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http://blog.greens.org.nz/2009/11/03/burning-the-mona-lisa-to-cook-din ner/#comment-94898

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Trevor.

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Trevor.

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Which party was it that signed New Zealand up to the Kyoto Protocol?

(clue: smells of old money and flip-flops)

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How do you get joe public to truly understand the implications and real cost of an ETS unless they pay their way.

‘Joe’ will willingly ‘pay his way’ but directly, where he can see it and where he can choose to ‘buy or not buy’. He won’t be happy to have money siphoned out of his wallet as a tax that has no connection to his spending. By all means raise the price of meat and milk, but don’t pluck notes from Joe’s paycheck to cover the costs that others, including farmers, have incurred.
Joe will get angry. Especially if the deceit is pointed out to him.

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The Green position is that the commons has a price and the person using it to produce something or provide some service, pays.

The person using it is then free to, and encouraged to, pass on costs as appropriate in the provision of his/her goods and services to the public. Which then decides if IT will pay… and so on as the market is recognized as doing a good job of efficiently allocating resources in this sort of situation.

As for the implications and real-cost of the ETS. That rather depends on the price of the CO2 credits available.

I wasn’t here to consider the Kyoto negotiations, so I can’t speak to whether what we negotiated made sense or not. Given the part of the presentation of “Forest and Bird” relating to our native bush and the sequestration allowance table details that were basically unknown at the time, I might guess that faulty assumptions were the rule rather than the exception… but I don’t know.

We didn’t sign up for much. We have to be realistic about some other things though.

First: Even if we signed up for 25%-30% reductions or 40% reductions… we still have to consider that those reductions are binding only if other people in other countries work to the same sort of reduction targets and associated pain. Despite the propaganda, we’re not all that crazy about going back to primitive levels of existence.

Second: We can ease off far more easily than we can tighten up. If we set tight goals and we determine at some point that they are tighter than necessary, loosening them is not difficult to arrange. If we see that the uncontrolled feedbacks make them moot, we can withdraw them… and any economic benefit that we imagine might be available at the easier compliance levels becomes available.

If on the other hand, we set lax goals and we then discover that we’ve got to go harder, the economic pain becomes a step increase from whatever little bit we started to do. Moreover, because we’d gone deeper into the emissions hole to stimulate the economy, we’d have made that step a larger step than it might otherwise have been.

Environmentally, Politically and Economically I would prefer to be in the state of overdoing it a little at first, than of coming up short and having to play catch up. One almost never succeeds in catching up.

respectfully
BJ

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If they withdraw the modifications they’ll just play up their responsiveness to the public.

You have to know that that is how they’ll spin it, and never mind the degree of idiocy involved in doing it in the first place. Russel was not a meter away when I lambasted them for it in select committee. I don’t have much more to say.

BJ

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