It's clear he knows about peak oil, but to give the illusion that we can have a sustainable ecomony and use less energy is pure fantacy. As long as people work, as long as the population grows, as long as we allow more immigration, then we must use more energy.

I did find some of his tax measures interesting. I would love to get a tax break on what I have spent, and what I will be spending, to use less energy because it will cost me plenty to do it.

There are a number of items though that are really are only tinkering. Example,

"We can enable 100 000 Canadian homes to install alternative energy generation systems." That's very few homes, about 10%, thus it will have little impact on CO2 emissions and energy savings over all. It will be fine for the people who can afford to do such changes, but it will cost some $20,000 for each home to change over to a system, like geoexchange, so few will be able to afford to install it.

Others like this is not physically or economically practical.

"A net meter allows for the flow of electricity both in and out of a house, enabling
Canadians who produce their own electricity to flow the energy they produce onto the
grid. In other words, all Canadians will be able to reduce their own energy bill by selling
the electricity that they produce."

I've looked into this and visited a home set up with solar panels. He has 20 panels on his roof, and the system in the basement. To make it work, he had to separate key electrical systems in the house that run on this array. About 25% of the home is divided this way, with the other 75% connected to the grid. It was not physically possible to make the whole house off the grid, he would have to have 4 times the panels and array of batteries (about 60 min), lead acid batteries I might add, lead that has to be mined. He hoped that next summer he will be able to sell some, a small faction, of this back to the grid. But it's very small. The point is, the costs to set this up is enormous, at least $25K, his system was more than $30K to set up. Panels are expensive, $1000 each (don't bother with the one's at Canadian Tire, they are small scale). And he informed me that the panels are becoming increasingly hard to get because the demand is outpacing supply. Now add 100,000 homes to this and the supply will not be able to make that demand. So there would be a lag time of many years before factories can ramp up.

Don't forget also that the mining, manufacturing, and transporting of these panels emits CO2, so there would be a lag until the panels replace CO2 emissions that would have to be calculated into this.

Some things are impractical for many people. Example, he harps on about insulating one's home. As an example, my mother-in-law lives in an 85 year old home in the beaches. It's a brick masonary home. There is no insulation between the walls, just 2 inches of air, and then 2 layers of brick. To insulate that home would require a complete renovation. She won't do it, and can't aford to do it even with tax credits. It would cost $30K-40K to do it and produce a truck load of garbage at the same time. Just about all the homes in the area fall under that. Same with my daughter's appartment. No inslation in the building at all, concrete walls and brick, and crappy single pane windows to boot. It would cost more to retrofit the building than it is worth, so it won't be done.

Which brings be to what I have been saying all along. What we can do is tinkering, we will NEVER meet a 60% reduction in CO2 emittions in 40 years and keep our standard of living. Besides in 40 years we will be well on the road to oil decline, and the economy will have already collapsed.

What I found unfathomable is this carbon trading system. Who sets the price? What criteria makes that price? How will it be enforced, and how would honesty be kept. Boy, I see see this system being grossly abused, not to mention make more middle men rich in the process. Someone has to buy and sell these credits on the open market. I can see it now, someone comes up with a method of extracting CO2 out of the atmospher and fix it into solid form, some carbonate of some kind, like Cacium carbonate, and gets credits for doing this and sell those credits to companies that emit CO2. Nice game of musical chairs that will only make greedy traders rich, making products more expensive at the same time.

At least he was right about the carbon tax. Finally someone who sees the folly of that.

Again, it's not physically possible to have a sustainable economy. The economy must grow in order for it to survive. There is so much debt that is expected to be repaid by an increasing growth in the economy. Even the NDP dosen't want the government to put any money on the national debt but instead allow economic growth to wittle it down relative to the GDP (which by that time we will have paid out some 2-3 TRILLION in interest payments alone). Thus any attempt to create a sustainable economy must fail.

Don't like this, too bad, it's reality.

Enough bickering by me, I do have some solutions that are practical, though still not for all, but it will mean very hard choices. I'd be happy to list them.

Richard
No one is ahead of their time, just the rest of humanity is slow to catch on.

Vigorous and thoughtful discourse is necessary to shake out the weaknesses in arguments and proposed methods to face this challenge that will affect us all. As members of the relocalize network we acknowledge that the responses to this issue will be first and foremost local in nature as they allow individuals like ourselves to greater effect the course of the ship. Bickering over which national party or which international event will not affect those politicians but it will rob of us our energy to imagine and implement effective strategies that may positively affect our immediate area. The benefit of municipal politics and municipal actors is the lack of declared parties that actors work in the best interests of the community without being handcuffed by policies and over arching philosophies. If Bush Senior and Jim Baker can't effectively turn the US ship than a bunch of Canucks who have no vote in US politics won't either. What we can do is continue to share our knowledge, experience and energy to get our own communities ready.

I recently read PO compared to a bear, that peakniks didn't have to outrun the bear, only the unprepared, pausing to bicker while the bear is running down on top of us would seem to an observer a less than appropriate use of time and energy. The outside events of the world are both vexing and beyond our scope to change. I urge you to curtail this discussion about 'shoulds and musts' in places we have no or little influence and focus on the places we can be effective. The fight with PO ignorance is large enough for all of us, let's stick to one battle at a time.

If not you? Then who? If not now? When?