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Individual American states are putting together a system to cap and trade greenhouse gas emissions, despite the Bush administration's opposition to the Kyoto protocol on global warming...

...The regional-level initiative, led by the Republican governor of New York, George Pataki, aims to be able to announce the details of a scheme by April next year. Nine north-eastern and mid-Atlantic states are taking part, with several other states and some Canadian provinces involved as "observers" in the process.

The scheme could even link up with the emissions controls and trading system being established by the EU next year, allowing emission allowances to be traded across the Atlantic. It is understood that informal talks have already taken place between environmental officials of the US states and their European Commission counterparts...

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The nine states in the project, which is known as the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative (RGGI), are Connecticut, Delaware, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island and Vermont. In addition, Maryland, the District of Columbia and Pennsylvania are "observers" in the process, as are some eastern Canadian provinces.

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ExxonMobil funds the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Tempe, Arizona.

This center, which has been closely affiliated with Western Fuels Association, has Craig Idso as president, Keith E. Idso as vice president and Sherwood Idso as its scientific advisor.

Sherwood Idso created a $250,000 video for Western Fuels in 1991 titled "The Greening of Planet Earth" which touts the virtues of global warming. The highly misleading video – which claims that global warming is good for humanity was paid for by the coal industry and was the subject of Congressional Hearings in the early 1990s...

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Why do you insist on denying the obvious? Why do go to partisan hacks instead of as objective as possible researchers? Do you even begin to understand how shrill and un-credible you make yourself?

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Originally posted by Coyote:
Why do go to partisan hacks instead of as objective as possible researchers?

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Originally posted by pogge:
Before that he worked for the tobacco industry writing testimonials on the healthy effects of smoking.

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...While individual decades or years have been warm in Burgundy, the anomaly now is that the warming trend has kept going for more than a century.

That is a strong sign of climate change, he said.

The big shock, though, was the evidence from the summer of 2003, Dr. Chuine said.

In Burgundy, the temperature was far hotter in 2003 than it had been since the medieval grape harvesters began collecting data, the French researcher said.

The models showed that Burgundy was 5.86 degrees Celsius warmer than during the reference period. The next-highest anomaly was in 1523, when it was 4.10 degrees above the norm. In temperature terms, a difference of more than a degree is considered huge.

Worse still, said Dr. Yiou, is that the 2003 temperature "was completely unpredictable from what we knew before 2003."

He said it could be a coincidence, or troubling evidence that climate is becoming more variable and therefore more unstable...

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Mr. Dion said Britain has experimented with its own trading system and has moved to merge it with the larger European one. He wants the architects of Canada's new system to look at making theirs work with Europe.

Also coming: investing in green technologies, possibly with money from the sale of the federal government's interest in Petrocan; the rapid development of renewable sources of energy; and establishing a more detailed plan for the large industrial emitters of greenhouse gases, he said.

This is in addition to the 240 less-detailed measures unveiled in Canada's Kyoto action plan in 2002.

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Originally posted by Contrarian:
Does Dion have the clout in cabinet to be able to accomplish some of this?

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To accomplish some yes, to do enough to make a difference no.

Martin is governing with a minority as if he had a majority. Therefore i can not see him bending to Dion around the Cabinet table.

The smart thing to do would be to implement as much as possible as quick as possible since that would provide NDP and most Bloc members support.

So you know the Oatmeal Savage types are severely in the fringe, and it is best to alienate them and continue with discussions on how to deal with Climate Change.

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Portugal will serve as the launching pad for these planned ''eco-cities,'' said officials from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) as they revealed the blueprint for the 'One Planet Living' initiative here Wednesday, at a major conservation conference.

The 4,340 hectares of land south of the Portuguese capital Lisbon, identified for this first phase in an ambitious global drive towards alternative living, will have by its completion 6,000 houses, apartments, shops and hotels. The estimated cost, according to the WWF, will be over one billion euros (1.3 billion U.S. dollars).

''We aim to build a series of flagship communities for people to live sustainably, and which are affordable and comfortable,'' Eduardo Goncalves, coordinator of the 'One Planet Living' initiative, said during a meeting at the 3rd World Conservation Congress, in the Thai capital, organized by the World Conservation Union or IUCN.

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[WWF report] ...the average footprint of a person today is nearly 2.2 hectares, which is in excess of the 1.8 hectares of land for natural resources available for each resident of the planet.

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Climate change is 'a myth', sea levels are not rising and Britain's chief scientist is 'an embarrassment' for believing catastrophe is inevitable. These are the controversial views of a new London-based think-tank that will publish a report tomorrow attacking the apocalyptic view that man-made greenhouse gases will destroy the planet.

The International Policy Network will publish its long-awaited study, claiming that the science warning of an environmental disaster caused by climate change is 'fatally flawed'. It will state that previous predictions of changes in sea level of a metre over the next 100 years were overestimates.

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The report is set to cause controversy. The network, which has links with some of the President's advisers, has received cash donations from the US oil giant ExxonMobil, which has long lobbied against the climate change agenda. Exxon lists the donation as part of its 'climate change outreach' programme.

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There could, however, be an interesting marriage of the dismal science with the real one if we changed the way we put our accounts together. Understanding global warming as a kind of ecological debt, largely run up by rich countries, would give economists the idea that whatever else they do, they have to live within our collective environmental budget. This will mean a major redistribution of entitlements to natural resources and economic opportunities in favour of poor countries.

Using the lens of ecological debt to compare the group of eight top industrialised countries with countries defined by the World Bank as poor and heavily indebted, the world quickly turns upside down. Creditors become debtors and vice versa. The rich countries routinely over-consume while the poorest countries under-consume, effectively lending their environmental space to the international community.

Resolving the ecological debt crisis could bring about the paradigm shift in rich/poor relations that has so far eluded us. Climate change and poverty reduction then become simultaneously the top priority.

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At first, scientists were skeptical about the natives' reports of unnatural brightness in winter. Climate data showed the Arctic getting warmer, and the rules of physics suggested that such low-density air would make the winter darkness even more profound.

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Mr. Davidson guessed the strange twilight is a mirage, a little-known effect of climate change in which thermal inversions carry light from the South into the dark North. He tested the theory by floating a weather balloon into the sky in Resolute Bay on a November day more than a week after the winter night began, and the sky showed an unnatural glow.

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But only the modern trend toward global warming could have blanketed the North with enough warm air to create a widespread and sustained brightening of the Arctic nights, Mr. Davidson said.

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