Is it time to import third worldians to replace our cars.

He he..no idea..how much do you charge?

 

The rickshaw runners could live under our bridges, in the laneways or on less attractive public reserves. They could also eat from our bins, and capture water from our gutters. That way they would help to keep our public spaces clean and reduce waste.

They would not need to read or write, and would not be worth the price of health care, as they would be cheap to replace. We could raise their kids to be grateful for the privilege of serving us.

As a safe guard we could make laws that they were only allowed to drive rickshaws, as it would be counterproductive to have them taking on the sort of low but not so low paid jobs that we would take on ourselves.

 

But that's the point! Five star hotels, perks and meetings to discuss the problem - and side benefit of a new taxation system that the masses will accept without too much argument.

 

Bah! Everyone is missing the point with the whole global warming scam. Read 'Super Freakonomics' for some perspective.

For starters, CO2 isn't even the magor greenhouse gas, water vapor is. And of all the CO2 that is caused by human activity, transportation only generates only a pretty small amount of it.

And even then, a doubling of carbon dioxide traps less than 2% of the outgoing radiation emitted by the earth. Furthermore, atmospheric carbon dioxide is governed by the law of diminishing returns: each gigaton added to the air has less radiative impact than the previous one.

Carbon dioxide is not poisonous to animals at except in extreme concentrations of 50 000 ~ 100 000 ppm (currently 390 ppm, up from 280 ppm about 150 years ago). It is, however, extremely benificial for plant life in higher concentrations. In many ways, a higher carbon future is in the best interests of all life on the planet.

It's the warming we don't want. So instead of spending the $1.2 trillion (before being adjusted for inflation) each year on carbon mitigation measures that Nicholas Stern insists on, the book proposes some ingenious, scientifically proven methods for geoengineering that offer the promise of cost effective strategies to address the real problem, instead of using the climate change scare as cover to implement a global tax on the air we exhale from our lungs.

 

Pre-decimal the cost of living is too high in Australia to live on $5 an hour.

I'm not convinced that living on $4 or $5 an hour in Australia is necessarily a better standard of living than living on $3 a day in a poor asian country. The cost of living for poor people based on the lifestyle they live is a fraction of what it would be to live the same lifestyle in Australia. There a re a lot of countries where poor people can eat on less than $2 per day try that in Australia.

Besides it would be faster, cheaper and you would get more exercise walking everywhere rather than using Rickshaws so what is the benefit for the consumer.