Corpobligation: While the carbon tax initiatives of the Quebec and British Columbia (BC) government are modest, they show the potential of tax shifting to discourage bad things (polluting/destructive) and encourage good things (innovation, sustainability). Carbon taxes (may) promote better CSR and environmental practices.

• Apply to virtually all fossil fuels, including gasoline, diesel, natural gas, coal, propane, and home heating fuel, making it among the broadest and most comprehensive in the world.
• Initial rate based on $10 per tonne of associated carbon, or carbon-equivalent, emissions and will rise by $5 a year for the next four years — reaching $30 per tonne by 2012.
• Carbon tax will be revenue neutral as a result of tax cuts and allowances to aid in adaptation.
• The proposed carbon tax is mostly for show, if we rely on narrow neoliberal economics (read more below).
  

Quebec's carbon tax :

• October 2007 - 200 million dollars a year, 1.2 billion dollars over 6 years, to support projects that will allow us to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
• According to the CBC, The tax will amount to 0.8 cents on every litre of gas sold in Quebec, and 0.9 cents on each litre of diesel fuel.
  
• Oil companies will be hardest hit. They will pay about $69 million a year for gasoline, $36 million for diesel fuel, and $43 million for heating oil.

What, you need a bigger flat screen movie/entertainment display? We have a deal for you.

The Globe and Mail's, Grant Robertson highlights the growing presence of bigger TVs in both our homes and landfills. Falling prices on new flat panel, LCD, and plasma televisions illustrate the problems with an economic system that fails to internalize costs of resource use and waste disposal. What do you do with the TV after it's obsolete? Can we afford to recycle all of these TVs?

From the Kyoto Protocol of 1990 to the Bali Conference of 2007, greenhouse gas emissions have risen along with the rhetoric of corporate social responsibility and "governments social and environmental responsibility (GSR). Almost every serious company or government has a platform or mission statement claiming that they are doing their part in fighting climate change. The question is whether government commitments at the Bali Climate Change Conference can actually make a difference in the actions of businesses and individuals? Can we as developed country citizens recognize the truth of the statement: The industrialized nations, as the main causers of climate change, are in the responsibility to support such processes (Peter Hoeppe's, head of the Geo-Risk research department at Munich RE).

In the moments of doubt, the moments of futility where the odds seem impossible, words from artists like Drew Dellinger , Poet, Professor and Activist, can speak to us on a deep level. The narratives that activists, business people, students, consumers, builders, and all sorts of other types of artists create a future that will either be a better future or a future with an end in environmental death. What a choice, eh?

Here is an excerpt of a recent poem that he read at the Be the Change Conference, London, UK

hieroglyphic stairway

it's 3:23 in the morning
and I'm awake
because my great great grandchildren
won't let me sleep
my great great grandchildren
ask me in dreams
what did you do while the planet was plundered?
what did you do when the earth was unraveling?...

Listen to Drew reading the poem via Treehugger.com - You need quicktime to hear