Carbon Tax/Cap-and-Trade

There is a lot of talk these days about the need for a way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Two proposed ways of doing this are the carbon tax and the cap-and-trade system. While both are ways to go about drastically reducing emissions, the differences between them are very important to understand.
The basic idea of a carbon tax is to put a tax on energy, forcing people to pay for their carbon emissions. In the system, the price is higher for forms of energy that are more polluting, so there are insentives to both use less energy, as well as increase use of non-polluting renewable energy.
The cap-and-trade system is a little more complicated. Basically, limits are on the amount of carbon that that be emitted, and if someone goes over the limit, then they have to buy more credits from someone who pollutes under the limit (if one pollutes under the limit, they can sell the difference).
Different sides have different advantages, and while one isn't clearly better than the other, economists think that a carbon tax would be better suited in implementation, and would be less likely to be manipulated. A carbon tax puts the pain on the consumers, so they must chose to reduce their energy consumption or pay the price themselves. If people reduce the energy used, and polluting forms of energy are too expensive, then we will see society emitting a lot less carbon. Not all people may understand the extreme and immediate danger of the climate crisis we now find ourselves in, but everyone seems to understand dollar signs.

Making a Solar Panel

I found a recipe for making your own solar panel. The link is below. I haven't been able to build it yet, but plan on doing so this weekend. I'll add another post once I complete and test the project. It looks like one should be enough to power a room without too many appliances, but may not be strong enough for a more comsuption-intensive room, like a kitchen.

http://www.rain.org/~philfear/how2solar.html

Kleercut

The clearcutting of the Canadian virgin Boreal forest is one of the newest environmental focus-points. The recognized "enemy" of the situation is the Kimberly-Clark company (the largest tissue producer in the world), which owns the paper products companies Kleenex, Scott, Viva, Kotex, Cottonelle, Andrex, Scottbrand, Scottex, Hakle and Huggies. The problem is the forest that they use the logging from is endangered, in that it is one of the few virgin forests left on the continent. Only 20% of the world's original forests remain today, and the Boreal accounts for a quarter of this number. Also, the way the logging in this forest takes place is problematic. The forest is clear-cut, meaning literally everything is cut down, leaving the remaining land barren. Tons of other life depends on this forest as well. It's estimated that over a billion birds breed in the Boreal each year. The forest is also part of the caribou's path of migration, making them dependent. Moose, lynx, wolverines, cougars, bears and wolves all live in the forest too, as well as over half of all North American bird species. Also, over 80% of Canada's indigenous people live in and depend upon the Boreal for survival. The Boreal is also a vital resource in the fight against global warming, because it is one of the largest storehouses of global warming on the planet.

So just for redundancy's sake, I'll state the obvious; we need to stop the destructive and merciless logging of the Boreal forest, espcially since it goes to products that are used once then flushed down the toilet or thrown away.

For more info, Google it, or check out www.greenpeace.org/usa/campaigns/forests/kleercut

The Climate Project

So you may or may not have heard about The Climate Project. Basically, it was started in the late summer/early fall of 2006 by Al Gore. He had been giving his slide show on the climate crisis for a while, and following the success of the movie, 'An Inconvenient Truth' he wanted to spread the word even more. Thousands of people applied to be one of the thousand presenters that would be trained by Gore to give the slideshow, and they were trained over a period of months. The purpose is to get the word to literally ever corner of the country (and now the world), especially in places where people probably wouldn't see the movie on their own. By training people to go out and give the speech, the ability to spread the word and create positive and affirmative action on the climate crisis is greatly increased, making it more of a grassroots effort and taking away some of the aspect of it being a political debate. Check out the official website. If you want a presentation, there are presenters all over the country, and chances are great that there's one who would happily give it to you and your group.

http://www.theclimateproject.org/

All About It

So I just created this blog after reading a blog about why Live Earth was a complete fake. It pissed me off so I wrote a HUGE rant and posted it (we'll see if it gets published), and after that I was still mad so, here I am. I thought this blog could just be a place to share stories, articles, and ideas about being eco-friendly. I won't edit or moderate your comments, so just say what you feel (politely, of course) and we'll see what we can do.