So as I always suspected the Government are plying even more taxes on the hard-pressed Brit under the guise of "Saving the Planet" while in reality it is being used to prop up the greedy banks and pay them even bigger rewards for failure.

This is the same as the car taxes imposed on drivers where Bliar admitted it was used to fund the NHS and not anything to do with the environment.

Is it not high time these greedy bankers were flung out onto the street and control of money given back to the nation?

The taxpayer is being taken for a big ride by these shady corporate elitists and it is about time it was nipped in the bud.

The environment is being used as a scapegoat for every type of taxation increase, a story based in fantasy but touted as fact. A very convenient situation for the government.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224222/Flight-taxes-hiked-bail-banks-Its-environment-says-Darling.html

Andrew

riders_on_the_storm wrote:So as I always suspected the Government are plying even more taxes on the hard-pressed Brit under the guise of "Saving the Planet" while in reality it is being used to prop up the greedy banks and pay them even bigger rewards for failure.

This is the same as the car taxes imposed on drivers where Bliar admitted it was used to fund the NHS and not anything to do with the environment.

Is it not high time these greedy bankers were flung out onto the street and control of money given back to the nation?

The taxpayer is being taken for a big ride by these shady corporate elitists and it is about time it was nipped in the bud.

The environment is being used as a scapegoat for every type of taxation increase, a story based in fantasy but touted as fact. A very convenient situation for the government.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1224222/Flight-taxes-hiked-bail-banks-Its-environment-says-Darling.html

Andrew

While I agree with you Andrew, that this government AND others have used the environmentalism argument to hike up taxes in the past I don't think that any of those so-called "green" taxes are ringfenced for anything in particular and especially not for real green policies.

I am sure that even the government know that we do not want to see any more of our money go to shore up failing banks as they have had quite enough of our money already thank you !

The recent actions of breaking up these banks and selling off the more profitable arms leads me to think that the government are actually trying to capitalise on these previous actions so that at least some of those billions might come back into the coffers of the treasury.

I am sure that if New-Labour do the job right there will be no money left to come back once the Tories are back into power. They would not want to gift them this windfall if they can possibly avoid it.

Can anyone tell me if they know of a single "green" tax that is actually going to the environment?

"Can anyone tell me if they know of a single "green" tax that is actually going to the environment?"

Emm no and there isn't likely to be either. The logic of paying tax to then repair the environment is as silly as saying i'll pour all this oil into a river then pay a tax for doing it. We would be better making sure that doesn't happen in the first place.

Of course our silly government are going about it all the wrong way by taxing an odourless harmless gas that makes up 1/10000 of the atmosphere while the real pollution and destruction cranks up to ever newer silly levels in the background.

Maybe they should implement a tax on companies who deliberately make items that encourage short life-spans, which encourages frequent replacement to stop the mountains of rubbish. Of course all that happens is the company passes on the tax to the buyer and when spread across all items the consumer hardly notices the increase, the company keeps on making crap and so the story never ends. What would be a better idea would be the threat of big fines and bad publicity in order to make them think twice, or a threat that would ban them from trading in this, or other countries.

Legislation on limiting plastic packaging to a bare minimum would also be another good idea.

Andrew

There are dozens of ways that any government can help the environment and almost all of them cost money to carry out.

If it is left to the privatised industries of the world they will just keep doing what they think they need to do to keep making profits and only strong pressure by environmental groups and really green governments will stop them from polluting the land, sea and air as they do it.

I am sure that you are aware that it is the tiger economies and the third-world economies that are growing fast that want to keep doing what they need to do to keep growing at the pace they are used to. They will NOT be environmentally careful unless they are made to be by the governments of the world that can see what these practices will do to the long term sustainability - or not - of this unchecked growth.

The list of poisons and toxins that are expelled by industry in these places is a very long one and even if you don't believe that CO2 is one of them I and many millions more environmentalists do believe this. If we are wrong then no harm done but if we are right time will come when it will be too late to stop the world from being destroyed by all of these toxins and poisons - INCLUDING CO2.

Maybe carbon dioxide or ( CO2 ) IS a colourless and odourless gas but just like carbon monoxide or ( CO ) - which is also a colourless and odourless gas - it too is a dangerous one.

Anyone who knows about at least one of the fine balances in nature knows that this balance is maintained by the production - by us and all other oxygen-breathing animals - of CO2 and by the metabolising of this gas by the green plants and sea-animals that use it to live - which take it in and in return give us oxygen to breath. ( And the cycle goes on and on ).

If it was only the production of CO2 that was made by these breathing animals that was being inserted into the atmosphere I am sure that nature could adjust it's chemical factory to keep maintaining this fine balance. The fact is that it is NOT just us and our animals that are causing this imbalance but it is our industrial processes that are seriously adding to this problem.

Ninety-percent of the world's environmental experts now believe that this CO2 output is too much for nature to handle and they are attempting to teach the deniers that this gas is starting to - along with other greenhouse gasses - do serious and eventually irreversable damage to our atmosphere and general environment if we do not do something about this RIGHT NOW.

As I have asked many times before here and in other places....."Are we prepared to take that risk just because we are willing to stick our heads into the sand and hope that this problem will somehow go away all by itself ?"

I for one certainly am not !

Instead of building that wall of disbelief any higher why don't you just look at what most of the scientists and the environmentalists are saying.

So as not to snow you under with this argument, here are just two sites to use with which to look at these facts. There are many many more if you are interested.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_carbon_dioxide_emissions

http://www.bbc.co.uk/climate/evidence/carbon_dioxide.shtml

Finally...as I have also said before here and in other places.....It is NOT a co-incidence that the strongest deniers of all of the climate change subject and the CO2 argument are sourced from the people that want to keep on polluting. They are the ones that have the money and the resources to keep building that wall of denial for their own ends.

You either join them or you don't....that is your choice !

Without wishing to call anyone a liar be they anti or pro global warming or CO2 emissions It might be relevant if we were to be told the truth about CO2 emissions ie what part is man made (should that be "Person" made) and what part is natural which is to say produced naturally by the normal planetary cycles. You may be surprised to discover that of the worlds CO2 emissions LESS than 10% are man made.

Yes, I have heard that one too Wrinkles...but I simply don't believe it !

Can you provide any INDEPENDENT support for that statement ?

When we look at the world we either see it with us in it or without us in it if we want to see nature doing what it does best.

Without us in it the amount of CO2 generated by natural means: - volcanoes and emissions from the decomposing dead animals etc are easy for nature to metabolise away so as to create a balance.

With us in the mix the whole picture changes:

Read these links first.....

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenhouse_gas#Natural_and_anthropogenic

http://www.ace.mmu.ac.uk/eae/Global_warming/older/Carbon_Dioxide.html

At or around 1750, ( the birth of the industrial revolution ) this balance started to be eroded....

Quote from one of the links above:

Since then, man-made emissions of carbon dioxide from burning fossil fuels, deforestation, waste incineration and the manufacture of cement have upset the balance between natural sources and sinks of carbon dioxide. Consequently, the concentration of carbon dioxide in the air has increased to about 370 parts per million, and is continuing to increase at a rate of about 1.2 parts per million each year. This level of carbon dioxide is higher than at any other time in the last 160,000 years.

On top of that we have the output of carbon-dioxide from the expelled breath of 6+ billion people and all of their domesticated animals that were not there before we came onto this earth.

The pre-industrial count of CO2 was around 280ppm.
The count today is around 387ppm.
With a difference of 107ppm.

This is simple to count and it adds up to an increase of around one third in this short period of time.

As the tiger economies of India and China and South America grow at an ever-increasing rate and the established modern countries - especially America - make no effort to stop the increasing output of fossil-fuel-sourced CO2, it is now growing at an exponential rate.

On top of this one single gas there are also many more "greenhouse gasses" including Methane, ( produced by ruminating animals both natural and anthropomorphic ones - there at our behest ), Nitrous Oxide produced by natural means and anthropomorphic means and all of the group of CFC gasses that are manufactured for our use that are TOTALLY anthropogenic and that did not exist before the industrial revolution.

These are the facts and I have found that the ones that feel the need to continue to create this dangerous output are usually the ones that have the money and the clout to put forward the opposite case.

As time goes by more and more scientists and environmentalists - THAT ARE NOT CONNECTED TO THE POLLUTERS - have come to the settled opinion that what we are doing is very dangerous for our future and out children's futures and I and millions more now honestly believe that we should try hard to stop this before it is too late.

The only other choice is to stick our heads into the sand and leave our backsides exposed for abuse !

Last edited by papa_umau on Thu Nov 12, 2009 11:23 am; edited 1 time in total

I won't argue the point with you as I know little about the science involved and even less about the true facts, However there are a number of eminent scientists that would, and do, contest those assertions. I tend to weigh both sides against the middle and so far I have yet to see conclusive arguments from either side. If CO2 is increasing is it purely down to man? Is it a natural cycle that is self correcting. There have been several similar spikes in the distant past, well before the industrial revolution, where global temperatures have risen and fallen well beyond the "average". Even that average is an arbitrary figure dependant on the point in time at which the measurement commences. If you start measuring from 200 years ago then the rise is quite steep, start 2000 years ago and it is less so. 20000 yrs and a different picture emerges. I am still to be convinced however the fact that moves to decrease emissions are under way can only be to the common good. If nothing else it will stimulate innovation and the resultant technical advances may well lead to alternate energy sources.

Like others that have formed a superficial opinion about this subject it is easy to take a stance and hold on to it if you are not prepared to look for and find the unattached science that is there to be found.

As I said before, almost ALL of the scientists that put forward the opposite view are scientists that have been funded by the big oil, gas and fossil-fuel-burning industrialists who obviously feel the need to find reason to keep on doing what they are doing just now.

The ones that sit on the fence are not worth listening to as this is a subject that does not lend itself to fence-sitters.

I have always admired a man/woman who sticks to his or her guns in situations like this but now that the independent science is irrefutable surrounding this subject I believe that sticking to the denier stance is now just bloody-mindedness and stubbornness in many cases.

Quote:

"Without wishing to call anyone a liar be they anti or pro global warming or CO2 emissions It might be relevant if we were to be told the truth about CO2 emissions ie what part is man made (should that be "Person" made) and what part is natural which is to say produced naturally by the normal planetary cycles. You may be surprised to discover that of the worlds CO2 emissions LESS than 10% are man made."

CO2 consists of around 3.4% of the atmosphere's gasses and of that 3.4% about 7% of that is the man-made bit. I'm still to be convinced that we have risen CO2 levels from 268 to 350PPM, it is likely the oceans that have done this because the oceans have warmed in the last 25 years or so up till the early 2000s, but they have stopped now funnily enough for the time being.

While we are on oceans they have found that oceans warming starts 2 miles down, in other words it is underwater volcanic activity that is warming the oceans (unless paps has another greenpeace theory for us?) because WE CAN NOT even dream of heating the oceans let alone warm them from 2 miles down.They are too vast.

Try heating a bath of cold water with a hair dryer, or by warming up the room, it doesn't work. for the atmosphere to heat the oceans (by the values we have seen recently and in the past) the atmosphere would need to heat up to about 300 degrees before anything happened.

In addition to this the greenhouse warming theory states warming (if it's greenhouse) would start in the upper atmoshpere, but the little warming that was observed - up until it stopped about 1999-2001 - was on the ground level mainly.

Andrew

Another wee bit of basic science:

When the earth was young and covered in volcanoes and long before any plants or animals appeared, the atmosphere of the earth was around 70% CO2 and because of this any heat that came from the sun or from the volcanoes was immediately trapped within the early greenhouse effect making the surface and the atmosphere totally anti-life.

Over the millenia the CO2 started to be absorbed by the oceans, ( CO2 is extremely water-soluble ), and eventually the early greenhouse effect diminished enough to allow the oxygen-producing and carbon-dioxide absorbing algaes and ferns - before the true trees came along - to start to reverse this process. ( It is also this effect that stopped the earth's atmosphere from taking on a runaway greenhouse effect, ( like what happened on Mars ), which would have boiled away all of the surface water in the oceans ).

As more and more air-breathing animals appeared the CO2 levels started to rise again until the growth of the true forests and the green algaes in the oceans started to cover the earth. Once this happened there was a balance created between the CO2-Makers, ( us and our domesticated animals and the wild animals ), created a very fine balance allowing more and more animals and fish and birds to eventually replace the prehistoric animals - which were made extinct.

Once we started to cut down much of the forests and began burning the underground CO2-locking fossils as fuels we started to build this level of CO2 up again until there was not enough photosynthesising greenery left to help generate this balance once again. It is only the strong growth of the green ocean algae that is holding back this new and serious greenhouse effect.

If we and our ANTHROPOGENIC effects on the earth are not curtailed or stopped this effect will grow until eventually WE are wiped out just like the dinosaurs were, ( even if this will be achieved in a different way ).

Yes, you can find a small amount of "ANTI" material out there but before you read it and accept it try to find out it's true source. If you do I am sure that you will find that it comes from the scientists that are in the pockets of the polluters and very little of it is actually supportable using TRUE and independent science.

Read more about this HERE if you are really interested.