回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

Ignatieff and oil
Demonizing oilsands shows a lack of political leadership
Calgary Herald April 12, 2011

Two years ago, Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff defended Alberta's oilsands to a group of business students in Montreal. "The stupidest thing you can do (is) to run against an industry that is providing employment for hundreds of thousands of Canadians, and not just in Alberta, but right across the country," he told his audience at HEC Montreal, a management school affiliated with the University of Montreal, adding: "all questions of energy policy are a question of national unity."

Last week on the campaign trail, Ignatieff sang a different tune, referring to Alberta's "dirty oil." He used the pejorative while referring to the need to clean up the oilsands. Most Albertans wouldn't disagree on his point -developing the resource to the highest environmental standards is in everyone's best interests. But Ignatieff does a disservice trotting out the "D" word.

The oilsands have a much smaller carbon footprint than the collective impact of coal.
Technology is on the verge of eliminating tailings ponds and vastly reducing the amount of water used in the extraction process. Penn State University researchers recently announced a method they believe could make tailings ponds disappear. Canadian companies are exploring similar processes.

Yet, rather than touting promising technologies, Ignatieff and NDP Leader Jack Layton are using the oilsands as a political punching bag. They both decry Alberta's "dirty oil," yet seem to love our filthy money.

Ignatieff recently proposed a national cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions. Carbon trading essentially gives industrial emitters permission to pollute under a complicated credit auctioning system run by bureaucrats. Many politicians favour cap-and-trade, in part, because it obscures the full cost of curbing carbon emissions. Economists generally prefer carbon taxes to cap-and-trade because a tax provides clarity to the industry. Alberta already has a levy on carbon that is re-invested in technology -a much wiser system than sending money outside the province in exchange for carbon credits elsewhere.

Ignatieff also announced that he would ban tanker traffic along the west coast, effectively leaving the U.S. as the only market for Alberta's crude oil -a market that could get more difficult to supply if opposition to the Keystone XL pipeline proposal plays out.

For somebody who said it was stupid to run against an industry that is vital to the Canadian economy, Ignatieff has a strange way of showing it. He is squandering an opportunity to have a bigger conversation about a national energy strategy that works for all Canadians.

If Ignatieff and Layton are playing to Quebec, they would be wise to heed the recent Leger poll for the Montreal Economic Institute. It found considerable common ground between Quebec and Alberta, with 71 per cent of Quebecers supporting development of the oilsands as long as efforts continue to curb environmental damage -something that is also desired in Alberta.

回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

Cap-and-Trade Useless, Dumb, and Reckless: Goldstein

Michael Ignatieff’s irresponsible election promise would be a financial disaster for Canada
Toronto Sun, April 5, 2011

Michael Ignatieff’s 2011 election Red Book promise to create a cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, completes a triple play of stupidity on energy and environmental policy by the Liberals going back almost 20 years.

It started with Jean Chretien’s reckless promise in his 1993 Liberal Red Book to cut Canada’s emissions to 20% below 1988 levels by 2005.

That economy-killing idea was a steal of the same promise made in the 1988 election by the then-Progressive Conservative government, which also did nothing to implement it.

Chretien did worse than nothing by signing the Kyoto accord in 1998 and ratifying it in 2002, bringing it into effect.

Kyoto called for Canada to achieve a more modest but still totally unrealistic target of reducing our emissions by an average of 6% below 1990 levels between 2008 and 2012.

Chretien and his successor, Paul Martin, did nothing with that commitment until the Liberals lost power in 2006, at which time Canada was 30% above its Kyoto target and incapable of achieving it by 2012.

Stephane Dion, after replacing Martin as Liberal leader in 2006, discarded Chretien’s previous rejection of a carbon tax and his own preference for cap-and-trade, in order to support a carbon tax as the central plank of his “Green Shift” program. It was massively rejected by voters in 2008.

Ignatieff, who called for a carbon tax in the 2006 Liberal leadership race, has flip-flopped in the opposite direction from Dion. Now he rejects a carbon tax and favours cap-and-trade.

Both policies put a price on industrial emissions of carbon dioxide when fossil fuels (coal, oil, natural gas) are burned for energy.

This drives up the cost of most goods and services by billions of dollars annually, either by businesses passing along their increased costs to consumers (cap-and-trade), or by governments imposing higher taxes (carbon tax).

While both measures have failed to lower emissions where they’ve been tried, Ignatieff’s proposal is even worse than a carbon tax.

Governments know how to tax. They know nothing about setting up an international cap-and-trade scheme a global stock market in which big industrial emitters trade carbon credits.

Each credit permits the bearer to emit one tonne of carbon dioxide, with governments theoretically lowering total emissions over time.

For Ignatieff to cite Europe’s cap-and-trade market, the Emissions Trading Scheme, as an example to Canada, is political insanity.

Since it was created in 2005 by European governments it’s been a disaster.

It failed to lower emissions. (What did, unintentionally, was the 2008 global financial crash.)

It sent prices consumers pay for fossil-fuel generated electricity skyrocketing.

It provided undeserved profits to giant utilities and energy companies, while hospitals and universities fired nurses and teachers to buy carbon credits.

It has been beset by multi-billion-dollar financial frauds, plus widespread fraud in the carbon credit markets.

The latter occurred because many First World investments into “green” energy projects in the Third World to generate carbon credits, failed to lower emissions, due to lax regulation and financial and political corruption.

Unsurprising, given the earliest corporate backers of cap-and-trade in the U.S. were Enron’s fraudsters.

Present boosters include the Wall St. banks that precipitated the 2008 global recession through reckless trading in subprime mortgage derivatives, who were then bailed out by hundreds of billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money.

Critics of cap-and-trade argue a global market based on the suspect foundation of carbon credits, will lead to another disaster like the subprime mortgage crisis, costing trillions of dollars of wealth globally and tens of millions of people their jobs, homes and life savings.

Ignatieff’s apparent determination to establish a cap-and-trade system here, regardless of what the U.S. does, suggests more Liberal recklessness.

Considering U.S. cap-and-trade legislation is gridlocked in the Congress, this would place our fossil fuel industry in Alberta and Saskatchewan especially the oilsands at a huge economic disadvantage with our largest trading partner.

The Conservatives, since 2006, have continued the Liberal policy of playing lip-service to lowering emissions while doing virtually nothing.

Prime Minister Stephen Harper has said Canada won’t implement cap-and-trade without the U.S., but the fact remains both it and carbon taxes, have been disasters.

We should abandon them.

We need a made-in-Canada policy focusing on clean air, safe drinking water, cleaning up toxic waste dumps, safely disposing radioactive waste, tougher vehicle emission standards, boosting research into practical “green” energy sources such as natural gas, putting scrubbers on coal-fired electricity plants and creating more national parks.

Not another dumb Liberal idea.

回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

好长，头晕……

回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

中国不是伊拉克 说:

好长，头晕……

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哈哈，团长来了。
我刚看完一篇，现在又copy上来了... 凡是谈政治和经济的，都很长很晕的，我今天看了至少十篇以上，每个媒体的评论员文章都看了。这个是新发表的文章。

Ignatieff’s dangerous emissions

Do the Liberals know what they’re promising on climate change? Do they care they’re being reckless?
By Lorrie Goldstein, QMI Agency

Watching Michael Ignatieff and the Liberals address the issue of climate change in this election is like watching children running through the house with scissors.


They’re careless, they’re reckless and they don’t understand it’s all fun and games until somebody loses an eye.


Simply put, if you’re going to promise “a Liberal government will establish a cap-and-trade system … that sets a ceiling on the total amount of permissible greenhouse gas emissions by large industrial facilities, and then auctions off emission permits to companies, who can trade them amongst themselves to remain compliant under the law,” here’s what you don’t do.


You don’t bury what is actually a major financial policy, costing tens of billions of dollars of our money every year, 46 pages inside your election platform, with no answers to the key questions this promise raises.


You also don’t just add a throwaway line, this will apply “to all sectors of the economy, with no exceptions” and it “will be equitable across all regions of the country” without explaining how, given that this has huge implications for every province and industry, for example, not just Alberta’s oilsands, but Ontario’s auto sector.


You don’t, as Andrew Leach observed in a Globe and Mail blog post on the day Ignatieff unveiled his platform, fail to mention cap-and-trade once when asked by the media to comment on your climate-change policies, in favour of talking about a green renovation tax credit and how you’ll phase out the Accelerated Capital Cost Allowance tax break for oilsands investments, two years faster than Stephen Harper and the Conservatives.


Not in step with U.S.


It’s not that these other policies aren’t significant, but they pale beside cap-and-trade, especially if your plan is to implement it regardless of what happens in the U.S. where cap-and-trade legislation is deadlocked in Congress.


Of equal concern, the Liberals have a history of making absurdly unrealistic commitments on climate change Jean Chretien’s 1998 signing and 2002 ratification of the Kyoto accord being a prime example and then walking away from them, leaving chaos in their wake.


It’s hard to know what the Liberals were thinking when they committed us to Kyoto and the carbon dioxide emission reductions it required of Canada, but no government that understood the potential economic consequences for Canadians would have signed the deal the Liberals signed.
Adding to the confusion, Ignatieff, who now supports cap-and-trade, used to favour a carbon tax, unlike Stephane Dion, the previous Liberal leader, who favoured cap-and-trade, before flip-flopping and campaigning on a carbon tax in the 2008 election.

Given all this, here are some questions for the Liberals to answer.


(1) The moment any government announces a cap-and-trade system based on auctioning carbon credits, a massive lobbying campaign will be launched by major industries to obtain the credits for free and to exempt large sections of the economy from cap-and-trade, which is what happened when Europe set up its system in 2005. What assurance can Ignatieff give that the Liberals won’t cave in to this lobbying effort, which in Europe resulted in governments giving out more free permits to industry than total emissions, undermining the entire purpose of cap-and-trade, which is to lower emissions, not raise them?


(2) What verification and enforcement mechanisms will the Liberals use, and how much will they cost, to prevent fraudulent carbon trading and tax fraud, both of which are now multi-billion-dollar problems in Europe’s cap-and-trade system?


(3) Since cap-and-trade drives up the price of electricity when fossil fuels are used to generate it, how will consumers cope with yet another spike in hydro rates, given that rates are already skyrocketing across large sections of the country?

(4) How is cap-and-trade not going to hurt Canadian industry if a similar policy isn’t adopted by the U.S., our largest trading partner?


Please, Liberals. Put the scissors down and think before someone gets hurt.

加拿大这几天油价涨的，引起了不少恐慌～ 政治和经济的影响真是息息相关啊～

回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

Michelle Libra 说:

Ignatieff and oil
Demonizing oilsands shows a lack of political leadership
Calgary Herald April 12, 2011


-----------------------

Obviously， you try to misguid our readers.

It found considerable common ground between Quebec and Alberta, with 71 per cent of Quebecers supporting development of the oilsands as long as efforts continue to curb environmental damage -something that is also desired in Alberta??????

If your words were correct, those politicians would not say " dirty oil" in Quebec. Ignatif, a long-time professor at Havard University, he would not play that card in Quebec, if your words were ture.

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回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

To reduce the emmission of CO2, it is the world's common concept. Only Alberta opposes.

Pollute our prairies! Conservator, go back to your dirty oil.

回复: 分享：Quebec and the Fairy Godmother

小妹妹，油砂产业污染环境是没法否认的事实。不过由于加拿大地方大，污染一点影响不大，就算了吧。

但是给石油工业减税，哈伯政府有点不地道。