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subsidizing ourselves to death

I find it rather bothersome that, while we as individuals are supposed to strive $100 at a time to buy local sustainable underpants made from carrot tops or whatever, our governments continue merrily subsidizing unsustainable activities to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

So you maybe want to spend a bit more energy communicating to your governments that they should stop subsidizing destructive sh-t, and a little less worrying about whether American cotton is worse than New Zealand merino wool or whatever.

Our highways and truck stops are crowded with 18-wheel warehouses -- publicly funded, incredibly costly and focused only on getting goods to market at top speed. The result? Pollution, short-sighted city planning and gridlock

Ottawa Citizen - Speed trumps all in just-in-time economy - by Clive Doucet - April 22, 2007

Chanting "there is no economy without an environment" might also help those who insist that doing anything would be too expensive, boo hoo hoo. Yeah, call me the next time you do a study that tells you something you WANT to do will be too expensive. Funny how the studies only confirm it would be impossibly hard to do stuff you didn't want to do anyway.

The ridiculous thing is we don't need to do anything that costs any taxpayer dollars. Spend LESS. The problem is too much spending on bad things. Stop doing that.

Energy efficiency saves money. Stop building cr-p cheap buildings and driving around in cr-p cheap cars in some stupidity of false economy. "All activities of the federal government will exceed the highest international standards of energy efficiency". How hard is that sentence to write? No committees, no reports, no giant layers of twisty legal terminology.

Sigh.

http://www.akerman.ca/doom.html#Subsidies

Labels: doom, subsidies

posted by Richard at 10:11 / permalink (post) | permalink (numeric)