Saturday 22 September 2007

Cap-and-trade: No warming; no climate effect; no sense.

Lunacy of the week is the "ludicrous" cap-and-trade scheme announced this week by David Parker with the fatuous one-liner that "four cents extra a litre to save the planet is a good deal."

The man is a moron. You could turn off NZ permanently and no emission counter would even notice the loss. Hell, even if a country the size of Britain were to shut down for good, as Christopher Monckton points out the growth in carbon emissions in China would more than make up for the sacrifice long before the Kyoto agreement expires in 2012.

Far from "doing our bit" with this nonsensical sale of indulgences, all we're doing by raising power and fuel prices and shackling local industry is raising power and fuel prices and shackling local industry. That's the only result of the "deal" to which Clark, Key, Parker and Smith are all fatuously fawning over.

And it's not like there's even anything to fix. As the graphs above clearly show, it isn't even warming in NZ anyway. [Click image to enlarge]

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

We all live on the same planet. If I drop my used-up chewing gum on the footpath, it doesn't make much difference.

But then other people notice me doing it, and they start doing it, and then before you know it, the footpath is an unnavigable mess.

The solution is for everyone to stop throwing their chewing gum on the streets.

Eric Crampton said...

There's not much chance of other countries changing their behaviour much because of what New Zealand does.

That said, there are far worse ways that the government could have approached the problem. At least cap and trade encourages firms with the lowest costs of reducing emissions to do so; straight regulatory regimes would have been far more costly.

maksimovich said...

Increasingly, a spectrum of scientists with differing views on the causes, degrees and
consequences of global warming are concluding that the UNIPCC’s Kyoto regime is
more about “climate politics” and less about climate science. That is why a number of
former contributors to the science sections of the periodic Assessment Reports have opted
out of participating in the 4th assessment process – some quite vocally. Unfortunately,
this trend will likely facilitate diminished science and enhanced alarmism in the final
document – particularly the much quoted Summary for Policy Makers.

Others see the process as more about creating schemes for “social justice” and
international wealth transfers than about “saving the planet.” Or as Al Gore has written,
more about population control and resolving our collective “spiritual” crisis through forced societal reeducation and a command/control reorganization of society structured around “environmental principles” – whatever that means.

Some perceive it all as more about bureaucracy-building, lavish social gatherings,
economic and political advantage and saving face than about enhancing the health and
lives of Homo sapiens.The structure, language and functioning of the Kyoto regime is a lawyer’s dream.

As we see here on page 14 of the Summary the Inconvenient agenda.

B1. The B1 storyline and scenario family describes a convergent world with the same global population, that peaks in mid-century and declines thereafter, as in the A1 storyline, but with rapid change in economic structures toward a service and information economy, with reductions in material intensity and the introduction of clean and resource efficient technologies. The emphasis is on global solutions to economic, social and environmental sustainability,including improved equity, but without additional climate initiatives.

Anonymous said...

Helen Clarke certainly wants to be seen as playing the game when it comes to global warming. For New Zealand to not comply could result in adverse trade conditions. It is a dangerous situation we are being sucked in to.

more about population control and resolving our collective “spiritual” crisis through forced societal reeducation and a command/control reorganization of society structured around “environmental principles”

Yikes, everyone to the barricades!