How disappointing that yet another column touts a carbon tax or cap-and-trade as solutions to climate change. Face it, only so much solar radiation strikes earth; nature and technology are currently capable of converting this into chemical or electrical energy at very low efficiencies. If we opt for a carbon tax we will either leave those who are too poor to pay it with inadequate energy resources to survive, or the tax will be too low to make any difference in the outcome (likely extinction of the biosphere).

The generation of carbon dioxide should be as much a human right as access to clean water and air. We should not allow one class of people to generate disproportionate amounts while denying others the ability to generate enough to survive. During WWII we rationed key resources like rubber, flour, and gasoline. Rather than a carbon tax I sure would like to see people start talking about a carbon-rationing program. Among other benefits, this would speed up the nascent movement towards buying local if we count the transportation-generated carbon dioxide into a product’s “carbon cost” and greatly heal America’s trade issues with Asia. Of course, it would force some hard choices on some people, like whether to heat/cool the 12,000 square foot home or drive the hummer.

I frankly don’t care who authorizes and performs renditions and torture; we should pack the lot of them off to The Hague. Maybe the usurpers in the Bush regime can be next in line after Charles Taylor. If Clinton did it too, then by all means give him a turn before the tribunal. It is high time we got out the tape and put our shredded Constitution back together.

“To say that Australia is a racist country because of John Howard is like saying that the USA is an inarticulate, fundamentalist Christian, warmongering nation because of George Bush.”

Once one leaves the coasts, that is quite an accurate description of the USA. According to pollingreport.com, sixty percent of Yanks think the story of Noah’s Ark is literally true. Our warmongering is a matter of history and I would address the inarticulate part of the quote, but there are too many syllables for me to understand the word.

Seriously, can any reasonable person deny the racism in Australia (or the USA)?

I can't believe Ms Walsh considers the one who takes the lowest road wins. I know, four decades of nearly unbroken smear campaigns that have been mostly successful is hard to argue with. However, Carter was inevitable in '76 precisely because the US was fed up with dirty tricks and ugly innuendo. I think this cycle is repeating and this time the cleanest candidate who brings the most positive message wins. Of course, I may have to find the vegetarian equivalent of crow to dine on come Nov. '08.

I think 1984 was the only book governor W ever read. Unfortunately, he thought it was a religious text.

Can’t these Bozos even get their visuals right? If it was truly cold in that house, Joe Dufus would not have unzipped his coat to mid-chest and gone without head and neck covering. I guess these geniuses have never experienced life outside the thermostat zone. Probably a nonissue since very few Americans ever venture into temperatures below 40F or above 90F.

I notice they also didn’t show the roads full of people cycling to work since someone might see how cool it would be to fill the roads with clean, efficient bikes instead of CARcinogen-spewing SUVs. I lived in a town that had that in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s. It was glorious.

By the by, when oh when will we stop talking about cap and trade and start talking about individual carbon quotas? Probably not until we get serious about climate change

G.W. was still alive and kicking for the treaty of Tripoli and Abe no doubt had read it. Clearly Willard is woefully ignorant of its contents, this first unanimously ratified treaty that stated that the U.S. is NOT a christian nation. Our founders will roll in their graves if this bat-shit spewing theocrat is planted in the Presidency.

Let’s see now, DK is a loony because he thinks we can make it on much less energy than we are currently using without sitting in the dark freezing. How about we check in with the numbers? Bush has squandered approximately three Trillion dollars on his Iraq fiasco. That money could have bought and hooked up over one trillion watts of photovoltaic power (or a lot of other useful things). With one hundred million homes in the U.S. getting on average five hours of useful sunlight per day that works out to fifty kilowatt-hours per household per day. Consider that the average home in California uses about half that amount of electricity.

So, had DK been President these last seven years, we might be generating all of our daytime electricity by fully renewable means and had a bundle left over to either subsidize useful industries with or just convert to hydrogen for nondaylight energy needs. Add in wind and tidal sources and we can clearly close down every coal-fired power plant as well as the nuclear ones.

The only place he is not visionary is his refusal to acknowledge that we will eventually need to restrict people’s global-warming emissions with a carbon quota (as opposed to a carbon tax). Being rich enough to pay a carbon tax should not give one the right to destroy the ecosystem that sustains all life.

I wonder what kind of trial system the bush administration officials will get at The Hague for their war crimes. Hopefully they will get a fairer trial than they are willing to give the Gitmo prisoners.