Snowmelt runoff leading to ND oil spills - Beaumont Enterprise

Williams County Emergency Manager Mike Hallesy says there was record snowfall in the Williston area this past winter, and water from snowmelt this spring is running over fields and swamping oil well sites.

Sales pitch for carbon tax unleashes a dog of a proposition

''One million people will be better off'' is the USP with which the Minister for Climate Change, Greg Combet, hopes to persuade the public to buy his shiny new carbon tax.

I almost choked on my 100 per cent natural grain Wheaties. This must be a really crappy product.

There can be only one genuine way to sell the carbon tax, and that is by advertising the fact that it will prevent anthropogenic warming. It's like Mortein. I buy it because I have a nasty problem that needs eradicating. Excessive CO2 emissions around your home? Stop them dead with the new carbon tax! Available at all good stores.

It's instructive to think of how the GST was sold to a less than enthusiastic public. Basically, it was the castor oil strategy - this stuff is going to taste slightly unpleasant, but it's going to do us all a power of (economic) good. And it worked. Arguably that is the only honest way of selling the carbon tax, too. Self-sacrifice for the greater good. In this case, of mankind.

Yet despite all the political shenanigans of the past few years and a massive teaser campaign for more than a decade (rising sea-levels, end of the world, Al Gore) "the greater good" is not the USP with which the government has chosen to sell this product.

Which must mean, to put it bluntly, that the product doesn't work.