Posts by Angus Robertson
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He said, "it's not about the goals".
How flowing artistic interpassing, spacing and a good mobile midfeild can find room in even a strong defence to set up a shot - its beautiful to watch. It doesn't matter if the shot goes in or misses, so denial is not the point (only at a Phoenix game the shot always misses).
Oh come now. Arsenal Trade Marked eeking out boring 1-0 wins for over 100 years. Are you denying them their destiny?
Wenger has changed them. They now exhilerate.
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This is what football fans crave, being constantly brought to the edge of celebration and then having that cruelly denied to them.
Arsenal have a team that plays beautiful flowing football; Man U win.
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Dammit, actually read the thing and it seems me above conspiracy theory might be missled, being that Kingsland and Eden village are entertainment zones. Hate to waste a good conspiracy, mutter, mutter...
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A councillor or crony owns something there?
Even simpler.
Venues in areas who had the gall to not elect Citizens and Ratepayers get closed down, because obviously it is unsafe for such people to drink or have fun.
It's 30 seconds' walk from Upper Queen Street, for goodness sake.
It is 30 seconds walk outside of the Hobson (C&R, C&R, C&R) ward and 30 seconds inside of the Eden-Albert (CV, CV, Focus Eden) ward.
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Maybe it won't be the entire solution, but it seems mad not to try.
Without buy in from the developing world Emission Caps cause more pollution than they prevent. The British achieved a 5% reduction in emissions between 1992 & 2004, but their carbon footprint including imports and excluding exports rose by 18% over the same period - the British are killing the planet 18% faster and emitting 5% less pollution. This is what happens when emissions can escape from under a cap.
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It'd be great if there was some kind of effective price signal to encourage the development of these technologies through (clearly unstoppable) unfettered capitalism.
A global systems of Emission Trading Schemes doesn't do that. A global ETS spreads cost evenly across the entire world and its "effective price signal" is therefore mostly effective to the worlds poor. And since poor people don't drive capitalism it doesn't drive technology, it is an exercise in fail.
The only way to send an effective price signal to rich people is to tax rich people consumption at a rate much higher than applied to poor people. This "tax the rich" concept is completely at odds with current "left wing" thinking, obviously...
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But it is also manifest that we cannot continue to emit carbon dioxide - and nitrogen, and methane - at the rapidly rising rates we are doing so. We need to find ways to let developing countries industrialise without raising carbon emissions. We need to cut our own. Just saying "the evil West wants to keep everyone down" is not going to solve the problem. If there's no incentive to reduce emissions, no-one will do it. China and India might not want to; doesn't mean we don't have to try. We don't really have a choice.
But if we try using an ETS we will fail and the world is screwed.
No, we need to adopt solutions that are not exploitative and there are choices available. We as global consumers have the power to create and deny consumer demand on the basis carbon footprints:
- The left wing option is to regulate away consumer goods that are inherently polluting - start with incandescent lightbulbs and work our way up to air-travel.
- The right wing option is to put massive consumer VAT on the basis of carbon footprints - triple or quadruple the price of fuel and double the price of cheese - as high as it can be to maximise tax take and to price pollution out of the reach of poor cosumers.
Regulation or taxation, take your pick, because there is no market solition.
Unfortunately neither of those options is politically palatable in Western consumer societies as long as there are ETS selling pricks who wish to use climate change as their opportunity to rort the developing world. And our political parties are...
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We had a good climate policy, the price was set too low but could have been raised eventually, and it priced carbon directly for all sectors of the economy.
It was crap, it was designed in anticipation that the world would adopt an Emission Trading approach and that is not going to happen.
Todays policy is crap because it is an ETS, anticipating a global ETS, when such schemes are dead in the water.
An ETS approach was only ever an attempt to do one thing - shift costs for combating climate change onto producers. Well as it happens, producer countries are unwilling to bear the disproportionate cost of tackling climate change.
You can't win if you don't fight. You have to pick your battles, of course, but climate change is something worth fighting against.
Every day we see Western pricks applying pressure to adopt an ETS, so the West can exploit the worlds poor. It is going to take a long time to change the greedy, self-centred, self-absorbed, arrogant, exploitative instincts of the West.
But like you say exploitation and climate change are things worth fighting against, right?
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And it brings the whole idea of market mechanisms into disrepute.
An ETS was never a reputable mechanism. It was always a market mechanism to impose pollution costs on producers. It was put forward (unsurprisingly) by rich consumer societies as their preferred solution to climate change and inherently unfair to producer societies.
If they're just about wealth transfer rather than doing anything, then we might as well go for regulation instead. It's the only way we can ensure that we won't be out of pocket for it.
Actually that is the only other politically viable left wing solution, there is another viable solution but it is right wing in ethos - high carbon consumption tax to price signal consumers into changing behaviour.
The greatest strength of an ETS is that it is a compromise acceptable to, more or less, both the left and right of rich consumer societies. The fact that it is unacceptable to the Chinese, Indian, Malay, Brazillian, etc. producer societies and therefore unworkable as a global climate change solution has not really ever been considered a problem.
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The key idea underlying an ETS or any market mechanism is "polluter pays"...
...so we consumers don't have to.
An ETS is a politically contrived piece of BS that has consumer society politicians portraying producers as "the problem".
We are a consumer society wallowing in carbon footprints 4x larger than in anyway sustainable, we are the cause of climate change. We need to pay for this and honestly $20 per tonne is way too low a price to pay for the damage our consumption does to the planet, really it should be 3x more at least.