The Labor Party still wants to push for an ETS after the debacle of their own doing in introducing a carbon tax. After being smashed in the polls largely due to this issue.
They still refer to "the science" being right despite "scientists" telling us opposite things. So who knows whats true anymore? Genuine debate has been thrown out, allowing emotive types to bleat about doing whats good for our children.
One thing is for sure, if you want an ETS to punish big polluters then you ought to rejoice when they go out of business. Instead Labor has a culture of bailing out industries such as manufacturing. This is an attempt to keep people in work. This is despite their lack of competitiveness in the marketplace. Labor governments have continually propped up failing enterprises that are big polluters.
The loss of jobs should pale into insignificance if your goal is to punish big polluters. Punish them out of business. That's success! Loss of jobs is merely collateral damage in this "principled" venture.
They still refer to "the science" being right despite "scientists" telling us opposite things. So who knows whats true anymore? Genuine debate has been thrown out, allowing emotive types to bleat about doing whats good for our children.
One thing is for sure, if you want an ETS to punish big polluters then you ought to rejoice when they go out of business. Instead Labor has a culture of bailing out industries such as manufacturing. This is an attempt to keep people in work. This is despite their lack of competitiveness in the marketplace. Labor governments have continually propped up failing enterprises that are big polluters.
The loss of jobs should pale into insignificance if your goal is to punish big polluters. Punish them out of business. That's success! Loss of jobs is merely collateral damage in this "principled" venture.
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4 comments:
Paragraph two implies an inconsistent message or lack of consensus from scientists. This is factually false.
Studies have performed large scale surveys of climate scientists and of published papers. 97% of published papers endorse the position that man-made global-warming is happening.
This is a simple counting exercise, and as such is a pretty undeniably fact. You may argue that they're all wrong if you so wish, but you cannot argue in any measure of honesty that they lack consensus.
Several sources:
IOP letter of the same
Union of concerned scientists
NASA on scientific consensus
(or more specifically, the papers to which they refer)
No one is denying that it is happening. To what amount, what we can do about, whether it's worth doing something about it is definately up for debate.
To say "I believe in the science" is manipulative as it suggests those that don't agree with you are unscientific in their views. When esteemed scientists have challenged the climate science group think with success.
Here's how scientific concensus works.
There once were ten biologists. Each had a frog. One day, the ten biologists released their frogs into a murky pond. Then they decided to track their behaviour using fish-finding sonar. To their surprise, they detected eleven similar signatures. They agreed that there must be an eleventh frog - a scientific consensus.
Along came an ameture seahorse enthusiast. He told the biologists that he believed the eleventh signature might be a seahorse, because he can see bubbles breaking on the surface like seahorses blow. But the ten biologists disagreed - the eleven signatures are nearly the same, and anyway, they're biologists and the enthusiast is just a hack.
After a few days, there had been no rain and the pond dried up. There in the shallow puddle sat ten frogs and one crab. The biologists ridiculed the enthusiast for his error.
Moral: you only need a consensus when you have no facts, a concensus can only be based on assumptions, and it blinds you to other possibilities. The enthusiast was right about one thing - there was no eleventh frog.
LB
PS. In my mind, the science is not settled about how to spell "consensus".
I also find it interesting that you were attacked for your legitimate thoughts on the state of the science, rather than for your excellent economic observations.
LB
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