LT recently posted on Prime Minister Harper's and President Bush's environmental perspectives. I thought it would be an interesting follow up to my earlier link on the climate change debate.
Canadian Perspective
On Thursday, the story broke that a report commissioned by the federal Environment Ministry found that a substantial carbon tax would have minimal impact on economic growth. The report, dated Jan. 16, 2007, was obtained and released by the Green party through an access to information request.American Perspective
She's right. A hefty carbon tax is, without a doubt, the most effective way to reduce the emission of greenhouse gases, and no government serious about climate change would dismiss it. But the Harper government has dismissed it. John Baird even called a carbon tax "the mother of all taxes." And he did that while claiming that his government is committed to reducing greenhouse-gas emissions. Even by political standards, that is dazzling cynicism.
It's hard to know which economists to disbelieve (Dan Gardner, The Ottawa Citizen, June 23, 2007)
cache from Google
Earlier this year, the world's top climate scientists released a definitive report on global warming. It is now "unequivocal," they concluded, that the planet is heating up. Humans are directly responsible for the planetary heat wave, and only by taking immediate action can the world avert a climate catastrophe. Megadroughts, raging wildfires, decimated forests, dengue fever, legions of Katrinas - unless humans act now to curb our climate-warming pollution, warned the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, "we are in deep trouble." ...
"We're going to see a big debate on it going forward," Cheney told ABC News, about "the extent to which it is part of a normal cycle versus the extent to which it's caused by man." What we know today, he added, is "not enough to just sort of run out and try to slap together some policy that's going to 'solve' the problem." ...
An examination of thousands of pages of internal documents that the White House has been forced to relinquish under the Freedom of Information Act - as well as interviews with more than a dozen current and former administration scientists and climate-policy officials - confirms that the White House has implemented an industry-formulated disinformation campaign designed to actively mislead the American public on global warming and to forestall limits on climate polluters. ...
more at Rolling Stone