However, California has made some great breakthroughs, namely the Global Warming Act , which will force CO2 emmitting industries to curb their emissions and enforce trade of CO2 credits on the free market. You can read more about it here if you’re interested: http://www.onlyblue.org/blog/?p=29 . Arnold has also recently signed a bill to implement solar powered houses as an experiemnt project.

And the charges only start with the price of fuel. Nav Canada charges an airliner thousands of dollars to fly over Canada, and more to land, plus the security fees other charges. When you consider that you can get a BA in Rennaisance Theatre in Canada, and the government will pay two thirds of the cost, but if you want to learn to fly, you’ll pay full freight plus GST, you can see that governments do aviation no favours.

I have read many newspaper and magazine articles that repeat the conventional wisdom that flying produces more carbon dioxide than driving. Having actually looked up aircraft range and fuel consumption specs, I can tell you that, as usual, the things “everybody knows” they really don’t know at all.

The actual carbon emissions of a trip by an ideally tuned car, driven at the speed limit, carrying an average number of passengers, puts about as much carbon into the atmosphere per passenger as a regional flight to the same destination. If you allow for the SUVs and mini-vans in Canada’s passenger fleet, and for the way most drivers routinely exceed the speed limit, it actually makes more sense, it terms of actual carbon emissions, to fly. Now, some estimates roll the “radative forcing” produced by aviation contrails into the warming effects of flying. However, this ignores both the reality that not all flights produce contrails, and it also ignores the warming effects (and other baneful environmental results) of road building.