All these little consumer level things we do here in Canada are fine. I mean, compared to what corporations are doing they're completely meaningless, but yeah recycling and using less electricity is great.birdboy008 said:
I mean, when you get into it it's complicated, because using less electricity simply means that electricity becomes more expensive when you're dealing with a non-storable resource.
Recycling is another one of those things us greedy Canadians do to increase our emissions per capita.
If we only recycled metals, we'd have a lot less carbon emissions, but more landfill area. So if Canada stopped recycling glass and plastic we'd have less carbon emissions.
Personally, I like the idea of less landfill, but those Kyoto targets don't really care about land. If they did we'd be heroes.
The issue is that Canada survives off of natural resources. So the bulk of Canada's wealth comes from harnessing it's natural resources, which results in emissions.
Do you think mining, oil, or forestry, has any hopes of being green?
The government cutting emissions simply means Canada scaling back on it's natural resource wealth, which means a further plummeting economy.
Instead of axing the unions and saving billions of dollars, Canada is going to focus efforts on diminishing our natural resource sector.
Sorry Canada, it's not politically correct to use natural resources anymore, guess you're out of luck.
Maybe a nice green industry, like the film industry will support the country once mining becomes globally frowned upon.
Do you know what kind of infrastructure is necessary to keep Canada functioning?
We have half the population of the UK, a country that is less than half the size of our little Baffin Island.
We should be punishing them for not having enough undisturbed natural habitats, not enough indigenous wildlife, not enough forestry to produce their share of global oxygen, certainly they don't produce enough steel to support their own industry. Not enough farm land to feed their overpopulated country.
It's easy to throw rocks at the tiny little giant country who needs to provide infrastructure to almost no population spread across a huge land area.
We have to lay more infrastructure, transport more oil, more food, more everything, to support a meager little population, so of course per-capita we're going to look like heavy polluters.
Do you know how much in emissions shipping supplies to our extremities costs us?
Drastically underpopulated, too many natural resources, too much land, too much water, too cold, we're the bad guys with exactly the opposite problems of the rest of the world.
Essentially we're being penalized because we don't have enough population to make our natural footprint look good on paper.
We should just close the most Northern 90% of our land area, force everyone to move into that Southern 10% and suddenly we'd fit into that neat little emissions model the rest of the world drew up without taking us into consideration.
Shockingly Australia has worse emissions per capita than we do, but I'm not going to blame them for it either. They face the same issues we do.
Russia is fairly close as well.
