More data that it's the Sun that does it

dwh

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Cariboocoot wrote: »

If we take the other route and deny its potential and it turns out there isn't any, then no loss, no gain. But if we're wrong ... oh yes: the whole world dies and takes us with it.

I'll take erring on the side of caution any day over the ultimate doomsday proposition. :roll:

Ahh...Pascal's Wager

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pascal%27s_Wager

I still want ice cream.

Me too. I'm a gonna have me some tonight.

mikeo

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Me too. I'm a gonna have me some tonight.

Just had some, made a mistake when I made it up and added Orange extract instead of vanilla, so I have Orange Chocolate ice creme, actually tastes pretty good.
Got one of those Cuisinart ice creme makers of ebay for $29 where you put the chiller bowl into the freezer and when frozen, take it out and add ingredients and 30 minutes later you have homemade ice creme.

dwh

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

mikeo wrote: »

Just had some, made a mistake when I made it up and added Orange extract instead of vanilla, so I have Orange Chocolate ice creme, actually tastes pretty good.
Got one of those Cuisinart ice creme makers of ebay for $29 where you put the chiller bowl into the freezer and when frozen, take it out and add ingredients and 30 minutes later you have homemade ice creme.

Oh man...that sounds really good. I love these things:

http://www.amazon.com/Terrys-Chocolate-Orange-6-17-Ounce-Boxes/dp/B001LN4IZS

drees

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Cariboocoot wrote: »

The problem with the carbon tax is that it taxes use, not waste. Therefor it gives no incentive to conserve; it just hikes prices all around.

How do you put a tax on waste? If you want to incentive conservation, you have to get the money from somewhere.

Cariboocoot wrote: »

The tax is now up to four cents, and gasoline is down to $1.18/L. So how effective has it been? Not effective at all.

Not surprising - the tax isn't high enough.

Cariboocoot wrote: »

Neither was changing to HST which put 7% tax on energy conserving items such as insulation where there was none before. Sensible energy policy? Not in this Province.

Again - 7% is too low - even with a 30% tax credit here in the states, there are a LOT of people who should take advantage of the incentives but don't.

Cariboocoot wrote: »

In the past we've had policies that did make sense. These were funded and administered mainly through BC Hydro, or Government-monopoly electric utility. At the time they realized that investing in conservation was as good and sometimes better than investing in new production.

And how exactly did they invest in conservation? And where did those funds come from?

BB.

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Then "they" drive the price of gasoline/petrol up to $8.00 a gallon or so--and when folks try alternative fuels and/or conservation (renewables, electricity), "they" write huge fines for using untaxed fuels or try their darnedest to put a GPS system on every vehicle and replace the "lost tax revenue" with something else and increase charges even more with time of use / city center charges too...

I don't think taxes are the way to go here... The various green tax rebates and cash rebates (eco-cars, home improvement rebates, even solar rebates, etc.) are just subsides mostly for the rich paid for by the folks that cannot afford their own homes or hybrid Mercedes/etc. in the first place...

And, instead of reducing driving--it appears to increased miles driven because of the lower cost per mile of the more efficient vehicles.

[FONT=Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif]In 1994, U.S. residential vehicles traveled 1,793 billion miles (Figure 3.1), a distance equal to more than 70 million trips around the world. The amount of travel in 1994 was 282 billion miles more than in 1988. From 1988 through 1994, the average annual growth in the number of miles traveled was 2.9 percent, almost 3 times the rate of growth in the number of residential vehicles during that period. [/FONT]

And because the government was pushing for smaller cars and the fuel economy standards did not apply to light trucks--people started driving more miles in their (less fuel efficient) light trucks (and SUV) instead.

So far, the saying from a past president still seems to fit: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it.

-Bill

russ

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Here unleaded premium is 10 USD per gallon and diesel is about 7.5 USD

Doesn't slow people down and there is plenty of traffic.

Taxing fuel heavily just screws the rest of the economy.

Cariboocoot

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

drees wrote: »

How do you put a tax on waste? If you want to incentive conservation, you have to get the money from somewhere.

Power-to-weight ratio tax would be one idea. But as Bill mentions; it has to apply to all vehicles. The days of high HP cars is past, but no one seems to accept it.

Not surprising - the tax isn't high enough.

If you tax, tax, tax and push the price up "high enough" you get what Russ has described. It only generates inflation. A sudden increase would be economic devastation.

Again - 7% is too low - even with a 30% tax credit here in the states, there are a LOT of people who should take advantage of the incentives but don't.

You completely misunderstood that. I guess I wasn't clear enough. It used to be that energy saving things like insulation were exempt from the 7% PST. Now with the HST that advantage is gone.

And how exactly did they invest in conservation? And where did those funds come from?

BC Hydro spent the money it would have spent building new generation facilities on conservation. It is a Crown Corporation, so technically it makes no profit (HAH!). Instead, "surplus funds" are held in trust for future needs such as infrastructure upgrading or new plants. In this case it gave us some of our own money back so we could buy CFL's, LED's, more energy-efficient appliances, et cetera. Sure it was our money, but I see nothing wrong with it coming back to us to help offset the costs of investing in things that will save us money on the electric bill.

There was a government rebate on hybrid cars too, now gone. Typical of government policies; it was only on hybrids. Never mind all the "gas only" cars that used less fuel than the hybrids. Politicians got sold on the idea that "hybrid" was the magic answer, so that was that. Just the way some are sold on the "hydrogen solution" which shows no real promise of ever becoming practical.

And here you have the policy problem: no long-term strategy. They change the rules to the latest fad solution before any real results can be seen from the previous efforts. This is because politicians typically do not understand technology. Neither does the majority of the voting public, it seems.

bryanl

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

We need consistent policies that promote conservation and penalize waste.

It is interesting in that there is a system of such policies well proven over time to do as given here, policies that work directly at an individual level.

But, rather than learn from history, we have folks who insist on meddling with it with the hubris that they know better. They want to use government to tax or otherwise penalize what they think is wasteful and to "stimulate" what they think is the right way to go.

The policy that works is the market. Its fundamental value is that people don't want to waste their resources or money. What all the governmental intervention is doing is providing folks a diversion from energy efficiency into working the system. The goal changes from trying to save money by finding more efficient sources of energy and using less of it to that of trying to figure out how to get more money from the government. Talk about waste! All that effort being diverted away from efficient energy into politics and law.

dmiller

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Who are the climate scientist at top institutions who do not believe the earth is undergoing man-made climate change?

dwh

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

dmiller wrote: »

Who are the climate scientist at top institutions who do not believe the earth is undergoing man-made climate change?

Here's one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Lindzen


"Richard Siegmund Lindzen (born February 8, 1940, Webster, Massachusetts) is an American atmospheric physicist and Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his work in the dynamics of the middle atmosphere, atmospheric tides and ozone photochemistry. He has published more than 200 scientific papers and books.[1] He was a lead author of Chapter 7, 'Physical Climate Processes and Feedbacks,' of the IPCC Third Assessment Report on climate change. He is a well known skeptic of global warming[2] and critic of what he states are political pressures on climate scientists to conform to climate alarmism."




"In a 2009 editorial in the Wall Street Journal, Lindzen points out that the earth was just emerging from the "Little Ice Age" in the 19th century and concludes that it is "not surprising" to see warming after that. He goes on to state that the IPCC claims were...

“ "...based on the weak argument that the current models used by the IPCC couldn't reproduce the warming from about 1978 to 1998 without some forcing, and that the only forcing that they could think of was man. Even this argument assumes that these models adequately deal with natural internal variability—that is, such naturally occurring cycles as El Nino, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation, etc.

Yet articles from major modeling centers acknowledged that the failure of these models to anticipate the absence of warming for the past dozen years was due to the failure of these models to account for this natural internal variability. Thus even the basis for the weak IPCC argument for anthropogenic climate change was shown to be false.""

icarus

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

As I have said before, this is teetering too close for my tastes to a political discussion, but it seems that the mods think it ok. I am not going to wade in on this much as I don't want to fall into that hole, except to comment on this, Cariboo 'Coot wrote:


"There was a government rebate on hybrid cars too, now gone. Typical of government policies; it was only on hybrids. Never mind all the "gas only" cars that used less fuel than the hybrids. Politicians got sold on the idea that "hybrid" was the magic answer, so that was that. Just the way some are sold on the "hydrogen solution" which shows no real promise of ever becoming practical."

The rebates on hybrids was designed to encourage acceptance of the technology, and to allow it to become mainstream. It has to a grater or lesser extent, as evidenced by the success of the Toyota Prius. The tax credit expired in the US in 2007 or maybe 2008, so the car was forced to sink or swim on it's own, and the results are clear, the technolgy works, has been accepted by the mainstream, and it has lead to a considerable leap forward in basic car efficiency.

Other competing cars and technologies that were not as good, or in the case of the gm "hybrid" systems couldn't stand on their own and have failed. I personally think that it was money (the tax credits) well spent. I do think that similar incentives for PV and other RE technologies going forward is a good thing for a number of reasons as well.

Whether or not you think global warming is a real issue, or whether or not it's consequences are going to be severe (I do on both counts by the way!) the solutions are a win/win/win. The move away from fossil fuel has a number of side benefits that are often overlooked, and indeed are seen as short term costs but really aren't. Moving toward sustainable energy will lead to slower energy cost rises in the future (thereby costing consumers net/net less than we will if we stay on the course we are currently on)the move to sustainable will create non=offshoreable jobs in the R&D as well as the installation and support of these industries, thereby helping to stabilize and stimulate the economy Moving to a sustainable energy will reduce our dependence on unstable energy supplies from those that don't "like" us, leading to increase in geopolitical security.

So those that think of energy efficiency and sustainable energy as nothing but a cost, should look further than the next few years. As many know here, the reality is that regardless of any global warming issues, energy costs going forward are only going to go up. The sooner we begin to use our energy more wisely and efficiently, the sooner we realize that it is on our own economic self interest to do so, the cheaper the costs will be and easier it will be to make the transition.

And so, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this and it is my hope that this doesn't devolve the way I have seen it do on so many other forums.

Tony

bryanl

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

this is teetering too close for my tastes to a political discussion ... the results are clear, ... I personally think that it was money (the tax credits) well spent. ... Whether or not you think global warming is a real issue, ... the solutions are a win/win/win. ... Moving toward sustainable energy will lead to slower energy cost rises in the future ... the move to sustainable will create non=offshoreable jobs ... Moving to a sustainable energy will reduce our dependence ... those that think of energy efficiency and sustainable energy as nothing but a cost, should look further than the next few years. ... energy costs going forward are only going to go up.

The problem isn't politics, it's when political opinions diverge from matters of fact and reality. The quote here shows many examples. The presumption that energy costs will rise does not fit with historical precedent. Artificial 'creation' of jobs by governmental action has never been shown to be a viable long term solution. Costs are never strictly immediate transaction cash.

It is political to opine that government money on wild gooses chases ( ;-) ) is a good thing or that reactions to hypothetical scenarios that may or may not occur is going to be beneficial no matter what. Such opinions are not constructive for learning about the topics and issues. What can be constructive is to delve into the basis for the opinions and find out whether they are soundly based and where the boundary between reason and ideology lies.

The problem with 'politics' in forums is that many folks don't want to examine the basis for their views and engage in some rather destructive behaviors maintaining emotional peace. We've seen that here in the form of challenges and disputes about observation.

Cariboocoot

Re: More data that it's the Sun that does it

Actually, Tony, I was referring only to the BC Gov't PST rebate specifically applied to hybrids only. It wasn't about getting the technology accepted; it was just a politically popular thing to do.

Good intentions are used as paving material on a certain road, as you know. :roll: