110 comments on New Liberal Leader - First Green PM?
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110 comments on New Liberal Leader - First Green PM?
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anywho point is.. we "recognize the limits to growth argument"
and if your argument against us is that we dont see it as our number one concern.. well i dont believe we need a #1 concern, thats like having a car about to hit you at the same time as being in the path of a train. guess what i dont care which one i should be MORE worried about, there both about to kill me!
My number one concern is that people are too scared to take a chance, and elect a party with some real progressive policy!
Go ahead, vote Dion, because he did sooo much as the Liberals environment minister!
You keep your eye on the second and you will mis the first.
Global Warming is now, our actions in the next 10 years have a huge impact on the climate of the planet in the subsequent 100.
There is a wealth of scientific evidence that CO2 concentrations are rising faster than we thought, and that the effects of this (Greenland Ice Sheet melting, acidification of the oceans, release of methane from permafrost) is greater than our models indicated. There is a growing alarm amongst the scientific community that we are crossing a number of natural 'tipping points' where CO2 accumulation will become unstoppable, or at the very least the necessary abatement of our emissions will become unfeasible.
Moreover the choices we make now determine our CO2 output 20 to 50 years from now: a coal or nuclear fired plant built now, will still be running in 2050. A car bought now lasts for 14 years, a commercial vehicle potentially much longer. So there are enormous lead times to 'turn the supertanker'.
The Greens are absolutely right on this one.
(where I think they are wrong is on the question of nuclear power. Ontario, for example, would be one of the worst CO2 emitters in North America if it didn't have 12,000MW of nuclear power).
Peak Oil is a hypothesis, which remains unproven. We have one, unambiguous, signal about PO: the price of oil. The price of oil is the point at which
supply +/- changes in inventory = demand
That is tautologically true.
Right now the price of oil is saying there is demand for oil, and it is being met, at a price. It is not saying that there is an impending shortage of oil.
(It is trivially true that oil will run out, ie Peak, this is the definition of an exhaustible resource. The question is when?)
All data on oil reserves and future oil production is suspect to a greater or lesser extent: the key players, the large state-owned oil companies, do not submit themselves to outside audit.
I would be the first to argue that a current commodity price, nor a futures oil price, set by financial markets, is not an exact unbiased forecast of the future price of oil.
But it is the best piece of data we have, and it is not saying we are running out (yet).
If we do hit Peak Oil (and in some ways, Peak Gas will be worse), then the outlook for Global Warming is even more gloomy than if we do not, because we will burn more coal and coal is one of the key roots of world CO2 emission (about half of world electricity production, and about 30% of world CO2 production, currently-- I'd have to check the exact number).
Peak and running out are definitely not the same thing, that is fundamental to understanding PO. You put far too much faith in pricing, it's production figures that will indicate the peak. Anyway, doesn't a 300% increase in price indicate something?
For practical planning purposes both PO and GW are issues that need addressing now, as you put it.
You write lots of words, under your ironic "ValueThinker" tag, but still you seem completely clueless about the basics.
Valuethink means I like low PE stocks which I think are undervalued -- nothing more, nothing less.
You attack me personally, and in that, entirely devalue any criticism you make of the content my arguments.
Let's put this another way: you are a grade A plonker (or behaving like one, it may not be innate) who doesn't know how to structure an argument.
I shall treat your 'arguments' with a similar level of courtesy and attention to the principles of rhetoric ;-).
This will help. But the rate of energy descent will be outstripping the rate of ingenious technical fixes.
There seems to be need of a social rearrangement. If Elizabeth were to sell the need to accept a significant reduction in material conveniences, then I would be convinced that the Greens understood the limits to growth.
We need a revolution, not a violent one of course, but a revolution in thinking. I like the way Thomas Homer-Dixon describes it. We need to build resilience into our societies not stretching out further on a limb.
I think that the difference between the Greens and the Liberals could be that the Greens emphasize that building resilience is central to all other institutions where as Liberals (quoting Dion) wants to do a balancing act. A balancing act won't prevent a crash since everything is so out of balance. The analogy is going off a cliff. Either you crash, or you have prepared and you glide to a landing(possibly rough).