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Nah, the "environment movement" as you call it is obviously funded by the governments looking for an excuse to raise taxes. It's the governments giving away gra

Nah, the "environment movement" as you call it is obviously funded by the governments looking for an excuse to raise taxes. It's the governments giving away grant money to fund the "scientific consensus" (another ridiculous term). Meanwhile, this has nothing to do with "saving the world", only with the sovereign debt crisis. United States, EU and Japan are dead broke, they will try every ploy to raise taxes and steal from the "evil rich people", even if it means ending the Western Civilization.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
neffy 7y ago
If a group of people is allowed to consistently get away with not paying their taxes, then fairly quickly, just by the operation of the monetary system, they will be the only people with any money. The real question is, are these really the people you want in control?
- LessDmesg 7y ago
  It's not about "getting away", it's about the governments being broke. There is no way to repay the 100% of GDP in debt for the Western governments, and the current pension and welfare programs are doomed. They can tax the hell out of companies but that will turn the West into a quaint XVIIth century villageland with horse-carriages while Asia becomes the epicenter of technology, industry and civilization. The climate religion is just the apoptosis of the Western civilization, it will not and cannot save the climate (even if one were to believe that it needs saving). Chinese and Indian coal stations don't care about Greta Thunberg.
  - AJ007 7y ago
    Yes they can, it’s called inflating away the debt - presuming it isn’t debt issued in a foreign currency.
  - neffy 7y ago
    You think the Chinese banking system doesn´t have these issues as well? They introduced loan securitization a few years ago, and their system does not have anywhere close to the flexibility or tolerance for dissent they are going to need to deal with the issues that is creating for them.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  No, the real question is why do you think that "the government" is entitled to a percentage of your money, and why you think they can spend it better than the private sector.
  - ykevinator 7y ago
    Because they pay for sewage and libraries
    - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
      Much less efficiently than the private sector could.
  - huffmsa 7y ago
    Unless you pay a private firm to drill a well and put a septic tank in the ground. Cost a few thousand dollars, and a few hundred every few years to have them come and pump the tank. I pay Amazon ~$10 a month for access to more reading, listening and video content than most major university libraries have access too. No late fees either. Of course sewage is better handled at the municipality level in dense areas, and I'm not okay with private firms having control over access to information, but Federal level governments are highly inefficient.
    - michaelmrose 7y ago
      Anyone who thinks Amazon is a fit replacement for libraries hasn't thought the matter through much. If one has 12-48k to pay rent this year a few hundred for a machine, about 1k for internet access then one can pay 10 a month to access a worse collection a homeless man could check out at the library. Access to the rest of human knowledge is available for 10 to 100 a pop.
      - huffmsa 7y ago
        A cellphone, a cheap data plan + prime will run you ~$500 at the most. Or ~$1.50 a day. And you get the rest of the internets knowledge included. No hours of operation, no librarians giving you dirty looks
- wincy 7y ago
  I’d rather no one be threatened with prison for not paying taxes. I don’t think the state (or anyone else) should be able to throw you in prison because you haven’t paid up. It’s just the modern day threat of debtors prison.
  - DFHippie 7y ago
    How many people are actually in prison for refusing to pay taxes? How does this compare to the number of people who have suffered some penalty for refusing to pay taxes? What should be done about people who Bartleby the Scrivener their way out of a legal obligation?
erpellan 7y ago
Yes, NASA was funded to collect the actual data until Trump arrived. The facts don’t care if you don’t like them and they don’t go away if you cover your eyes like a child and pretend they’re not there.
- LessDmesg 7y ago
  The facts are that nobody knows how climate works and there is no proof that humanity controls climate. The facts are that there is a large propaganda machine in the media using dirty tactics (e.g. a mentally ill child) to spread fearmongering and doomsday bullcrap. The facts are that there is big money behind this climate religion that has nothing to do with helping the environment (reality check: carbon dioxide is a benign gas and not a pollutant).
  - katbyte 7y ago
    Oddly I think it’s you who have fallen pray to propaganda. (Ps calling her mentally ill when she is clearly not does nothing for your position)
    - LessDmesg 7y ago
      Here, educate yourself: > Four years ago, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s, on the autism spectrum https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/greta-thunberg-autism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/greta-... Just watching any of her public speeches makes obvious that she is a poor ill person. And as they say, whenever the government wants to make some especially heinous laws, they use children. It's especially disgusting to see the media use a mentally ill child to further its agenda, but the fact remains.
      - ocschwar 7y ago
        Do you know just how many users here are also tagged with the scarlet 'A'?
  - DFHippie 7y ago
radikal_shit 7y ago
What's ridiculous about a scientific consensus? It's a trend in the publication of scientific facts. Show me a better way of unearthing what the data is showing than extrapolating from publications of hundreds of independent research. Especially when you follow it with a steam of unfounded speculations.
- LessDmesg 7y ago
  Science is not determined by consensus. It's determined by fact. If 100% of scientists paid for by a government declare what the government wants to hear as "fact", it does not become fact. Especially if it's based on arbitrary models that have been shown wrong. In the 1970s the "scientific consensus" was about global cooling, now it's about global warming, and Al Gore promised that Manhattan would be submerged underwater by now. The truth is, there is no model proven to be accurate in predicting the Earth's climate even over a timeframe of 50 years.
  - ocschwar 7y ago
    So why have the government's scientists not changed their tune in 2016? Why were the saying the same things during the Bush years that they said during the Obama years?
- GarrisonPrime 7y ago
  The problem comes when people forget scientific consensus isn’t set in stone. Science is a continuous process of discovery and refinements, not a final declaration. Especially when so many studies are flawed, or their results cannot be reproduced. But the public at large, politicians, and most business interest desire the comfort of facts, so people have a tendency to want to believe things are more settled and concrete than they may actually be. I am grateful, by contrast, that my med school professors frequently declared “ten years from now, perhaps half of what we’re teaching you today will have been proven incorrect”. While half is an exaggeration, I’ve certainly been astonished at how much has changed so dramatically in such a short time. Of course we just have to do the best we can with what we know at any particular time. So if the climate consensus is pointing one way, by all means let’s follow the bread crumbs. But overconfidence can be a dangerous comfort.
IG_Semmelweiss 7y ago
I dont understand why you are downvoted.
imtringued 7y ago
>governments looking for an excuse to raise taxes. In Germany energy taxes + VAT make up more than 50% of the price of gasoline and this has been the case for decades. If we switch to 100% electric cars then the government will lose 10% of its tax income. This is a strong motivation to avoid transportation policies that are good for the environment.
- kgwgk 7y ago
  > If we switch to 100% electric cars then the government will lose 10% of its tax income. The government can tax whatever it wants, there is no reason why electric cars couldn’t generate the same tax receipts.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

neffy 7y ago

If a group of people is allowed to consistently get away with not paying their taxes, then fairly quickly, just by the operation of the monetary system, they will be the only people with any money. The real question is, are these really the people you want in control?

LessDmesg 7y ago
It's not about "getting away", it's about the governments being broke. There is no way to repay the 100% of GDP in debt for the Western governments, and the current pension and welfare programs are doomed. They can tax the hell out of companies but that will turn the West into a quaint XVIIth century villageland with horse-carriages while Asia becomes the epicenter of technology, industry and civilization. The climate religion is just the apoptosis of the Western civilization, it will not and cannot save the climate (even if one were to believe that it needs saving). Chinese and Indian coal stations don't care about Greta Thunberg.
- AJ007 7y ago
  Yes they can, it’s called inflating away the debt - presuming it isn’t debt issued in a foreign currency.
- neffy 7y ago
  You think the Chinese banking system doesn´t have these issues as well? They introduced loan securitization a few years ago, and their system does not have anywhere close to the flexibility or tolerance for dissent they are going to need to deal with the issues that is creating for them.
huffmsa 7y ago
No, the real question is why do you think that "the government" is entitled to a percentage of your money, and why you think they can spend it better than the private sector.
- ykevinator 7y ago
  Because they pay for sewage and libraries
  - GarrisonPrime 7y ago
    Much less efficiently than the private sector could.
- huffmsa 7y ago
  Unless you pay a private firm to drill a well and put a septic tank in the ground. Cost a few thousand dollars, and a few hundred every few years to have them come and pump the tank. I pay Amazon ~$10 a month for access to more reading, listening and video content than most major university libraries have access too. No late fees either. Of course sewage is better handled at the municipality level in dense areas, and I'm not okay with private firms having control over access to information, but Federal level governments are highly inefficient.
  - michaelmrose 7y ago
    Anyone who thinks Amazon is a fit replacement for libraries hasn't thought the matter through much. If one has 12-48k to pay rent this year a few hundred for a machine, about 1k for internet access then one can pay 10 a month to access a worse collection a homeless man could check out at the library. Access to the rest of human knowledge is available for 10 to 100 a pop.
    - huffmsa 7y ago
      A cellphone, a cheap data plan + prime will run you ~$500 at the most. Or ~$1.50 a day. And you get the rest of the internets knowledge included. No hours of operation, no librarians giving you dirty looks
wincy 7y ago
I’d rather no one be threatened with prison for not paying taxes. I don’t think the state (or anyone else) should be able to throw you in prison because you haven’t paid up. It’s just the modern day threat of debtors prison.
- DFHippie 7y ago
  How many people are actually in prison for refusing to pay taxes? How does this compare to the number of people who have suffered some penalty for refusing to pay taxes? What should be done about people who Bartleby the Scrivener their way out of a legal obligation?

erpellan 7y ago

Yes, NASA was funded to collect the actual data until Trump arrived. The facts don’t care if you don’t like them and they don’t go away if you cover your eyes like a child and pretend they’re not there.

LessDmesg 7y ago
The facts are that nobody knows how climate works and there is no proof that humanity controls climate. The facts are that there is a large propaganda machine in the media using dirty tactics (e.g. a mentally ill child) to spread fearmongering and doomsday bullcrap. The facts are that there is big money behind this climate religion that has nothing to do with helping the environment (reality check: carbon dioxide is a benign gas and not a pollutant).
- katbyte 7y ago
  Oddly I think it’s you who have fallen pray to propaganda. (Ps calling her mentally ill when she is clearly not does nothing for your position)
  - LessDmesg 7y ago
    Here, educate yourself: > Four years ago, she was diagnosed with Asperger’s, on the autism spectrum https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/greta-thunberg-autism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2019/apr/23/greta-... Just watching any of her public speeches makes obvious that she is a poor ill person. And as they say, whenever the government wants to make some especially heinous laws, they use children. It's especially disgusting to see the media use a mentally ill child to further its agenda, but the fact remains.
    - ocschwar 7y ago
      Do you know just how many users here are also tagged with the scarlet 'A'?
- DFHippie 7y ago

radikal_shit 7y ago

What's ridiculous about a scientific consensus? It's a trend in the publication of scientific facts. Show me a better way of unearthing what the data is showing than extrapolating from publications of hundreds of independent research. Especially when you follow it with a steam of unfounded speculations.

LessDmesg 7y ago
Science is not determined by consensus. It's determined by fact. If 100% of scientists paid for by a government declare what the government wants to hear as "fact", it does not become fact. Especially if it's based on arbitrary models that have been shown wrong. In the 1970s the "scientific consensus" was about global cooling, now it's about global warming, and Al Gore promised that Manhattan would be submerged underwater by now. The truth is, there is no model proven to be accurate in predicting the Earth's climate even over a timeframe of 50 years.
- ocschwar 7y ago
  So why have the government's scientists not changed their tune in 2016? Why were the saying the same things during the Bush years that they said during the Obama years?
GarrisonPrime 7y ago
The problem comes when people forget scientific consensus isn’t set in stone. Science is a continuous process of discovery and refinements, not a final declaration. Especially when so many studies are flawed, or their results cannot be reproduced. But the public at large, politicians, and most business interest desire the comfort of facts, so people have a tendency to want to believe things are more settled and concrete than they may actually be. I am grateful, by contrast, that my med school professors frequently declared “ten years from now, perhaps half of what we’re teaching you today will have been proven incorrect”. While half is an exaggeration, I’ve certainly been astonished at how much has changed so dramatically in such a short time. Of course we just have to do the best we can with what we know at any particular time. So if the climate consensus is pointing one way, by all means let’s follow the bread crumbs. But overconfidence can be a dangerous comfort.

IG_Semmelweiss 7y ago

I dont understand why you are downvoted.

imtringued 7y ago

>governments looking for an excuse to raise taxes. In Germany energy taxes + VAT make up more than 50% of the price of gasoline and this has been the case for decades. If we switch to 100% electric cars then the government will lose 10% of its tax income. This is a strong motivation to avoid transportation policies that are good for the environment.

kgwgk 7y ago
> If we switch to 100% electric cars then the government will lose 10% of its tax income. The government can tax whatever it wants, there is no reason why electric cars couldn’t generate the same tax receipts.