Month: July 2008

I am so tired of all the brouhaha surrounding the green movement.
Why? Because I live in Canada, because we are overtaxed for every little thing and now we got the ‘carbon tax’ to help the government fight the global warming caused allegedly by our bad habit of driving too much instead of walking 30 km to work!! Idiots.

My beef with our government politics is a double whammy so to speak:
– Outsourcing to India and China– that causes loss of jobs in Canada, decrease of quality of life, increase of cost of living. In the mean time their economies are booming, increasing the demand for fuel. So we are fucked in every possible way: no jobs for us, increase in fuel cost making commuting (when we have a freaking job) more and more expensive, along with the fuel increase all the other essential things become more and more expensive. In my opinion, the government should penalize the companies which are outsourcing jobs to India, China and Pakistan. I don’t want cheap stuff from China; I want good quality, reasonable priced stuff from Canada. Yep, that means the dead of the freaking unions negotiating ridiculously high incomes. But that’s a different subject.
– Pollution in China and India goes unregulated
What about imposing sanctions and forcing India and China to follow Kyoto protocol or any other good-for-nothing- protocols that will make them reduce their pollution? What about the level of pollution in China, where Beijing is always wrapped in huge smog, they can’t even see the light. He, he… they can’t anyway.

A fast analysis – data from CIA World Factbook- shows a clear picture:

Country -Surface[million square km]- Population
China- 9.5- 1.3 billion
India- 3 -1.1 billion
EU- 4- 493 million
Russia- 17 -140 million
USA -9.8 -303 million
Canada- 9.9 -33 million

How ridiculous is that? Canada has the lowest population, spread over a territory bigger than China, and still has to accept Kyoto?
What the heck could be such a big pollutant in Canada, to make our government squeeze the last penny from us?

Ah, I forgot!! China and India won’t give a shit about global warming. We are left to clean their mess. Companies in Canada go tits up because they can’t afford extra money spent on making everything ‘green’. The heck, they can hardly stay afloat even without all the ridiculous ‘targets’ established by irresponsible politicians, too busy to kiss our neighbour ass, to take a closer look at our lives.

So, based on the above data, I would say that China, India, EU and USA should nicely work together on reducing the pollution, because to me, they are responsible, not Canada. I know, I know… we are blamed for loving big cars, the so called ‘gas-guzzlers’ and the Chinese and the Indians are using (for how long??) bicycles, ricsas, tuk-tuk and some other transportation gizmos.

But they eat. In the past fifty years, global meat consumption has increased fivefold and is still on the rise. Why does it matter? One word: methane.

Methane is twenty-five times more potent than carbon dioxide and although not as abundant as carbon dioxide, is better at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere.
Almost half of all global methane emissions come from belching livestock.
Did you know that a single cow can belch out anywhere from 25 to 130 gallons of methane a day?
There are around 1.5 billion cattle on our planet, over a billion sheep and some 800 million goats, meaning that the methane emissions must be pretty high.
Actually, according to the U.N. livestock are responsible for 18% of greenhouse-gas emissions worldwide, more than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet.

True, the Indians won’t eat beef but they consume dairy products, and the Chinese and other emerging nations eat anything with four legs (except probably the table)

In conclusion: the booming economies in China and India will increase the need for fuel and food, because people will have money to buy both of them. And we are screwed, unless some dramatic changes happen.

Fresh news: WTO talks collapse over farm trade between the USA and emerging powers including China, India and Indonesia. China and India have been acused for not opening their market to imports (is it such a big surprise, seriously?)