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Too frightening for words. Henry Ergas has a bone-chilling warning.
It takes time to get a feel for how spectacularly insidious the Australian carbon tax could be.
Firstly there’s the anti-democratic nature of it: apparently Gillard is doing things that are considered utterly beyond the pale in other nations. Ergas suggests that by granting “property rights” she is threatening to make the cost of removing her legislation all but insurmountable. (For all the world, it appears she’s determined to stop the opposition offering the people the choice to remove the carbon tax. Could it be, that for the sake of an advantage in the next election campaign she’s tossing the country down the nearest black hole?)
Secondly, the Australian Carbon Tax is a freakishly large sacrificial offering: Australians will be hit for $391 for every man, woman and child, and that’s just the first year (according to the government estimates). Compare this to the EU. There in the land-of-exploding-economies, each good citizen has had to fork out the vast grand sum of (wait for it) … one dollar fifty cents each (yes, $1.50). And, it gets worse, (how do you satirize this?) — that’s the cumulative total since the EU […]
It’s 22 times as expensive to to something rather than nothing.
Gillard’s tax on “carbon pollution”: the facts
The PDF version for printing
If the Australian Government’s proposal to oblige 500 big “polluters” to engage in what the City of London calls “trading hot air” were to achieve its stated aim of cutting 5% of Australia’s CO2 emissions by 2020, and assuming HM Treasury’s 3.5% pure-rate-of-time-preference commercial discount rate for inter-temporal investment appraisals –
By 2020, CO2 in the air would be 411.987 parts per million by volume, compared with 412 ppmv if no action were taken. Global warming forestalled by 2020 would be 0.00007 C°: i.e. 1/14,000 C°. 0.00007 C° is 1/700 of the threshold below which modern instruments and methods cannot detect a global temperature change at all. At this rate, total cost of the carbon tax/trade policy will be not less than $127 billion between now and 2020, not counting gasoline and power price hikes. If all the world’s measures to cut greenhouse-gas emissions were as cost-ineffective as the Australian Government’s proposed policy, forestalling just 1 C° of global warming would cost the world $1.7 quadrillion. Forestalling all of the […]
By Jo Nova
The global carbon market in sacred certificates-to-stop-storms now “worth” nearly one trillion dollars
Remember this number next time someone tells you fossil fuels are stopping “climate action”.
The whole trillion dollar carbon market is a vested interest. It is a fake market entirely created on government whimsy. The whole absurd point of it is supposedly to slow tornadoes or floods in 2100, and reduce beach-weather in Europe. Because who likes the beach?
LONDON, Feb 7 (Reuters) – The value of traded global markets for carbon dioxide (CO2) permits reached a record 850 billion euros ($909 billion) last year, analysts at Refinitiv said on Tuesday. Around 12.5 billion tonnes of carbon permits changed hands in the world’s emissions markets – 20% less than the previous year – but the value of the markets rose by 14% as prices for permits were much higher.
In a carbon market, certain favoured groups can say they produced less carbon dioxide this year than they otherwise might have. They get to sell their anointed pieces of paper to other less favoured people who have to buy credits because the government says they must. At any point in this game, industries can […]
By Jo Nova Despite achieving nothing but a holiday junket for 45,000 people, COP27 has managed to eke out the usual PR “win” in the grand media theater. They have a document they call a historic breakthrough which is actually nothing but a wish list for future UN wet dreams. It’s just a “roadmap for future decision-making” meaning, they haven’t made any decisions yet. They can’t say who’ll pay, or who’ll get the money, or how big the money will be, or exactly what it will be for. But they can say they will meet again to figure it out.
They’ve simply announced a new category of globalist graft
Take it from Reuters:
“…the text of the agreement leaves open a number of crucial details to be worked out next year and beyond, including who would contribute to the fund and who would benefit.”
But there is no agreement yet over what should count as “loss and damage” caused by climate change – which could include damaged infrastructure and property, as well as harder-to-value natural ecosystems or cultural assets.
November 22nd, 2022 | Tags: Plant growth, UNFCCC | Category: Big-Government, Global Warming |  Print This Post | |
The idea that we could make “a carbon credit” work as an international currency and fix our weather at the same time, is the stuff of Econo-alchemy.
It’s where a scientific quagmire marries an economic fairy. Instead of salvation we get the swamp to end all swamps. It doesn’t give power to the people or produce an honest mode of exchange or stop the storms either. A carbon currency just feeds corruption and centralized unaccountable unelected committees who play power-brokers and Kingmakers, deciding what is and what isn’t a real “right” and who or what should pay. It serves global bankers who broker the transactions. It is the paper currency from hell.
Where do we start? A bar of carbon “rights” is not a bar of gold
How do we weigh a “carbon right”? Every nation on Earth knows what a gram of gold is, and with 2,500 years of trading history, everyone knows that come the apocalypse, they can still swap gold for goods.
What sort of security is backed by the right to emit one unit of carbon dioxide, a right that all life on Earth and most of the rocks and water already has? The largest consumer […]
Stuffing a useful gas into holes under the ocean is harder than they thought
Chevron spent $3 billion to put just 5 million tons of carbon dioxide under the ocean floor. The project was plagued with delays and problems with sand clogging the machinery. They captured about one fiftyth of the Chevron emissions in a five year period.
CCS is a modern industrial talisman: Chevron concedes CCS failures at Gorgon, seeks deal with WA regulators
Reneweconomy
Chevron is understood to have spent more than $3 billion building the carbon capture facility, but it took several years after the start of gas production for the Gorgon CCS project even to begin operation due to delays and technical difficulties. The first CO2 was injected into an undersea deposit in 2019.
It is understood regulators may ask Chevron to offset the emissions it failed to store by purchasing offsets from either local or international carbon markets. If Chevron is made to buy Australian Carbon Credit Units, which currently trade at above $20 per tonne, the cost to the company could easily exceed $200 million.
So they could have done it all 30 times cheaper. (Or, if they […]
Most Cantons in Switzerland voted “No”.
The Swiss just voted down their governments plan to change the weather with increased car and airline taxes, albeit by only 51.6 to 48.4. That nearly half the population voted yes is testament to thirty years of non-stop propaganda, and the near complete suppression of skeptics.
Imagine what the vote would have have been if they allowed skeptics equal air time and funded skeptical scientists even at 10% the rate the believer-modelers get?
BBC reporters were shocked:
Swiss voters reject key climate change measures Switzerland’s policy on fighting climate change has been thrown into doubt after voters rejected key measures in a popular vote.
A referendum saw voters narrowly reject the government’s plans for a car fuel levy and a tax on air tickets.
The measures were designed to help Switzerland meet targets under the Paris Agreement on climate change.
But no one mentioned this on the ABC or SBS news tonight. Instead they told us “Australia is increasingly isolated” for the 440th time.
A huge shock
By Imogen Foulkes, BBC News, Bern
The no-vote to limiting emissions is a huge shock. The Swiss […]
A nation watches the fires. The Australian Navy has rescued around 1,100 people and 250 pets. Thousands of other have fled. Thousands more on the SE corner of Australia have been chopping down trees, cleaning properties, waiting in queues for fuel and food. Today is forecast to be as bad as New Years Eve when 380 houses burnt down. Temperatures will be above 40 C — up to 45C inland in places like Wagga Wagga. (Right now, perhaps there’s a BOM site glitch but temperatures from Nowra south range from 30 -45?) Humidity levels will be very low. But a cooler change is coming late. Things should be much better on Sunday. Best wishes for everyone on the front line.
Suddenly, many people are taking “hazard reduction”. If only it weren’t too late.
Meanwhile the Labor Party still hope to reduce bushfires with an international carbon market. Good luck with that. A carbon market is form of carbon tax that sends money overseas and will make their friends at the UN and Goldman Sachs happy, but probably won’t impress the workers the Labor party used to serve. The only way it will stop fires is if people clearfell old growth […]
It’s being hailed as a “soaring investment” but it’s just the fake fiat carbon scheme that has been fiddled back to life. The EU ETS market had too many credits and crashed down to 5 Euro or less by 2013. On deaths door, the EU decided to cull a quarter of the credits for the EU ETS every year starting in 2019 and the price predictably went back up. The big success of this unnecessary unfree market is that it has added a tariff to cheap coal to make it just as expensive as gas, and pushed up electricity prices in the EU.
Any illusion of generating economic wealth, or energy efficiency is purely coincidental. There’s no supply and no demand, no extra products or productivity — and without government force, no market at all for imaginary carbon penances. It draws money from every consumer and hands it to gas, and renewables giants, as well as bankers, crooks and VAT Tax cheats. And if this market goes global it’s potentially a $7 Trillion dollar money-making racket for bankers. No wonder HSBC, Deutche Bank, Goldman Sachs, BBVA and Citigroup want to “save the world”.
Back to 2008:
Government decisions largely […]
An imminent train wreck that has been coming a long time…
Supporters of an overthrow of the Australian PM are phoning in, numbers are being tallied:
by Simon Benson, Dennis Shanahan, Joe Kelly, The Australian
The leadership crisis engulfing Malcolm Turnbull has deepened, with cabinet ministers privately accusing the Prime Minister of cobbling together his plan to cap retail power prices in a last-minute bid to save his leadership.
The Australian is aware that a number of MPs called Home Affairs Minister and leading Queensland conservative Peter Dutton at the weekend to pledge support should he seek to challenge Mr Turnbull.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott told a Tasmanian Young Liberals meeting at the weekend he was looking forward to serving under a “Dutton government”.
Even PM’s allies ask: what use is he to us?
Simon Benson, National Affairs Editor, The Australian, says the word is that the challenge is “inevitable”.
Malcolm Turnbull is in full capitulation mode. In the face of a possible and increasingly likely challenge, he has buckled to rebel MPs, and in the process surrendered the future of his leadership to the demands of a few.
[…]
The first year’s data is out — Australia’s secret Emissions Trading Scheme is up and running, it’s small, inefficient, and pointless, but all the government needs to do is raise those caps, and the carbon trading monster octopus could wrap around on half our economy.
Australian carbon credits are for sale (called ACCU’s), the price was $14-$18 and the total volume was probably around $7 million. This supposed tiny “free market” marvel could not even match the $11/ton price that Abbott’s direct auctions achieved — proving yet again how inefficient economy-wide incentive schemes on essential molecules are. If the caps were raised the price would rocket. (Remember Labor’s carbon price ended up being $5310 per ton.)
What do you mean, you didn’t know Australia had a carbon credit market?
Obviously, you havent been spending your weekends reading the finer points of our legislative instruments. The legislation for this was voted on in the last sitting of Parliament before Christmas of 2015 while Turnbull was a new PM. There was no public debate, no parliamentary discussion and no news coverage of it til May the next year, and it was barely covered at all during the election which occurred the day […]
It takes a really big government to waste money on a scale like this
Carbon capture aims to stuff a harmless fertilizer underground in order to change the weather. With CCS, the hard part is deciding which obstacle is the most stupidly unachievable. One ton of solid coal generates nearly three tons of CO2 in a puffy, fluffy, expanded gas form. It doesn’t take a genius to know it won’t fit back into the same hole. And even if you get it down there, it may not stay there. The gas has to be compressed, or refrigerated (or both). Underground holes are hot. Not surprisingly, this takes a lot of energy, so that to build a coal plant with the capability to “store CO2” we must spend 60% more dollars, and then throw away 40% of the electricity as well.
You, I, global business, practically no one would spend their own money on it. The geniuses planning it thought the carbon price would rise from 30 euros to 100 euros which would make it a goer. Instead the carbon credit price feel to seven. (And that’s only after the EU propped it up.)
EUObserver spotted this CCS bonfire. I read […]
In socialistspeak people don’t produce goods to make money, they “find” money lying around the crysanthymums or something, because $300,000,000,000 dollars didn’t have anywhere else to be.
Innovative finance needed to find $300 billion a year for climate losses
And what if the solar dynamo drives climate change instead?
Tax the Sun.
My climate prediction: Global climate reparations are going to employ 100 million accountants.
By Laurie Goering
LONDON (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – With money for action on climate change already in short supply, an estimated $300 billion a year needed to help countries deal with unavoidable climate losses will have to come from innovative new sources, such as a financial transaction tax or carbon tax, researchers say.
Funding for such climate “loss and damage” aims to assist people who lose their land to sea level rise, for instance, or are forced to migrate as drought makes growing crops impossible in some regions.
“What stands out most clearly is that there isn’t currently enough funding to even begin thinking about financing loss and damage, with available climate, development, risk reduction and disaster recovery financing all falling short by an order of magnitude,” said researchers […]
Looks like China is going to apply punitive taxes all sorts of human pollution even noise pollution, but they’re not taxing CO2:
Polluters will be charged for contributing to air, water and noise pollution, according to a copy of the legislation on the NPC’s official web site.
But CO2 did not make the list, which includes air and water pollutants such as sulphur dioxide and sulfite, taxed at rates beginning at 1.2 yuan ($0.17) and 1.4 yuan ($0.20) per unit respectively.
It also stipulates a monthly tax ranging from 350 to 11,200 yuan ($50 to $1612) for noise pollution.
China is the worlds largest emitter of CO2 and they are happy to do symbolic things for the climate, like sign the Paris agreement where they can commit to do nothing til 2030, and not much after that. But taxing carbon does actual collateral damage on an economy. China is obviously having none of that.
For a change, the thing that apparently inspired these new laws was a real pollution problem:
The new law was precipitated after 20 cities in Northeast China went on high smog alerts, which forced the closure of factories […]
It started on Monday on ABC AM when energy minister Josh Frydenberg was asked about the review about climate policies.
If you listen to the full AM program from 9 – 10:30mins he absolutely rules out an economy wide approach, but when asked about an electricity sector “emissions intensity scheme” he does say “wait and see”. Was it a bizarre slip of the tongue, or was he fishing to find out the strength of the opposition to bringing in a carbon price on electricity?
9 mins: He is asked about an energy “emission intensity scheme”.
Josh rejects any “economy wide approach”. “”What this review has indicated is we will look at a sector-by-sector approach. The electricity sector is the one which produces the most emissions — around a third of Australia’s emissions come from that sector.”
OhOH:
Frydenberg: We know that a large number of bodies have recommended an emissions intensity scheme a baseline and credit scheme.
Any chance of that happening?
10 minutes Frydenberg “Wait and see… we want to hear from the experts on the lowest cost of abatement… thats what we owe the Australian households […]
Tony Abbott’s plan is one of the most efficient and effective programs anywhere in the world. But the Green hero is really enemy number one. Apparently giving the eco-cartel what they say they want is a disaster. Don’t look now, but green underpants are showing. Who cares about carbon reduction or trees? Givem’ power and money!
Gillard’s carbon tax cost $5310 per ton. Abbott’s plan at $10/ton this round is 531 times greener. The Direct Action plan uses a reverse auction to buy the cheapest carbon reduction in Australia. In the third round another half billion dollars has bought 47m tons of carbon reduction at an even cheaper price than the first two rounds. Most it achieved by planting or restoring greenery and trees.
The real problem with the Direct Action plan is manifold — a/ it doesn’t specifically punish the “big polluders” (those big independent companies that don’t need the government to survive). b/ it doesn’t reward the right patrons — there’s no money for the parasitic windmills and solar industries. And c/ It is more like the real free market solution the eco-fans say they want — showing that the fake free market idea of imposing an […]
Free markets are a hot tool, but sometimes they’re “hot” like a jackhammer at a sewing bee. Who thinks it’s smart to use a free market on a ubiquitous molecule that cycles through almost all life on Earth? Answer: people who profit from it, or people don’t know what a free market is.
About 5 years ago, the VAT tax scam with carbon credits earned financial sharks around five billion Euro. The follow up to that is that, slowly, years later, in Frankfurt about 10 people have been given prison terms. (Is that all? Only ten people and 5b, or are there others in other countries?)
This type of fraud could happen in other markets too, but it surely must be easier to accomplish in fake markets where no goods are transferred. The Global Worriers narrative is that there’s risk in unleashing carbon dioxide, but they never discuss the risks of setting up fake markets, which need a lot of regulation, auditing, checking and all that — especially when every cat and dog have a stake, and the whole market might be controlled by phytoplankton.
Every fake market we set up is a feeding lot for corruption and friends-of-the-mafia. Is […]
According to Nicholas Stern, the climate industry is set to rival the Industrial Revolution. Graham Lloyd of The Australian asked the obvious question that nobody at the COP 21 Flop thought to ask in Paris: “if [the] $650 billion a year being promised by US banking institutions will ever be expected to make a profit and, if so, will it need public support to do so.”
“US Secretary of State John Kerry sees it as “the most extraordinary market opportunity in the history of humankind”
Michael Kile expands on the little conflict of interest in the UN’s decarbonisation mission
It seems the UN is co-founding groups for money managers to get large funds to “decarbonize”. That’s code for chiseling investments out of coal and forcing them into the pointless, inefficient and uncompetitive “renewables”. But of course, renewables are only worth investing in if governments keep demanding people use them. If the darn voters vote muck it up, by voting for leaders who will stop wasting their money, the renewables industry is a dead dog. So the UN project (which is probably funded by taxpayers) aims to remove the risk for investors by lobbying governments to keep the regulations […]
Australians have voted against a carbon tax twice. Liberals threw out Turnbull over the introduction of an emissions trading scheme in 2009, yet here he is, barely leader for two weeks and already they are floating a timeframe for the introduction of emissions trading.
I did warn that the Turnbull agreement with the Nationals to keep Tony Abbott’s climate policies means almost nothing. It’s easy for him to keep the “target” and shift towards an Emissions Trading scheme (ETS) and he and Greg Hunt are suggesting that already.
Indeed, some of the fine print Turnbull probably wanted was already written in Abbott’s plan. Thanks to Al Gore and Clive Palmer, the possibility of emissions trading was left in the Direct Action legislation.Why else would Gore fly out here to stand next to a coal miner? And what did he offer Clive in return we wonder? Suddenly, Palmer demanded an ETS for his vote, but finally settled for a clause saying an ETS should be “reviewed” if our main trading partners brought one in. So Turnbull can technically keep the Abbott “plan” but entirely break the spirit of it. The Nationals (and 54 pro-Turnbull Liberals) will look like fools if they […]
TonyfromOz explained how fatal the numbers on “carbon capture” are. (It’s like the GFC of engineering). The new coal plants cost 60% more to build and waste something like 40% of the entire energy they generate to “catch” a beneficial fertilizer and and stuff it in a small hot hole underground.
It’s hard being first, but hey, the plant is only 2 years behind and $4.4 billion over budget. Part of the costs are due to delays because of wet weather. (Apparently the climate models did not see that coming…)
Obama has set aside $6 billion since 2009 for lab research and “commercial deployment” of clean coal. In response to the abject failure he’s doing what most people do when spending other people’s money — “Despite these troubles, the White House says it will continue to support clean coal.”
News last week:
America’s First Clean Coal Plant Put Mississippi Power ‘on the Brink of Bankruptcy’
[Link may not work, try “cached copy“.]
Stephen Lacey
Last week, state regulators approved an emergency rate increase for Mississippi Power in order to keep the company afloat as it completes the increasingly-expensive Kemper plant. Mississippi Power customers will […]
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The nerds have the numbers on precious metals investments on the ASX
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