Fiddling while the planet burns
The Government’s decision today to scrap the Carbon Tax is unfortunate in itself, but the really worrying thing is the change of thinking that it points to.
What is clear from the policy review (offline) that prompted the decision is that the Government views the rise in New Zealand’s carbon emissions as inevitable and that they are only going to try and slow the trend, rather than actually reversing it.
As Jeanette has said today:
“A small country like ours can only contribute in a meaningful way on issues like climate change by showing moral leadership. The Government’s stance assumes other countries will take action and produce enough carbon credits that we can buy them at a cheap price. But if every nation took New Zealand’s ‘someone-else-will-fix-it’ attitude, carbon credits will be outrageously expensive and the human race and the planet will be in serious trouble.
Some are overestimating the relevance of the new Government’s structure and /or Dr Brash’s tax prescription. For instance, Greenpeace have said:
Basically, Dunne and Peters said, ‘jump’ and Labour said ‘how high?’ “
I’m not so sure. The policy review was called in June and printed at the beginning of November, a week or two after the Government formed and weeks before Brash’s anti-carbon tax campaign started.
No, this is Labour caving in to the vested interests themselves. The pre-empting of National to try and compete for one group of voters and the blaming of Peters and Dunne so they can hold on to another is just, for them, a fortunate side effect.
As Jeanette also said today:
The Greens are now the only party prepared to stand up to the vested interests who want to continue to fiddle while the planet burns.
December 21st, 2005 at 5:11 pm
Snap! But I guess it’s the obvious headline.
You’re right; they’ve caved to the vested interests themselves. Which is funny; I thought we’d elected a Labour government, not the BRT.
December 21st, 2005 at 6:59 pm
There you go, yet another example of a price signal being redefined in popular-speak as a tax (which it just isnt) and the business community screaming “government! government!! government!!!”, as its more convenient to fix the price signal than to respond to the price signal.
Humbug.
December 21st, 2005 at 7:24 pm
The world is now hotter than at any stage since prehistoric times, a top climatologist announced last week. His startling conclusion comes as Nasa reported that 2005 has been the hottest year ever recorded.
Dr Michael Coughlan, head of the National Climate Centre at the Australian Government’s Bureau of Meteorology, said: “One probably has to go back into prehistoric times - and way back in them - to be seeing these sorts of temperatures.”
Top British climatologists agree privately but are cautious of saying so in public because, naturally, no measurements were taken of temperatures then.
Dr Coughlan is supported by research that shows carbon dioxide levels in the air - the main cause of global warming - are higher now than at any time in the past hundreds of thousands of years.
December 21st, 2005 at 7:45 pm
Our only realistic hope is for a global worldwide recession bankrupting a raft of business “leaders” and peak oil shutting down their hot air. This is still possible… perhaps a law making them and their family fortunes hostage to the climate change over time might make them take notice.
The problem with the “enviro-bonds” suggested by some Doctor of Economics a few days ago (was in the Dom Post) is that nobody would buy one now, so nobody would have the “vested interest” in making reducing the damage to the commons that he discussed so obliquely. Force our captains of industry to put a substantial piece of their personal wealth into the damned things and perhaps THEN they could substitute for the carbon tax…
…except that OUR leaders are only leaders of NZ, we’d have to enforce THAT on a global scale instead of pushing carbon-credits and a market solution.
I have never seen anything as stubborn as the idiots on the other side of this argument. They have NO other answer and they’ve proven it repeatedly. The answer we’ve come up with allows them complete “market freedom” as long as they pay the price for the damage caused to the commons by their actions and they are whinging and screaming at the top of their voices… which given the amplification applied by their money is very loud indeed.
You can’t punish them for this retrospectively when the damage finally comes home to roost. They will likely be dead in any case. Publicly punishing their families is barely acceptable. The problem is that they and their families will profit from the current short-sightedness and probably grow substantial fortunes… at the expense of every other living creature on the planet. If it were clearly indicated that their fortunes and their families would be wiped out FIRST if the trouble comes home to roost, it might get their attention.
I’m dreaming… this will never occur.
“Impunity n. - Wealth ” - “The Devil’s Dictionary - Ambrose Bierce.
All we can do is what we are doing. We can’t quit. We have to build the windfarms and we have to grow all the trees we can plant and capture all the methane we can catch and insulate and make sure our new infrastructure builds are done above where the new shorelines are going to wind up.
The idiots are in control, and there isn’t going to be an ambulance at the bottom of THIS cliff.
As bad as it will be here, it will likely be worse elsewhere. We could perhaps, create a list of the people who are to blame so that future generations will know whose families and fortunes should be forfeit. They NEED a reality check on the bet they are making with the future of the planet.
respectfully
BJ
December 21st, 2005 at 8:10 pm
Italian dictator, Benito Mussolini, a former member of the Axis, defined it this way: “Fascism should more appropriately be called Corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power�.
Paul Wolfofitz(neo-con), newly made chief of the world bank…………
December 21st, 2005 at 8:12 pm
New Zealand’s future under “free trade”?
Despite its poverty, Bolivia contains a wealth of natural resources, from minerals to significant oil reserves, and the second largest proven gas reserves on the continent. But an estimated 63 per cent of the people remain rooted in poverty, and its indigenous people - mainly Aymara and Quechua Indians - who make up more than half of the population, are suffering disproportionately.
Bolivia was in the vanguard of nations that experimented with the neoliberal “shock tactics” of privatisation and austerity measures that swept Latin America during the 1980s and 1990s, known as the Washington consensus. These policies helped to control hyperinflation but failed utterly to deliver the promised prosperity to all but a few of the business elite.
December 21st, 2005 at 10:14 pm
Yes i think the point is well made . So what is your alternative proposal here Labour ? I don’t see one .
Kind of depressing , Labour once again play absolute pragmatic centrist politics …. this, even by Labours standards who it has to be said are, so far, a much better bet viz a viz the environment than National (committed to the RMA etc) feels like a real sellout .
December 21st, 2005 at 10:19 pm
No!!! And this was Labour’s first good policy in nearly twenty years. Something they could be proud of. Damn. This hurts a lot. And I just came back from a cracker of a christmas party. Those b******ds. I am going to go and cry now…
December 21st, 2005 at 10:50 pm
The reason it was scrapped was because they basically exempted everyone except power companies. Which is kinda amazingly stupid. It’s better, in my opinion, that they tax everyone or no-one for emissions. Exemptions are just tools for political expediency.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:02 pm
The question is whether the cost of political action to respond to global warming is greater than the benefits of the response. Carbon tax in NZ would have delivered no actual benefits to NZ at all.
“The problem is that they and their families will profit from the current short-sightedness and probably grow substantial fortunes… at the expense of every other living creature on the planet. If it were clearly indicated that their fortunes and their families would be wiped out FIRST if the trouble comes home to roost, it might get their attention.”
BJ this is arrant nonsense at best, at worst it is a willingness to do violence to innocent people - let’s threaten to wipe out someone’s kids because we think they are profiting from something “at the expense of every other living creature on the planet” sounds a bit like a paranoid European chap in the early 20th century who had his own solution to people “like that”. It is quite vile.
Humanity is NOT facing armageddon - if global warming exists because of the development of humanity, and the high use of carbon based fuels - the question is whether we would be worse off without that. Probably yes - because it has facilitated the development of so much technology, increases in lifespans, improvements in standards of living and opportunities.
This is not to say that steps should not be taken that will not deliver measurable returns, such as the ongoing improvements in the efficiencies of motor vehicles (e.g. hybrids) and simple measures like pricing congestion off of roads, which would make an enormous difference to emissions, time savings and reduced motor vehicle use. There needs to be benefits greater than the costs - carbon tax for NZ fails to deliver on this.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:15 pm
I must say, here’s a Christmas present that doesn’t need wrapping!
And Idiot/Savant, I would kindly suggest that it is not the ‘obvious headline’. Rather, it is rather obvious to steal the good one.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:19 pm
And let’s not forget the lopsidedness of the carbon tax proposal: costs if you were emitting, but did you get the revenues if you were a carbon sink? Did you bollocks - the Govt nationalised that side for itself. Cullen noted that it would be difficult to gauge a year’s growth for every tree-owner, pay them each year, only to have to tax them at harvest time. Easier to just keep it all.
News flash for Govt: transacting multiple small non-dollar amounts is technology that has actually been mastered for some time now: ask any FlyBuys member or Frequent Flyer.
So amongst the tears being shed over this whole sorry saga, perhaps save a few for the asymmetric policy devisers who thought that this was ever going to fly.
I actually agree that a price signalling scheme is a fine thing: it lets individuals react and innovate as they wish.
But the carbon tax as promoted was never that.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:19 pm
As a side point, can I please ask you Frog to link to where Jeanette said:
“The Greens are now the only party prepared to stand up to the vested interests who want to continue to fiddle while the planet burns.”
I can’t seem to find it.
December 21st, 2005 at 11:49 pm
you obviously didn’t look very hard
http://www.greens.org.nz/searchdocs/PR9470.html
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/PA0512/S00327.htm
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:14 am
Liberty Scott said “….sounds a bit like a paranoid European chap in the early 20th century who had his own solution to people “like thatâ€?. It is quite vile.”
I recall a few posts back of yours libertyscott, where you were telling us that nature is all about eat or be eaten, kill or be killed.
That was the exact way your paranoid European chap in the early 20th century saw the world also. It is also the underpinning of how “free market” ideologues and corporations see the world too. That’s why at the time they funded your paranoid chap.
That’s why most media sources are corporate. It’s why Mussolini called fascism… Corporatism.
December 22nd, 2005 at 1:05 am
Even, complete nonsense. Nature is about kill or be killed, NOT humanity. Human beings can only survive applying their minds to their environment and then producing what they need through that - they enhance their lives by exchanging that with other human beings, through voluntary exchange which respects each others bodies and property. This is fundamentally the free market. There is a world of difference between trading value for value vs theft and fraud - which is what you equate capitalism to.
I am not the one believing in initiating force - Hitler, Mussolini, Lenin, Stalin all did. You may also forget that Hitler was the darling of much academia in the 1930s, as was Stalin - the trend at the time was to support big government that ordered people around and told them how to live. Hitler was democratically elected, and had the widespread support of the masses of the German population for most of his period of rule.
You’re also confusing corporatism (where government and business collude in a corrupt relationship where government uses force to give privileges in law or money to business) with capitalism. Most liberal democracies engage corporatism through subsidies, regulations, protectionism to pick winners - what they should do is abolish all such privilege and let the rule of law stand.
Nobody I know who advocates laissez-faire capitalism believes in the law of the jungle - but they do believe in the law protecting personal and property rights, and enforcing contracts. In other words, providing the basis for adult citizens to interact voluntarily themselves or with others by mutual agreement - the state only steps in when someone takes out the gun to breach this.
December 22nd, 2005 at 7:07 am
Waymad
In your post you make a valid and annoying point about the way this government was playing with the tax because you are RIGHT, they have to provide the credits back to the people who earn them. All in all, the arrangement was rather one-way after they announced that the government would keep the credits (if any) that people earned. I never was much happy with that, though it would’ve complicated the law, it certainly was not an intractable issue. The response of scrapping the entire idea is brutally wrong. Understandable for a government as “diverse” as this one is, but still brutally wrong. Shame about the planet.
respectfully
BJ
December 22nd, 2005 at 7:58 am
LibertyScott - “BJ this is arrant nonsense at best, at worst it is a willingness to do violence to innocent people
No LibertyScott, it is the musings of someone on 3 hours of sleep a night with a problem… the people who abuse the planet and the commons DO often profit from it, and “in the long run we’re all dead” is their credo. They are stealing from every child of every person on the planet to enrich themselves, and they do not wish to face the consequences of their actions. THEY are betting there will be no consequences… the wealthy seldom suffer. You may have noted that I couched that in some rather unusual language for me… my real proposal appears at the end of the post, that we record their names for posterity.
IF at some future date, there is no particular bad consequence to their actions, no problem whatsoever. IF on the other hand, the seabed and foreshore issue becomes important to the people of Hamilton and the wind power problem is what to do with the 6 Typhoons a year that are rapidly washing Christchurch into the ocean… people in THAT time will know who’s fortune is forfeit… and the act of engraving those names of Climate Change “Criminals” (thieves) will make the people who are in the business of raping the environment reconsider the way they are managing the risks they present to the future.
These are people who are not accustomed to considering the long-term. FORCING them to think about it requires a means of accessing them through their own greed. I think this might be a reasonable approach.
Humanity is NOT facing armageddon - if global warming exists because of the development of humanity, and the high use of carbon based fuels - the question is whether we would be worse off without that. Probably yes -
If you think that a planet that is better armed than fed is going to survive long in a climate changing environment you haven’t observed the reality of human nature. Armageddon is pretty nearly exactly what you should be looking forward to, and the benefits you cite are no excuese for damaging the future further now that we know the likely costs. We didn’t have a clue in the first half of the last century… but we can see it happening from space now, and measure distances and temperatures and effects that prior generations could access only at great cost and risk.
We’ve taken our step up on the backs of dead dinosaurs, but now we know better the cost of taking a further walk along that path. The most effective and efficient way to get people to modify their behaviour with respect to the commons is to put an actual price on the damage done to the commons. The Carbon Tax idea is the most direct and efficient means of doing that. The “Carbon Tax” as it was altered by gov’t to be all stick and no carrot however, is as flawed as Waymad points out. Scrapping it was dead wrong, and the death of our species is a likely consequence… but that makes the gov’t grab for the gold JUST as reprehensible as the business community stealing from the future.
It doesn’t make the idea of the tax wrong… and the government has now created a large uncertainty for business and in TYPICAL New Zealand fashion, delayed doing anything until it is too late to benefit anyone. I have a lot of patience, but even I get fretful when faced with the endless delay and dithering that passes for decision on these islands. When I encounter indecision here I reflect on the nature of black holes and the speed of dark.
The thing is, you’re wrong about armageddon… the actions of the last generation this generation and possibly our children, will define the survival outcome for the species in the next 2 centuries… and we aren’t doing all that bloody well for all the intelligence and science we putatively possess.
This government can create a new policy and a new tax regime and announce it in the next 4 CALENDAR weeks or it can go to hell. That it will unfortunately take the rest of us with it is of indifferent concern as its current path leads there as well.
respectfully
BJ
December 22nd, 2005 at 8:52 am
I must admit that whilst I support the goals of Kyoto the structuring of the carbon tax always seemed pretty week to me and also contrary to the Kyoto carbon trading models envisaged. I suspect that high petrol prices and a slowing economy will have a similar effect over the next few years (as will that special cattle feed those clever Scotish scientists have developed that essentially stops cows farting).
Interesting that in today’s DomPost the consent for a massive wind farm got a higher front page possition. Celebrate that all you non-Makara residents. Also, far more effective would be stricter building codes for energy efficiency, an ugrade of our vehicle fleet (does Government have a fuel efficiency criteria for purchasing new vehicles?) and more support for public transport. It would be nice to have a national passenger rail network back again, for instance.
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:26 am
Hi
Modelling suggested the carbon tax would reduce CO2 emissions by 13Mt of CO2 in 2012. That is about 3% of emissions. My view, based on experience in countries with carbon taxes, is that this is probably a little low. There is considerable prospect of substitution away from high carbon sources - for example substituting wood waste for coal in process heat.
In a capitalist economy, carbon needs a price if it is to be managed by the corporate sector. Those who champion the ability of capitalism to overcome “peak oil” seem unwilling to apply the same logic to CO2.
Climate change demands global action and those who think it may deliver benefits greater than costs appear to have become lost in abstraction. It doesn’t matter how much agriculture contributes to GDP; if global food production falls by 20-30% a large number of people will die.
Our only real hope is moral leadership - if New Zealand shows it can act then it has some chance of persuading others. Our “relax and buy carbon credits” approach assumes other people will act. If no-one does the price of credits will go through the roof, Kyoto will collapse and the world will have lost another decade. Of course we may soon learn that runaway climate change is upon us; if that discovery coincides with peak oil then the outlook is pretty grim indeed, as we will lack the energy needed to adapt let alone mitigate.
Back home, the Greens view of course has been to use the carbon tax to help fund income tax cuts at the bottom of the tax scale. Cuts at the bottom of the scale are very close to the economist’s holy grail of redistribution “lump sum transfers”, and also have political buy in as they deliver something for everyone while delivering proportionately more to those who need it.
Most modelling shows that carbon taxes, if appropriately recycled, can even lead to higher than baseline GDP. One reason among several for this is that capital and natural resources have a higher degree of overseas ownership than labour and carbon taxes shift the economy towards investments that enhance labour productivity. The net result is that more of gross revenue remains within the domestic economy.
I would tend to agree that a low-level across the board tax is a better idea in theory - but it would need a political consensus. Since Simon Upton left National no-one there understands environmental economics.
By the way, Adam Smith, I think you sit rather uneasily between your namesakes views and those of Nietzche. The Wealth of Nations is predicated on the Theory of Moral Sentiments - that is to say capitalism work if people pursue enlightened self interest rather than what we might call “naked” self interest. I’d be interested to know if you have ever read After Virtue by Alastair McIntyre.
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:53 am
jgg
Not quite sure what your recommendation is with the above commnet and I also miss the link about how a tax cut for low income earners (however worthy for social reasons) impacts on energy use.
Totally agree on National missing Upton, I would contend that the Envirnment portfolio itself is missing Upton. Even if you disagreed with him he had some sound analysis behind his thinking, not the made up knee jerk clap trap that seems so much in vogue today.
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:19 am
jgg: the “3% of emissions” headline figure is deliberately misleading. With Kyoto, we’re not concerned about gross emissions, but net emissions, and particularly those in excess of 1990 levels.
According to the government’s projected balance of units, we are expected to exceed our allowed emissions in the first commitment period by 36.2 million tons of CO2 equivalent (or about 10% of total emissions, roughly speaking). So the carbon tax would have solved in one fell swoop a third of our problem. Not the entire problem at once, but combined with other policies, a damn good start.
Oh, and Mr Smith: I had written the bulk of the post and decided on the headline long before Jeanette’s press release came out. The section on the economics of the policy was a last-minute addition…
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:47 am
I’m maybe being naive but I’m hanging on the following sections from the press release:
“…Officials now advise that the proposed carbon tax would not cut emissions enough to justify its introduction…
…New Zealand is committed to meeting our international obligations under Kyoto and achieving our domestic goal of lowering emissions. The government takes seriously the threat that human-induced climate change poses to our environment, economy, and way of life. We have an obligation to do something about it, and we will…
…It is important that we modify climate change policies in light of this. They need to be fair to everyone, from residential consumers and small businesses to major energy users and power generators.�
So, the Government *will do something about it*, and the replacement will cut emissions *more* than the proposed carbon tax, and will to that extent go far enough to at least justify itself (and maybe even achieve something more) and moreover, it will be *fair*.
That can only mean that all forms of carbon emission will be priced/taxed upwards.
That sounds good!
What I hadn’t realised was that the schedule was 2007…. I hope the replacement will come in sooner still, so that we can cut emissions even more and make it even more justifiable
We can hope.
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:12 pm
idiot/savant: totally agree that the cut in emissions was significant! I was trying to make the point that when a ten percent cut is needed, 3% is a good start. Thank you for adding the information that makes that clear
December 22nd, 2005 at 12:19 pm
jeeves: tax cuts at the bottom end of the spectrum help maintain social equity when a carbon tax is introduced. Otherwise you get forced reduction in consumption at the bottom end of the income scale, which is creates its own problems. Increased alienation and resentment, along with poverty, is not a good way to build climate awareness.
This is a bit of an aside but the public health literature is increasingly filled with evidence that inequality per se is bad for our health beyond a certain level. Whatever else we may like to pretend we are biological creatures with a rich evolutionary history - it appears that feeling too much like “bottom monkey” is bad for us. So we can add that to the list of reasons why a consensus about the spread of wealth is important in a society.
December 22nd, 2005 at 2:57 pm
LibertyScott said :
Human beings can only survive applying their minds to their environment and then producing what they need through that……., yes i agree, it’s what we evolved doing……… - they (can) enhance their lives by “exchanging that” [substitute(working together)] with other human beings, through voluntary exchange[substitute (participation)] which respects each others bodies and property……..with a few changes yes, that is what we evolved doing……………..
This is fundamentally the free market……….NO!!
The free market is corporate propaganda, increasing inequality, drug companies, corrupted science, prisons, unregulated pollution, degradation of individuals, communities and environment, militarization. corporate big brother networks in place of independent small business etc etc.
Hitler and Stalin being the darling of academia??
Between the mass book burnings and dissapearances in the middle of the night or just plain shootings and torturing that went on, if u were unlucky enough to be suspected of ANYTHING, i suppose their popularity did go up.
i’m not sure if Hitler eva polled more then 50% and given the corporate backing his shock storm troopers got to bullyboy any opposition, to him and any recognition of individual or workers rights, you could say that the democratic process was perverted, in a slightly more unsophisticated way than what we are use to, by corporate interests.
December 22nd, 2005 at 6:47 pm
Oh, sorry Idiot/Savant if I wasn’t clearer. I didn’t mean that I believed you had stolen the title - rather that frog had. This is why I requested a link to where Jeanette actually says that. In the press release, she certainly doesn’t mention ‘fiddling’.
December 22nd, 2005 at 10:40 pm
“The free market is corporate propaganda, increasing inequality, drug companies, corrupted science, prisons, unregulated pollution, degradation of individuals, communities and environment, militarization. corporate big brother networks in place of independent small business etc etc.”
Um, a market is where individuals exchange value for value, a free one is one where nobody else interferes with their right to do this. Attach whatever labels you want to it - but it is as simple as that, despite what the Marxists say. The opposite of the free market exists in a number of countries - if you find the free market so awful, see what happens when you eliminate it.
The rest of that statement is just random rage - you don’t want drug companies? Good luck getting a small business to develop and produce enough medication for 100 million users. you don’t want prisons? So the couple who starved their 5 kids to death that were just caught in the UK should not be held somewhere securely? How are you going to fix inequality - punish those who are smarter, who produce more and work harder?
By the way, look into the books on politics and political economy written by some in the West in the 1930s - many lauded Hitler and Stalin for the new way forward. Stalin was lauded by many western academics through till the 50s, just like Mao was in the 60s. There is also much evidence to show that Hitler was genuinely popular in the mid 1930s in Germany given the economic recovery and the huge boost to national morale that presented Germans - certainly there is little evidence of dissent or any effort by Germans to go against the regime. Remember Hitler was a National Socialist - the socialism was there, with a strong belief in equality, in sacrifice to the common good and big brother government, and most of what Hitler got done was done by the state, hardly the free market, nobody was allowed to set up businesses without state approval.
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:15 pm
Murderers.
The impact of climate change on the already strained farming environments of the world is predicted to be huge. The worst hit continent is going to be Africa according to most models, and less rainfall, increased winds and widespread desertification are going to intensify the ressures that already exist.
The report by the New Economics Foundation “Africa Up In Smoke” provides a good backgrounder to the issue.
On the basis of it’s failure on climate change, this Government is worse for the worlds poor (intergenrationally) than any other in our history. We might have a few more dollars in our pockets for a few more weeks, but they certainly won’t see any benefit.
When we write up the list of climate criminals, Clark and Hodgson will get my nominations.
Shame!
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:36 pm
The reports can be found at
Africa - Up in Smoke
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?PID=208
Cast adrift: How the rich are leaving the poor to sink in a warming world.
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=200
Up in Smoke
http://www.neweconomics.org/gen/z_sys_PublicationDetail.aspx?pid=196
Incidentally the journal Nature - http://www.nature.com/nature/index.html
makes for a terrifying read; the actual peer reviewed research on climate change gives more cause for concern than the battle of the headlines. Don’t trust the journalists. Go straight to the source
December 22nd, 2005 at 11:44 pm
Scrapping their system of tax was a good idea. Not commiting to drafting a new system of carbon tax immediately was a horrible idea.
We may not end up facing armageddon, but what we may end up with instead is industrial collapse at best. If we run out of oil while we’re still oil-dependant, and we’re being hit by abnormally violent weather which destroys our infrastructure, how do you think people are going to cope? Can you realistically see anyone living like we do now? This is certainly assuming mankind doesn’t come up with anything… but sitting there and saying “yes it’s a problem”, but not incentivising anyone to do what they can to avoid the problem doesn’t help anyone. It just makes us look better about doing nothing.
It’s not a simple matter of cost-benefits analysis, and if it works out we’re right as rain. There are big, scary unknowns in this equation, and when such things appear you do your best to minimise them. And minimising them right now means cutting emissions and oil dependancy.
December 23rd, 2005 at 12:40 am
Adam: I don’t think its stealing if Frog does it. Remember, this is a Green party blog, written by Green party staff. You’d expect it to frequently echo the words of the press releases…
December 23rd, 2005 at 11:43 am
Just to be blatantly political for a minute :
It’s fascinating that Labour had caved on the carbon tax even BEFORE getting into bed with the centrists, who had that item high on their agenda.
Hard to see them making such an announcement in the context of a Lab/Green government.
Retrospectively it looks like a good reason for Clark & co not to want to have Greens on board…
fits my idea that Labour had already decided to drift further towards the centre-right, and having Peter and Peters on board is merely an alibi.
December 23rd, 2005 at 4:42 pm
Liberty Scott said….
“Um, a market is where individuals exchange value for value, a free one is one where nobody else interferes with their right to do this. Attach whatever labels you want to it - but it is as simple as that,”
and
“you don’t want drug companies? Good luck getting a small business to develop and produce enough medication for 100 million users”
Here is an consequence of your “where nobody interferes with their right to do this” in the most holy benevalent free market going and our model for advancement-the U.S.:
WASHINGTON - December 20 - The first ever nationwide compilation of tap water testing results from drinking water utilities shows widespread contamination of drinking water with scores of contaminants for which there are no enforceable health standards. Examples include the gasoline additive MTBE, the rocket fuel component perchlorate, and a variety of industrial solvents. The pollution affects more than one hundred million people in 42 states.
http://www.commondreams.org/news2005/1220-01.htm
And yes, i don’t think we evolved having a prevalence of drug companies providing medication for 100 million people and don’t consider it an improvement. Your free market exchange value for value means in exchange for the value of pollutions, toxins, “beneficial” technologies and massive profits that at least 90% of the population get no real benefit from, we get the value of drug companies and their trillion dollar profit margins in control of the living enviroment.
The above disregard is off course very much the rule, not the exception, when it comes to the wisdom of the free market and corporate self regulation and permeates through out.
December 29th, 2005 at 11:10 am
Satellite photos taken this year revealed that there was 20 percent less Arctic sea ice compared to the first pictures taken in 1978, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado.
The loss of ice is not too surprising given the four degrees C rise in average winter temperatures in the Arctic. However, the extent and speed with which the Arctic ice is melting is unprecedented.
Those changes are impossible to predict with precision, but Scambos believes that the sea ice will continue to melt. The loss of sea ice appears to have triggered a major feedback loop because there is less ice and snow to reflect the sun’s energy, making the region ever warmer.
“We think that these feedbacks are starting to take hold and that we’re going to see an accelerated decline in sea ice,” Scambos said in a release.
Greenland alone has enough ice to raise global sea levels three metres.
Earlier in the year, European scientists reported that analysis of ice cores from Antarctica shows that today’s level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is 27 percent higher than any previous peak — looking back 650,000 years
Political leadership is all that’s missing to achieve emissions cuts of 30 to 40 percent,” said Marshall
http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1228-04.htm
Corporate Media Kills….
December 29th, 2005 at 3:50 pm
The scientists I worked with at JPL were scared of this 10 years ago. The process is modeled linearly, but every one of us could see the many non-linear feedbacks available to the system. Bush, Cheney et.al. are going to surpass all other tyrants combined in terms of mass-murder. They are murdering the future… and the disadvantage of my atheism is that I cannot imagine them writhing on spits in hell. The USA in its mindless mantra “We’re number 1″ will be number 1 in genocide as well.
Thanks Even… I’m still here, and still bitter about the failing condition of my country and I really needed to spit it out a bit
respectfully
BJ