Fighting Global Warming Without Carbon Taxes

So with all constructive and reasonable dialogue over global warming still hijacked by the usual brainwashed bickering and political rhetoric - I thought I'd share this great story with you:

This is an example of people coming up with creative, pragmatic and profitable solutions towards a low carbon economy, instead of just you know - using it all as an excuse to complain how much TPTB wanna control their lives, but then mindlessly sitting around and waiting for those exact same people to tell them what they should think and do next anyway...

College pals build North America’s “greenest hotel”

The cool thing about this is, first of all, check out all the creative ways they went about lowering their carbon output by 75%:

GEOTHERMAL

Geothermal heat pumps, which draw heat from 115 metres below the earth through a series of pipes, are “the heartbeat of the building,” Rand says. But getting the technology installed was a battle, since they didn’t own land to drill into. It took six months of slashing through municipal red tape to bury almost 2 kilometres of piping in an adjacent city-owned laneway. Since then, Toronto has created a taskforce that expedites similar requests.

SOLAR PANELS

The roof bears two kinds of solar panels: photovoltaic, for powering the building, and solar thermal, for heating water. “No one will ever know” the place is mostly off-grid, Aarts says as he stares at a meter measuring how much energy is currently flowing from the gigantic panels. The roof also serves as a bar for patrons with a panoramic view of Toronto.

LOW-CARBON TECHNOLOGY

Copper coils encircling the drainage pipes, designed by the Canadian company RenewABILITY, recover heat lost down the drain and use it to warm incoming cold water.

The whole building is lit by LED bulbs, which all combined use less energy than a toaster. The decision to use LED meant many of the light fixtures had to be custom-made. Rooms are also equipped with motion sensors so the lights go out when no one is there.

Now the best part is this - all these improvements save them money, because the cost of the extra loan to implement them is less than what their energy bills would have been without them.

According to Rand, the money they’re saving on geothermal heating alone amounts to more than the loan payments for the green retrofits. Carbon reduction “makes us more economically competitive, because every dollar I don’t spend on energy I can spend on something else,” Rand says. He hopes the project will be a model for retrofitting larger buildings. “Everybody could do it.”

Meanwhile - guess what else: you're not paying a carbon tax if you're not using carbon. And the more people that take this sort of initiative - the more the industry and infrastructure for cheaper renewable alternatives grow. This allows people to do their part to combat global warming without submitting to any sort of government scam, it gives them the opportunity to save and make money, and it leads to the sort of energy independence and freedom that any real libertarian-conspiracy theorist should be trying to champion, not mindlessly reject because oil companies and neocons told you to "follow the money" conveniently far away from their own dirty trail.

This is the real story behind global warming, and this is just one of a multitude of ways real action against it, i.e. by initiating a switch to more sustainable, resource based, and socially conscious economic principles gives everyone the opportunity to escape the dirty clutches of TPTB - not submit further to them.

But it depends on YOU. So this is exactly what "they" don't want anyone to see. Instead they keep the picture muddied by focusing all your attention on taxes and uncertainty and fake email scandals that only keep the public scared and apathetic rather than awake and self-motivated.

And this is exactly the thing that keeps all of us "enslaved" way more than any taxes ever would anyway.

Also here's a brief video of Mr. Rand talking about his hotel project.



Gives some great insight into how our governments and banks should be approaching the issue as well:

Buildings around the world account for 40% of our greenhouse gas emissions. And if everybody did what we did, we would cut global emissions by a third. And everybody who did it would be making money. This is low hanging fruit, and I'll tell you how we pick it. There is a role for government here - so President Obama, Prime Minister Harper - backstop or force those commercial banks to lend money at low interest rates for these kind of retrofits. Better yet: mandate the retrofits.

- it creates local jobs
- it cuts carbon
- and it forms the basis of a new clean-tech economy

That's an economic stimulus package. For 20 years we've been frozen into inaction on climate change by bickering - and my story says we can kick the fossil fuel habit and Planet Traveller offers a very simple, and very constructive way forward.