Should Greens support the NDP-Liberal coalition?

Maybe they can stuff May into the senate or something.

Steve_Shutt wrote:

...incoming US President Obama's Green-fueled economic recovery plan...

[IMG]http://i6.tinypic.com/2z3q7f4.gif[/IMG]

ETA: Oh, wait! I get it! You mean "Green" as in truckloads of public money!

No question about it.  It was never about cap and trade vs. carbon tax. Both are good, one should come first and the other later as it takes time to implement.

[i][b]Brian Topp[/b]: Our friends on the blue team seem to mostly focus on sticks, and not so much on carrots. ;)[/i]

Coyote wrote:

Can May support a coalition government that has explicitly rejected the carbon tax and has adopted the NDP environment plan, which is cap and trade?

The Green Party platform was based on Cap and Trade and Carbon Tax.

Quote:

This need not be an either/or proposition. The Green party believes a cap-and-trade system -- of the type advocated by the NDP, for instance -- can help bring down emissions from the largest polluters. In particular, such an approach might be used in certain sectors -- allowing coal-fired electrical plants to trade carbon credits amongst one another, for instance, as the cap goes down on their collective emissions.

But to bring down emissions in the nation as a whole, and provide the fiscal flexibility needed to significantly reduce the tax burden and alleviate energy poverty, we also need a carbon tax.

-- Elizabeth May

The Simple Solution

Absolutely, and it is completely toothless, and not at all the kind of government intervention that will effectively curb global warming. The first displaces the burden of the cost of environmental cleanup onto the "developing world", and creates negative insentives to economic development there, while the latter displaces the cost onto the less advantaged in Canada.

In my view the latter is preferable to the former, since at least Canadians have the option of voting on the measure that will impact them directly, whereas the people of the Amazon most certainly do not.

That said, both solutions are principly market driven insentive programs, and niether directly or effectively confronts the problem. The only reason that the main body of expert environmentalists ever supported "cap and trade" is because it was tied into Kyoto, and Kyoto was considered important because it set up an international regulatory system within the UN structure, one that could be built on with real regulatory provisions directly targetting polution.

Thing is there has been so much hoopla about Kyoto, a lot of people have gotten themselves so caught up in the cause that they think the Kyoto system was the end in itself. It was not. It was meant to be the first baby step. A kid gloves way of getting an international regulatory system into place that could be built on with real regulation, which would ensure that all economies were competing on a level playing field through an international agreement with attached regulatory aparatus. 

The only thing that is going to effectively curb CO2 emmissions is direct government intervention, and regulation, not airy fairy "economic insentives" of the kind dreamt up to appease the very same crowd that has brought us the "Great Depression II."

Kyoto is dead now, so we can stop pretending.