On the four points made - wrong, wrong, misleading, irrelevant.

• Yes, CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it changes in response to temperature and amplifies changes. It is not responsible for triggering the warming.

• Just wrong. The steady rise of CO2 content from around 270 ppm to around 390 is directly measured and well documented. This is the most egregious error discredits the source. Who knows why Science Daily said that, but it's quite wrong.

• True the science is not completely settled, but we can't wait until it is - see next point. So in the meantime we have to rely on judgement, and the collective judgement of climate scientists is that we are causing the problem and need to reduce our emissions. The recent Australian Academy of Science report recounts DIRECT evidence that our emissions are causing the warming. Get informed.

• Yes there have been big shifts in climate in the past. If we were living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle we might adapt, although it's not so easy to walk into someone else's territory. In other words there would have been "wars" and not everyone would have survived those changes. These days we have a fragile industrial civilisation with much of our population and infrastructure within a few meters of sea level, and with critical food production at the mercy of even small shifts in climate. You think there won't be pain and death as the change comes on? You think the pain and death have not already started?

Thanks, good article

I'm fascinated by people who want to "change the climate", I never hear what they want to change it to - or what would happen if we screw it up.

It may be that if we try to control, stop or reverse a huge natural system like climate, we could screw it up. We certainly do not understand climate, not do we understand weather - we understand a lot about observing it - but not predicting what will, not might, happen

Sure, we've affected the climate, unintentionally with our progress, but that doesn't mean we can reverse, stop or control it.

Personally I believe that the people who most fervently want to "do something" are more driven by the finger wagging syndrome and by insisting someone else actually do the doing, than anything else. They actually want "something done" than to do something themselves, beyond harassing and waving hysterically that to do something is better than doing nothing.

Doing something stupid is not better than doing nothing. Trying to change something we do not understand is stupid.

If you can predict the future, how come you don't know EXACTLY what it will be like in 50, 100 years? (If you can predict the future, who will form government in Australia?) Anyone who claims they can predict the future is a fool. Fools have tried to predict the future for our entire existence.

Taxing people and redistributing wealth is a totally different matter to paying lots of money to change the climate - however, both are magnificent follies, which in the end, will achieve nothing.

The assumption made in this article, and by most people, is that it will cost a lot of money to address climate change. This assumption is incorrect.

If you take the cost to build any renewable energy "factory" the value of the energy produced from the factory is greater than the cost to build and the cost to operate. The reason that renewable energy is said to be more expensive is that we are told we must finance renewable energy from expensive savings or taxes. There is another option.

If the factory is built with interest free credit then renewable energy systems will make us richer not poorer because the major cost component of renewable energy projects are interest costs.

We do NOT have to finance renewable energy projects with savings or taxes. We can finance them with interest free credit paid off over the lifetime of the asset. This makes all renewable energy projects profitable.

Geoff - true the author's point about CO2 not increasing in historical terms is from the more obscure parts of skeptical opposition to climate change, but I wouldn't dismiss it.
The carbon cycle part of global warming theory (a part of which is the length of time CO2 remains in the atmosphere) is in fact the weakest part of the whole chain of reasoning.
Emissions may be increasing, but CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere are in fact below the mid point of IPCC projections. Yes, that is a fact. Find the Special Report on Emissions Scenario projections for ppms of CO2 in atmos and compare them with what's happening. Methane concentrations stopped increasing entirely around the turn of the century, incidentally.
Then there is the atomic signature of CO2 in the atmos which scientists can read to work out what proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere is from industrial sources. The IPCC won't give you the overall answer because its not one that the panel likes. It only says that the proportion is increasing which is true, but they don't give a figure for the actual level. Other sources give it as 4-5 per cent.
There is a problem.

Fickle Pickle

The proposition that reducing anthropogenic CO2 emissions will slow down AGW is an assertion. There is no irrefutable scientific evidence to prove that reducing such emissions would have any significant effect on AGW.

It should be noted that the costs of renewable energy relative to coal-derived are about three times for wind power and ten times for solar power, making it irrational to subsidise their development and production . Consequently, spending billions on CO2 emission reduction and renewable energy would be pointless. Both of the major political parties have erred grossly in pursuing such policies.

Fickle Pickle - as Raycom points out, the cost of alternative energy is more than three times that of conventional for wind. Alternative energy involves an enormous, additional, job destroying cost.
You try to wave away these costs by asserting that your hypotehetical alternative energy factory should be provided with interest free capital. Who will provide the capital? The proposal does not get rid of interest costs, just shifts those costs elsewhere - the capital has to come from somewhere and it has to be paid for.

"We do NOT have to finance renewable energy projects with savings or taxes. We can finance them with interest free credit paid off over the lifetime of the asset."

It's like saying "We do NOT need to finance renewable energy in ways that cost more natural resources. We can just use machines of perpetual motion, powered by magic pudding."

This displays the positively infantile level of thought running through the entire argument for policy action on global warming

Low percentages of something does not signify its importance to a things form. Saying that small increases in atmospheric CO2 shouldn’t matter is kind of like saying that your body won’t be affected by a 10% increase in salt content in your blood. Or one can use DNA to show that even a 1% change can make a markedly different result – chimps DNA is are about 1% different to humans, but if that were to be 2% difference, the chimp would no longer be a chimp. It’s the same with the atmosphere.

Still, I agree. An ETS is not the way to go. An ETS concentrating on carbon would certainly be a placebo. Any such system needs to cover all forms of business generated pollution.

A PTS (pollution trading scheme) 20 years down the track will be fine, once we have found out what pollution is really not avoidable.

Any money governments spend should go straight into large scale energy farms NEVER into household products – to date that’s where the biggest waste of taxpayer funding has gone. You can tell there is some skulduggery going on simply due to the sort of propaganda governments use with things like Solar Panel grants.

Groan, the Economic Luddites strike back!

This is a poor argument on so many grounds it defies reason.

Curmudgeon, Raycom, Peter Hume 90%+ of your costs of renewable energy are in finance charges of taxation, repayments, interest and profits or what I call TRIP costs. The other 10% is in repairs, operations and ongoing maintenance. The capital cost to build a wind farm to produce the equivalent of 1 kw continuously is of the order of $6,000. Spread over 20 years that is repayments of 3.4 cents per kwh. The average price of energy at the gate of a coal fired power station is currently about 6 cents per kwh. The maintenance costs of a windfarm is about 1 cent per kwh. This means each kwh will produce a profit of 1.6 cents.

The interest cost on $6,000 is 4.7 cents per kwh at 7%. Remove this imposition of 4.7 cents per kwh and renewables are very very profitable at existing energy prices. Geothermal capital costs are today $4,000 per continuous kw and expected to drop rapidly.

Interest free credit for infrastructure is economically sensible and used to be the way we built things. Read the history of the Commonwealth Bank and see how it helped build Australia in the years between 1907 and the mid 1920's. We can do the same today.

Interestingly, the title of this article is "The moral debate of our time", so all those who argue the properties of CO2, true or false, simply miss the point by miles, for the underlying issue is moral, not scientific.

The aim of [good-]scientists is to seek the truth. The aim of politicians is to control, to dictate, to enforce their will on people, from which they derive the greatest pleasure. For most politicians, climate-change was never a source of worry, but rather a golden opportunity to justify more control. They count their blessings for this sudden fortune and for being able to hide behind "the scientists said".

Should the choice be between living under dictatorship or the sea rising by a few metres (and all the other geographical implications), there is no doubt in my mind that it is better to be punished in the hands of God/Nature than in the hands of men.

However, neither is necessary: before the government took over the issue of climate-change, people and households already took so many energy-saving measures, even painful ones, voluntarily and with enthusiasm. It is in our nature to care and we are willing to go a long way to help the environment - so long as it is by choice, so long as we have a chance to express our inherent goodness. Once the government takes over, once it is compulsary, once we are the denied the choice to show that we care for the planet, then why bother? then it is no longer OUR planet, but THEIR planet, in which case let it go to hell. We would then sit and watch with satisfaction how this world drowns along with its politicians.

Fickle Pickle - actually the main costs of a wind farm is in depreciation which is tax deductable now that I think about it, so its depreciation plus interest on the capital plus operating costs. The green case is that wind farms are "only" 50 per cent more costly than conventional but there is evidence from overseas that its three times more expensive.. see Economic impacts from the promotion of renewable energies: The German Experience, ( http://www.wind-watch.org/documents/economic-impacts-from-the-promotion-of-renewable-energies-the-german-experience/
And that does not seem to count the cost of additional generator reserves required and having to remake the entire network to accommodate wind.
So even if you somehow shift the cost of capital elsewhere, or halve it by waiving tax on the income received by the lender (I guess that's what you're talking about when mention taxation) you are still left with a substantial cost burden indeed.
If you want wind farms they have to be heavioy subsidised indeed, or favoured by mandatory targets, and we will have to put up with the subsequent job losses due to the extra burden on the economy.
Trying to pretend that the costs are light or can be waved away with a change in the tax laws is patently ridiculous..

The arguments for AGW policy action have been conclusively exploded so many times that I swear we could raise the money for such policies by charging the warmists $1 every time they re-run these refuted arguments.

Even if there were no issue as to the climate science, science does not supply value judgments, whereas policy requires them. Strike one.

The valid argument that doing nothing will have environmental and economic costs applies equally to doing something. Since policy advocates are completely unable able to show that any given policy action would result in net benefits, rather than net costs for human society as a whole, therefore: Strike two.

(If it’s true that the resources can be provided “free” then the solution is for all those in favour of such measures to provide the capital at no cost to themselves or anyone else. What could be fairer than that? It’s a fantasy. But if it’s true, it requires no policy response.)

Policy advocates ignore the ethical dimension. People are already going hungry and sick and poor. Forcibly diverting capital on a massive scale from productive to loss-making activities directly implicates those doing it in causing the deaths and sickness of other people, whether they understand so or not. Strike Three.

In reality however, there *are* issues about the climate science. 89 percent of the weather stations don’t comply with their own minimum standards of accuracy! Strike Four.

The data, by themselves, are just reams and reams of temperature measurements. To understand them requires interpretation, which requires judgment. Governments have paid billions to thousands of scientists to find global warming, and they have done so. It’s not a "conspiracy". Rather, all over the world, acting independently, in thousands of little decisions, these publicly-funded 'scientists' have ‘adjusted’ (manipulated) the data trends unidirectionally *up*. The value judgments to do that are *not* supplied by the science. They are supplied by the scientists’ personal interests in grants, conferences, status, and perhaps a bit of pious fretting. If all the manipulations *up* were replaced with manipulations *down*, they would show global cooling. Strike Five.

REgarding "Climate Change" just follllow the money and the connections!

It's not that hard. What I found most refreshing in the article is the GOLDMAN SACHS connections with Turnbull...

It seems every character 'SCREAMING' out for 'fight climate change' is somehow connected to GOLDMAN SACHS or.. some similar networked body.

GORE Chaiman-> GENERATION INVESTMENTS CEO= David Blood..also a GOLDMAN SACHS operative in his former life.

Even Landis and Gyrr CEO Cameron Orielly is ex Goldman Sachs and L&G make SMART meters......

There is a network of business people.. investment bankers.. who are networked into a HUGE MORAL ISSUE of our time..i.e.Climate Change the SCAM of the century.

Finding SOROS mentioned also re-inforces this...

Don't forget mr UN Environment "Maurice Strong" and the Chicago Climate Exchange connection (He is a director)

Or BOB CARR who positioned himself with mouth/pockets wide open as CEO of ENVEX a carbon trading company in Sydney (affiliated with CCX)

A good article.. fills in some of the blanks.

Curmudgeon depreciation is the book-keeping name for repayments. That is the main cost of renewables. Please do the calculations yourself. Don't just take costs from articles without seeing exactly how they are derived.

Networks do not have to be remade to accommodate wind and there is no need to add in additional generator reserves. Wind generation can be easily accommodated in our existing network while the level is below 20% of total output.

Renewable energy does not have to be subsidised if we use interest free credit to fund them. You ask where does the money come from to pay for the energy? The answer - like all investments - is that it comes from the profits generated by the investment.

Our current financial system creates most new money through the monetization of assets. When we monetize an asset we should charge interest on the money because the money created represents an existing asset.

However, we do not have to use savings or money from existing assets or from taxation to fund new assets. We can fund new assets through interest free credit repaid from the earnings of future assets. This will favour some assets over others but that is a different argument. The fact is that interest free credit makes renewables profitable at today's prices and there are sound economic reasons for moving down this path - not the least is that it will stabilise energy prices at current levels or less.

Did you know that 40% of profits in the Australian Economy go to financial organisations which do not produce anything. Getting rid of interest on some funding of new assets will move some of the finance profits to those who produce goods and services.

Fickle Pickle
That is just nonsense. If it's true, then why don't you and everyone else who agrees with you, fund it yourselves? If it's true, there's no need for policy action, because it can be funded by the profits on the machines of perpetual motion.

It would only be true that financing adds "nothing" to the project if no-one had to undertake the risk or delay. But all action is uncertain, and everyone prefers results sooner rather than later. Therefore these functions are valuable.

That's why you, and everyone who agrees with you, are not offering to fund it voluntarily, isn't it? That's why you're trying to force everyone who doesn't agree with you to fund it under compulsion, isn't it?

By the way, I notice you have simply evaded the five points I raised which show that the entire thing is baseless.

A conservative historian takes on modern science...and thinks he knows better.
Frankly James, I'll take the opinion of the 97% of publicly funded professional scientist's over your view.
There are *not* "Many thousands of high profile scientists" who disagree. First, are they climatologists? Having a PHD in *something* does not entitle one to a professional opinion. "Many Thousands" is pure hype and not even remotely credible.
Feeding the poor is a laudable aim, but distributed power systems that extract the ambient energy are much more likely to be of assistance than traditional centralised systems that involve worldwide transport! Pardon me for being sceptical when Big Oil and conservatives say Green energy investment should be spent on the poor! Like, when were they ever a priority to you?
As for the feasibility of renewables...until fossil fuels are not taxpayer subsidised we cannot compare apples with apples. They get tax breaks for exploration, extraction, transport and distribution. Being vertically integrated, most fossil fuels are now competition free zones where profits can be moved within the industry stack to where taxation is minimised and profits maximised. Except for the odd country like Norway, a large portion of the worlds economic activity is being channelled to very few...who are encouraging anti-GW articles and memes like this one.
I laugh when folks believe there is a world-wide science conspiracy, yet they ignore the blatant efforts of industry to avoid accountability. I do agree that politicians are abusing the situation...science and politics are a *bad* combination.

Peter,

I am in the process of working on the details for such a system with a major Australian Organisation. So yes we will be doing it and yes it does require no policy response. It can and will be done without the need to involve government policy - but it is easier and more effective if governments are involved.

With respect to your points nowhere have I said that funds add nothing to a project. What I have said that we not need to pay interest on credit that is used to fund new assets. Indeed that is what happens with equity investing. We do not pay interest to investors as well as pay dividends. Credit repaid from future earnings is true investing and charging interest on credit is unnecessary and unjustified.

Risk on renewables is close to zero for many existing well proven technologies and there is no reason to factor in a cost of risk - or if we feel the need it is very low cost and can be achieved with a one time insurance rather than an ongoing interest fee.

Without interest charges renewable systems are profitable so your comments about directing investment elsewhere is not relevant. Energy is a crucial input to prevent hunger and sickness - not money per se. The ethics of charging people for credit to build energy infrastructure is something I would very much like to explore.

I have not said anything on whether climate change is caused by human activity so I will ignore points four and five.

Unfortunately few people understand the nature of money. We think it has to always be interesting bearing but there are many situations where it is unnecessary and inappropriate for us to charge interest on money.

Fickle Pickle - depreciation is most emphatically not the book keeping name for repayments. Where do you get this stuff from? Its a cost which does not affect cash flow, until you have to find money to replace the capital items.
Yes, you do have to revamp the network. You have to put in more load following open cycle gas turbines, among other changes.. and the reserve requirements do increase. The green case is that the reserve requirements are small, but there is evidence that they completely wipe out any savings in carbon.
As for the rest of your post basically you seem to be hoping that capital will arrive of its own accord with a few, simple changes to the financial system. Well it won't. Supply and demand of capital follows laws far more fundamental than anything in science and you mess with them at your peril.
Wind systems represent a vast additional cost for no real gain, and no amount of fast talking and redefining accounting terms is going to alter that. Leave it with you..

Ozandy
"As for the feasibility of renewables...until fossil fuels are not taxpayer subsidised we cannot compare apples with apples. They get tax breaks for exploration, extraction, transport and distribution. Being vertically integrated, most fossil fuels are now competition free zones where profits can be moved within the industry stack to where taxation is minimised and profits maximised."

That is so true.

It's interesting to do the thought experiment of wondering what would have happened in the 20th century if the state had not subsidised fossil fuels. Decentralised alternative energy forms - like solar, wind, etc. - would have been more economical, and would have been developed with the capital that the state diverted into its coal-fired power stations. We might now be at the stage where each house provided its own sustainable energy, with the trillions of dollars the know-it-all state snaffled.

Taxpayer subsidisation of energy should ideally be abolished. The restrainer is the great social dislocation since entire industries, and all the jobs and families they support, have grown up around these subsidies. This teaches us yet again that these kinds of interventions to subsidise uneconomic activity set up serious intractable social problems that are very difficult to reverse.

Was there a need for government to take on itself the task of decreeing coal-fired power in the first place? No! If power stations needed subsidies, they were uneconomical, and the population's scarce resources should not have been confiscated to pay for them.

The irony of it is that the people now urging the government to dictate energy policy, and subsidise uneconomical sources, are the same people who declare that doing so has produced the biggest moral mistake in the history of the world!

What makes anyone think the know-it-all state knows any better now than it did when it caused the problem?

FP
"So yes we will be doing it and yes it does require no policy response. It can and will be done without the need to involve government policy..."

I think that's great and wish you all the best - without taxpayer funds.

These forums are a fascinating examination in psychology. Not surprisingly some comments were positive towards the article, and some negative.
What was very surprising was the fact that virtually no one commenting actually addressed the moral point raised at the core of the piece.
Instead contributors seem to largely address their own agendas, most of which were of the strategic view that the best form of defence is attack, and that if evidence is presented contrary to their opinion then it must be dismissed - I was particularly impressed with the comment by one "Who knows why Science Daily said that, but it's quite wrong." Yes why would one of the foremost scientific journals publish such slander to the cause at such a prominent time as just before midnight on New Years Eve?
On the plus side it makes a nice change not to be accused of being in the pay of the oil companies (I'm not by the way). Perhaps there is a fear of that accusation being countered by "Are you in the pay of Goldman Sachs & friends then?"
As the quote from Dr Rancourt concludes "Actually address the question; otherwise you are weakening your effect as an activist."

James,

"What was very surprising was the fact that virtually no one commenting actually addressed the moral point raised at the core of the piece."

I believe I did - have I missed anything?

My apologies Yuyutsu. You were one of the very few who addressed the key point of the piece. - JF

James the moral point - unless I am mistaken - is that the author maintains that it is going to cost a lot of money to reduce green houses gases and that this money is better spent doing other things. The author says that we are not certain about the effect of ghg emissions and until we are we should not increase the price of energy.

What I am pointing out is there is no moral dilemma as it can cost us less to reduce green house gases by generating energy with renewable energy without increasing the price of energy. This can be achieved by advancing credit to those who will invest in ways of reducing green house gas emissions.

Economists and the general population believe that the only way to create credit is to mortgage existing assets. There are other sound economic ways to create credit without mortgaging assets.

The moral debate we could be having is not whether we should be investing in renewables but whether those with assets are the only ones in society to whom we advance credit.

Fickle - the moral point is the one that was originally made by Oxfam in the Wall Street Journal. (...."for every $50 billion spent to “fight” AGW, “around 4.5 million children will needlessly die”. However we will have the satisfaction of “reducing global temperatures by 1000th degree F in 100 years”)
While we suck billions of dollars annually out of the world economy in order to do our best King Canute impression, we will merely further enrich the already super-rich (eg: our friends at Goldman Sachs, Merrill Lynch etc) at the expense of those who have little enough already. But perhaps that was their intention all along?