that I wanted this bill voted down although I would support a reasonable carbon tax bill. I was told that my representative is planning to vote no.

[deMolay]

Now pay attention Boys and Girls to what Strong said at Davos in 1990. About 1/3 from the end of the article........Fight Kyoto Book Excerpt featured in the Calgary
Sun and Edmonton Sun
Monday, December 2, 2002
Kyoto Protocol compiled by un-elected global bureaucrats
Ezra Levant

THE Kyoto Protocol was the work of thousands of bureaucrats, diplomats and politicians. But no one person is more responsible for it than a Canadian named Maurice Strong.

Strong organized the UN first-world environmental summit in Stockholm in 1972 and has never stopped pressing for a world where UN resolutions would be enforced as law all over the Earth.

Strong went on to chair the 1992 UN Conference on Environment and Development in Rio and to become senior adviser to Kofi Annan, the UN's secretary general. Not bad for a kid from Oak Lake, Manitoba, who dropped out of school at age 14.

But Strong is different than other social butterflies who flit from one UN conference to the next. He is a powerful businessman, who has served as president of such massive energy companies as Petro-Canada and Ontario Hydro, and on the board of industrial giant Toyota.

He is a huge political donor, not just here in Canada, but to both the Republican and Democratic parties in the U.S. as well.

At age 29, he became president of Power Corporation, fusing his destiny to Canada's wealthiest and most influential families - including Paul Martin Sr. and Jr., now heir apparent to the prime minister.

Strong hired Paul Jr. to work for him during a vacation from university. "We controlled many companies, controlled political budgets," Strong said of his time at Power Corporation. "Politicians got to know you and you them."

Strong hired Martin into Power Corporation's executive suite. He helped guide Martin towards unimaginable personal wealth - and even predicted Martin's path to becoming prime minister. But Strong's influence reaches farther than Canada.

Indeed, compared to Strong's American and European friends, Martin is a small star in the constellation.

Strong sits on boards with the Rockefellers and Mikhail Gorbachev and chairs private meetings of CEOs, including Bill Gates. He hobnobs with the world's royalty, too - and with dictators and despots.

He once did a business deal with arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi, and wound up with a 200,000-acre ranch in Colorado - which his wife, Hanne, runs as a New Age spiritual colony.

He told Maclean's magazine in 1976 that he was "a socialist in ideology, a capitalist in methodology." He warns that if we don't heed his environmentalist warnings, the Earth will collapse into chaos.

"Do we really want this? Do we want Marx to be proven right, after all?" Strong asks. He shares the views of the most radical environmentalist street protester, but instead of shouting himself hoarse at a police barricade outside a global conference, he's the secretary general inside, wielding the gavel.

Strong has always courted power - but not through any shabby election campaign. He was a Liberal candidate in the 1979 federal election, but pulled out a month before the vote.

How could a mere MP wield the kind of international control he had tasted in Stockholm? Journalist Elaine Dewar, who interviewed Strong, described why he loved the UN.

"He could raise his own money from whomever he liked, appoint anyone he wanted, control the agenda," wrote Dewar.

"He told me he had more unfettered power than a cabinet minister in Ottawa. He was right: He didn't have to run for re-election, yet he could profoundly affect lives."

Strong prefers power extracted from democracies, and kept from unenlightened voters. Most power-crazed men would stop at calling for a one world Earth Charter to replace the U.S. Constitution, or the UN Charter.

But in an interview with his own Earth Charter Commission, Strong said "the real goal of the Earth Charter is it will in fact become like the Ten Commandments. It will become a symbol of the aspirations and commitments of people everywhere." Sounds like Maurice was hanging out at his spirit ranch without his sunhat on.

There has been no one like Maurice Strong before, except perhaps in fiction - Ernst Blofeld comes to mind, 007's round-faced nemesis in You Only Live Twice. But Blofeld sought to attack the world order, to challenge it from some remote hideaway - not to co-opt it, and transform it from the inside as Strong does.

Blofeld would threaten a meeting of the UN; Strong would chair the meeting and script its agenda. Strangely, Strong once indulged his inner Blofeld, musing to a stunned reporter about a violent plot to take over the world through one of his many super-organizations.

In 1990, Strong told a reporter a fantasy scenario for the World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland - where 1,000 diplomats, CEOs and politicians gather "to address global issues."

Strong, naturally, is on the board of the World Economic Forum. "What if a small group of these world leaders were to conclude the principal risk to the earth comes from the actions of the rich countries?...

In order to save the planet, the group decides: Isn't the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn't it our responsibility to bring this about?"

That's Strong talking, but those are Blofeld's words coming out. But this is no fictitious Bond movie villain speaking - it is the man who chaired the Rio Earth Summit and who is Kofi Annan's senior adviser.

"This group of world leaders forms a secret society to bring about an economic collapse," continued Strong, warming to his fantasy. "It's February. They're all at Davos. These aren't terrorists.

"They're world leaders. They have positioned themselves in the world's commodities and stock markets. They've engineered, using their access to stock markets and computers and gold supplies, a panic. Then, they prevent the world's stock markets from closing. They jam the gears. They hire mercenaries who hold the leaders at Davos as hostage. The markets can't close..."

Strong catches himself. "I probably shouldn't be saying things like this."

But is fantasizing about holding the world hostage, like Dr. Evil in an Austin Powers movie, any less strange than Strong's other solutions to environmental problems?

In 1972, as Strong organized the first environmental conference for the UN, he granted an interview to the BBC. "I am convinced the prophets of doom have to be taken seriously," he said.

The only way to avoid doomsday, said Strong, was if "man, in light of this evidence, is going to be wise enough and enlightened enough to subject himself to this kind of discipline and control."

That discipline and control, of course, would be meted out by supernational organizations such as the UN. Just like his interview at Davos, Strong warmed to his topic.

The BBC reporter asked him what discipline and control people could expect - would it include legal limits on the number of children that a family could have?

Strong explained: "Licences to have babies incidentally is something that I got in trouble for some years ago for suggesting even in Canada that this might be necessary at some point, at least some restriction on the right to have a child."

But, if the world didn't follow his instructions - if governments didn't heed the warnings of the doomsayers - then "this is one of the possible courses that society would have to seriously consider." Strong himself has five children.

He knows how he is viewed by opponents to his radical environmentalism, or his promotion of a UN government with taxation and enforcement powers that trump national governments. And he seems to rather enjoy being described as a man at the centre of secretive power-brokering.

"Sure, these are but the deluded and paranoid ravings of the Western far right, and I wouldn't normally trouble to mention them at all," Strong writes in his self-conscious autobiography, "Except that my reaction when I hear a few of these charges is that I wish I had a smidgen of the power (and money!) they say I have.

"I wish I could accomplish a few of the things they already attribute to me. I do wish I could assist my many friends and colleagues in all the organizations I belong to, to remake the political and economic landscape."

But this is Strong feigning modesty, and not very convincingly. Later in his autobiography, he reprints his ostentatious seven-page resume, boasting every connection he has.

His book takes name-dropping to a new level, including a seven-page "name index," a list of hundreds of blue-chip associates that Strong has in his Rolodex.

Maurice Strong: A Dr. Evil-style strategist. Owner of a 200,000-acre New Age Zen colony. Designer of a proposal to "consider" requiring licences to have babies.

The architect of the Kyoto Protocol.

[deMolay]

How many in the US will drink Barrack "Jimmy Jones" Obama's Kool Aid.

[Plantagenet]

[Plantagenet]

Ignore the six million actual jobs that have disappeared since Obama started his wonderous reign of error.

Focus instead on the promise of five million new jobs from Obama.....ohh, things will be so great when the new jobs appear........and Obama will serve you pie-in-the-sky too!

[shortonoil]

Plantagenet said:

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'F')ocus instead on the promise of five million new jobs from Obama.....ohh, things will be so great when the new jobs appear........and Obama will serve you pie-in-the-sky too!

[highlander]

so, we continued to pump record amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere since 2001 and the "AGW" just stopped. What is up with that?
Now we will be saved by reducing CO2 80% by 2050. If you think this is possible then you really suck at math. When oil peaks, coal power plants will start springing up. Unless there is an "endgame" that eliminates 80% of the western world and india and china, this is just the latest of wealth transfer schemes by TPTB.

[Plantagenet]

Druggies for Cap n Tax

druggie rallies from sick bed to support cap n tax

[kiwichick]

finally some leadership from the US

its not enough and its too slow , its not perfect but it is a start

hopefully results will start to come though quickly

the right here in OZ has been using the same arguments here

in fact watching the flatearth republicans would be hilarious if they
weren't so dangerous

congrats to those who realize this is a global problem and that we all
face major change as we go over the peak