There's a problem with that. The political right has been pushing away intelligent people. Right wing talk radio, for example, thrives on one-sided and biased arguments and often uses blatant misrepresentation to score political points. Intelligent people who can spot the deceptions will be inevitably be turned off this behaviour (unless they are also extremely biased). The Republicans have developed a strong anti-science bias because the science indicates that some of their policy objectives are unreasonable and/or unwise. Rather than changing the policies to match what science informs us is true, the Republican party has frequently chosen to ignore or attack scientists for daring to oppose them.
Scientists used to generally lean right as did university professors. It was Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war that started their slow shift to the left, out of the Republican party and into the Democratic party. Or perhaps more succinctly, Scientists tend to be more liberal because "reality has a well-known liberal bias".
So, no, it's not about ignorant people passing bad legislation. It's about people whose objectives are different than YOUR objectives passing legislation.
I think it is both. I would strongly suspect that most people in Congress have little idea about technology and little interest in it. Congressional elections select for those who can convince a small group of primary voters to select them often based on their success in raising money for their campaign. That means most representatives have two areas of expertise: fund raising and convincing people to vote for them. They may have some other areas of expertise, but it's not guaranteed and most of them probably won't have overlapping areas of expertise. So on any issue, you might have a handful of subject matter "experts" who are qualified to understand and comment on the issue, and over 400 other people who want to get camera time, serve their own political empires. Add in the problem that there is no real way to identify who has expertise on an issue and you might begin to see why American laws are almost always a mess. You might think committee members would have a higher comprehension of the committee subject, but they're often used a political rewards which inevitably leads to non-experts being appointed to them.
It's not just that they have different objectives, it's that they have different objectives and collectively no understanding of anything other than begging for money and telling people what they want to hear.
I would assume that the "Bush costs" include the ongoing costs of his unfunded programs and tax cuts over the last four years. Also, I'm pretty sure it was January 2009 when Obama took over from Bush. That does impact your numbers because it's $10.7T in debt at the start of 2009. Which puts Obama's additional debt at $4.4T. So in Bush's last year he put $1.5T on the debt.
Not really. Income inequality leads to wealth disparity and wealth disparity leads to political inequity. The politicians naturally cater to the people who fund their re-elections. When the top 20% control 92% of the wealth in the country, the politicians will do whatever the top 20% wants as long as it probably won't hurt their re-election chances.
You might be forgetting half of the slogan... I think it was "No taxation without representation". A lot of the Tea Party people seem to forget the last two words.
The problem is that almost almost half of the people in the country think the other half doesn't work or pay taxes. The majority of the "half the people in the country" who don't pay net income tax don't pay net income tax because the people they work for don't pay them enough to both pay taxes and pay for food and shelter. The government could tax them, but then it would have to give the money back anyway so that they can continue living. Many of the working poor work long hours for little pay, often holding down several part time jobs and working more than 40 hours each week to try and make ends meet.
Part of the problem is that the income for the bottom 75% of Americans has stagnated for more than 30 years. Often the working poor have seen their wages decrease relative to inflation so that each year food and shelter costs a greater percentage of their income. How can this be? Well, virtually all of the proceeds of progress have been accumulating in the hands of the richest Americans, they have increased their share of the country's wealth from about 20% in the mid-70s to almost 40% now. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% of Americans control around 8% of the total wealth of America.
But you are free to choose to blame those who can't pay over those who won't pay, if you like.
Bush policies created about $7 trillion in additional debt, while Obama's policies have create $1.4 trillion. Almost half of the debt that Bush created comes from the lost tax revenues thanks to his tax cut. If you work it out, Bush added almost $900 billion dollars of debt for every year he was in office. Obama's contribution is less than half of that, and most of Obama's debt is one time costs (over half of it is the stimulus package) rather than yearly costs like Bush's tax cuts, expanded drug benefits and wars.
Unless there's something seriously wrong with that graphic, Bush makes Obama look like a fiscally responsible conservative.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not Bill's scale that's off but the Republican party's scale. The cuts he's talking about are the ones the Republicans like to proposed as an alternative to raising taxes. When you look at the number is becomes immediately obvious that they are not seriously trying to cut the budget but to use the deficit as an excuse to punish their "enemies". There are a disturbingly large percentage of the Republican base that think the U.S. spends billions on NPR and arts funding every year.
Every year it gets harder to tell if the Republican candidates are trying to capitalize on that ignorance, are generating it, or both.
If it weren't for George Bush's interference in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, IE probably wouldn't be the default browser in Windows. The issue wasn't just bundling IE, it was the bundling along with all of the other stuff they did, especially the endless emails obsessing over how to destroy Netscape because web browsers represented a potential threat to their operating system monopoly. In the end not much was done, because Microsoft literally bought a pardon from Bush with campaign donations.
Of course Chrome has no particular reason to want to kill Firefox, but hey.. it's money they could use on their own browser and get search users they don't pay for, strengthen their own brand and that is 100% loyal to Google and will implement any data gathering they want.
That's pointy-haired boss logic. The truth of the matter is if Google cuts funding for Firefox they will get a public relations mess and they will lose revenue from current Firefox users. Even worse, one of Google's competitors will get that revenue instead. For example, it could suddenly make Bing "a contender" for top search engine if Firefox went to Bing instead, even a handful of news stories about Bing's sudden market share increase would cost Google money, because there's not much lock in on "search engine". Google has a win-win deal with Mozilla, because they both profit from it. Google has no real incentive to break the deal unless Firefox's market share falls so low that they are no longer relevant. If it's true that Opera has a similar deal with Google, then Firefox would probably have to be south of 1% market share before Google would even consider cutting them loose.
There's a several infographics around that show how the majority of the deficit is attributable to Bush policies. About 90-95% of it is the tax cuts, the wars, and the unfunded drug plan extensions. Ironically, the Bush tax cuts gave away about the same amount of money as the Bush wars cost. Talk about doubling down on stupidity. Bush should have raised taxes by 3% on those earning more than $250,000 per year and the debt would have grown only by the 1.8 trillion spent on stimulus. Which could be easily be paid for out of the taxes after the wars ended.
The U.S. is more than able to pay for it's programs. However, the people with 40% of the money would rather not.
It seems unlikely. I checked the results from 2010 and he got 69.8% of the vote, that's nearly the triple the number of votes his Democratic challenger got. If he gets the same number of votes in 2012, you'd need to get 100,000 extra democratic votes in that district to defeat him.
Such arrangement is less problematic so long as you have freedom of movement.
It's ok if people run the (Jews|gays|blacks|atheists|Hispanics|Asians|whites) out of the state because some other state will (probably) take the refugees? That sounds like a victory for bigotry and prejudice to me. Also, the people most vulnerable to this type harassment generally don't have the capital to simply move to another state and what state is going to want to accept unemployed refugees?
His main issue is one that helps compartmentalize the damage that a voting group can do. It is much more agreeable to me that poor laws can be limited to a subset of states than to have poor laws applied to ALL of the states.
I bet those "compartments" will work exactly as well as the ones in the Titanic.
Personally, I think monotheism is partially responsible for the problem. Any monotheistic religion naturally lends itself to authoritarianism for reasons that should be obvious. This naturally leads to a system where some people are judged to be "closer" to the god, and people are further from god are encouraged to obey those who are closer. The system thereby develops an inherent weakness because the larger group becomes deferential and subservient to their superiors. This allows the leadership of the group to commit great evil, whether or not they intend to do so, because the questioning of the leaders is actively discouraged by the mere existence of the hierarchy. Usually, the leaders don't even need to actively discourage questioning, the followers will punish any of their fellows who question the leaders with whatever tools they think most appropriate, be it ostracism, lectures, discipline, and even violence. They will do so because the hierarchy implicitly says the leaders are better than the followers. This allows the followers to perform evil as long as the leaders either condone it or fail to condemn it.
This isn't unique to religions, it's a problem with authoritarianism. However, as I said at the outset, monotheistic religions are by nature authoritarian and thus exceptionally vulnerable it the ills of authoritarianism.
Of course, this is enabled by the consolidation of media control into the hands of 5 or 6 corporations. In effect, a few dozen people get to decide what is news in the United States, based on the orders of a half-dozen CEOs. And where the interests of the corporations coincide with each other there will be casual collusion to promote or bury stories, as the case may be. If the CEOs who run the corporations that own the majority of the news media don't want anyone talking about SOPA, (for example because they think it will boost the revenues of their entertainment divisions) then they are perfectly able to make it known that it is in every employee's best interests to make sure it is not covered in any depth, if it absolutely has to be covered at all.
Of course, the flip side is the issue just isn't nearly as interesting to most people as celebrity gossip, so they may not even have to do that. After all, bread and circuses is a very old formula.
I ducked nothing - the fact is you have not presented a single fact in all your posts while I have presented many facts and pieces of data. When you start backing up your wild claims with some actual facts then maybe you can try to make demands, but hand waving doesn't get you there.
Frankly, I find that argument more apt to you than me. You've presented exactly one fact in this argument to support your conclusion that the conservatives are better at curbing emissions than the Liberals. And that alleged fact is that emissions were lower in Canada in 2009 than in 1998. You have not cited where your number comes from and I have explained the facts that would lead us to expect emissions to fall in 2009. You also haven't been willing or able to explain what you think the Conservatives actually did to decrease emissions by 25% in 1 year.
The reason is that they didn't do anything. The two largest contributors to greenhouse gases in Canada are oil production, transportation, and electricity generation in that order. Both oil production and electricity fell during the recession because demand fell significantly. These are facts. It is a fact, that GDP didn't grow in 2009, it shrank by more than 3%. It is a fact that during a recessionary year, our emissions were still 17% over Kyoto targets.
Now if we look at the actual reasons why GHG emissions increased between 1990 and 2009, 54% comes from fossil fuel industries, and 45% from transportation. Which means the single largest contributor to the failure to meet Kyoto targets? Alberta. The booming oil industries in Alberta are responsible for almost half of the increase in GHGs.
Frankly, I find your hostile and abusive behavior to be the real polarizing problem here. I have been more than fair, I attribute blame to both the Liberals and the Conservatives, yet you can't seem to accept that. I made one comment about the Prime Minister, at the outset, I have not invented any conspiracies. Unless you somehow think recessions are conspiracies. I have repeatedly shown that the facts don't mean what you think they mean and you have repeatedly ignored everything I have written, to criticize me for not agreeing with you.
Considering you can't even recognize that context is vitally important when discussing trends and the fact that you think the largest recession in decades isn't important to the numbers under discussion, leads me to believe that you are clueless partisan with no interest in actual discussion. I'm done here.
It is the date that the last report was made - sorry I'm not going to cherry pick data to make things look better for you. It is hardly a "Poor year for comparison" as stated the population and the GDP increased while emissions decreased.
Really? There's nothing major that happened near the end of 2008 and continued into 2009? Nothing say world wide. That we're still dealing with the repercussions of? Nothing at all?
Correlation is not causation, but I see you ducked the question of what the Conservatives did to achieve this miraculous turn around. The answer is, of course, nothing or close to it. Most of the decline comes from the recession, the remaining part from the provinces who took action because they saw the conservatives were doing nothing. You continue to credit people who have repeatedly and publically announced that they would do nothing about climate change with dramatic action because you seem to have a very poor understanding of the situation.
it is untrue - not only did they try but the Conservatives succeeded where the Liberals failed.
One question: What have the Conservatives done to reduce GHG emissions? Or are you crediting them for the actions the provinces have taken and the reductions caused by the 2008 Recession? Your ending date, 2009 would obviously be an atypical year because of the global recession, which makes it a very poor year to use for comparison.
Better the truth than the hypocrisy of the Liberals.
You seem to be pretty angry about the Liberal government, maybe you need to calm down. Like I said the Liberals didn't do much about Kyoto, I don't care whether they "really believe" or not. The Conservatives have made it clear time and again that they have no interest in doing any thing about Greenhouse Gases.
the Liberals made things much worse.
You don't seem to understand the difficulties inherent in stopping a rising trend. It is possible to fail to halt or reverse the rise while still making the situation better than it would have been. Unless you can show where the Liberals were actually making things worse and what the Conservatives have actually done to make things better, I'm just going to conclude that you're angry and irrational.
Tell me again the tragedy of not being in Kyoto?
Mostly, it's a self-inflicted blow to our credibility as a country. It's also potentially illegal for the Government to withdraw from the treaty after it's been ratified. As for Kyoto itself, I'm no big fan of it. It has many flaws which can be pointed out at considerable length by people who care about them.
Actually, my characterization is correct. The Liberals didn't do much to meet the targets, here's a time line of what they did do. They tried a few things, but Kyoto wasn't ratified in Canada until 2002, and the Kyoto protocol didn't actually take effect until 2005 and by then time the Liberals only had a minority government. At that time, further action on Kyoto was abandoned to appease the Conservative Party of Canada and get them to support the budget.
The Liberal Government did actually spend billions on trying to reduce emissions, however, it was not nearly enough to meet the targets. Maybe you're the one trying to score political points and not actually concerned about global warming. Let's look at the Conservatives instead, they've repeatedly promised that they would come up with a "made-in-Canada" solution to the climate change. The preferred conservative "solution" is to do nothing, but barring that they would tie pollution to GDP so as long as you're making money it's open season on the environment (and I'm not just talking green house gases here).
While the Liberals failed to live up to the challenge, the Conservatives failed to even try, so I see no reason I need to pillory the former Liberal government when discussing the ideological failings of the current Conservative government. The mere fact that you would insist that I must do so, indicates that you are, in fact, the one focused on scoring political points.
Amusing. You realize that pretty much every claim in that article is false, right? Temperatures are rising, Arctic ice is at record lows in extent and more importantly, volume. Of course, I wouldn't expect much more from Climate Depot, it exists only to deny that global warming is occurring. If they were ever to accept that it was actually happening they'd be out of business.
Of course, the real reason they're fundamentally opposed to climate change has nothing to do with the science but with the ideological consequences of accepting global warming. If the unregulated free market can actually endanger the prosperity of the human race, then one of the ideological foundations of modern conservative thought is in extreme danger. That's an identity crisis that the conservative leaders are not prepared to handle, and worse if their followers were to understand the problem, they might stop believing in the conservative mythos.
Alberta as a whole contributes about $36 billion annually to the federal government revenues. About half of which is income tax and the rest is other taxes including gas and oil taxes. According to what I was able to find the estimate was that direct oil and gas corporate taxes represented a meager $1.3 billion dollars each year, though that information may be old. Also as of 2005, the oil and gas industries were receiving $1.5 billion in subsidies a year.
The oil sands themselves don't seem to propping much up, though they do hold vast reserves of hydrocarbons.
Of course, washing your hands is still better than not washing at all.
They are likely correct that any solution that doesn't account for all nations won't achieve much. Consider if the world was divided into two Blocs, the Green Bloc and the Brown Bloc. If "dirty" production can be shifted from the Green Bloc to the Brown Bloc then few (if any) gains will be made because the same production will occur just in an area where the laws won't penalize or prevent it. In fact, the few gains made will be wiped out by the increases caused by transporting the finished products from Brown Bloc back to the Green Bloc.
Of course there are (at least) two solutions to consider then, either the Green Bloc needs to do nothing at all and join the Brown Bloc and wallow in pollution, or slap import duties on all products from the Brown Bloc that are at least equivalent to the costs imposed on Green Bloc factories to produce equivalent products in a manner consistent with the Green Bloc.
Of course, this would be extremely unpopular with a variety of very wealthy corporations who do not want to see their supply of cheap Brown Bloc products disrupted.
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There's a problem with that. The political right has been pushing away intelligent people. Right wing talk radio, for example, thrives on one-sided and biased arguments and often uses blatant misrepresentation to score political points. Intelligent people who can spot the deceptions will be inevitably be turned off this behaviour (unless they are also extremely biased). The Republicans have developed a strong anti-science bias because the science indicates that some of their policy objectives are unreasonable and/or unwise. Rather than changing the policies to match what science informs us is true, the Republican party has frequently chosen to ignore or attack scientists for daring to oppose them.
Scientists used to generally lean right as did university professors. It was Richard Nixon and the Vietnam war that started their slow shift to the left, out of the Republican party and into the Democratic party. Or perhaps more succinctly, Scientists tend to be more liberal because "reality has a well-known liberal bias".
So, no, it's not about ignorant people passing bad legislation. It's about people whose objectives are different than YOUR objectives passing legislation.
I think it is both. I would strongly suspect that most people in Congress have little idea about technology and little interest in it. Congressional elections select for those who can convince a small group of primary voters to select them often based on their success in raising money for their campaign. That means most representatives have two areas of expertise: fund raising and convincing people to vote for them. They may have some other areas of expertise, but it's not guaranteed and most of them probably won't have overlapping areas of expertise. So on any issue, you might have a handful of subject matter "experts" who are qualified to understand and comment on the issue, and over 400 other people who want to get camera time, serve their own political empires. Add in the problem that there is no real way to identify who has expertise on an issue and you might begin to see why American laws are almost always a mess. You might think committee members would have a higher comprehension of the committee subject, but they're often used a political rewards which inevitably leads to non-experts being appointed to them.
It's not just that they have different objectives, it's that they have different objectives and collectively no understanding of anything other than begging for money and telling people what they want to hear.
And what happens when you weaken the government?
I'm not sure what part of that post you find to be impossible?
I would assume that the "Bush costs" include the ongoing costs of his unfunded programs and tax cuts over the last four years. Also, I'm pretty sure it was January 2009 when Obama took over from Bush. That does impact your numbers because it's $10.7T in debt at the start of 2009. Which puts Obama's additional debt at $4.4T. So in Bush's last year he put $1.5T on the debt.
Not really. Income inequality leads to wealth disparity and wealth disparity leads to political inequity. The politicians naturally cater to the people who fund their re-elections. When the top 20% control 92% of the wealth in the country, the politicians will do whatever the top 20% wants as long as it probably won't hurt their re-election chances.
You might be forgetting half of the slogan... I think it was "No taxation without representation". A lot of the Tea Party people seem to forget the last two words.
The problem is that almost almost half of the people in the country think the other half doesn't work or pay taxes. The majority of the "half the people in the country" who don't pay net income tax don't pay net income tax because the people they work for don't pay them enough to both pay taxes and pay for food and shelter. The government could tax them, but then it would have to give the money back anyway so that they can continue living. Many of the working poor work long hours for little pay, often holding down several part time jobs and working more than 40 hours each week to try and make ends meet.
Part of the problem is that the income for the bottom 75% of Americans has stagnated for more than 30 years. Often the working poor have seen their wages decrease relative to inflation so that each year food and shelter costs a greater percentage of their income. How can this be? Well, virtually all of the proceeds of progress have been accumulating in the hands of the richest Americans, they have increased their share of the country's wealth from about 20% in the mid-70s to almost 40% now. Meanwhile, the bottom 80% of Americans control around 8% of the total wealth of America.
But you are free to choose to blame those who can't pay over those who won't pay, if you like.
According to the White house.
Bush policies created about $7 trillion in additional debt, while Obama's policies have create $1.4 trillion. Almost half of the debt that Bush created comes from the lost tax revenues thanks to his tax cut. If you work it out, Bush added almost $900 billion dollars of debt for every year he was in office. Obama's contribution is less than half of that, and most of Obama's debt is one time costs (over half of it is the stimulus package) rather than yearly costs like Bush's tax cuts, expanded drug benefits and wars.
Unless there's something seriously wrong with that graphic, Bush makes Obama look like a fiscally responsible conservative.
Actually, I'm pretty sure it's not Bill's scale that's off but the Republican party's scale. The cuts he's talking about are the ones the Republicans like to proposed as an alternative to raising taxes. When you look at the number is becomes immediately obvious that they are not seriously trying to cut the budget but to use the deficit as an excuse to punish their "enemies". There are a disturbingly large percentage of the Republican base that think the U.S. spends billions on NPR and arts funding every year.
Every year it gets harder to tell if the Republican candidates are trying to capitalize on that ignorance, are generating it, or both.
If it weren't for George Bush's interference in the anti-trust case against Microsoft, IE probably wouldn't be the default browser in Windows. The issue wasn't just bundling IE, it was the bundling along with all of the other stuff they did, especially the endless emails obsessing over how to destroy Netscape because web browsers represented a potential threat to their operating system monopoly. In the end not much was done, because Microsoft literally bought a pardon from Bush with campaign donations.
Of course Chrome has no particular reason to want to kill Firefox, but hey.. it's money they could use on their own browser and get search users they don't pay for, strengthen their own brand and that is 100% loyal to Google and will implement any data gathering they want.
That's pointy-haired boss logic. The truth of the matter is if Google cuts funding for Firefox they will get a public relations mess and they will lose revenue from current Firefox users. Even worse, one of Google's competitors will get that revenue instead. For example, it could suddenly make Bing "a contender" for top search engine if Firefox went to Bing instead, even a handful of news stories about Bing's sudden market share increase would cost Google money, because there's not much lock in on "search engine". Google has a win-win deal with Mozilla, because they both profit from it. Google has no real incentive to break the deal unless Firefox's market share falls so low that they are no longer relevant. If it's true that Opera has a similar deal with Google, then Firefox would probably have to be south of 1% market share before Google would even consider cutting them loose.
There's a several infographics around that show how the majority of the deficit is attributable to Bush policies. About 90-95% of it is the tax cuts, the wars, and the unfunded drug plan extensions. Ironically, the Bush tax cuts gave away about the same amount of money as the Bush wars cost. Talk about doubling down on stupidity. Bush should have raised taxes by 3% on those earning more than $250,000 per year and the debt would have grown only by the 1.8 trillion spent on stimulus. Which could be easily be paid for out of the taxes after the wars ended.
The U.S. is more than able to pay for it's programs. However, the people with 40% of the money would rather not.
It seems unlikely. I checked the results from 2010 and he got 69.8% of the vote, that's nearly the triple the number of votes his Democratic challenger got. If he gets the same number of votes in 2012, you'd need to get 100,000 extra democratic votes in that district to defeat him.
Such arrangement is less problematic so long as you have freedom of movement.
It's ok if people run the (Jews|gays|blacks|atheists|Hispanics|Asians|whites) out of the state because some other state will (probably) take the refugees? That sounds like a victory for bigotry and prejudice to me. Also, the people most vulnerable to this type harassment generally don't have the capital to simply move to another state and what state is going to want to accept unemployed refugees?
His main issue is one that helps compartmentalize the damage that a voting group can do. It is much more agreeable to me that poor laws can be limited to a subset of states than to have poor laws applied to ALL of the states.
I bet those "compartments" will work exactly as well as the ones in the Titanic.
Personally, I think monotheism is partially responsible for the problem. Any monotheistic religion naturally lends itself to authoritarianism for reasons that should be obvious. This naturally leads to a system where some people are judged to be "closer" to the god, and people are further from god are encouraged to obey those who are closer. The system thereby develops an inherent weakness because the larger group becomes deferential and subservient to their superiors. This allows the leadership of the group to commit great evil, whether or not they intend to do so, because the questioning of the leaders is actively discouraged by the mere existence of the hierarchy. Usually, the leaders don't even need to actively discourage questioning, the followers will punish any of their fellows who question the leaders with whatever tools they think most appropriate, be it ostracism, lectures, discipline, and even violence. They will do so because the hierarchy implicitly says the leaders are better than the followers. This allows the followers to perform evil as long as the leaders either condone it or fail to condemn it.
This isn't unique to religions, it's a problem with authoritarianism. However, as I said at the outset, monotheistic religions are by nature authoritarian and thus exceptionally vulnerable it the ills of authoritarianism.
Of course, this is enabled by the consolidation of media control into the hands of 5 or 6 corporations. In effect, a few dozen people get to decide what is news in the United States, based on the orders of a half-dozen CEOs. And where the interests of the corporations coincide with each other there will be casual collusion to promote or bury stories, as the case may be. If the CEOs who run the corporations that own the majority of the news media don't want anyone talking about SOPA, (for example because they think it will boost the revenues of their entertainment divisions) then they are perfectly able to make it known that it is in every employee's best interests to make sure it is not covered in any depth, if it absolutely has to be covered at all.
Of course, the flip side is the issue just isn't nearly as interesting to most people as celebrity gossip, so they may not even have to do that. After all, bread and circuses is a very old formula.
I ducked nothing - the fact is you have not presented a single fact in all your posts while I have presented many facts and pieces of data. When you start backing up your wild claims with some actual facts then maybe you can try to make demands, but hand waving doesn't get you there.
Frankly, I find that argument more apt to you than me. You've presented exactly one fact in this argument to support your conclusion that the conservatives are better at curbing emissions than the Liberals. And that alleged fact is that emissions were lower in Canada in 2009 than in 1998. You have not cited where your number comes from and I have explained the facts that would lead us to expect emissions to fall in 2009. You also haven't been willing or able to explain what you think the Conservatives actually did to decrease emissions by 25% in 1 year.
The reason is that they didn't do anything. The two largest contributors to greenhouse gases in Canada are oil production, transportation, and electricity generation in that order. Both oil production and electricity fell during the recession because demand fell significantly. These are facts. It is a fact, that GDP didn't grow in 2009, it shrank by more than 3%. It is a fact that during a recessionary year, our emissions were still 17% over Kyoto targets.
Even the Conservative Government credits the reductions in 2008 to slower economic growth and less coal-fired power. Power generation is a provincial matter, not a federal one.
Now if we look at the actual reasons why GHG emissions increased between 1990 and 2009, 54% comes from fossil fuel industries, and 45% from transportation. Which means the single largest contributor to the failure to meet Kyoto targets? Alberta. The booming oil industries in Alberta are responsible for almost half of the increase in GHGs.
Frankly, I find your hostile and abusive behavior to be the real polarizing problem here. I have been more than fair, I attribute blame to both the Liberals and the Conservatives, yet you can't seem to accept that. I made one comment about the Prime Minister, at the outset, I have not invented any conspiracies. Unless you somehow think recessions are conspiracies. I have repeatedly shown that the facts don't mean what you think they mean and you have repeatedly ignored everything I have written, to criticize me for not agreeing with you.
Considering you can't even recognize that context is vitally important when discussing trends and the fact that you think the largest recession in decades isn't important to the numbers under discussion, leads me to believe that you are clueless partisan with no interest in actual discussion. I'm done here.
It is the date that the last report was made - sorry I'm not going to cherry pick data to make things look better for you. It is hardly a "Poor year for comparison" as stated the population and the GDP increased while emissions decreased.
Really? There's nothing major that happened near the end of 2008 and continued into 2009? Nothing say world wide. That we're still dealing with the repercussions of? Nothing at all?
Correlation is not causation, but I see you ducked the question of what the Conservatives did to achieve this miraculous turn around. The answer is, of course, nothing or close to it. Most of the decline comes from the recession, the remaining part from the provinces who took action because they saw the conservatives were doing nothing. You continue to credit people who have repeatedly and publically announced that they would do nothing about climate change with dramatic action because you seem to have a very poor understanding of the situation.
it is untrue - not only did they try but the Conservatives succeeded where the Liberals failed.
One question: What have the Conservatives done to reduce GHG emissions? Or are you crediting them for the actions the provinces have taken and the reductions caused by the 2008 Recession? Your ending date, 2009 would obviously be an atypical year because of the global recession, which makes it a very poor year to use for comparison.
Better the truth than the hypocrisy of the Liberals.
You seem to be pretty angry about the Liberal government, maybe you need to calm down. Like I said the Liberals didn't do much about Kyoto, I don't care whether they "really believe" or not. The Conservatives have made it clear time and again that they have no interest in doing any thing about Greenhouse Gases.
the Liberals made things much worse.
You don't seem to understand the difficulties inherent in stopping a rising trend. It is possible to fail to halt or reverse the rise while still making the situation better than it would have been. Unless you can show where the Liberals were actually making things worse and what the Conservatives have actually done to make things better, I'm just going to conclude that you're angry and irrational.
Tell me again the tragedy of not being in Kyoto?
Mostly, it's a self-inflicted blow to our credibility as a country. It's also potentially illegal for the Government to withdraw from the treaty after it's been ratified. As for Kyoto itself, I'm no big fan of it. It has many flaws which can be pointed out at considerable length by people who care about them.
Actually, my characterization is correct. The Liberals didn't do much to meet the targets, here's a time line of what they did do. They tried a few things, but Kyoto wasn't ratified in Canada until 2002, and the Kyoto protocol didn't actually take effect until 2005 and by then time the Liberals only had a minority government. At that time, further action on Kyoto was abandoned to appease the Conservative Party of Canada and get them to support the budget.
The Liberal Government did actually spend billions on trying to reduce emissions, however, it was not nearly enough to meet the targets. Maybe you're the one trying to score political points and not actually concerned about global warming. Let's look at the Conservatives instead, they've repeatedly promised that they would come up with a "made-in-Canada" solution to the climate change. The preferred conservative "solution" is to do nothing, but barring that they would tie pollution to GDP so as long as you're making money it's open season on the environment (and I'm not just talking green house gases here).
While the Liberals failed to live up to the challenge, the Conservatives failed to even try, so I see no reason I need to pillory the former Liberal government when discussing the ideological failings of the current Conservative government. The mere fact that you would insist that I must do so, indicates that you are, in fact, the one focused on scoring political points.
Amusing. You realize that pretty much every claim in that article is false, right? Temperatures are rising, Arctic ice is at record lows in extent and more importantly, volume. Of course, I wouldn't expect much more from Climate Depot, it exists only to deny that global warming is occurring. If they were ever to accept that it was actually happening they'd be out of business.
Warming hasn't stopped.
Artctic sea ice hasn't recovered.
Of course, the real reason they're fundamentally opposed to climate change has nothing to do with the science but with the ideological consequences of accepting global warming. If the unregulated free market can actually endanger the prosperity of the human race, then one of the ideological foundations of modern conservative thought is in extreme danger. That's an identity crisis that the conservative leaders are not prepared to handle, and worse if their followers were to understand the problem, they might stop believing in the conservative mythos.
Alberta as a whole contributes about $36 billion annually to the federal government revenues. About half of which is income tax and the rest is other taxes including gas and oil taxes. According to what I was able to find the estimate was that direct oil and gas corporate taxes represented a meager $1.3 billion dollars each year, though that information may be old. Also as of 2005, the oil and gas industries were receiving $1.5 billion in subsidies a year.
The oil sands themselves don't seem to propping much up, though they do hold vast reserves of hydrocarbons.
Of course, washing your hands is still better than not washing at all.
They are likely correct that any solution that doesn't account for all nations won't achieve much. Consider if the world was divided into two Blocs, the Green Bloc and the Brown Bloc. If "dirty" production can be shifted from the Green Bloc to the Brown Bloc then few (if any) gains will be made because the same production will occur just in an area where the laws won't penalize or prevent it. In fact, the few gains made will be wiped out by the increases caused by transporting the finished products from Brown Bloc back to the Green Bloc.
Of course there are (at least) two solutions to consider then, either the Green Bloc needs to do nothing at all and join the Brown Bloc and wallow in pollution, or slap import duties on all products from the Brown Bloc that are at least equivalent to the costs imposed on Green Bloc factories to produce equivalent products in a manner consistent with the Green Bloc.
Of course, this would be extremely unpopular with a variety of very wealthy corporations who do not want to see their supply of cheap Brown Bloc products disrupted.