Carbon emmission trading.

Brought to you by the same happy idiots that brought:

Net filtering
grocery watch
fuel watch
and many other feel good impractical policies.

and now Budget Deficit.

Need I say more.

yabby,
They still wont learn even by the hard way.

Must be 30 years since that film 'Design for Disaster" was made about houses getting burnt in LA and only a week ago they lost a heap.

Canberra was the same. Why build an urban area next to a pine forrest?

Oh well, our bushfire fighters discovered that an urban area will stop a wild fire eventually. Better than some poor cocky losing stock, fences or his shearing shed. Town planners have a lot to answer for.

Then the fires in the high country, after they banned the usual summer cattle grazing. How many weeks did it take to get that under control? Wonder what the carbon emissions were from that?

And another thing. If you are going to lose your property/house to a bushfire, make sure its a bigun, on national TV and flying visit by PM and Premier. They will give heaps of assistance. But if it only an ordinary 'run of the mill' fire, they dont want to know you, its just bad luck and help yourself Jack.

Ho Hum,

I doubt you have even the faintest inkling of what Milton Friedman's theories of economics were about.

All he presented was a mathematical model to more accurately explain the effects of monetary policy on the economy.

That it showed the tax and spend tradition of labor was doomed to failure was simply as showing 2+2=4 and not a policial statement. That socialists don't like hearing it does not make it wrong and is the case of shooting the messenger.

Democritus is right to a point however Milton Friedman isn’t the sole villain any more than Samuel Colt was for the lawlessness in the ‘wild west’.

To say that Friedman only wrote a mathematical formula that was as cut and dried as 2+2= 4 is misleading and/or disingenuous.
His piece ignores ‘context’ and appear blind to the consequences of his lifetime of teachings. He provided the intellectual justification for what has followed.

The problem with Economics in general is that it is a ‘soft science’ (i.e. there are no absolute answers) and all include leaps of faith, biases and flaws. While they may be internally consistent and even logical within their context but add/change an input or two and the resulting consequences can and are wildly different to what was expected. Add to that the impacts of unknown/incorrectly a librated factors and you have a less than perfect basis for decision.

Tom Quirk is correct in pointing out that the measurements/models are badly deficit even fatally flawed but so is the entire economic structure that underpins our society. Even this excellent article has the same flaws of the Garnaut report…lack of a complete set of facts (questionable science).

A more reasonable position would be to acknowledge that “our science” is flawed. Therefore so too are both arguments it behoves us to work to improve the carbon tax or suggest alternatives that serve the agreed goal, reduce CO2 fairly.
Tom’s biggest problem in this area he is a beneficiary of the current system and his reticence to tax it (hobble it in his mind) is understandable. The absence of either improvements or alternatives one can assume his endgame is to simply discredit what he sees as impediment to business. This should all be taken into consideration.

Taswegian is drawing an even longer (self interested) bow with his reasoning that the inaccuracies of measurements of animal fluctuance applies to the timber industry.
The fire risk myth is also based on dubious science for a number of reasons.

The Garnaut report claims that Rural Australia faces pressures for structural change from both climate change and its mitigation.

The report states that ‘Effective mitigation would greatly improve the prospects for Australian agriculture’, and that ‘Choices for landowners will include production of conventional commodities, soil carbon, bioenergy, second-generation biofuels, wood or carbon plantations, and conservation forests.”

Garnaut believes that there is considerable potential for biosequestration in rural Australia. Presumably, from photosynthesis of the plants that provide feed and shelter for our standard cows.

“The realisation of a substantial part of the biosequestration potential of rural Australia would greatly reduce the costs of mitigation in Australia. It would favourably transform the economic prospects of large parts of remote rural Australia.”

So it is amazing that the Greens, the so called environmentalist political party that have championed Garnaut, emission cuts and new taxes this week sponsored a motion for disallowance in the senate of environmental and natural resource management guidelines in relation to the establishment of trees for the purposes of carbon sequestration.

Even more amazing some politicians usually seen as champions of Rural Australia were not prepared to support these new rural industries. Some Nationals crossed the floor to support the greens, and at least one NSW Liberal refused to support his party by abstaining.

Perhaps the IPCC mitigation report needs to be read by the Greens and these other Senators, particularly the chapter on forestry In Climate Change 2007: Mitigation. Contribution of Working Group III to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that states:

“In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit"

Cheap effective mitigation will allow our cows to continue to produce food for the nation and provide exports to the World, support for biosequestration will give new hope to our farmers and rural communities.