If a tax on gasoline consumption led directly to a reduction in global warming. That a policy instrument as elegant as that (often referred to as a Pigouvian Tax) probably wouldn't work should be self-evident. From Alex Tabarrok:

The result is a simple application of the theory of tax incidence. The burden of a tax falls on those who can least afford to escape the tax. The world's demand for oil is inelastic but the supply is even more inelastic. What is Saudi Arabia, for example, going to do with its oil except sell it? The oil is already fetching a price well above cost so if there is a world tax on oil that's like a tax on land - Saudi Arabian land to be precise - and a tax on land is born by land owners not by consumers.

More here. He doesn't mention, moreover, that the marginal cost of consumption (in terms pollution) is most likely higher in less developed countries because they are least likely to have developed or atleast be using relatively more efficient technologies.
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Facebook Infomercial Parody

So true.

[HT: Karisa (yes, she is a Facebook friend)]
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"Daisuke is the pitching master!" said Boston Globe baseball columnist Bob Ryan, hopping from one foot to the other as he described videotape footage of Matsuzaka's otherworldly pitching power and control banishing a flock of evil, conniving, left-handed-batting carp-spirits to the netherworld during a 2003 Seibu Lions game. "His Ultimate Galactic Dragon Gyroball Pitch Power Explosion breaks three feet inside before cutting sharply toward the dugout, where falsehood and cowardice are forced to shrink before it!"

Rest of the story here.
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This piece on ABCNews.com (by Michael Malone) takes an honest and humiliating look at what exactly is news, and who should be the ones purveying it. This section grabbed me:

We are in a perpetual race to get to the news as early as possible....The result is a behavior that I can only describe as "surfing upstream". That is, we surf the cable stations on television even as we race around the net, trying to capture the latest update the instant it appears.

...The problem is that in going this far up the news cycle, we are also usually by-passing all of the standard intermediators that we normally depend upon to do our filtering for us... Needless to say, that's led to a lot of disenchantment with the traditional media. And rightly so.

Yet, by surfing ever further upstream, we go past not only analysis to news to breaking news, but all of the way to the raw information streaming off the event in real time.... Downstream, in the world of long, leisurely feature stories and news analysis, the current is wide and slow and fairly predictable. But up at the source, information and data is blasting out of spillway like an immense firehose; all is confusion, energy and chaos.

Most of have neither the time nor the inclination to navigate against this torrent; yet, that is precisely where most of us want to be. The result is a paradox, and one that is rapidly destroying traditional media.

Put simply: we want the news as it happens, but we also want it to be intermediated by some sort of objective, professional news filter. The Internet, cell phones and digital cameras have gotten us unprecedentedly close to the real-time unfolding of news events around the world. But only rudimentary institutions - notably the blogosphere — have yet appeared to deal with the problem of filtration. Thus, our current behavior: channel surfing cable news, dropping into places like the Drudge Report fifteen times per day, and bouncing around the Web to the blogs we trust the most.

I think that's about right. [HT to (who else?) Matt Drudge]
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