A Tax By Any Other Name . . . .

This will surely be music to Progressive ears.

Thousands of motorists with large cars will soon have to pay hundreds of pounds to park outside their house.

Councils across London are pressing ahead with a sliding scale of charges for residential parking permits that penalises owners of fuel-hungry vehicles.

Horse crap. It's a tax except for electric cars.

Richmond was the first to push through a swingeing £300 levy on gas-guzzlers and 4x4s earlier this year.

Now other authorities are planning to do the same as the green lobby piles on the pressure for tougher measures against motorists.

From the beginning of next month, Hackney residents with cars that have engines bigger than four litres (producing around 350g/km of carbon dioxide emissions) will have to pay £207.50 a year - compared with £80 now.

Yes!! 'Global warming'. Be sure to get your carbon credits.

These include the BMW 745 and Hummer.

Cars with engines over three litres, including the BMW 735 and some models of the Land Rover Discovery and Isuzu Trooper, will attract an annual charge of £166, while anyone who wants to park a Mercedes E-Class or Porsche Boxster, at over two litres, in a controlled parking zone (CPZ) will get a bill for £124.50.

Owners of smaller cars under 1200cc - such as some models of Volkswagen Polo, Ford Focus and Nissan Micra - and hybrids such as the Toyota Prius, much loved by environmentally conscious MPs, will be charged only £41.50.

And permits will be free for electric vehicles such as the Mega City and Piaggio Porter van.

Islington, meanwhile, is carrying out a borough-wide referendum on a proposed increase from £95 to £200 for cars over 2500cc.

It claims about a third of motorists would pay more, and two-thirds would either pay less or see no change in the cost of a parking permit.

In a message to residents, the council's Lib Dem leader James Kempton said: "Cars dirty our air. They emit carbon dioxide, along with other pollutants, so reducing their emissions will be a step in the right direction."

Similar charging structures are being considered by Lambeth, Tower Hamlets, Camden, Kensington & Chelsea, Barking & Dagenham, Haringey, Southwark and Brent.

Well, they do have to cover the spiraling costs of providing council estates and social benefits for the easily offended portion of their populace.

------ ker-snip ------"But this policy is not just window-dressing. . . . "There is clear evidence that it will have a significant impact on air quality and climate change."

And I'm the high rabbi of the Magic Kingdom.

Note: At current exchange rates, £1 equals US$1.97.

Freedom, Not Climate, Is At Risk

Just as we had the panic of global freezing in the '70s, global warming is the hue and cry of the alarmists now.

We are living in strange times. One exceptionally warm winter is enough – irrespective of the fact that in the course of the 20th century the global temperature increased only by 0.6 per cent – for the environmentalists and their followers to suggest radical measures to do something about the weather, and to do it right now.

In the past year, Al Gore’s so-called “documentary” film was shown in cinemas worldwide, Britain’s – more or less Tony Blair’s – Stern report was published, the fourth report of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was put together and the Group of Eight summit announced ambitions to do something about the weather. Rational and freedom-loving people have to respond. The dictates of political correctness are strict and only one permitted truth, not for the first time in human history, is imposed on us. Everything else is denounced.

The author Michael Crichton stated it clearly: “the greatest challenge facing mankind is the challenge of distinguishing reality from fantasy, truth from propaganda”. I feel the same way, because global warming hysteria has become a prime example of the truth versus propaganda problem. It requires courage to oppose the “established” truth, although a lot of people – including top-class scientists – see the issue of climate change entirely differently. They protest against the arrogance of those who advocate the global warming hypothesis and relate it to human activities.

As someone who lived under communism for most of his life, I feel obliged to say that I see the biggest threat to freedom, democracy, the market economy and prosperity now in ambitious environmentalism, not in communism. This ideology wants to replace the free and spontaneous evolution of mankind by a sort of central (now global) planning.

The environmentalists ask for immediate political action because they do not believe in the long-term positive impact of economic growth and ignore both the technological progress that future generations will undoubtedly enjoy, and the proven fact that the higher the wealth of society, the higher is the quality of the environment. They are Malthusian pessimists.

[....]

I agree with Professor Richard Lindzen from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who said: “future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree, and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age”.

Read it all. You will not be disappointed.

The Goracle; newly-minted environmental expert Jean-Pierre Kerry; and leading presidential candidate Ron Paul were unavailable for comment.


Note: Czech Republic President Vaclav Klaus will be answering your questions.

President Klaus spoke before the CATO Institute March 9, 2007.

Goracle? Line 1, please

Another heretic from the scientific community has weighed in on 'global warming'.

Czech-born U.S. climatologist George Kukla, 77, today bore Czech President Vaclav Klaus out in his opinions about climate changes as he said that people are only marginally to blame for global warming. . . .

What the hell does some old coot know about something the Goracle is such an alarmist expert about?

Kukla, who left the former communist Czechoslovakia in 1971, said that the accelerating warming of the Earth is not caused by man but by the regularities of the planets' circulation around the Sun.

Kukla, an expert from the University of Columbia, has defended his opinions about climate changes in the U.S. Congress several times. In 1982, he confronted his views with later U.S. vice-president Al Gore. . . .

Heh. A real expert.

Abuse and Incompetence Reign Supreme

This comes as no great surprise.

A Guardian investigation has found evidence of serious irregularities at the heart of the process the world is relying on to control global warming.

The Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), which is supposed to offset greenhouse gases emitted in the developed world by selling carbon credits from elsewhere, has been contaminated by gross incompetence, rule-breaking and possible fraud by companies in the developing world, according to UN paperwork, an unpublished expert report and alarming feedback from projects on the ground.

However, there's an inconvenient truth that the al-Guardian doesn't mention: which Americans are profiting from the carbon credit scheme.

Global Warming Hysteria at the LA Times

They get right to it in the subhead, warming of cataclysmic climate change.

IF YOU HAVE KIDS, take them to the beach. They should enjoy it while it lasts, because there's a chance that within their lifetimes California's beaches will vanish under the waves.

Do it for the children!

Global warming will redraw the maps of the world. The U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predicts that sea levels will rise 7 to 23 inches by the end of the century; as the water gets higher, the sandy beaches that make California a tourist magnet will be washed away. Beachfront real estate will end up underwater, cliffs will erode faster, sea walls will buckle and inlets will become bays. The water supply will be threatened as mountain snowfall turns to rain and the Sacramento-San Joaquin Delta faces contamination with saltwater. Droughts will likely become more common, as will the wildfires they breed.

So in light of the hyperventilating over events they can't possible predict with any certainty, what do these geniuses suggest?

More taxes, of course.

Read the rest.