Arjay and Under One God (UOG)
I know you feel emotional about the Carbon Tax but can we at last agree that global warming science is different to government policies? I'm sure we've discussed this before, but you both really sound like you've been taken for a ride by the Denialists. There are 160 well known climate MYTHS, and you've both just promoted them. Are you qualified climatologists to make these pronouncements from on high?

It's not just the IPCC and their special panels of expertise all coming together for a synthesis report. No way. It's every decent scientific organisation and National Academy of Science on the planet!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_opinion_on_climate_change

So what I'm often left wondering is which is scarier; the true science of global warming or the Denialist belief that the whole world's science community has been had by some enormous, elaborate conspiracy? Seriously, do you both just think you woke up one day with Phd's in climatology? You know better than the climatologists and every climate department in every scientific establishment on the PLANET!? How on earth did you become persuaded of this? Who is running this conspiracy? And if you stopped inhabiting paranoid Denialist websites in the middle of the night, and just concentrated on living, nice meals, and getting a good night's sleep, don't you think a little balance and common sense might return to your perspective?

Eclipse Now,just more adhominem from those who who do not pay respect to the true scientific method.Dr David Evans is a true scientist and the imperical evidence as well as the every day experiences tell us the CO2 is not the demon portrayed by the IPCC.

Your scam ahs been layed bare and it is time to fess up to the reality.

Arjay, not wanting to get offside with a good OLO mate, but there seems to be something fundamentally contradictory in what you are saying.

You’re experimenting with hydrogen and espousing it as an excellent energy source. That’s great.

But you are fundamentally against the carbon tax.

Isn’t the purpose of the carbon tax strategy to get a whole lot more effort put into this sort of alternative energy source.... in order to reduce fossil fuel usage just a little and thus reduce emissions just a tad?

Why do you think the carbon tax is the pressing issue of the moment?

I don’t get it. It is so piffling. Economic growth will continue just the same. The effects will be minimal. Basically I reckon that the big-business pro-growth-forever lobby has had a huge win with this carbon tax thing. Now they and the Gillard government can be seen to be a little bit green, with a slight change of course, while essentially powering on in the same old grossly unsustainable manner.

I would have thought that your camp would be very happy with the outcome, Arjay. Afterall, the tax could have been much greater and it could have easily included petrol and diesel. And if the government was serious about the whole deal, they would have been looking at least at a 25% cut by 2020 instead of the ridiculous 5%.

Arjay,
Dr David Evans might be a true scientist. There are many "true scientists" who disagree with global warming. But what is he a true scientist of? Geology, like the infamous Ian Plimer? Has he had any work reported in the climate peer-review literature?

Again — when it comes to *peer reviewed* climate literature, there isn't one National Academy of Science that disagrees with the AGW position. So tell me, why hasn't Dr David Evans convinced the NAS that it's all bunk? Precisely because of the NAS respect for the TRUE peer-reviewed process that analyses ALL the factors and doesn't just rip them out of context, cherry-pick, and attack straw-men.

So once again, rather than attacking *me* for not respecting the 'true scientific method' why don't you Denialists tell us why the NAS's of the world aren't all respecting the 'true scientific method'. Seriously, do you know how that sounds? "There are Aliens at Area51 — if you'll just LOOK at the evidence and read the dozen websites I've selected for you and be prepared to believe the evidence for yourself!" Um, no. The data has to be verified and analysed by the proper authorities and sources. I'm not going to just believe something because it is on some cooky website.

In the meantime, Ludwig's hit on a point. Not only is this little piece of paper not going to do very much while nuclear power remains illegal in this country, but it can be reversed at a moment's notice. Say, when oil prices climb even higher because of peak oil. After all, rather than just NATIONALIZING energy and building the nukes, Labor have applied a Carbon Tax as a free-market mechanism. They just want the price of coal a little bit higher and then let the market decide. It's not like the government is going to do anything *bold* and make an actual decision on how to get off coal for once!

I note that none of the people here bothered to engage with Saul Eslake's excellent articles on the carbon tax proposal except Arjay and his contribution was the usual "it's all imaginary, why are we bothering", which may or may not be true, but it doesn;t add to the debate at this late stage.

Basically, Eslake is in favour of some carbon-reduction scheme, but he's quite a lot less happy with the idea of a financial derivative instrument as the means for achieving it. I agree.

I made the comparison between greenhouse pollutants and other forms of waste. We don't have a "toxic liquid waste" trading scheme, or a "municipal garbage trading scheme", but we do have lots of both of these waste streams. Because the cost of sequestering such waste is high, businesses pay lots of money to other businesses to handle the disposal on their behalf. Because this costs lots of money, they look for ways to reduce, reuse, recycle and so less waste is produced and useful things begin to be made from what used to be considered fit only for landfill.

Why on earth would the same thing not work for greenhouse pollutants, including but not limited to carbon? Make the release of such pollutants a costly exercise by making laws that say you musn't do it, just as waste disposal was fostered by making laws that said a business wasn't simply allowed to pile it up in a corner of the yard. Soon enough some enterprising firm will decide that paying all this money to throw useful stuff away isn't very clever and voila! we have a new industry.

Instead of that simple approach we have created a massive cashflow product for financial traders with no real incentive for anyone to do anything but pass the buck around in circles.

As Eslake said :"I'd like to hope (but I can't be sure) that regulations [will prevent misuse by the financia markets]". Great scheme...

I'm tempted to agree. Make nukes legal and we'll have powerful abundant clean energy 24/7 (unlike wind and solar). Then companies can be set up to build today's Gen3 AP1000 complete with passive-safety.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AP1000

But part of me says just nationalise energy and build the beasts now! Enough already with the farting around! Then when the Gen4 S-PRISM arrives in 20 to 15 years, we'll have enough nuclear waste from the AP1000's to feed into the S-PRISM's. Then we can run the world for 500 years just on today's existing nuclear waste, let alone any new waste we might have to burn from all the new AP1000's I hope we get stuck into building.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S-PRISM

(The potential to run the world for half a millennium has the additional side effect of turning nuclear waste into a resource worth $30 trillion dollars! Australia should volunteer to 'store' the world's nuclear waste while we get busy building our own S-PRISM's. Then when we show them how it's done, we can sell both the S-PRISM's and nuclear waste back to them at an enormous profit! Say it with me.... $30 TRILLION dollars! That's $30 thousand billion dollars!)