Individual:
"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!"

You and Runner have gotta be related?

I wish you were right, but I can assure you the globalisation agenda has nothing to do with socialism, and everything to do with harnessing the consumption of the whole planet for the capitalists.

Squeers is absolutely correct. The only ecologically sustainable solution to AGW is for consumption to be reduced radically, but that isn't going to happen voluntarily. Unfortunately, the logic of capitalism demands ever-expanding markets, and I can't see the big emitters and polluters reducing their output of their own volition.

The Carbon Tax will only be useful as a means to introducing a Carbon market, itself only useful while the world remains locked into a global capitalist economic system, under which cost is the only disincentive to exponentially increasing exploitation, pollution and emissions.

Of course, the irony is that none of these half-measures is likely to achieve much in the way of AGW amelioration. That won't happen until the whole house of cards collapses, and our descendants have no choice but to live in the ways that Squeers envisages.

Socialism by Stealth!

(In loving memory of Our Col.)

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

Hahahahaha

The only way that rampant over-consumption could be cut is for the masses to voluntarily withhold their participation - and that isn't going to happen (Well, not that I can envisage.) Governments and corporate interests will never be catalysts for such a movement.

We are all aboard a hurtling train and one day it is going to run out of track....

I also love Poirot's revision of Descartes' cogito ergo sum, and you brought a tear to my eye conjuring dear old Col up like that, Houellebecq :(.

morganzola,
I s'pose we have to acknowledge the spurious logic behind the tax (especially as it is set to increase) in that it is meant to drive innovation in clean technology. But this doesn't alter the fact that it uses growth markets to capitalise the R&D, hence the original problem of burgeoning and unwieldy populations, environmental degradation and resource depletion are exacerbated. The whole ponderous process must finally come to a point of collapse. And herein lies the real conspiracy imo; wholesale attrition is factored into this mode of development. It would be naive to imagine the world's think tanks and power-elites see current and growing populations as sustainable, or even desirable! Don't forget a central tenet of liberalism is "anti-social". We're merely the cattle from which they draw their wealth; "natural" attrition, or even a "humane" cull due to exigency, would be easily rationalised. There's too much momentum in population growth for it to be curtailed via any other means than collapse. In fact collapse is a necessary component of this blind strategy for technological transcendence--our consumptive gift to posterity.

I suspect Australia will be among the lucky countries again, though. I'd like to say Australia should initiate a coalition of countries--New Zealand would join--that opted out of this mad rush over the cliff, but the process is already unstoppable I suspect, so it would be a futile gesture. In any case Australia is relatively isolated--especially its bottom half in a warming world--and would be well-placed, in the aftermath, to exploit the new technologies that were developed before the fall.
The Romans bequeathed their technologies and so shall we.