Carbon tax a bust? Looks like E.U. members are suffering from carbon tax plans and Kyoto commitments. Last night (September 22, 2008) on Mike Duffy live the first hint that the national media is starting to question global warming. Here is a little article about the great Elizabeth May for your enjoyment.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/GIS.Servlets.HTMLTemplate?current_row=1&tf=tgam/columnists/FullColumn.html&cf=tgam/columnists/FullColumn.cfg&configFileLoc=tgam/config&date=&dateOffset=&hub=margaretWente&title=Margaret_Wente&cache_key=margaretWente&start_row=1&num_rows=1

Here it is...

"What's not to like about Ms. May?

She is genuine and sincere, but it's hard to take her Green Party's policies seriously

By MARGARET WENTE
mwente@globeandmail.com

Saturday, September 20, 2008 – Page A27

NEW GLASGOW, N.S. -- Elizabeth May can talk your ear off. She has facts and figures at her fingertips. She can talk for hours and hours about her carbon-tax plan and how it will transform our economy. It's hard to get a word in edgewise, so finally I start interrupting. How the heck are you going to sell people on higher gas taxes? How can we tackle global warming when India and China have told us to get lost?

"Can I finish the answer!" she barks, and then, "I never said that! Haven't you read our policy documents?" She tells me Germany has created 400,000 new jobs in green technologies. Finally, I interrupt to ask why she thinks it's feasible to stabilize global greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 - by all accounts, an impossible target. "You are really a tough interviewer!" she says in exasperation. "I wanted you to like me. And I don't think you do."

That's nonsense. Everybody likes Elizabeth May. She is the People's Choice - the spunky underdog who muscled her way into the old boys' club of the leadership debates. Even though the Green Party has never elected a single MP, she has persuaded the national media to take her seriously. They seek her out for quotes and deliver daily updates on her campaign tour - just as they do for the Old Boys. In English Canada, she has attained the status of a legitimate fourth party.

The reason for her popularity is no mystery. People see her as genuine and sincere - an anti-politician who's in it for a good cause, not for herself. They like the way she takes potshots at the big guys. As an environmental activist, she's been on the stage for 30 years - ever since she made her name battling forest companies that were using herbicides to wipe out the spruce budworm. She is a polished, and indefatigable, public speaker who relishes her image as a giant-killer.

We scoot a few blocks across town for an interview with the CBC. The studio consists of a camera set up on the sidewalk. Her rival Peter MacKay, the Conservative Defence Minister, is already there, doing a sound bite about Afghanistan. They hug affectionately, then Ms. May does a flawless two-minute monologue on the Green Party's economic policy. Across the street, several heavily tattooed citizens lounging on a broken-down old sofa give her the thumbs-up.

Ms. May has a gift for persuading powerful and important men to do what she wants. Astoundingly, she persuaded Stéphane Dion not to run a Liberal in this riding (a decision that still has local Liberals hopping mad). Even so, she stands zero chance of winning against the popular Mr. MacKay. This area has been sending MacKays to Ottawa since 1971. So why run here, instead of someplace where she might actually have a shot? "I've won most of the campaigns I've ever fought, against impossible odds," she says firmly. "I'm not particularly impressed when people tell me what the odds are."

New Glasgow is not exactly a hotbed of environmentalism. The town is a two-hour drive from Halifax, in the middle of picturesque Pictou County. It's a land of rolling hills, small towns, white church spires, and deep roots. Unemployment is high and incomes are low, and big old charming houses come cheap. For people with good jobs, the quality of life is fabulous. For others, there are the Alberta oil fields.

"The boys used to come back every three months," says a single mother named Colleen, whose brother has gone west. "But a lot of them don't do that any more. It's too depressing." Colleen holds down two jobs to make ends meet. She likes Elizabeth May, even though she doesn't know a thing about the party's policies. "She's a strong woman."

The next day in Halifax, Ms. May unveils her election platform under glorious sunny skies. All the major media show up. Unlike other environmental crusaders (see: David Suzuki), she does not preach doom and gloom. She does not warn that the world will end unless we mend our wicked, wicked ways. Instead, she is cheery and full of uplift. Her carbon plan will cure just about everything that ails us. It will even pay for universal day care.

She has freely admitted that her key idea of shifting taxes from incomes to carbon is the same as Mr. Dion's. The difference, she insists, is that "I can explain it better than he can." She tells the cameras that her economic plans are realistic, business-friendly and fiscally responsible, and waves some Excel spreadsheets to prove it. "All the countries that have implemented tax-shifting plans have found that they work." But her message goes far beyond mere economics. She also promises a slower, kinder, closer-knit and more community-minded world - something that resembles New Glasgow back in the fifties, only better.

Not all the onlookers are buying. "There's something noble about it," says Jim O'Dowd, a tourist from Surrey, B.C., who has stumbled on the scene by accident. "But it's economic idiocy. It will never work."

Ms. May insists it's time to take the Greens seriously as a political party, not just a moral cause. So I asked some experts to evaluate their green plan.

"Their economic platform is incredibly detailed, with all sorts of micro-managing issues on many, many fronts," says Sherry Cooper, chief economist at BMO Capital Markets. "They are calling for nothing less than a full-scale remodelling of the Canadian economy. They are anti-trade. They want food sufficiency on a regional basis, so I guess we will all have backyard vegetable gardens and never again eat pineapple or bananas. ... Instead of harnessing modernity and using our scientific know-how to find alternative fuel sources, the Greens want to take us back to life before electricity and the combustion engine."

"Her budget doesn't balance unless we massively increase our carbon emissions," points out Aldyen Donnelly, who's president of the Greenhouse Emissions Management Consortium. She also faults Ms. May on the facts. Every European country that introduced carbon taxes - including Germany, Sweden and Denmark - has suffered heavy losses of manufacturing jobs. As for Germany's green jobs, they're all subsidized by the government. "Carbon taxes have proven to be an economic death spiral," Ms. Donnelly says.

In Europe, the Green wave is in full retreat. Faced with souring economies, Britain and other countries are pressing the European Union to roll back its carbon-cutting legislation. In the U.S., talk of international climate treaties has all but vanished. The new slogan is: Drill, baby, drill.

In Canada, the Green Party is polling at an impressive 10 per cent. But a fair chunk of that support, pollsters say, comes from people who are simply in a snit about everybody else. It's not unlikely that the peak of Ms. May's popularity is right now - and that after the debates and the election, air time will be hard to come by.

But don't feel sorry for Ms. May. She loves long odds. And she has a rich life plan. Her faith (Anglican) is quite important to her, and one day she'd like to be a parish priest. "I like parish life," she says. "Church is one way we still knit together as a community." In her spare time, she's studying theology, which, she says, "is a lot more interesting than politics."

In her sensible black suit and shoes, I realize, that's exactly what she is. An energetic parish priest, delivering hope and a message of uplift to whoever wants to listen. Someone who wants to knit together a community, and find a better way to live. What's not to like about Elizabeth May? Even if you don't believe.

"

Explain with peer reviewed references how the temperature rose from 1850-1945 due to our CO2 emissions, which then was a mere 14% of today, mostly around WWII. Then explain with peer reviewed references how CO2 emissions caused a global cooling from 1945 to 1975 in spite of an increase of 4 TIMES the rate of CO2 emissions.

Thus the only window of temp increases that can be attributed to AGW is from 1975 to 1998. The last ten years has seen a level and then drop in temps.

Thus of the years from 1945 to 2008, where 86% of our increase in CO2 emissions happened, we saw only 13 years of warming, only a mere 20% of the time.

Now it looks like the sun has changed to such an extent that we could be in for a prolonged, decades, of cooling such as we had from 1945 to 1975.

Did I call it or what?

http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/09/23/nasas-press-conference-on-the-state-of-the-sun/