People hated it but Australia's carbon tax 2012-2014 reduced emissions. Aluminium and steel producers got a massive exemptions (96.5%?) when there should have been carbon tariffs on competing imports. Conceivably Australian coking and thermal coal complemented exports of iron ore and alumina so they would have been partly taxed returned as finished products.

Local and global emissions could still decline without carbon pricing. EVs could be cheaper while wind and solar could be made more reliable but there is precious little sign of that happening. Peak Oil and global recession could slow emissions down somewhat. I expect this by 2025.

And then we wonder, why doing anything real on real man-made climate change has been made so dam difficult! As Authors like Geoff rabbit on about accounting practice or whose model best hides the facts and or, the most rational approach/solution!

Thousands of farmers and millions of city dwellers are being massively and negatively impacted by the after-effects of man-made climate change.

How many of our Grannies have to succumb to unprecedented heatwaves, heat stoke and Farmer suicides, before the grinning useful idiots will grow both a backbone and a conscience!?

If coal/gas-fired power were to be subjected to the very same rogue radiation emissions as thee nuclear fuel industry? None would be allowed to continue to operate!

Fracked gas emits radon a radioactive gas when burned. And coal-fired smokestacks emit uranium as well as a whole host of other highly toxic and carcinogenic toxins. such as cadmium, arsenic, lead and mercury, just to mention a few!

Yet we have activists for coal and or fossil fuels rabbitting on about accounting tricks to measure CO2!? And, just to maintain the current status quo and allow a 3 trillion a year fossil fuel, industry to steamroll over our rights to breath clean air, drink clean potable water and grow food that supports our farmer's income streams!

Big tobacco and asbestos scientists were telling their masters one thing while simultaneously lying through their back teeth to the general public! Credible reported whistleblower reports say, this is now occurring in all parts of the fossil fuel industry?

When will they ever learn? When? The answer my friends is blowing in the wind!

We need to not just cut emissions genius, but eliminate them altogether and stop exporting them! Along with all the other pollutants that we create or export with them. And with an emission exclusion model that also massively turbocharges our own economy.

Something like the Author and the bulk of our alleged representatives assiduously ignore! And like Geoff, go to considerable lengths to obfuscate the issue and any real viable solution? "Accounting"? You're sh!ting me!? TBC.
Alan B.

A steel mill that's been effectively mothballed, can with around a dozen or so dayshift workers turn out 30 foot lengths of 12-inch steel pipe, from recycled steel, by the truckload daily, by small co-ops. For a price, China cannot match!

Given we create facilitate and fund enough of these co-ops, as steel pipe production? Arc furnaces and exclusively recycled steel, will eliminate most of the CO2 emission!

The only missing element!? The political will!? Instead, we here, are hobbled b the political WON'T!

Allow us to crack on pumping recycled or desalinated water to a parched inland and create thousands of new jobs and wealth creation opportunities in the process for we Australians, rather than, debt-laden,tax-avoiding, price-gouging, profit-repatriating foreigners!

Ok, our current energy provision and cost factors won't support this essential drought-proof model!

So, change it to one that not only does but uses the HIGHLY SUCCESSFUL Woolworths volume model over the failed profit margin model to increase power companies (ours) revenue streams!

I mean, we all know what happens when one trader starts increasing prices to retain a revenue stream, right? The customers vote with their feet and go to the competition, which benefits from the increased volume and (massively) grows both its market share and gross profits!

Difficult, when with assiduous government assistance you limit the competition to, like here in Queensland, just one single operator!

And because it's being used by the, highly autocratic, incompetent, mismanaging, Labor Government as its own personal ATM!? TBC.
Alan B.

We have a desalination plant and a connecting pipeline grid. We can move water from the Gold Coast to Wivenhoe if we choose to do so? Then pump it up to Tarong or Toowoomba, if we chose to? We also pump water from Boondoomba dam to Tarong. Now with just a little tweaking, we could conceivably pump our desalinated water through those combinations all the way to Boondooma? In the knowledge that the water then needs only be lifted 15 lousy metres to get it to flow inland to become part of the flowsheet of the Murray/Darling!

I know, the energy bill!

And all that prevents any of the above and several other equally outrageous schemes. But if we had much, much cheaper energy?

Possible? Doable? Absolutely!

We just need the balls to buck the completely bogus fearmongering sign Australia up as an income-earning repository for the world's current stockpile of nuclear waste, then build a dozen or so MSR thorium powerplants and also task them with burning this free to us, fuel and build all we need with the annal billions the rest of the world would pay us to take this mostly, UNSPENT FUEL, off their hands!

Then reticulate wherever, via buried graphene, to eliminate most of the transmission/distribution losses and all but triple the available volume as the intended outcome! Capiche

It's a no brainer! And only prevented by obstinate obdurate asinine recalcitrant, subservient politicians!

Who will as is their practice, shovel money out the door to shore up their electoral prospects and little else and with money already spent in dozens of examples as they pretend to care or do something real!? And if the cap fits?
Alan B.

still talking about humans ability to change the climate. What an arrogant and naive lot humans are.

there was a time when I used “triple bottom line assessment (TBL)” (accounting , evaluation, performance etc) were environmental, economic and social costs/benefits were evaluated to help stakeholders to compare options for water projects so they could compare ‘business as usual’, with let’s say for example a new dam, desalination, recycling or bore field to deal with population and demand growth.

Initially it worked well, until emissions targets, carbon prices etc arrived as a new fuzzy set of variables. The issues were related to getting a handle on the slippery nature of energy, due to its non-transparency and ‘soft’ accounting practices. After that, the whole energy emissions climate change mist appeared and what previously had bee a helpful approach (TBL) to ranking projects, became just as indecisive and vexed as the climate change cultism that drove it. The problem with energy, energy targets, offsets and targets is that they do not get accounted for well. In the 1st world its hard enough, where we have become accustomed to quality systems, certification and chain of custody concepts that, when audited and adhered to, can be tracked. However even then, trying to account for the claims that (for instance) a desalination plant is powered 100% renewable energy… its all done in the media release but then accepted further down the track on trust!

As for the 2nd and 3rd worlds…. you haven’t got a snowballs chance in hell to track, let alone balance the accounts. So the whole concept of using carbon taxes, credits, certificates, offsets or what ever you use is as impossible as getting accurate predictions out of a GCM!. Climate models are poor misrepresentations of the climate, and have ‘massaged data’ fed to them, but compared to the data and accounting on carbon emissions, they are many orders more useful than carbon accounting can be.

That’s why politicians love carbon accounts. The less accountability, the better and the greater degrees of freedom (to use an old-fashioned statistical term) they have to slither around with when things go wrong, and the more variables (other people in other words). That’s reality!