Green taxes' place in the big picture of climate change

New Labour New Highs
In a masterful and courageous move, Labour has decreed that you do indeed get higher on cannabis than you do on mere class C drugs. Not as high as you would on a class A drug, of course, that is some serious shit, but if you find you only get a class C high, then I think you can report your dealer to trading standards.At least that is, presumably the message Gordon Brown is trying to send. This is all about message after all, rather than inconvenient reality.Unfortunately the message actually sent is that government drugs policy is arbitrary and not to be trusted. Science, it turns out, has a higher duty to the truth than it has to the tablo

Strange angle on road deaths
In the news today is a report showing that children in deprived areas are four times more likely to die in road accidents than those in wealthier locations, and that therefore deprived areas should get priority in funding for speed bumps, cameras etc.On the face of it that sounds fair enough, but actually it is deeply confused and offensive. Funding for traffic calming should go to where it has the greatest benefit. If this correlates with poverty, then more of it will go to poor areas, as it should. But where there are accident hotspots in prosperous ar

Greens and Keynes: total muddle
You'd think it would be a simple question. Do the Greens support the fiscal stimulus to get the economy growing again, or do they, like the Tories, consider it more important to balance the budget sooner?Logically, as the Greens are not supposed to be that keen on economic growth anyway, you would expect the latter answer. But that has to be weighed against visceral knee-jerk opposition to the Tories.So I've been intrepidly commenting on Green blogs trying to get to the bottom of this. Natalie Bennett at Philobiblon was cheering the return of Keynes but wouldn't explain whether she wanted the gr

Why MPs should stop complaining and pay up
Various MPs are disputing the fairness and legality of Thomas Legg's retrospective application of limits to cleaning and gardening expenses. They shouldn't. Their argument is that if you employer approved your expenses, they shouldn't later change the rules and ask for it back.The problem with this picture is that the parliamentary fees office isn't the MPs' superior, it is their subordinate. You cannot pass the buck to a subordinate. This is not a case of your boss saying "you can claim for this". It is more like your secretary saying "oh yes I'd claim for that if I were you".If the rules failed to specify appropriate limits for such things

The tyranny of the harm principle
So I and possibly half a dozen other people voted against the ban on airbrushing, which was not surprising given the one-sided nature of the debate, and the near-universal, it seems, misunderstanding of JS Mill's harm principle. With hindsight I should have tried to speak myself.The harm principle is a prohibition on banning things that don't cause any harm to others. It is not a sufficient justification for banning anything. Some bans are worse than the harms they would prevent. And many bans are wrong because they are ineffective at preventing the harms they are intended to prevent.The problem is that it can be difficult to be seen to agre