Green Agenda Going Too Far
- Thread starter DavidB
- Start date
I haven't done anything. He was voted in by Americans to lead the United States. I'm a Canadian. But yes he is a puppet, a bad one at that. He wouldn't be around if not for the nuts who brought down WTC, so I will blame Al Qaeda for his re-election.
Then by which standards would you propose to judge then? Remember I have seen your laws at work. You have no clue except what the sensationalistic media has brainwashed you into believing. Remeber how you were lead down the garden path during the cold war into believe so many things about the USSR that simply weren't true. This is no different.
Yes, I do owe you an appology for the Bush comment. There is so much difference between your countries, isn't there?
Yes, I do owe you an appology for the Bush comment. There is so much difference between your countries, isn't there?
You must be attempting to bait into an argument. Perhaps you're trolling. Either way your nonsensical remarks remove you from the community of those capable of reality-based discourse, at least on this thread.
Pangloss
Kreskin:
It would seem I let us get off the topic. What I was talking about in my first post is that the West got rich by exploiting there own natural resources. Now that the developing world is trying to do the same the West has started calling these resources "dirty fuels". Not only that but now they are pressuring us into the useless Kyoto Accord. Many of the world's struggling countries see this as nothing more than an attempt to keep them down. To develop the network of "green" generation and production methods is economically unattainable by all but the richest of nations.
It would seem I let us get off the topic. What I was talking about in my first post is that the West got rich by exploiting there own natural resources. Now that the developing world is trying to do the same the West has started calling these resources "dirty fuels". Not only that but now they are pressuring us into the useless Kyoto Accord. Many of the world's struggling countries see this as nothing more than an attempt to keep them down. To develop the network of "green" generation and production methods is economically unattainable by all but the richest of nations.
Everyone except for the 50% of the population that don't have beards or penises.
I find it funny how very little you understand about such matters. Don't let the misinterpretation of a few angry youth taint your view. Do your own research and find your own truths. I suppose ignorance of such matters is brought about by a conservative controlled media attempting to justify their own insecurities. For the record Egyptian women enjoy the right to vote, work and attend school. So much for your little theory.
Now how does this relate to the environmental myths of this Green lobby? If you would prefer we could start another string where I can educate you about the real face of the Middle East.
Now how does this relate to the environmental myths of this Green lobby? If you would prefer we could start another string where I can educate you about the real face of the Middle East.
Yes, Caused alot of headaches (deaths and illness), Learn from our mistakes and take a better route.
Yes, and its environment is destroyed, sand dunes choke some cities, most air is black as coal. They needed to resort to a draconian policy of 1 child per couple which is causing a demographics nightmare since they all want boys.
Ok, seriously...look around. Most countries have cultural norms that allow for one to come late to meetings as much as an hour late (most hover around 15-20 minutes)
Simple math, you need a declining population to generate this kind of wealth reliabley. This is the very reason China instituted its harsh 1 child policy. The more times you have to divide up inheritence (including infrastructure) the more work one needs to do in life to break even to your parents standard of living.
Their complaining about rights is worries about slight imbalances in pay. Not being told they can't work, can't leave the house without a man, can't vote, can't own property or any other common complaint in the world.
I never said that. I said ethnicity doesn't matter worth a damn. If you give a damn about ethnicity you are hurting the economy and not truly wanting to be wealthy.
You mean every western nation that is locked into controlling itself to keep its standard of living?
Pretty much, China made the leap. It took the same sacrifices we made and got the same gains. People are giving up family life for wealth, just like the west. Its a big sacrifice, so don't whine about wealth until your willing to make it.
Then you missed the big lesson, our wealth and our culture are linked. You also missed lesson two, don't assume things about others. I do business with other countries, I travel and I know many cultures, being raised with many (My parents remarried alot), and friends with just as many (when you travel alot most of your friends live accross oceans)
As much as I would love to continue messing with your ignorance I have to go. Have a blessed evening.
I just write what I know and believe. Last time I checked evaporation does cause rain and rain is fresh water. Water evapoastes more quickly when it is warm. Plants need warm weather to grow, therefore we will have a longer growing season during the warming cycle. And the air is cleaner now than it was in the 60's. If stating facts is trolling, so be it.
Assuming you are from Egypt, then perhaps in your particular country the work ethic is different from Ethiopia, Dubai, and Turkey which are the nearest places I've had to deal with people.
But so far your logic is "I don't see that so it doesn't exist". Take your own advise and open your eyes. And travel more than a classroom and an apartment in a country and think all is laid out.
To paraphrase Ghandi " [few] cannot hold down [many]".
If you compare clean air in the past and in the future. Yes, we have better air now than in the past. I do not know if you would like a life with more polluting air, more things to worry about or a place where air is really clean, there is few mishaps and all our future generations are alright. If you look at the status of the world instead of one square, then warm weather is not great all around the globe. Too much heat create droughts and too much water drowns everyone.
China's really not getting that rich. Sure, if you compare the past and future. The condition there is really awful. There is still farming problems, health care, and the virus in question, SARS and mutated form of SARS. I heard Chinese news every day and there is always a flood, a drought or some sort of awful thing once a week to drag them down. The boom is temporary. They do not really have everything under the coal or oil. And those mine accidents, don't let me get started with those. The good thing is, they blown up a nuclear reactor and installed wind generators in the sandy and windy areas of Gansu. A least they are going to make it after all.
When I started this post, I didn’t want to give the impression that I am completely opposed to environmental concerns. I am well-educated enough to appreciate a clean environment for me and future generations; however, I am also a firm believer in free market economics. For all the good intentions that may motivate present policies, I am certain most of them yield results completely opposed to their goals.
Following are a few examples.
Every year I make a few trips out of the Vancouver area into smaller communities. I know several people there and chat with them a bit. One of the topics they bring up are the taxes on gas furnaces for heating their homes. The reaction by many of them is to convert to wood burning furnaces. They are chopping down trees, cutting them up, splitting the wood, letting it dry, and then burning it. Personally, I think such a trend is a step backwards.. Instead of moving forward, Canada is moving backwards, exhibiting the traits of a second- or third-world nation. When I first heard of this reaction, I thought of the fall of the Iron Curtain: we discovered that the Soviet Union was not cleaner, more-advanced than the west. For all their bureaucracy, control, and micro-management, environmental progress had been non-existent for forty years.
Air Care (http://www.aircare.ca/) here in Vancouver is a real joke (although the hit to our wallets is real). For anybody unfamiliar with Air Care, here is some background. When your car insurance comes due for renewal every year, before you can get the insurance, you must first take your car through a testing station that measures its emissions to ensure it meets certain criteria. And you pay for these tests ($23 - $45). This program is just a cash grab by the government as far as I am concerned; when the Air Care program first started up several years ago, the media ran all kinds of stories about how inconsistent it was (how does a car spewing blue smoke out of its exhaust pass the tests, but a current-year, fuel-efficient model fail?!)
Public transit is a huge waste of money and is turning into a real out-of-control monster. New routes are being talked about all over and everything is being taxed to pay for it. However, everybody who uses public transit hates it and is anxious to stop using it as soon as possible. People value their time/life too much to want to waste it riding public transit. In addition, the presence of public transit in a neighborhood makes living in that neighborhood too expensive for the people it was intended to serve. (Even a senior manager of Vancouver’s Translink has made this comment. The expense of building, say, a SkyTrain route into a neighborhood, the high taxes needed to sustain it, and the increase in property values/taxes in that neighborhood all serve to drive the lower-income families out of that neighborhood and into outlying suburbs. The only people who can then afford to live there are higher-income people who do not want to ride public transit.)
Why are there deposits and environmental levies on bottles? I mean, if the money collected from the environmental levy was put in a province-wide pool to fund litter collectors, who were paid to collect bottles from the streets, I could understand its purpose. However, the whole point of having a deposit on bottles is to encourage people to return their bottles to depots for recycling, thereby eliminating the problem in the first place. I cannot think of a better way to avoid having these bottles end up in landfills (other than to stop purchasing all drinks, juices, soups, etc. entirely). However, I still don’t understand why both deposits AND environmental levies are applied to so many items.
An analogous statement could be made for car tires and motor oil. If I make efforts to maintain my vehicle so that it doesn’t spew out blue smoke, why am I hit with an oil disposal fee? The service station that changes my oil and charges me this fee, sends the old oil back for recycling. What are they trying to do? Compel me to change my own oil and dump the old oil down a storm drain?
The common thread in all these examples is that they are all programs in which money is taken out of people’s pockets for wasteful programs--preventing them from investing in truly environmentally beneficial actions. The slew of regulations, taxes, fees, levies, etc. is reaching the point that people are actually impeded from purchasing newer, cleaner, technologies. Instead of purchasing a photovoltaic kit to play with (one of my interests), my money is wasted on Air Care. All the taxes and fees mean that instead of parking my car, I have to work a few extra days just to earn the same after-tax money I would if these fees didn’t exist. That means burning gas driving to and from work (and of course there are big taxes on the gas), burning gas in my chainsaw as I chop down trees to feed the sawmills, spilling oil on the ground as I grease up the chain, etc. Think of it this way: the average forestry worker in BC can chop down many trees in a day. The fewer days a forestry worker has to work to achieve the same personal goals, the fewer resources used up, the better it is for the environment. The free market is the most efficient allocator of resources. If politicians were smart, they would accept that the fewer hurdles placed between people and their goals, the better for the environment.
Regards.
David
Following are a few examples.
Every year I make a few trips out of the Vancouver area into smaller communities. I know several people there and chat with them a bit. One of the topics they bring up are the taxes on gas furnaces for heating their homes. The reaction by many of them is to convert to wood burning furnaces. They are chopping down trees, cutting them up, splitting the wood, letting it dry, and then burning it. Personally, I think such a trend is a step backwards.. Instead of moving forward, Canada is moving backwards, exhibiting the traits of a second- or third-world nation. When I first heard of this reaction, I thought of the fall of the Iron Curtain: we discovered that the Soviet Union was not cleaner, more-advanced than the west. For all their bureaucracy, control, and micro-management, environmental progress had been non-existent for forty years.
Air Care (http://www.aircare.ca/) here in Vancouver is a real joke (although the hit to our wallets is real). For anybody unfamiliar with Air Care, here is some background. When your car insurance comes due for renewal every year, before you can get the insurance, you must first take your car through a testing station that measures its emissions to ensure it meets certain criteria. And you pay for these tests ($23 - $45). This program is just a cash grab by the government as far as I am concerned; when the Air Care program first started up several years ago, the media ran all kinds of stories about how inconsistent it was (how does a car spewing blue smoke out of its exhaust pass the tests, but a current-year, fuel-efficient model fail?!)
Public transit is a huge waste of money and is turning into a real out-of-control monster. New routes are being talked about all over and everything is being taxed to pay for it. However, everybody who uses public transit hates it and is anxious to stop using it as soon as possible. People value their time/life too much to want to waste it riding public transit. In addition, the presence of public transit in a neighborhood makes living in that neighborhood too expensive for the people it was intended to serve. (Even a senior manager of Vancouver’s Translink has made this comment. The expense of building, say, a SkyTrain route into a neighborhood, the high taxes needed to sustain it, and the increase in property values/taxes in that neighborhood all serve to drive the lower-income families out of that neighborhood and into outlying suburbs. The only people who can then afford to live there are higher-income people who do not want to ride public transit.)
Why are there deposits and environmental levies on bottles? I mean, if the money collected from the environmental levy was put in a province-wide pool to fund litter collectors, who were paid to collect bottles from the streets, I could understand its purpose. However, the whole point of having a deposit on bottles is to encourage people to return their bottles to depots for recycling, thereby eliminating the problem in the first place. I cannot think of a better way to avoid having these bottles end up in landfills (other than to stop purchasing all drinks, juices, soups, etc. entirely). However, I still don’t understand why both deposits AND environmental levies are applied to so many items.
An analogous statement could be made for car tires and motor oil. If I make efforts to maintain my vehicle so that it doesn’t spew out blue smoke, why am I hit with an oil disposal fee? The service station that changes my oil and charges me this fee, sends the old oil back for recycling. What are they trying to do? Compel me to change my own oil and dump the old oil down a storm drain?
The common thread in all these examples is that they are all programs in which money is taken out of people’s pockets for wasteful programs--preventing them from investing in truly environmentally beneficial actions. The slew of regulations, taxes, fees, levies, etc. is reaching the point that people are actually impeded from purchasing newer, cleaner, technologies. Instead of purchasing a photovoltaic kit to play with (one of my interests), my money is wasted on Air Care. All the taxes and fees mean that instead of parking my car, I have to work a few extra days just to earn the same after-tax money I would if these fees didn’t exist. That means burning gas driving to and from work (and of course there are big taxes on the gas), burning gas in my chainsaw as I chop down trees to feed the sawmills, spilling oil on the ground as I grease up the chain, etc. Think of it this way: the average forestry worker in BC can chop down many trees in a day. The fewer days a forestry worker has to work to achieve the same personal goals, the fewer resources used up, the better it is for the environment. The free market is the most efficient allocator of resources. If politicians were smart, they would accept that the fewer hurdles placed between people and their goals, the better for the environment.
Regards.
David
DavidB I’m not fan of knee jerk reactions or extra taxes but I think you’re a tad cynical about some good programs. For furnaces I don’t think people can convert to wood. As far as I know wood fireplaces are illegal. Of course I don’t agree with banning wood fireplaces or furnaces but I do agree it is better to burn oil then trees. As for Air care, I haven’t heard of it before. It might be an okay idea. I guess it is a tradeoff of freedom vs the environment.
I strongly disagree with your stance on public transit. If it it is more expensive to live by public transit do you think that just maybe that is because it is still cheaper then owning and operating a car. I would have to pay an extra 100 dollars a month just for a parking stall. Also if you think traffic is bad now imagine it without public transit. Besides property taxes are small so stop combining. You would wish you were paying them if you saw the resulting grid lock that would result if you weren’t. Obviously you are right about plastic bottles but you should do as you say and buy products that don’t have these “levies” if you are real concerned about the cost.
As for motor oil I have no idea if you are right. Do you have any statistics that back up your theory that it will compel more people to do it at home. In conclusion yes there are wasteful programs but there are also a lot of good ones. What is important is we get rid of the fear mongering and have a sensible debate about what makes sense and what doesn’t.
I strongly disagree with your stance on public transit. If it it is more expensive to live by public transit do you think that just maybe that is because it is still cheaper then owning and operating a car. I would have to pay an extra 100 dollars a month just for a parking stall. Also if you think traffic is bad now imagine it without public transit. Besides property taxes are small so stop combining. You would wish you were paying them if you saw the resulting grid lock that would result if you weren’t. Obviously you are right about plastic bottles but you should do as you say and buy products that don’t have these “levies” if you are real concerned about the cost.
As for motor oil I have no idea if you are right. Do you have any statistics that back up your theory that it will compel more people to do it at home. In conclusion yes there are wasteful programs but there are also a lot of good ones. What is important is we get rid of the fear mongering and have a sensible debate about what makes sense and what doesn’t.
k. Sorry about my words. If you need anything, just post and see what I can do for you.
Read the whole thread in 7-ways to save the word.
Read the whole thread in 7-ways to save the word.