I think we should put more into our children’s education, as when they will grow up it will be a natural thing to care about our environment.

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“A carbon tax can be repealed as soon as there are the numbers in the House. An ETS creates property rights and cannot easily be done away with. ”

A Carbon tax may just be a better way of modyifying behavious and not to discuss it demonstrates the closed mind/we know better that typifies the last 9 years of givernment.Discussion gives all sides the chance to air their opinions and more information often leads to better decisions – reconsider the EFA for instance! You may noty have noticed however how easily Labour removed Maori property rights in the Forshore & Seabed legislation so if the Greens actually want to be considered as a credible voice they need to address the actual facts and all potential solutions and not lecture/pontificate entrenched views – adapt to the situation of become a DODO.

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sdonovan Says: Owen McShane – your post strikes me as a rather large dollop of ideological diarrhea. …. I’m bored of cantankerous old men like Owen McShane asserting that they know more about everything than everyone else.

The sooner these people pull their heads in the better.

Perhaps you could indicate which part of Mr McShanes post you find so ideological??

Each of the points he made seems to be factual does it not??

Kick the ball not the man.

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>> be more aware of the limits of their own knowledge.

He who knows not and knows not that he knows not is a fool; shun him.
He who knows not and knows that he knows not is teachable; teach him.
He who knows and knows not that he knows is asleep; wake him.
He who knows and knows that he knows is wise; follow him.

Attributions: Persian apothegm, Sanskrit Saying

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P.S. This is not to say that cantankerous old men have no contribution to make, only that they – more than most people – need to be more aware of the limits of their own knowledge.

YouTube videos of Alan Greenspan acknowledging the existence of shortcomings in his economic framework are the most sobering reminder that even the most intelligent amongst us are unable to fully comprehend complex systems.

Someone said “the older I get the more I know what I don’t know.”

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Excellent post Kevyn and thank you for the link.

Owen McShane – your post strikes me as a rather large dollop of ideological diarrhea. I was almost blinded by the bias that you spout.

No mode of transport pays it’s way. Cars, trains, planes, ships, and bicycles are all subsidised to some degree.

What’s relevant is how large the subsidies are, how subsidies are provided, and for how long the subsidies have been in place.

There are large direct subsidises for rail, but there are also large subsidies for private vehicles. Free parking and air pollution are but two examples.

Accurate pricing of these items is likely to see an approximate doubling in fuel tax as well as parking prices in the order of $2/hour.

This could triple the cost of owning and operating vehicles – reducing their economic utility and the associated demand for vehicle travel.

Rather than ranting about ripping infrastructure up, we should be looking to move towards a more efficiently priced transport system for all modes.

As an aside – I’m bored of cantankerous old men like Owen McShane asserting that they know more about everything than everyone else.

The sooner these people pull their heads in the better. We need informed public debate on transport policy and pricing mechanisms; not ideology.

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I agree BJ it doesn’t matter who runs the show nothing will change.

BJ the democrats have held the purse strings in the US for the last 2 years. Trust me the spending come January is going to pick up.

It was the house republicans who tried to stop the bailout not the democrats. The thought of rep Barney Frank being unleshed on the US Taxpayer come January is not something any American should be looking forward to.

The question is will Obama be able to stand up to the senate, congress and special interest groups. My answer is no and we should expect more of the same.

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Turnip

It doesn’t matter which of the two branches of the wealth party runs the government. Both are wholly owned subsidiaries of the bankers.

To whom roughly 7 Trillion dollars in money and guarantees has been fed by THIS administration… and they are not lending it out, they are keeping it. Do you really think the Democrats will do worse? I don’t expect them to do much better… but both major parties are in thrall to the bankers and don’t you EVER forget it.

On this issue Greens and Libertarians share a complaint. We may have different answers about what the remedy is but… we both do see a mistake.

respectfully
BJ

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GG

Several kids as well I believe, all asking for branded goods and money for a car!

But wives nag? I asked mine. She said: “Nag, I don’t nag, I’ve never nagged! If you want to know about nagging I can teach you all about nagging! You just listen to me, if I decide to nag you you’ll know about it, I can Nag for New Zealand to Gold Medal standard.” I think she was a friend of Mrs. Noah!

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A deep thought on the length of the recession.

It won’t be over until our balance of payments is in sustainable surplus.

Help!

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Noah can’t have been the only survivor: he must have been married. Who else would have nagged him to get the Ark built in time?

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bjchip:

You said . . . . on November 30th, 2008 at 6:41 pm that

“The most recent bit is because of the presence of man. ”

Who knows, maybe an earlier one was as well, with Noah the only survivor!

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ahem..!..

“..Shunda barunda Says:
December 2nd, 2008 at 10:37 am

Just listen to the sneers at this fellow who called the current economic woes 2 years ago..”

could i note that if you go to whoar and key in ‘meltdown’ to the search-engine..

..you will find that my first warning was issued in august 2006..

..and repeateted..seemingly endlessly..since then..

http://whoar.co.nz/?s=meltdown

phil(whoar.co.nz)

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“I think bjchip is right, the world is stuffed ”

That line should have read:
I think bjchip is right, the world is stuffed

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Its only going to get worse here in the US now that Obama is president.
Come January and the congress starts handing out money left and right

What is that going to do to the US dollar and the global economy. NZ and the rest of the world is NOT decoupled from the US economy.

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Just listen to the sneers at this fellow who called the current economic woes 2 years ago.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2I0QN-FYkpw
Funny in one sense, incredibly disturbing in another, I think bjchip is right, the world is stuffed

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Hey… OUR economy is dominated by landlords and peasants! What progress

BJ

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The situation isn’t entirely hopeless if National replaces goals of environmental sustainability with goals of increased economic productivity, provided Kwy & Co are familiar with this ecomomic modelling described at The Oil Drum
http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2977

“One economic growth model that explains growth quite well is Accounting for Growth, the Role of Physical Work by Robert U. Ayres and Benjamin Warr, Structural Change and Economic Dynamics, February, 2004). This model looks at the amount of work (in a physics sense) that is done by energy. Thus, it considers both the amount of energy used and how productive that energy is. For example, power stations in 1900 converted only 4% of the potential energy in coal to electricity, but by 2000, the conversion efficiency was raised to 35%. This model explains the vast majority of US real economic growth between 1900 and 2000, except for a residual of about 12% after 1975.

A closely related result from the Ayres and Warr paper is that declining real cost of energy, particularly electricity, and the rising use of the much cheaper electricity, fed economic growth in the 1900 to 1998 period.”

The full papaer is here:
http://www.iea.org/Textbase/work/2004/eewp/Ayres-paper1.pdf

Essentially they are arguing that the most important factor of production for at least the last hasn’t been capital or labour, it has been falling energy costs. Firstly as a result of replacing manpower and horsepower with engines and motors. This has involved a feedback loop in which increased use of these engines and their energy supplies has led to economies of scale driving down costs and further increasing the use of these engines which in turn further drives down the costs. A virtuous circle as long as their is abundant energy available.

One crucial aspect of past economic growth is that while cheap energy has been a crucial driver it wasn’t actually cheap energy to begin with. But the new engines (steam, otto cycle, turbines, etc) used energy far more efficiently than what came before so that the energy actually didn’t need to be cheap because the cost of the energy input relative to the amount of work being done was lower because the conversion efficiency was higher. You get this going from manpower to horse power in terms of the amount of arable land needed to feed the man or horse, and of course you get it going from horse power to windmills then steam engines then petrol engines or electric motors. Thus the authors of the above study argue that 75% of the improvement in US productivity came from energy efficiency and it’s economies of scale feedback loop.

Ergo, if the government is serious about improving NZ’s economic productivity it will have to do the very things that the Green’s are promoting solely as “environmental” initiatives. This isn’t a radical idea. A McKinsey Associates study published a few months ago identified a wide range of energy efficiency investments that were profitable in their own right and many other’s that would be cheaper than paying carbon taxes or buying carbon credits.

Furthermore, the severity of the current recession is being measured by it’s impact on GDP growth and employment. No measurements are available of economic activity that doesn’t involve financial transactions. The fact that people are spending less doesn’t automatically mean people are worse off (unless they own a credit card company or or sell credit in some other way). Commuting by bicycle instead of by car switches financial cost for time cost. GDP only measures the former so assumes a deficit has occured in the national economy whereas in the personal economy of the person making the changing the economic impact has been neutral, simply shifting from one type of personal cost to another.

Before you panic about the imminent collapse of the global economy just remeber that economists are slow learners. Marx lived through the Victorian part of the industrial revolution but completely ignored invention as an important function of production, choosing to focus on capital and labour instead. That focus would have made sense 100 years earlier when the economy was still dominated by landlords and peasants. The importance of inventiveness was only accepted by mainstream economists in the 1950s. The finite nature of the earth’s resources still hasn’t been accepted by most economists. It hasn’t dawned on mosty of them that the most basic mathematical laws of economic were adapted from the incomplete laws of physics and have never been revised to keep up with developments in physics. If they had been then they wouldn’t still be based on the notion of a flat earth that extends without limits to every point of the compass.

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paranoid peter Says:
December 1st, 2008 at 10:27 pm

> If global warming is caused by human activities then why haven’t countries like China introduced population control, then there would be less humans and less human activitiy and subsequently less global warming.

what do you mean ‘why haven’t countries like China introduced population control’? China has the strictest population control in the world!

Of course, China also has the fastest growing greenhouse gas emissions in the world, because of growth in GDP per capita. And in most first world countries the growth in emissions is almost entirely due to growth in GDP per capita, because across most of the world the rate of population growth is tailing off, but the growth in GDP per capita keeps on going. It is possible to reduce greenhouse gas emissions while still increasing GDP, but it’s not a combination that happens by accident.

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