The Liberal Party released their carbon taxation plan today, and I’d say it’s… okay. It does a lot of what a carbon taxation scheme should, of course, but it misses two major points.

Firstly, there’s no tax on gasoline. I understand that gasoline taxes are unpopular, but the lack of a gas tax in a carbon taxation plan when you are taxing literally every other fossil fuel seems like staggering pandering to me. I don’t even think a gas tax is unsellable - say “look, we’re going to tax gas, yes, but the gas taxes are going to be specifically redirected into a fund to improve public transportation so that in five years you can take a hybrid bus from Chilliwack to the Bay of Fundy or from your home to your grandma’s back yard.” The longer you let people think that their old lifestyles are sustainable - and they just aren’t - the harder it’s going to be to tell them the truth.

Secondly, the tax is revenue-neutral, erring on the side of costing a bit of money. I understand that the Liberals want to make carbon taxation as painless as possible by lowering income taxes at the same time. But this idea is flawed for two reasons:

1.) We desperately need massive energy infrastructure investment. Canada has too much oil power generation as it is; we need to replace that with solar, tidal and wind ASAP, and additional revenues created by a carbon tax in the short term could help fund these initiatives.

2.) Carbon taxation in the short run is revenue neutral, but in the long run it is presumably revenue-lowering because given time everybody will find ecological ways to avoid paying the tax. Which is good, but that means eventually you have to jack income taxes back up to compensate. I don’t look forward to the squabbling when that happens.

Still, on the whole, it’s an all-right plan, a solid B+ effort. Could have been much, much worse.

Also: 350.

Volkswagen introduces concept car that gets 100km on one litre of gasoline.

I’m working on a long-form project which involves gorillas (I’m not really able to say more at this point), and during my research I was reminded of this.

Gorillas are gentle, shy creatures who would almost always rather run than fight, and they’re some of our closest relatives in the world; we know they’re intelligent, on the very borderline of human intelligence. There is no reason to kill them; mountain gorillas aren’t even good bushmeat. This is the work of some asshole or assholes with guns who couldn’t think of anything better to do with their time than slaughter some gorillas.

This makes me so angry I have trouble expressing it.

Federally funded scientists created fertilizer from human and industrial waste and tested it in poor black neighborhoods without informing residents of the potential risks.

Key sentence:

“However, there has been a paucity of research into the possible harmful effects of heavy metals, pharmaceuticals, other chemicals, and disease-causing microorganisms often found in sludge.”

Last year, it was bees - this year, it’s bats.

I consider energy issues to be awfully important, so here are some links that you can all read and then you can share with the rest of us your interesting thoughts on this global-emergency-level problem.

Firstly: this blog comment: ten reasons why nuclear power is a bad idea. Meltdowns and waste removal are barely even addressed, so you know it’s a good post when it doesn’t have to bother with the boogeyman reasons to avoid nuclear power and instead goes into the harder economics.

Secondly, Scientific American’s “solar grand plan” to make America completely solar-powered by 2050. The article makes extremely conservative assumptions about the progression of solar power (as in “it won’t get any more efficient” - they even ignore the new advances in the past two years which have made it more efficient, that’s how conservative their assumptions are) and ignore the potential upsides of individual home generation (IE, having photovoltaic cells on your roof). That last element is important, because decentralization of power makes it both more efficient and more secure. (I’m not particularly worried about a terrorist attack in Canada, but if I were, them taking out two or three generation plants in mid-January would probably be the nightmare scenario.)

Thirdly, if those arguing that it’s too late to stop global warming through carbon emission reduction because of the likewise reduction of global dimming are correct (and they probably are), how do we combat that? Realclimate discusses some of the options (lousy as they might be) here; to my mind they’re probably a little more down on the “smokestack plan” (which involves basically putting giant hoses on smokestacks, floating them up with weather balloons, and releasing sulphates into the upper atmosphere to simulate the cooling effect of a volcanic eruption) - not to say that the plan isn’t problematic, what with the threat of acid rain at the very least, but desperate times and desperate measures, etc.

“Low-oxygen” areas of ocean off the Pacific Northwest coast are “the new norm.”

Caused by global warming, you see - but pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

Well, it turns out the combination of global warming and human decimation of fish populations has led to a population explosion of the deadliest creature on the planet. Oh, and they’re migrating towards land masses.

See also: the “rise of slime,” AKA the toxic fireweed thriving under warmer-water conditions. This would be great news except for the part where it’s so toxic it can kill both us and also anything in the ocean we might be inclined to eat.

I remembered reading a while back about Nanosolar, the company trying to perfect extremely cheap, non-silicon based solar cells. And it occurred to me yesterday, “hey, how is that going, anyhow?”

After some Googling, it turns out that the answer to that question is very, very good indeed. The dawn of individual power generation is very nearly upon us, and it can’t come fast enough.

(Mind you, the United States alone uses over three terawatts of energy at peak hours right now, so, yeah, being able to produce 430 megawatts of generation capacity per year is, you know, not nearly enough. On the other hand, though, now that there’s a cheap model for people to copy, nanosolar production can be very easily advanced through government incentive programs. Imagine about a hundred of these factories and suddenly you’re producing 43 gigs of generation capacity every year; that’s the United States taken care of in a decade with room to spare. And that’s before someone unscrupulous just steals the technology outright and starts putting up factories in China.)

British Airways is flying empty planes across the Atlantic, wasting fuel and creating tonnes of CO2, in order to not let other airlines get the takeoff and landing slots at the airport.

Someone tell me again about how voluntary emissions reduction is the answer to the global warming crisis, please?

China’s starting to publicly threaten the dumping of its American dollar reserves.

(In other bad news from China, the Yangtze river dolphin is extinct.)