Is there climate change? Of course. How much is directly caused by humans? No one knows.
Should mankind strive to keep the air pure, oceans clean, earth uncontaminated? Of course!
Are all the myriad rules and regulations written strictly by unbiased, clear-thinking individuals
and agencies who have only goodness in their hearts. Of course not, and therein lies the problem.
Agendas unrelated to climate using climate to further goals unrelated to climate.
And those who dare question such agendas are immediately placed on the defensive
by the question: "Then can I assume you are against clean air and polar bears and don't care if
the rivers catch fire?" No one is allowed to say that there has to be some medium ground between
'saving the environment' and making it impossible for mankind to exist. That perhaps the minnows
in the Sacramento river are not as important as the livelihood of farmers in the Salinas Valley
who were growing food for mankind, for example.
This link below helps explain how so-called 'scientific data' can just be wrong. And how,
once that erroneous data is entered into the system, it never goes away.
And most of the erroneous raw data referred to here is due to ignorance and incompetence.
Add in the various political agendas by any number of politicians and governments all over the
world, some of whom could not give a royal hoot about the environment but are using 'green'
to further their own ambitions, often to the detriment of America and you get, at best, a very
corrupted version of what is often presented as "How can you possibly be against 'clean air?'
If your mind is open to both sides, take the time to call up the link. It's not a political link.
It's factual data, complete with pictures.

<http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2009/05/surfacestationsreport_spring09.pdf>

The official record of temperatures in the continental United States comes from a network of 1,221 climate-monitoring stations overseen by the National Weather Service, a
department of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Until now, no one had ever conducted a comprehensive review of the quality of the measurement environment of those stations.
By Anthony Watts SurfaceStations.org
During the past few years I recruited a team of more than 650 volunteers to visually inspect and photographically document more than 860 of these temperature stations. We were shocked by what we found.
We found stations located next to the exhaust fans of air conditioning units, surrounded by asphalt parking lots and roads, on blistering-hot rooftops, and near sidewalks and buildings that absorb
and radiate heat. We found 68 stations located at wastewater treatment plants, where the process of waste digestion causes temperatures to be higher than in surrounding areas.
In fact, we found that 89 percent of the stations – nearly 9 of every 10 – fail to meet the National Weather Service’s own siting requirements that stations must be 30 meters (about 100 feet) or more away
from an artificial heating or radiating/ reflecting heat source.
In other words, 9 of every 10 stations are likely reporting higher or rising temperatures because they are badly sited.
It gets worse. We observed that changes in the technology of temperature stations over time also has caused them to report a false warming trend. We found major gaps in the data record that were filled in
with data from nearby sites, a practice that propagates and compounds errors. We found that adjustments to the data by both NOAA and another government agency, NASA, cause recent temperatures to look even higher.
The conclusion is inescapable: The U.S. temperature record is unreliable.
The errors in the record exceed by a wide margin the purported rise in temperature of 0.7o C (about 1.2o F) during the twentieth century. Consequently, this record should not be cited as evidence of any trend
in temperature that may have occurred across the U.S. during the past century. Since the U.S. record is thought to be “the best in the world,” it follows.........

If I believed that any Canadian government would, in fact, use the revenues to pursue energy alternatives, I'd agree with you Hayne. Instead, however, those new tax revenues would go into the general account to be pissed away as governments always do without accountability. Nova Scotia has the highest gasoline taxes in Canada and theoretically a chunk of those is for highway maintenance and yet our highways, streets and bridges are crumbling.

I know that correlation does not imply causation. I know that the earth is in a warming cycle too; one of many through its history. What I don't see is one agreed-upon model for the effects of CO2 on what amount to long term global trends. The atmosphere is simply too complex so far for climate modelers and the fact that reputable scientists disagree on all of them says that modern models are weak. All of the draconian (Gore camp) predictions have been proven wrong. All of the nay sayers have vested interests. At some point it will be clear, but as Wendell (post #21) points out, even the data are flawed.