in the winter driving global hunger and water shortages to eating up our tax dollars carbon pollution is having major effects on just about every aspect of our lives so what can be done to combat carbon pollution and save our planet two a good first step would be to introduce a carbon tax and force companies to pay for the carbon that they're dumping into our skies all debate washington over national carbon taxes gone nowhere across the globe other countries are realize the environmental and economic benefits of a carbon tax one of those countries is ireland and joining me now from dublin to talk more about ireland's experience with a carbon tax is a man ryan former minister of energy and communications of ireland and now the head of the green party ireland mr ryan welcome thank you very much indeed good to talk to you thanks for joining us what motivated carbon to create a carbon tax and how did you go about doing it. it took a long time i guess we were looking at it from the late ninety's and it took almost

ten years before it was introduced in two thousand and ten and maybe not time it was useful in some way we got a lot of economic analysis done to show that if you introduce those and you use the revenues to reduce labor taxes and to protect people against fuel poverty and invest in new green energy systems that actually it does your economy good it gives you a net gain to the economy it raises activity cuts down the expense of imports of fossil fuels as well as cutting out the carbon so we were in government two thousand and seven two thousand and eleven and it was one of our kind of key commitments to try and deliver i was glad that we were able to do and i suppose glad as well just to see it working you know if the world didn't come to an end it wasn't an easy thing to do politically but the figures for ireland i think show an example that you can actually start cursing out the carbon and your economy still holds up and we went through a difficult period in our county but but the actual green economy has done well and i think it's a lesson for the rest the world not you know we're we're

a good people say duck and scandinavian countries they're always doing the right thing maybe aren't as a nice example because we're perfect sinners as well but the same time we were able to do it and it worked how does the irish carbon tax work. we had advantage of the spores were an island and it was fairly simple to introduce it in the sense that you put we put it at the point of entry so as as an oil ship comes into the into the port of cork and supported doubling our culture it comes into sharp shannon river we're able to put the tax at the point of entry and that's a big advantage because you cut out the expense of collecting it and it kind of trick astrue the rest of the economic system so you put it on the order tanker coming in or you put it on the code the code shipment. and that is applied in a myriad of different ways it's not a huge tax signal it accounts now for about one percent of our overall tax revenue but it's a signal that it's one of if you put it in as one of several segments it starts to have that effect in even there you don't expect you know in improving your energy

efficiency in your homes or improving industries energy efficiency when they see a carbon tax in place people know that they can vest in alternatives that actually cut out the use of fossil fuels so that's a big advantage we had is that was able to be fairly easily introduced at the point of entry it applied on on every aspect of transport he's saying. you can have it trickle through the economy enough way. and and his reason be easy to to collect if you were to translate ireland's carbon tax into. dollars or euros per tonne of carbon and they did do you know if you have a sense of or or even an exact number for what that would be and how michael mccann carbon tax is you know a little bit. roughly twenty five dollars a ton twenty five twenty euros a tonne whatever the current exchange rate is so we originally set it up by four to mirror the european union has another way of pricing carbon called emissions

trading scheme we set it up to mountain mirror that thousand that price that exists across europe now the emissions trading scheme of things fall into a very low price but our carbon price this trade. saying stop consistency that you you know it's twenty euros a tonic whatever different up occasion that it applies it raises about four hundred million euros in tax revenue and in terms of arms going through different economic situations so we needed to balance our budgets and the carbon tax i suppose provided about twelve percent of the just meant we needed to make on the tax side so we were fortunate in some ways in the revenue situation was very difficult and we were able to apply the carbon tax to help on that side but the real benefit is the signal that gives to investment in other areas and i suppose in ireland we've had bad benefit we're firstly we're a very exposed ninety percent of our energy is imported fossil fuels so we need to cut it i was and what we've seen in the last five years is we've doubled our amount

of our new but energy supplies we saw a twenty five percent improvement in the efficiency of new irish cards and so that those sort of signals and there was another in the car tax side we did some other measures around car tax to kind of have that happen i suppose the message the public one is it's not popular it's not easy to introduce that but every new irish car going into the to buy gasoline is spending twenty five percent less than i would have been had we not sent those sort of price signals so it's not easy to introduce you know no one should should underestimate the difficulty but the benefit for the consumer is even if through those signals you can cut out the wasteful use of energy that everyone's saving money in it more than covers the cost of the carbon tax in the press but now there's irish carbon taxes first proposed by the irish green party which you're the head of right now what how do other political parties react to it have you found any interesting coalitions or alliances of parties that you might not think of as typically being concerned about

global climate change or the cost of carbon. i think we have the advantage here in that there was broader conflict consensus around this whole transition towards a clean energy future that maybe it seems to exist in the states and i'll be honest i don't think it's easy to introduce this if it's turned into a left versus right or by republican versus democrat issue i think a key way of getting it getting it through is actually getting bipartisan agreement and i suppose if i was giving advice to the states where it is a current issue you know we know the budget negotiations you have ahead of you still isn't resolved surely it's one of the measures that actually could get some sort of bipartisanship support because in a sense it's leaving it to the free market to decide what sort of technology foster solutions you want to develop putting a price on carbon to actually leave the freedom of the market to actually work out plus the best way of doing that rather than a whole myriad of different government interventions so i think we were fortunate

here where we introduced it that there was reasonable broad support for it i mean people play politics with the to a certain extent but we were able to introduce it because we could build stuff sort of deal across the house and i think that needs to happen elsewhere otherwise it becomes a political football and people are scoring points and to be honest the public opposition then it's a real problem so i think the first precursor to get in some sort of agreement is get in some sort of deal with parties different sides of the highs and then i think once you have that then you're you're you're one tenth of the way they're aiming ryan thanks so much for being with us tonight. thank you dude. let's get geeky on getting in a good workout most athletes runners and gym rats know about it in the wall is the point of which your body is so exhausted that you can't continue to function whether you're out the field or in the gym but new research suggests that hitting

the wall may be the perfect example of mind over matter and that exhaustion may be all in your head researchers at the university of kent in england wanted to figure out if mentally pumping yourself up and encouraging yourself during a workout could help fight off the effects of exhaustion so they turn to a group of twenty four healthy and physically active men and women and ask them to ride on the stationary bike until they just couldn't ride anymore the researchers took physical measurements of the study members before asking each one to ride on the stationary bike and and until they hit the wall as the study numbers rode on the bike researchers memory measured their heart rates their pedal power their overall pace and the researchers kept track of their facial muscle movement and grimaces which are signs of physical exhaustion and they repeatedly asked the bikers how hard the exercise was on a scale of one to ten after each bikers measurements and initial reaction size was recorded the group was divided into two one group of bikers was told to continue

their normal exercise routine for the next two weeks while the other group was coached in using self talk during exercise learning how to positively talk to yourself about your workout during your workout it's positive talking clear phrases like you know well keep up the good work i'm feeling good this is making me feel better i can get through this after two weeks both groups return to the lab to take another round of exercise tests and the bikers who had learned self talk used it during their tests while those who hadn't did. researchers found that the group of bikers who had talked of themselves pedaled much longer before becoming tired but in their first rides and reported that the exercise felt easier even though the objective measurements their heart rates their facial expressions they remained the same from the first exercise test meaning that the second biking exercise has was actually just as hard as the first one it just didn't seem that way to them sam

wal-mart kora senior author of the study said that the results indicated that quote motivational small talk improves in durance performance compared to not using he went on to say that it's very possible that physical exhaustion develops primarily in the head so next time you head to the gym or go for a run think some happy thoughts and you may run right past that wall this applies to the real world by the way too this whole idea of coming up with affirmations is one time tested back in the eighteen under it's there was a frenchwoman. a really courageous something they had a long name at the end who came up with this what became an international fad where people would say to themselves five ten fifteen twenty times a day every day in every way i am getting better and better and better and it works if you can to actually talk yourself into things called bristol wrote a brilliant book called the magic of believing and he told the story about

a fellow that he knew who was had more to drink the need actually intended to who stood and looked him self in the mirror and said i am sober you are sober enough you are so and actually did how people can talk themselves into being successful. magical believed by quite bristol. crazy alert him for a new hobby why not give vadra donating a try you know that you're already still confused a lot performance artist casey jenkins who uses badger maybe as part of her show to explain. i'm spending twenty days. old that i've been sent in my vagina every day on

a scan of the main wound to say that i will travel from the same town and i pick it up inside me and i pull out of the bed and then meet the performance wouldn't pay the performance if i were a guy a cop out my menstrual side from that facade of women menstruating and makes me being a hell of a lot. of the world is what i'm saying that i'm a yank have it it's sort of slightly uncomfortable sometimes arousing sometimes when well at least now you know how grandma makes those fancy holidays sweaters for free. i've got a quote for you. it's pretty tough to. say where it's a story. it's just this guy like me or about john stead of working for the people

both missions the beach media for each other right on station. i would rather as questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on our t.v. question or. so

sometimes you know what you know and sometimes you know what you don't know and sometimes as the fires and the years as it rethink you know it's wrong and i don't think you're wrong if you want to hear your right spirit or i'll just say things that your your money everything you know is wrong is it's christmas time so santa clause is on everyone's mind once again thanks to meghan kelly said it has been a topic of conversation for more than the usual reasons this year fox news host unleashed a firestorm of controversy earlier this month when she set out to show that father christmas is definitely one. in slate they have a piece on dot com santa claus should not be a white man anymore and when i saw this headline i kind of laughed i saw this is so ridiculous yet another person claiming it's racist to have a white santa you know and by the way for all you kids watching at home santa just is white but this person is just arguing that maybe we should we should also have a black santa but you know santa is what he is. in the days since savage gate the

media has spent countless hours analyzing kelly's comments some pundits have come to her defense agree and says white of his have attacked or point out that the real saint nick a fourth century christian religious icon is actually turkish all politics aside though the whole maggie and kelly set of santa clause can controversy raises some interesting questions i mean why do we associate a christian holiday with a jolly fat man who lives at the north pole and what's that flying reindeer stuff all about joining me now from new paltz new york to help answer our santa questions and psychologist author of the center for symbolic studies dr steven larson dr larson welcome back pay to merry christmas hey stephen merry christmas let's start with the basics where does the idea of santa claus come. will you know it's a scene critic idea it's an ancient norse scandinavian

kind of theme that permeates norway sweden iceland finland parts of russia the baltic countries and saint nick is a wonderful kind of figure you're correct that he is his christian version is connected with the fourth century christian saint nicholas but this joey fat man i believe is really a kind of a transformation of the primordial showman. how so and i mean shamans from that part of the of the world. well the showman in the ancient circle. traditions the sherman is the ancient wonder worker is the guy miller's whether you've been naughty or nice he is the one who knows all your secrets he very often dresses in a row sometimes he appears with the a staff and. he is associated with the reindeer or the terrible in the.

yours very interesting what about where the flying reindeer. will you know tell i laughed and laughed when i first read those in and siberian anthropological text because there's a funny story about that so barry and sherman rely upon lewson own genetic plant called the am and need to miscarry are the mushroom it's a mushroom and it's a mushroom that has santa claus's it's a red mushroom with white spots on it and it's like santas perennial costume colors and the shamans go flying when they ingest that ceremonial mushroom and i found out that the caribou the reindeer of the northern concrete also eat the emmen even with scarier now one of the things about just a poisonous mushroom so one of the ways that you can have a high effect without getting poisoned is that you. drink the urine of

another shopman who has taken the hit so to speak for you and so sr shermans pee in a glass jar and they can give to drink eight apprentice shermans but the caribou also know the same thing so they eat each other's yellow snow the shermans eat the caribous yellow snow the caribou eat the shermans yellow snow so they all get high without getting poisoned while somebody whoever is first seen snow mushroom is getting poisoned with. it but they survive after after a while the body gets used to it ok that hits the liver i think it's and it's really bad so what all the whole idea of bad santa this that and the various cultures were said is characterized as as kind of a nasty or creepy guy. i sent some pictures along with the bad the bad santa there i don't know what. really i want to right now already showing some yeah this

is a sad with the horns i can't see the missed call but krampus and you know the idea of santa as a being that is able to inexhaustibly give gifts and good cheer and joey in this in the holiday season that's quite an amazing thing but in many of those cultures there are or ways in which the children aren't so good all year long so they have to kind of have a figure that could punish them or you know a traditionally in germany in holland coal was put in the stockings of bad children they were threatened with that sometimes sent piers with the door fish helpers sometimes their black elk was called black petes and so the idea that santa is white some of his helpers are people of color i suppose you'd call them politically correctly and they grab the bad children only put them in a bag and santa carries them away or tortures them so he's a is a kind of

a negative figure is also called the christmas so so called sinterklaas and he appears also with a beautiful sleigh and being pulled usually by a reindeer. he is it's amazing the. racism that has slipped into this is these are the dutch called terry. are is that holland where they've got the . sad news this is. actually i saw it in one piece his helpers his his black helpers were characterized as as his slaves. this is a track back to the time when when that part of our world was involved in the slave trade of course. you know so it's just a sort of the same as those black ceramic statues of people have on their lawns holding a lantern can only make sure that everybody can see that. is going on show you're a person of substance if you have slaves. now santa himself is

a mysterious character that harbors around the north pole and i want to just call attention to the idea that the whole is the axis money the axis of the world and he's got all these magical helpers that these dwarves and elves you know help him make the goodies all year long and then he knows if you've been naughty or nice and he can fly all over the place and he's like a showman he can make them so small he can make himself large down the chimney he goes and. he rewards the good and punishes them. is there or is there a connection between saturn and gandalf the wizard from the lord of the rings series well very interesting that you should ask the name gandalf comes from the thirteenth century icelandic it is and it means wise old elf which is exactly what santa is called so gandalf was a wise elephant it's kind of interesting now that as people are watching these

talking movies and particularly the second part of the hobbit this coming out again else is really a pivotal figure he is the the guy who knows the secret plot that is going on in course he knows that there is an evil force named so ron and so ron is like the krampus are and he's like his counterpart the evil guy just the same way as the devil is the counterpart of of god or of jesus christ so the so they get off and these these are the hodson the elves and all this stuff this is all ground. that in ancient mythology it's not something that jr tolkien just added out of his brain. well it's magical because tolkien didn't make it up from scratch it's metrical because it existed for a long long time and tolkien was very very convinced that the anglo-saxon imagination was the equal of the celtic imagination you know you find in. english

folklore a mixture of from the arthurian traditions you know the map and nobody on the welsh and irish and scottish lore but tolkien wanted to make sure that the norse mythology got in there and he was even went out of his way to do that for example the names of all the wars in tolkien are found in snorri still listens thirteenth century icelandic and has now these all in all these cultures you're describing are the northern european and russian eastern and they're all in northern northern cultures is that because the days get really really short there i mean is there some analog to santa clause in christmas in equitorial cultures for example you know there isn't one and maybe that's the percent is condemned to be wait forever they don't have an equivalent figure that i know of i could be. you know they certainly have schama ignorant about it they do have showman's but there is

a whole belt of shamanism that is really around the arctic circle and anthropologists have half in jest and have seriously said that it's because everybody in the northern hemisphere is because of the long nights in the short days in the winter time is a little bit de ranged and while when i lived in germany one of them one of the local psychiatrist actually from mine said that. the old tradition was they would see the days getting shorter and shorter shorter people start to panic around december twenty third and the priest would find a giant tree. and i i just feel like that sucker on fire and say i'm a ignore ignite the sun and then you know the next day the days are getting longer going to go he did it again and make him that you know they had praise for another year and that's why they had their calendar stones you know like you know. stonehenge so they'd know when that day was coming so that they get is that this is

the origin of the christmas tree people of had seasonal effective disorder for a long long time and that's why you have a festival of lights starting on the shortest day of the year december twentieth or december twenty first thank god it were for electricity because up until this time everybody used to put candles on tinder dry evergreen trees and villages whole villages would burn down on christmas day because everybody's having ingestible of lights on that's pretty incredible stephen with just thirty seconds or any final thoughts on on christmas some things we should know about. well you know it is it is wonderful to give a kind of an affirmation to the generosity of spirit that goes along with this holiday and to celebrate the children and the animals and it really does amalgamate with christ child. symbolism and the wisemen of the shepherds coming in

the beasts around the manger i think it's a wonderful addition to the northern traditions of santa claus and now we've got a a wonderful hybrid syncretic tradition you know stephen dr stephen larson merry christmas to you and robin and so much for you and weaves and sean and all your wonderful staff their time it's always a pleasure talking to all our elves. and now i know everything you know about christmas and santa claus is right.

no. this christmas no no no the north pole has been virtually invaded season occupied and so now santa is living in the occupied territories of the north ball. the found oil of their rudolph the red nosed reindeer has been read designated a terrorist. and a commie. n. word any word that sets you up and makes you see the need for the us military to occupy rudolph's oil rich homeland so while you may remember him as the free gift

giving flying good friend from now on folks is the commie terrorist all restraint here so bye bye sent by my rudolph there is oil to be secured from those bad guys. i would rather ask questions to people in positions of power instead of speaking on their behalf and that's why you can find my show larry king now right here on r t question.

well if you're a little more like. ali i can tell you. little . pleasure to have you with us here on our t.v. today i roller sutured.

coming up on r t edward snowden has declared victory in a washington post interview the n.s.a. whistleblower said his mission was accomplished we'll talk details with the reporter who met with stone the next and billion dollar bonuses wall street bankers are pondering how to spend their holiday bonuses but one group says it's obvious where all that money should go straight to the people who the banks made homeless we'll tell you more coming up and in the world's ocean floats millions of tons in trash it's a great concern for environmentalists as it makes changes to the earth's to change a deeper look at a trashed ocean later in the show.