Why is the government taxing carbon without simultaneously discouraging consumption?
Squeers,
Because this Govt is made up of lawyers & many other inadequate individuals with not an ounce of pragmatism or compassion.

Squeers,

"....they want to cut emissions "via" consumption. How does that work!....

- and the answer to that as we all know is that it doesn't. But they're not concerned at all about cutting emissions because that would entail curtailing growth.

Joseph Pearce in "Small is Still Beautiful" put it like this:
"The logical absurdity of the "more-onic" approach is that according to GNP-linked measurements of growth, a person who economises behaves uneconomically. He is bad for business. One could be forgiven for believing that the real had become surreal or that sense had become nonsense. The world of economics resembles a Mad Hatter's tea party where all the crockery is smashed at the end of festivities so that economy can be boosted by the necessity of buying a whole new tea-set."

So you see, Squeers, we've contrived our own Wonderland. Ordinary logic is apparently not applicable where the question of economic growth is concerned

Great quote, Poirot.

Individual, do you seriously blame "this" government? So the Libs are going to preside over cuts in consumption are they? Anyway, as I've often said here, governments precisely mirror us, en masse.

Talking of his own country colonising the world, Fredric Jameson says, "...This is consumerism as such, the very linchpin of our economic system, and also the mode of daily life in which our mass culture and entertainment industries train us ceaselessly day after day, in an image and media barrage quite unparalleled in history. Since the discrediting of socialism by the collapse of Russian communism, only religious fundamentalism has seemed to offer an alternative way of life--let us not, heaven help us, call it a lifestyle--to American consumerism".

Actually, I don't see fundamentalism as an "alternative", it's just another "mode" of consumption.

I suspect most OLOers don't absorb as much of this barrage as most people, so Jameson might sound hyperbolic. But look around. Walk down a suburban street at night and see all the curtains lit by the half-light of screens. Watch how sitcoms have evolved--does anyone watch Two and a half Men--not in sophistication, but explicit content in an ever-renewed effort to amuse. Whatever sells. I'm not being a prude, but observing the erosion of standards and values, whatever their failings were. Look how we've moved along from the comparative innocence of Benny Hill's tits and bums, to the scandalous humour of Little Britain. I wonder if they'll do a version of the royal wedding (hope so!)?
A main reason, in my view, that we don't know our neighbours, is the evenings are vouchsafed for personal, passive consumption, the sacred reward for our "labours" that we've been trained to cherish.

The Carbon tax is taxation of the rich and powerful to fund the poor to enable the poor to use more power and products produced by carbon emmissions; is a socialist Robin Hood tax. It does nothing to reduce carbon, it is just a transfence of money from one section of the population to another. It is a socialist agenda!

Ooh pelican you know you get me excited when you use words like 'incentivization'.

'there is nothing 'new' in ideology.'

You're not the first to think that everything has been thought before.

I'll come up with one on the back of a postcard by the end of the day. Doesn't mean it will work though.

'Human beings have come to expect more in the way of material goods and we live primarily in an immediate gratification society. No longer hanging onto the old uni furniture for years but needing to make our way down to Freedom Furniture, Ikea or Domayne to fit out the house just so'

Ending is better than mending. That Huxley was on the money. We even truly do have the government encouraging us to buy stuff to support our society. The economy is our new god. Nothing has any value unless you put a dollar figure on it. I'd love to see the calculations that were made when they tell us how much binge drinking costs the economy, or depression. I think the economy creates these things not the other way around.

You must think though, that the invention of ebay has brought back hand-me-downs. The furniture does get distributed to the poor in the end for very cheap prices, and has a much longer life cycle. Also council pick-up gets picked up by pikeys like myself. Apparently that's illegal I just heard too. Bloody councils claim that it's their land and the rubbish is left for them. See, baby steps.

Squeers,

It is the "passivity" of consumption that defines our apparent inability to think outside the square in consumer society.

It's as if we have indulged in a deliberate act of regression. so that in modern consumer society where the media is concerned, we are happy to clamber into our high-chairs every evening and be spoon-fed various vapid and glutinous offerings - and we like it!

Considering that humans are such a social being, it is noteworthy that we have for some reason reached a point where we're happy to settle for this passive gruel.

Descartes would have phrased things differently today:

"I sit and passively absorb, therefore I am."