Well I suppose there are so many things one could talk about this week but if we didn’t talk about the ETS being Emission Trading Scheme, or the Employment Termination Scheme depending on your opinion, then we would definitely be ignoring the political elephant in the room.
For Australians working in the productive section of the economy like our farmers and those working in the mining industry and are part of the economy that actually puts produce on the boat to pay for the standard of living in Australia, then for this scheme to have affect you will have to be affected.
China and the US have now got themselves into terminal mire as they try to work out how to look good without going broke.
China is pretty reasonable. They just want America to send 1 per cent of their GDP to compensate the rest of the world for the effects of carbon pollution reduction but because America has no money this is going to prove rather difficult.
Lord Monckton has released his report on the current continual differentiation between the international panel on climate change predictions on where global carbon emissions and temperature are supposed to go and where they are actually going and we’ve seen that the proportion of increases in temperature from a doubling of CO2 concentration has gone from 3.8 Kelvin’s down to in the vicinity of 1.7k or about 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the old scale.
The reason for this is that the final climate sensitivity parameter which relates to the global means surface temperature was not exceptionally and definitively calculated and has, by reason of multiplying errors, given a far greater exaggeration of where temperature will go or alternatively a huge underestimation of what’s required to fix it.
Lord Monckton calculates that if the Waxman / Markey bill was passed in its initial form it will cost between $60 trillion and $600 trillion to implement. Once you get into trillions you can just forget about the numbers, they are irrelevant. Basically it means you can’t afford to do it.
Its a very noble idea but it’s a bit like sticking the air conditioner on the outside of the house in an attempt to cool the planet however firstly you don’t cool the planet and secondly you’ll go broke trying and what Mr Rudd has proposed is a nothing but a political gesture; it’s an idea of no consequence.
What Australia has to decide is whether we sign ourselves up to gestures that will have major ramifications for our own domestic economy’s capacity to be an advocate for other things good in the future while keeping in mind that no one listens to you when you are broke.
Why is there this complete overwhelming desire that a carbon pollution reduction scheme has to be trading scheme and who are the winners and losers in a trading scheme?
The winners are those who benefit from the price going up, the losers are those who have to pay the price. So now we have a very select group of people who are going to be rolling in it because of the money the trading scheme makes, generally by commissions and administration and bureaucracy, and a very definite group of people who’ll be the losers, the mining and agricultural industries and the consuming end users.
Unfortunately we are not island of finance like England and we are not a manufacturing hub like the US or China and India. In our economy around 60 per cent of our GDP comes from the retail mechanisms of consumption but the real source of our wealth is from exports. The problem in Australia is that it’s hard to see how the introduction of an ETS would ultimately flow through to your position in the suburbs, but it will.
Whether its a reduction in our capacity of food sovereignty and more and more our nation is relying on imports to feed ourselves, or whether its the loss or capacity to earn export dollars from our mineral base, which is so overwhelmingly our major source, then all other sectors basically pale into insignificance. So you must realise this emission trading scheme is an extremely bad outcome for our nation.
Find me one time we added a production cost and employed more people for this is in essence what the pro-ETS debate want you to believe.
A tracking inspired tax on production is a bad outcome for Australia if the premise of a tax is carbon. Unfortunately it’s an argument that only time will determine who are the winners and who are the losers and who’s right and who’s wrong.
It’s an argument which must be on pragmatic principle from an Australian perspective and not driven by well meaning short term politics.
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