The simplifying assumption for this discussion is the current politicing between the Libs and Labour over the ETS is just what everyone pretends it is: a discussion solely over the best way to tackle Global Warming. It isn't of course, it is also a proxy battle over whether AGW is real of not. But let us set that aside and assume both sides really do think AGW is real, and recent policy announcements are what they say they are: what they think is truly the best way to tackle global warming.

So in one corner we have the ALP advocating a free market solution: put a price on emissions and let the market sort it out. The people who have to pay for all of this is the emitters themselves - which are primarily businesses.

In the other corner we have Libs advocating what is essentially a centralised planning approach reminiscent of what you might find in old Soviet Russia. They decide of the best techniques for emission reduction, they pass laws to impose them on everybody, and to keep businesses onside the use taxes gleaned from the workers to pay for it all.

This max's out my irony meter. And it just shows the contortions a pollie will go through to get a vote.

rstuart
Yes they are both absurd and disgusting.

However it's not correct to call Labor's policy 'a free market solution'. To politically 'put a price on emissions' is not a free market solution, it's a central planning solution. It involves the use of force - policy - to impose an arbitrary value chosen by a political process, backed up by threats of fines and police, courts and prisons. It must necessarily have all the detriments and disadvantages of interventionism, namely, incapaable of economic calculation, planned chaos producing unintended negative consequences worse than the original problem, the creation of legal privileges feeding exploitative vested interests, and any defects being dealt with by an expansion of all related bureaucracies: the complete disaster. Also, strictly speaking the parties to a transaction under the ETS are not trading carbon, they are trading tax receipts.

A free market solution is to leave the parties to contracts free to choose what value to set on the exchange. It probably would not involve trading in carbon receipts, which depends on a whole-of-world approach much beloved of social engineers and central planners - the forcible improvers of their fellow creatures. A free market solution is much more likely to be directed at satisfying human wants in the most direct and economical way, as judged by the people themselves. So for example, when the Dutch faced the problem of the incursions of sea-water onto their habitat, they didn't deal with it by trying to tax the whole world and control the tides. They did it by building dykes. They also economised on repairing dyke-holes by assigning this task to noble-minded boys who always used to stick their fingers in holes in dykes, when they weren't riding on ice-ponds on silver skates, riding bicycles to clog-making shops, and colonising the East Indies for spices which were always incorporated into Dutch short-bread. But I digress.

Peter Hume: "A free market solution is to leave the parties to contracts free to choose what value to set on the exchange."

No doubt the ETS not as free as you would have it, but it is as "free market" as it is possible to be, I think. If there is some other solution that forces carbon emissions down but in some sense gives even more freedom to individuals, I'd be interested to hear about it.

Peter Hume: "trying to tax the whole world and control the tides. They did it by building dykes"

Correct, they didn't tax the entire world. They just taxed the Dutch, including those who lived inland and didn't give a rats about the dykes.

rstuart

John Hewson has some good (and not so good) things to say here:

http://www.abc.net.au/unleashed/stories/s2812572.htm

It's never really been about the science.

I would have some optimism for the future if it were not for political, religious or socio-economic dogma.

qanda: "It's never really been about the science."

Naturally. If you are talking about politicians, their number 1 priority is and should be the politics. Their very survival in politics depends on it.

On that note, I think Howard is a far better professional politician than Rudd. Hewson's claim that Rudd hasn't explained the ETS rings true for me. In fact he rarely spends much time explaining any issue to the people who voted him in. It seems he leaves that job to his ministers. Howard made a point of hitting the airwaves in various forms a daily habit. Thus, regardless of what you thought of Howard's policies you at least knew what they were.

The same can't be said for Rudd. And if nobody understands your policies a clever opposition can turn them into anything they like. Right now Abbott is doing just that by characterising the ETS as a big fat tax. All I can say is: well done Mr Abbott. Mr Rudd left an opening so big your could drive a truck load of spin through it. That is just what Mr Abbott is doing. He would be a very poor politician if he didn't. I do hope Mr Rudd is learning from this, as we need good politicians that are also policy wonks, but my gut feeling is he isn't.

If it's not about the science then who will be the first international political leader to break ranks, dispute the whole idea and spend the money on other things?

Even India and China (who have the most to lose) don't dispute the phenomenon is real - they just don't want to surrender their current economic advantage to others who have less to sacrifice.

There are no new votes in this for anybody who accepts climate change as fact and there won't be any evidence of success until long after the current regimes are gone.

If that's the case, it must be about the science because there's no political advantage in it.

>>On that note, I think Howard is a far better professional politician than Rudd.<<

rstuart,

Did you see "Q&A" on the ABC last night? As a professional political speaker, Rudd is better and smarter than anyone else I've ever seen. He answered every question from an audience of 15-25 year olds very adroitly. And he did get some blunt and curly questions.

But I do get your drift. I take it you mean Howard was able to stick it out, cop the flak and actually implement his policies. Rudd so far has only shown his political adroitness. The other important quality of pushing an agenda through to its implementation and embedding into society has yet to be demonstrated by Rudd. Although, he might be leaving that to his ministers; it's hard to judge the situation as an outsider.

Rstuart
Centralised price-fixing, trading tax receipts and capital consumption are the opposite of free market principles. Let’s call a spade a spade. Both major parties are pursuing anti-market central planning policies based on collectivist notions. If any private company attempted to raise a millionth as much money in this way, the directors would be imprisoned.

> If there is some other solution that forces carbon emissions down but in some sense gives even more freedom to individuals, I'd be interested to hear about it.
That assumes that, even if AGW were conceded, which it’s not, it would require a collectivist solution that “forces carbon emissions down” by way of taxation, bureaucracy and capital consumption; rather than by satisfying the human wants in issue more directly, individually and economically.

>Correct, they didn't tax the entire world. They just taxed the Dutch, including those who lived inland and didn't give a rats about the dykes.

I don’t know that they built the dykes by taxing the Dutch population, did they? But even if they did, why should the upland Dutch who didn’t care about the dykes, have been taxed to pay for them any more than the upland Germans, or the pygmies in the Congo for that matter, who equally got no benefit from them, didn’t care about them, and didn’t want to pay?

This is just more of the collectivist belief system that people are herds of animals owned by government, and that society is a laboratory in which the clever people in government experiment on the lives and livelihoods of their subjects.

There is something that would benefit me that I can’t afford to pay for. Therefore rstuart should be taxed to pay for it. If he doesn’t want to, he should be locked in a cage, and I shall say that it’s all his fault because he’s anti-social. Right?

Peter Hume: "Centralised price-fixing, trading tax receipts and capital consumption are the opposite of free market principles. "

Capital consumption is the depreciation allowance for a countries assets. What that has to do with the ETS, and more to the point depreciation can be called the opposite of free market principles is beyond me. As for trading tax receipts, did you just invent that? Oh, I see you didn't. You picked it up from www.lavoisier.com.au. It seems they invented it, and for the same reasons Abbott invented the term "Big Fat Tax" .

Centralised price-fixing is against free market principles. But since the ETS lets the free market decide the price of carbon credits I am not sure why you mentioned it. Another case of cherry picking impressive sounding phrases from web sites, perhaps?

As for Dutch dykes, would you know there is a story about dykes on http://mises.org/story/2537 What an amazing coincidence, it's a favourite site of yours. If you read the article carefully, you will see the era of private dyke building ended in the 1770's. Needless to say most of Holland's current dykes were built after that date - by the state.

Peter Hume: "This is just more of the collectivist belief system that people are herds of animals owned by government, and that society is a laboratory in which the clever people in government experiment on the lives and livelihoods of their subjects."

The amazing thing I get from that statement is a sense of deja vu. It feels the same as the idealistic pronouncements from the young communists of my youth.

So does this statement from mises:

a few individuals, based on the popular recognition of their economic independence, outstanding professional achievement, morally impeccable personal life, superior judgment, courage, and taste, will rise to the rank of natural, voluntarily acknowledged elites and lend legitimacy to the idea of a natural order ... (Hoppe 2001, p. 106)

So, the world will be run by a natural order of elites. What a lovely idea. I trust you are planning to be part of that elite group?

RobP: "Did you see "Q&A" on the ABC last night?"

No. But thanks for pointing it out, I have watched it now.

I would not say he is the best public speaker I have heard. Most of the recent American presidents are astoundingly good orators. I wasn't too impressed at the start, as he was his usual formal and stiff self. But after 10 minutes or so he seemed to warm to his audience and was better than any other time I have seen him. More convincing than Howard on a normal day.

Which makes what I said all the more pertinent. If he was more of a media tart like Howard and say Beattie, he would be very effective in moving public opinion.

You seem to be under the impression that trying to throw up a smokescreen of irrelevance and personality makes up for your evasion of the issues. It doesn’t.

There is no evidence of catastrophic AGW in the first place, so don't try and get away with that evasion.

A licence is a permission to do something that would otherwise be illegal. Your alleged free market is in carbon “credits”. But what is a carbon credit? It is a government permission to emit so much carbon. Well why wouldn’t the particular producer just go right ahead and emit what carbon is involved in producing the goods they are making to satisfy human wants? Because the ETS edict would make it illegal, that’s why. It would make illegal all productive activity that involves the use of carbon, which is everything, except on terms that the producer pay the government the relevant amount, commonly known as a tax, for which the government would give a tax receipt, which would then be traded. It is either sheer ignorance, or mere dishonesty, to call this dysfunctional statist fantasy a “free market”, and you know it.

So anyway, what’s the answer to the question: why should upland Dutch, upland Germans, or the pygmies of the Congo be forced to pay for strand-colonising Dutch to have their dykes built for them?

No snivelling half-witted evasions, no personal argument and misrepresentations, just try some intellectual honesty for a change and answer the question.

Peter Hume: "There is no evidence of catastrophic AGW in the first place, so don't try and get away with that evasion."

I haven't so far. Why bring it up? But since you have, the majority view is it is cheaper to do something about AGW now than later. If there is anybody evading that majority view here, it is you.

A reminder: the point I did bring up here is putting a price on emissions and and letting business figure out what to do about it is obviously more of a "free market" solution than explicitly telling businesses what to do. Surely you agree?

Peter Hume: "It is either sheer ignorance, or mere dishonesty, to call this dysfunctional statist fantasy a “free market”, and you know it."

Is statist a swear word in your world Peter? I wonder.

Regardless of how inconvenient you find it, the trade in carbon credits happens in a free market. That carbon credits are a state invention doesn't alter the fact. Property rights are also a state invention. So I guess by your definition, revenues raised by government land sales are also a tax, but nonetheless private land sales happen in a free market. You see? Your word games about taxes are irrelevant.

Peter Hume: "why should upland Dutch, upland Germans, or the pygmies of the Congo be forced to pay for strand-colonising Dutch to have their dykes built for them?"

Ahh, a philosophical question. I can't answer it. I am not good at philosophical questions. They are more of Pericles line of work. So I'll just observe the Dutch have strong statist traditions, the pygmies don't, and you say the pygmies were forced to pay for the Dutch's dykes. I wonder why they did so? Maybe they were unlucky? If so, their bad luck continues to this very day. The Dutch are even more statist than ever, the pygmies still organise themselves in the anarchistic manner you so treasure and yet the Dutch remain strong and the pygmies are in the process of being wiped from the planet.

Peter Hume and others

I'm curious what do you think the point of a society/state is?
Current reasoning says that we each give up some of our rights to the state in order that we might all benefit.Taxation of one form or another is the logical consequence there of.

Your example of the Dutch dykes can only be described as medieval archery (long bow warfare). The only similarities between what is happening with AGW is rising water.

Firstly only one country was at stake, secondly The dutch did pay for it by 'taxing' other countries' wealth albeit it indirectly, it was called exploitation.How do you think Holland a pi$$ ant country had accumulated sufficient wealth to the government?

AGW will affect every country and there is no significant equivalent empire to pay for what needs to be done.

ETS is a market system in that the market determines the price of carbon. The fees offset/ partially compensates the people's extra costs. I.e. the polluters ultimately pay as such the silent hand of the market causes carbon to be elimiated.
Conversely, a carbon tax passes the cost on to the people, No compensation (help). The points inherent in RStuart and the government argument is that:
- the tax is determined by the government(s)
- it doesn't, necessarily force carbon to reduced.
- it would depend on an unachievable agreement, that ALL governments charge the same rate.
+This would lead to horsetrading between weaker governments for commercial gain,leading to it's ultimate collapse.
+ Internal political advantage devoid of carbon cost.
ETS effectively removes the latter point from internal political reach.
I would suggest that it is this element that political entities find most appealing but the same motivation doesn't have the same impact with leaders from countries that aren't as politically sensitive...i.e. China. their motivation is different.

IMO both options are far less that perfect.

Examinator
Good question but best for a separate thread I would think.

But for here, obviously if people can’t get the fundamental ethical and economic difference between voluntary and involuntary arrangements, and state and society, then the only result will be the moral and intellectual bankruptcy that the AGW camp displays.

Rstuart
Oh it get it, it’s like saying the Soviet Union was more “free market” than communist China. Why would anyone express it like that, except to dissemble the obvious?

Unlike the market for land, the market you are talking about doesn’t exist. The whole idea is that the government will extrude from its orifice an obligation forcing everyone to pay for something on which they set no market value. It’s not a market, it’s a compulsory tithe to a nutty religion, worshipping Kevin Rudd’s backside. We’re all going to boil to death from camel farts: the AGW cult are our salvation, hallelujah.

On being asked, you failed to give any reason why anyone should be forced to pay for either parties’ compulsory schemes to correct the world, any more than upland Dutch or Congo pygmies or anyone else should have been forced to pay for dykes they don’t want.

You don’t stand for “most people”; a false pretence of knowledge if ever there was one. But in any event, if the majority favour rape or robbery, does that make it okay?

Tax is by definition a compulsory impost, not a fee for services. Thus the state’s revenues depend on the forced expropriation of private property produced beforehand, and thus private property always precedes the state in logic, in fact, and in history.

Any now anyone who dares to want freedom from nasty fascists’ dream of centrally planning the entire world’s economy and ecology are “anarchists”?

Thus on every front the AGW cult, when challenged with critical scrutiny, retreats into a woeful welter of every kind of fallacy.

Peter Hume.
Clearly my prose missed its mark. what is the purpose of a society was intended to indicate the assumptive flaw in your reasoning.
You persist with the silly analogy about dykes. It is simply a nonsense, irrelevant.
You seem to have a common 'overly simplistic approach that every person and issue has some impenetrable barrier that precludes it's context

Without one there is no other. Your simplistic denial of these relationships creates a practical and or logical nonsense. No government can exist without some source of funds. That in essence some form of impost (taxation), in the case of a democracy that means the people (the beneficiaries of the collectivist concept inherent in a democratic society).

It might be argued the form of taxation or that *all* the taxation doesn't get used in direct benefits but it is the price that must be paid for that society and democracy.

IMO two of the key failings of philosophies are they tend to stereo type or ignore the human element and the wider context.

All forms of government incorporate traits from other forms. The key or unifying factor is the Human context.

Even your analogy about pygmies/ upland Dutch in the context of AGW is either a myopic nonsense or a failure to fully understand the concept of A *G* (as in Global, affecting everyone including the people you mentioned.)W.

If your argument is, I don't believe it so I shouldn't have to pay for it I could site the same (undemocratic reasoning about my paying for, current wars, our ridiculously expensive, ineffectual military forces and our part in the world wide military money black hole).In short, it's called democracy.

Your argument is simply a myopic AGW denialist one. Despite its faux complexity it is still as flawed as all the others.

Peter Hume: "Unlike the market for land, the market you are talking about doesn’t exist."

Actually it does. Europe has been trading emission permits for about a decade now.

Peter Hume: "forcing everyone to pay for something on which they set no market value"

Oh, I wouldn't worry about that Peter. If they are prepared to pay for it, it must have some value to them.

Peter Hume: "it’s a compulsory tithe to a nutty religion"

Nope. No one is compelling you to join the religion. Granted you are a part of it now, but Australia is a relatively free country. Find somewhere else that will take you, and no one will stop you going.

Peter Hume: "You don’t stand for “most people”; a false pretence of knowledge if ever there was one."

True. Which is why I didn't claim I stood for most people. Why do you say I did?

Peter Hume: "Any now anyone who dares to want freedom from nasty fascists’ dream of centrally planning the entire world’s economy and ecology are “anarchists”?"

It is more of a case of not wanting to be drawn into some dreamers vision of utopia on the basis of a lie. The world does not have a centrally planed economy and doesn't look likely to have one in my lifetime, and thus "wanting freedom from this nasty fascists" world is in fact wanting freedom from some delusional fantasy. You don't have to sell such freedom to me, Peter. I never suffered from the delusion in the first place.

>>This max's out my irony meter. And it just shows the contortions a pollie will go through to get a vote.<<

Pretty much the ultimate irony and ideological inversion in Oz politics in recent times was the way the Hawke/Keating Labor Government walked away from the socialist paradigm and embraced the globalised economy. Talk about chutzpah! By the time they were done, their successors, Howard and Costello, had little wind in their sails for big reform; they had no choice but to slowly start the process of micro-economic reform.

This shows that when a government takes a contemporary, strong policy line, the Opposition is rendered into picking up the crumbs. When the policy is not clear or set like in the ETS debate, the contest becomes a dialectic where both parties take a position that is as differentiated from their opponents as possible. Yes, it is about parties positioning themselves to get a vote, but it is also in the interests of getting a balanced dialectic around the issues.

I reckon the debate on the ETS is healthy for precisely that reason. The bulldust will eventually be outed through the pressure that comes from scrutiny, and a new direction will evolve out of the ashes of the old debate.

Peter Hume: "But in any event, if the majority favour rape or robbery, does that make it okay?"

Did someone say it was? Did I say what has and is happening to the pygmies is OK? No. But since you apparently think there is a chance I might believe annihilation of the pygmies is OK: I don't. Do you think everybody who disagrees with you favours genocide? You are right in one thing: I am selfish enough to want the society I live in be structured like those doing the wiping, as opposed to having the loosely coupled structure of the ones being wiped.

Peter Hume: "Tax is by definition a compulsory impost, not a fee for services."

So you have said, over and over again. It is like hearing some sermon from the mount, or a communist manifesto. It is as if you believe mere repetition of some meaningless phrase imparts relevance. Here is a tip: you don't have to tell me what a tax is, as I have been paying them for decades. I don't like them. Unfortunately I dislike the alternative even less.

It is a bit like that with AGW actually. It is not that anyone actually likes the idea of an ETS. It is just that if you happen to think AGW is real, you probably also think the alternatives are worse. Certainly for a liberal like myself, Abbott's ordaining centrally planned solutions like carbon sequestration, carbonisation of soil and what not is definitely worse. Doing nothing would be a better alternative. To give Abbott his due, he probably knows it. If so, doing nothing it is what he has had in mind all along.

Peter Hume: "Thus on every front the AGW cult, when challenged with critical scrutiny, retreats into a woeful welter of every kind of fallacy."

What a shame. You were doing so well with the smoke screens and mirrors. Yet in the end you could not help yourself and revealed what your real concerns. You can't stand to see anyone talk about AGW as if it was real, even hypothetically.

rstuart- I think the answer of the 360 of both party's policies is simply because Labor are NOW in government, and as thus are now being offered all of the contracts from any companies interested in jumping into the carbon market, while the Liberals are now in opposition and, now likely missing out on the contracts, now have the luxury to lazily say whatever approach the now-government is taking is irresponsible and saying whatever different policy they can come up with.

It's nothing but a change of circumstance between two equally shallow parties trying to make the best of their circumstances in a gigantic scam scheme.

If Labor lost the election to the Libs, expect Tony Abbot to "come up with a new market scheme" and Labor to take Tony's old position within a week.

So Stuart’s irony metre was maxed-out by Lib Lab ETS positions.
Now, I would have thought , to have irony, an outcome needs a certain measure of the unexpected.

So how could anyone who has had experience of OZ politics, have found such ‘contortions’ unexpected.
RobP reminded us of what happened a decade or more ago when Hawke, Keating & Howard played roles other than the ones they auditioned for.
And Stuart, himself, appears to both acknowledge & endorse such
“politicians, their number 1 priority is and should be the politics.”
“ Rudd left an opening ..so big your could drive a truck load of spin through it. That is just what Mr Abbott is doing. He would be a very poor politician if he didn't”

How then could such a piddling thing as libs peddling centralism & labs peddling freemarket max-out his metre ?
One possibility ,considering his handle , could be that Stuarts been shopping for price rather than quality, at El Cheapo Metres .
Which has some credence since I did notice his logic – metre started to go all wonky about six months ago.

The real pity though, is that if now such mundane things max-out Stuarts metre.
He’ll never get to experience the really big ironies like: 1 million+ belching camels NOT counting in ETS calculations , but a few thousand burping, chardonnay drinking, branch stacking, lefties, COUNTING!

Or the carbon lore anomaly that allows the biggest polluters to reduce culpability by offsetting it against their burgeoning populations (per capita)

Now those are real ironies for you…though I guess, none of them would register on Stuart’s Mickey Mouse metres

Still Stuart says: “ No one is compelling you to join the religion… Find somewhere else that will take you, and no one will stop you going”
But with the the ETS intended to be set in L-A-W, one might ask ‘where can one go, other that, to the outback with those disenfranchised camels?'.

Horus,

That post's pretty high up on my wedgie meter. Well, attempted wedgie, anyway.

>>How then could such a piddling thing as libs peddling centralism & labs peddling freemarket max-out his metre ?<<

FWIW, I think rstuart's irony may have been in reference to the way individuals in those parties have been forced to go, rather than the parties per se. You just have to look at Peter Garratt at the moment to see that.

Rstuart
People want to eat bread or drive cars. They don’t want “permits”. The only reason they pay for permits is ultimately to avoid being physically attacked by armed officers, in this case enforcing a law against all productive activity involving carbon unless they pay money to the state. Otherwise people could just do the productive activity without paying for a permit, which is the situation now. Thus the purpose of the ETS is to force people to pay for these permits which, if they were free to choose, the state knows they would not willingly pay for.

The point is, there is no ideological inversion, in which the supposed left wing party is defending the private, and the supposed right wing party is defending the public control of the means of production. Both parties are engaged in central planning schemes for the state to intervene in private transactions so as to control the means of production by forcibly overriding freedom of choice. “Socialist” or “interventionist” is the term you’re looking for, not “free market”.

Why are they doing this? Because they’re trying to adjust the world’s climate by directing economic activity away from certain uses and towards certain other uses. And why? Because they’re trying to achieve inter alia ecological sustainability, or maintenance of ecosystems within existing ranges. So it’s not “delusional” to suggest that they’re trying to politically control the world’s economy and the ecology. That’s exactly what they’re trying to do.

I haven’t suggested you’re in favour of rape, genocide, etc. But the issue is whether coercion is justified for no other reason than that ”the majority” are (assumed to be) in favour of it. Even assuming AGW, the argument for either Labor or Liberal policies on global warming assume such a justification, which would equally justify rape, robbery or genocide.

“Find somewhere else that will take you, and no one will stop you going.”
You are assuming what is in issue. Why shouldn’t the warmist zealots be the ones to piss off and leave everyone else in peace?

Even assuming AGW, the AGW camp have not even begun to explain or justify what reason there is to think that the best solution is by way of government attempts at centralised control of the climate, the economy and ecosystems. They simply assume all the tenets of central planning that have been disproved over and over again at enormous cost in human suffering and environmental destruction. It’s not enough for them to *disagree with* the ethical and pragmatic arguments for liberty: they need to *refute* them, which they haven't even started.

Thus the irrationality of warmism is not just in the defects of the natural science they rely on, which in any event does not supply value judgments, and therefore provides no justification whatsoever for any policy.

Their vacuousness as a matter of the social sciences is equally irrational and even more culpable.

As to the supposed preferability of one interventionist policy to another, the lesser of two evils is still evil. It would be preferable not to vote for either parcel of rogues. They belong in prison, not in the legislature.

examinator
The fact that you are forced to pay for actions that you consider immoral, destructive, or just plain crazy, is not an argument in favour of other people being forced to pay for actions that they consider immoral, destructive or just plain crazy: it is an argument against both.

Whether the dykes or AGW policies are beneficial is what is in issue. Majority vote does not of itself justify coercion as you have assumed. It is you who are failing to consider the complexity and the context, not I.

Thus even if AGW is happening, the arguments for policy measures still don’t reach first base. The warmists still haven't established - haven't even begun to consider - whether the relevant resources would not be more economically employed to better effect satisfying the relevant human wants (in the widest possible sense including values of ecosystems etc.,) in the absence of such policy measures, and how they know.

Peter Hume: "The point is, there is no ideological inversion, in which the supposed left wing party is defending the private, and the supposed right wing party is defending the public control of the means of production."

The inversion was in the way they went about controling it. It is pretty straight forward. Even my old sparring partner, Horus, doesn't deny it exists. As you can probably tell from his tone, I am sure he would love to be able to do so. Yet you can't acknowledge it. That's just weird.

Peter Hume: "it’s not “delusional” to suggest that they’re trying to politically control the world’s economy and the ecology."

The delusion is to think there is a single world government doing the controling. It is delusional to think an agreement free countries voluntarily enter and can later choose to withdraw from is a form of tyrannical government.

Peter Hume: "But the issue is whether coercion is justified for no other reason than that ”the majority” are (assumed to be) in favour of it."

If you mean justified in some moral sense, then we have another philosophical argument. I don't like such arguments as I think they are essentially meaningless, as in asking how many angles fit in the head of a pin.

If you are asking whether such agreements are in general in everybodies best interests, they usually are otherwise most people would not agree with them. For example, over the past few decades we have had international agreements draw up to try and protect fish stocks. In the short term these were vociferously fraught by the people they most effected, the fisherman as it drove many out of the industry. Nonetheless without the agreements it is possible fisherman around the world might end up like the former Canadian cod fishing fleet. Which is to say, all doing something entirely as there are no cod left to fish.

CO2 and global fisheries are two examples of one situation where your "let everybody do their own thing" style of government fails. That is anywhere the tragedy of the commons applies.

Even if we assume AGW is real, it still doesn’t follow that political action is warranted as a solution, even if we are faced with a ‘tragedy of the commons’ situation.

The original intent of the author of ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’ was to show how bad it was that private property had degraded the common resource. It was soon realized however that the same general problem inhered in holding resources in common. As Aristotle said “The property of all is the property of none.” People look after their own property better than they look after public property.

A classic example was the near extinction of the American buffalo on common property in the nineteenth century, at the same time as the same lands were filled up with privately-owned cattle, which are, biologically, virtually the same animal. As stark as these examples are, people are still making the same environmentally destructive mistakes today. The worst offenders are the environmentalists with their rampant romantic Rousseauian sentiments, their dreams of wilderness owned by no-one.

Before we rush to the conclusion that management of resources by way of private property has failed, we need to remember that there was a time when even land was not subject to private property. If we followed the line of reasoning of the statists, therefore land should have been put under public ownership, and the scarcity of resources should have been regulated by central government bureaucracies developing a plan for the management of the entire resource viewed as a whole. Advised by technical experts, they would then assign arbitrary values to particular resources. People could fit in with this grand plan by making an application for permission to use a particular piece of land for a particular purpose, and the whole scheme would be backed up by a mountain of rules and procedures, and fines, police, magistrates and prisons. The more ‘free market’ systems would graciously permit trading in the permits, but only on the basis of the arbitrary values that the state had originally assigned to the factors of production.

If we had done that, we would have starved to death by the millions. The reason we know this, is because the socialists have just tried it! In the last hundred years, they killed over a hundred million people, and they’re still starving them to death right now in North Korea.

Yet the interventionists just never seem to get it. Socialism doesn’t work! It’s not a good idea in theory, with a few technical problems in the implementation, as the socialists seem to think. It doesn’t have presumptive moral superiority. The reason it doesn’t work in practice is because it’s wrong in theory, and we need to recognize that, not continually repeat the same mistaken assumptions of governmental omnipotence every time we meet a resource-use problem.

In proceeding to common ownership, we must hasten slowly, and firstly eliminate the theoretical possibility that government is not itself already doing something to contribute to or cause the problem in the first place, and then eliminate that. (As it turns out, AGW is itself entirely an artefact of the government funding of science, media, industry, schooling and politics. There is no evidence for AGW, and the entire claim is riddled with vested interests, corruption, and fraud. We’re ignoring that fact, but we must not forget the idea of freedom, on which our lives and civilization depend.)

But, you might say, how could private property be established in air? Land stays still (mostly).

However even assuming AGW, we still have not arrived at the valid conclusion that the solution is political action to control the air. The private property solution doesn’t need to control the air, it needs to satisfy human wants, and remove human dissatisfactions, arising from climate change.

We already satisfy human wants because of climate now, by making walls, and roofs, and dykes, and clothes, and hats, and air-con, and so on.

The warmists still haven’t got to first base in showing that they even understand what they would need to prove in order to have a rational discussion about the advantages of their proposals exceeding the disadvantages.

Peter Hume: "The warmists still haven’t got to first base in showing that they even understand what they would need to prove in order to have a rational discussion about the advantages of their proposals exceeding the disadvantages."

If your last two posts are an illustration of what you think "understanding" or "rational discussion" are, then you are probably right. I could not pick up a single thread of logic from your post. Even facts you quote seem unrelated (eg the ETS and North Korea), wrong (the government doesn't set the price in an ETS, they set the number of permits available), or just utterly warped (the tragedy of the commons was really about the evils of private ownership - really?).

Peter Hume: "We already satisfy human wants because of climate now, by making walls, and roofs, and dykes, and clothes, and hats, and air-con, and so on."

Even the simplest things seem to escape you. The things you list are our wants now. But AGW is not about now. The claim is if the climate does what is predicted we won't be able to satisfy our wants in the future. In effect all solutions to AGW put an artificial price on CO2 now to reflect the damage it will do to our ability to satisfy our wants in the future. It is not like our kids in 50 years time can time travel back to us, and say "hey, the bottom 1/2 of Australia is now desert, and food prices have gone through the roof - here is the bill for the price difference", and we say in response, "jezzz, we don't want to pay that, it is cheaper to stop emitting CO2".

Common sense tells us the world doesn't work that way Peter. And most people aren't as happy as you seem to be at sacrificing common sense on the altar of some warped ideology. As I said, your words have the ring of an ideological text such as the Bible, the Koran and Mao's little red book. Whatever they are, they aren't reasoned argument.

All your arguments resolve into:
a) assuming what is in issue;
b) personal argument;
and are thus only different species of the genus fallacy.

Having assumed AGW, you then proceed straight to assuming that the solution to this supposed problem is governmental action. But you don’t establish why – you just assume it. When it’s questioned, your reply is to the effect that it’s “common sense”; and that it is a “totally warped ideology” to point out that you haven’t justified jumping to the conclusion that the remedy for this assumed problem is governmental control of the climate by way of governmental control of carbon dioxide. Even if we assume AGW, the fact that human wants would, ex hypothesi, remain unsatisfied, is no more a self-sufficient or self-evidence justification of governmental action than is the fact of human wants in any other case.

QED

Peter Hume: "Having assumed AGW, you then proceed straight to assuming that the solution to this supposed problem is governmental action. But you don’t establish why – you just assume it."

Oh for god's sake, I didn't assume it. Try reading my initial post that started this thread.

I said the two sides of politics say they have polices for addressing AGW / climate change. That is a fact, not an assumption. Those two policies are very different. Another fact. Relatively speaking, the Labour solution is more of a free market one and Liberal solution is decidedly less so. This is my evaluation, but it seems uncontentious. Apart from you, no one here disagrees. Given the fact that Liberals market themselves as the champions of the free market and Labour doesn't this means there has been an idealogical inversion.

There are no assumptions in that logic, Peter.

Peter Hume: "Even if we assume AGW, the fact that human wants would, ex hypothesi, remain unsatisfied, is no more a self-sufficient or self-evidence justification of governmental action than is the fact of human wants in any other case."

Absolute rubbish. We all have wants that are unsatisfied. Often they conflict: should we spend that money on an ice cream now, or save it for a holiday later. The two wants that conflict with AGW is wanting cheap energy now, versus having a liveable planet in 100 years time. You are deliberately ignoring the latter.

I guess it is because you can't think of a way to fix it without government intervention, so to admit it would undermine your vision of Utopia. The communists had the same problem with their predictions of the fall of capitalism while the west went from strength to strength. Like you, their solution was to deny or ignore it. That seems to be the way all ideologues handle inconvenient truths.

What rstuart says ... hear, hear!