Riverwind

If you want to use the market to encourage efficient allocation of resources then you need to require that the majority of partipants actually use the market. The system you proposed only forces people who can 'afford it' to use the market because a large segment of the population would be given cash to offset the costs. This defeats the entire purpose. You said in a previous post that a transportation subsidy would be graduated to avoid discouraging people from seeking work. Current programs such as the GST rebate only go to 0 for families with income above 60K so that is a useful reference point and I guessimated that only 10-20% people have incomes above that level. Compassionate? Only in your mind. Last time I checked women have the right to choose in Canada and the right to choose means is they are also responsible for their choices. It is possible to detect most cases of down syndrome today so carrying a child with down syndrome to term is as irresponsible as smoking or bad eating habits. I am saying the current system of publically subsidized transportation networks and fault-free healthcare is much more efficient than your 'user pay with exemptions whenever you feel like it' approach.

We already have an affordable housing problem in our cities and you want to make it worse by messing with the transportation system? It makes no sense. Completely fair considering farmers benefit by being able to sell their product to city dwellers. Higher transportation costs would reduce demand. Why should the poor get any subsidy in your world? User pay means user pay not matter what your income levels. There is nothing fair about a system where only 10-20% of the users pay the full cost because they happen to have an income above the subsidy thresold. It is kind of hard to make an argument based on principal when you are willing to discard it at the first opportunity. There is no lack of people in the world that would fill our need for taxpayers. In any case, you missed the point: any system that attempts to penalize people for lifestyle choices is a system that would impose the values of one group of people in another and that system would only be acceptable to the people that get to do the imposing. Here is a more blunt example: according to your logic any woman who does not abort a child with down syndrome should be expected to pick up the entire cost of the additional services required to support that child since it is her (irresponsible) choice that brought the child into the world. I realize you will resort to special pleading to justify an exception in this case but by doing so you discard all of the principals that you claim are important.

You missed the point entirely. A subsidized road system allows people to live further from work that they would otherwise do. This, in turn, reduces demand for housing in central locations. Remove the subsidies and housing costs in central locations will go up as demand increases. If you live in a central location today then you are benefiting from lower housing costs as a result of the road subsidy. Take the road subsidy away and your housing costs will go up. Implausible scenarios are not relevant. The general case is cities need to have goods delivered and they need a pool of relatively low paid service workers. The road subsidies reduce the cost of goods and services which the city dwellers use. Rural areas depend on relatively unused roads to connect them to the cities. Manyy rural communities could not survive if they were required to pay the cost of those roads. Cash handouts to individuals based on need are invariably bad policy because it results in a punative tax rate if people take a job that pushes them over whatever limit is set to determine eligibility. It makes much more sense to subsidize the roads/transit directly. That is your opinion. If we need taxpayers we let in more immigrants. No need for us to pay the cost of pregnancies and by arguing for those costs to be paid for you have just demonstrated why there is no absolute standard for determining what is a 'lifestyle choice' and that is why it has no place in healthcare policy.

You benefit directly from the road subsidy in two ways:1) You save a bundle on housing because there is less demand for housing within walking distance of your workplace. 2) The cost of goods and services you purchase are lower because of lower wage/tranportation costs. I also think that road/transit subsidies enhance social mobility/reduce unemployment by giving people more choices for work. i.e. in a world where every driver/rider paid the true cost of transportation you would find people stuck in a catch-22 because they cannot afford to move and they cannot afford the transportation cost (by transit or by car). A system where healthcare costs were assessed based on lifestyle choices would be incredibly expensive to maintain - and that assumes that you would be ok with the privacy violations that would be required to police people. The only practical option would be a user fee for services rendered based on whether the services were required by 'lifestyle choices' but then you get into a nasty problem of deciding what is a lifestyle choice. For example, sporting injuries, sexually transmitted diseases and pregnacies are almost always a lifestyle choice.

27000 years ago the world was in the middle of an ice age.

This alignment is really nothing more than an eclipse where the sun is blocking the earth's view of the center of the galaxy. There is no reason to believe this eclipse will be any more eventful than the solar or lunar type.

It only makes sense when we have the electric car technology that meets the transportation needs of society. How many decades have we been waiting for those mass produced fuel cell cars? It takes a lot more than a proof of concept before a technology can be deployed on the scale required. Governments CANNOT build infrastructure based on technologies that may never be mass produced. Out of hand? I gave you a link to a SciAm artical that estimated the cost to converting existing infrastructure to renewables by 2030 would cost $100 TRILLION globally or about $100 billion/year for Canada over 20 years. Only the most deluded fanatic can think that renewables are the answer to anything. Here is a better analysis of the SciAm article with numbers. Here is an analysis that compares that cost to interstate highway system in the US. Taking the estimates for the US potion of the $100 trillion cost ($16 trillion) means that this grand project would cost at least 35 times as much as the interstate highway system. Scale it back to the same level as the interstates system but that would only replace 2.8% of the US energy needs. Feel free to explain why we should invest billions/year on infrastructure that could never hope to supply more than a small fraction of our energy needs.Keep in mind that the $100 trillion figures are provided by people who believe in renewables but clearly have no knowledge of the economics of large scale projects. The real cost of renewables will likely be much, much higher. Bottom line, if you really believe that renewables are the answer then step up to the plate and show some plausible numbers that demonstrate that they are economically viable.

We have lots of natural gas. The electrical grid does not have the capacity to handle the power requirements fast charging electric cars. It would actually take a lot less infrastructure to pipe natural gas to a few filling stations than to install and meter outlets in every parking lot and garage. Keep in mind that natural gas can be put in a truck like gasoline. We can only plan based on the technology we have. Not on what might appear. It is a lot less ludicrous than your renewable fantasy. I gave you some concrete numbers of the cost of replacing our current infrastructure with renewable sources. They are huge and without some currently unknown technological breakthrough we have no choice but to continue to use fossil fuels.

It takes five minutes to fill up a car with fossil fuels. It takes 2-8 hours to recharge an electric car. Most people are not willing to plan their day around the time it takes to charge electric cars. You may not like fossil fuels but they are the only option if we what to keep our economy running. Renewables are a fantasy that cannot possibly meet our energy needs at a cost that is affordable.

If it is 1.5 degC warmer in 50 years then we will have evidence that CO2 is, in fact, the primary driver of climate. Until then it is impossible to seperate the effect of CO2 from the myriad of other variables that could affect climate because any CO2 signal is lost in the noise.

The US has become an enabler of terrorism by overreacting to these events. Why would a terrorist worry about blowing up plane with maybe 300 people in it when they can make the lives of millions miserable simply by failing.

Or maybe it is because the coho salmon figured our how to secret chemicals which humans don't notice but a taste really nasty to an Orca. There are other examples in nature where evolving a bad taste protects species from predators.

What is rediculous is the fact they have to pretend that they are treating everyone the same in order to satisfy the obessions of the politically correct.

I am disappointed that after all of these discussions you still don't understand the fundemental problems that plague climate science.First, there is little disagreement on the fundemental science that adding CO2 causes the planet to warm. However, there is a debate about how much warming will occur. Even the IPCC acknowleges that CO2 sensitivity could be as low as 1.5 degC/doubling and if it is that low then there is no need for CO2 mitigation policies since the temperature will stay below the 'safe' level of 2 degC even if we do nothing. This means the objections of the dissenting scientists are a lot more than a 'quibble' as far as the policy makers are concerned. Second, peer review in climate science has been rigged by people wishing to control the message received by policy makers and the public. Papers have been rejected for no reason other than the fact that they muddy the scientific waters or if they are accepted the editors collude with alarmists in order get a counter paper into the literature so alarmists can tell the public to ignore the paper by claiming it was 'debunked'. All of this has created an environment were scientists sceptical of the science are unlikely to even bother submitting papers and are going to find other avenues to research. The CRU emails provide evidence that supports the latter claims are sceptics have been successful in tracking down two previously unknown papers that CRU scientists 'spiked' for failing to support the cause. In at least one case, the paper was worthy of publication and the author admitted he choose to do other things with his career after realizing the climate science field was rigged. What this all means is the necessary pObjective and open scientific debatehas NOT been happening in climate science and it is not likely to happen any time soon because there are too many people with a vested interest in maintaining the current 'consensus' position.

Ah no. You don't know what people think of different policies unless they specifically talk about it. Speculating in the way you do is simply an ad hominum attack. For myself, I would support any emission reduction plan that 1) was likely to achieve the stated goal and 2) is economically and technologically achievable. Unfortunately, no one has proposed a plan that meets those requirements.

Cap and trade is what is on the table in legislatures so that is what people talk about. The only place where arbitrary emission limits without trading come up is with the EPA in the US and every agrees it is the dumbest way to do it but the democrats see threatening to shoot themselves in the foot as negotiating strategy.

The government does not have a magic wand that it can use to create economic, emission free technology simply because it wants them. For that reason any policy that imposes emission limits will fail unless the cost and technology required to meet those limits is well understood in advance. If that means we can't possible meet arbitrary time limits set by scientist/activists then so be it. We don't have a choice.

What did he say? Nature does bad things happen to poor people no matter what we do? That is a true statement. It is also a true statement that development and wealth creation is the best defense against climate change no matter how much CO2 is emitted in the process.

The trouble is health care in the US is like it was here in the 60s and bringing in a government backed insurance provider is equivalent to nationalizing a private enterprise without compensation. That processes of nationalization makes health care reform a very left wing proposal in the US despite the fact that in Canada national healthcare is supported across the spectrum. If we did not already have it in Canada I doubt we could set it up today because attitudes towards nationalization of enterprises has changed here too.

Politicians will do whatever they want but organizations like the WTO are designed to put constraints on what politicians can do or at least ensure there are consequences if politicians choose vote getting policies that harm international trade.There have been a number of instances where retaliatory trade sanctions have been designed to target politically influential groups within the US in order to create domestic opposition to anti-free trade policies.

GHGs are no danger to the eco system itself. In fact, CO2 is likely a net benefit to the eco-system. My reference is saying is the weather/climate can change but it won't affect humans.

You responded to my response to a 'per capita emissions should be equal argument'. I am saying that argument is nonsense for the reasons I stated. The 'paying the true cost of pollution' argument does not use ability to pay a justification to allow some people to evade paying the costs.

Then step up. You provide your evidence that the net negative effects of GHGs is a scientific fact. Here is a summary of the peer reviewed literature of the economic effects of climate change. Your mouthing off about how GHGs are KNOWN to have a negative effect cannot be supported by any evidence I have seen.

The 'negative effect of the global warming' is NOT an established scientific theory because we do not know what the effects will be. The only thing that the science tells us it it will get warmer if we emits GHGS. More importantly, we know from history warming is invariably for humans. Claiming that warming is necessarily bad is nothing but a religions belief equivant to the belief that eating pork is wrong.

You may say it but that cannot possibily be your goal if you support international treaties like Kyoto because such treaties are designed to do nothing but move emission producing industries to developing countries. If that is you goal then you should be supporting policies that have a chance of achieving the stated goal. All I care about are policies that can actually achieve their stated goal. If there is not a single global price for emissions that every pays no matter what their wealth then there will be no reduction in emissions. The only thing that will happen is the sources of emission will move to the lowest cost locale.