>>300ZX

Nice.

Heh heh. When I roll, I roll well.

But I can’t keep fit behind the wheel, so my baby stays in the garage much of the time.

But actually you do raise a good point. If I owned something a bit more fuel efficient than my 300ZX my Scottish genes might not limit my driving the way they do at the moment.

Surely a movement as international as the Green Movement can come up with a global “per capita” pollution allowance that all nations are required to subscribe to? This would allow countries like India, Tanzania, Sri Lanka, Zaire, China, Yemen, etc., to grow their industrial base, while requiring the USA, European Union, Australia, Canada, Russia, New Zealand, etc., to reduce the impact of our industrialisation. The alternative is to push back to an arbitrary ‘base point’, when the poor countries were too under industrialised to provide reasonable standards of living for their populations, and make sure we keep them there!

The unfortunate reality is that many countries, especially in the developing world do not have the ability to do this. i.e. India has trouble even reducing it’s petrol subsidies.

I think that carbon trading is beneficial because it allows a transfer of technology to developing countries - and it provides an incentive for businesses there to reduce emissions too - even when their country has no emissions targets.

I think that the biggest challenge in solving GHG emissions is going to be helping the developing world to develop using clean technologies. Carbon trading helps this happen.

But so what?

What if the more efficient car is used every day, and the inefficient car is used seldomly? The inefficient car produces less emissions.

I have a rather thirsty M3. However, I barely use it, as I also like to walk.

Failure To Lead

“Our leaders’ idea of promoting alternative energy is touting future, nonexistent technologies, and that false savior, ethanol. Ethanol consumes nearly as much fuel to make as it produces, while collaterally raising food prices and damaging the environment.

The latest panacea is drilling in the Arctic and offshore, a short-term solution of dubious value that is wildly popular among oilmen and congressmen up for re-election, and in the Bush administration —- which evidently hopes to use high gasoline prices as a wedge for opening off-limits areas to exploration for its Big Oil constituency.

Meanwhile, Congress has failed to take the simple step of renewing federal tax credits for wind and solar power that will expire at year’s end. How have our perceived options become so narrow and skewed?

It is because without any public debate, a de facto U.S. energy policy has evolved and is now in place: to cling ever tighter to our oil-based economy and its lucrative profits for the scions of the status quo, and to marginalize all who are not on board with this.

And now we are in the exact bind that Carter tried to prevent three decades ago. Acting with promptness difficult to fathom today, our elected leaders then enacted year-round daylight-saving time, dropped the speed limit to 55 and established government price controls. And oh so fleetingly, we downsized what we drove. All gone.” Atlanta Constitution-Journal

Now there are some other items in Carter’s resume that don’t look so good today, like the Iran hostage crisis and the Olympic boycott, and his recent activities have been questioned by some, but when it came to energy, the nuclear engineer and farmer seems to have known what he was talking about…
http://www.treehugger.com/files/2008/07/admit-it-jimmy-carter-was-righ t.php

>> fuel efficiency standards for cars

> Details? Define “inefficient�? What if I use my inefficient car less often?

well, you measure the fuel consumption of a car. Then you compare it with other cars that have a similar amount of space for people and luggage. and the one that has lower fuel consumption is the more efficient one.

> Like I said elsewhere it’s [HERS] capitalist, socialist and environmentalist all rolled into one.

and, of course, a Green Party initiative.