Kelly McParland: Dion downshifts on the Green Shift

But Mr. Dion has been saying since he introduced the plan that there will be no pain, thanks to the big tax cuts he'll introduce to offset the additional energy costs. On the party's thegreenshift.ca web site (not to be confused greenshift.ca, the private company that is enraged at the Liberals for stealing their name) is a calculator that purports to illustrate how much extra money individual Canadians will have thanks to the Green Shift. I just told it I'm a single person earning $100,000 (which isn't true), and it says I'll get $837 more than before. At $150,000 I'd be ahead by $1,172. So even rich people are going to make out like bandits.

So why, if the plan is so lucrative, are the Liberals offering $900 million more in "incentives and rebates"? And why, if I'm so much better well off, would I cut back on my heat or gasoline bill? For $1,172 I could put a down payment on a Hummer.

Is there something here they're not telling us?

"Science" in thrall to "ideology" keeps "bogus" debate alive - The Irish Times - Thu, Sep 04, 2008

...four decades later, in late 2007, US vice-president Dick Cheney was able to claim with a straight face that "there does not appear to be a scientific consensus" that climate change is caused by human activity.

The story of how the science of global warming has been hijacked and politicised was outlined at a lecture in Trinity College Dublin last night by Prof Naomi Oreskes of the University of California, San Diego.