The Political Thread

[The Legendary Shark]

Bringing back re-usable glass containers is a good idea from a societal and environmental standpoint. However, the oil and plastics corporations make oodles of money out of throwaway containers - more than enough to justify paying lobbyists to convince key MPs that glass milk bottles are dirty, dangerous, expensive and antiquated carriers of disease while plastic is clean, safe, cheap, modern and sterile.

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From a global economic point of view plastics are vital to the debt illusion. For precisely the same reasons as I outlined in my earlier "Chopping Tax" post, plastic has never been so abundant or so expensive (just like the oil from which it is derived) and to curtail its use would impact on tax revenues, thereby diminishing the government's borrowing power.

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Everything comes back to the money supply - fix that first and we've got a good chance of fixing a whole bunch of problems like this one.

[Theblazeuk]

Really long post

In theory Carbon Taxes may be about saving the planet, and so are they enthusiastically touted by cash-strapped governments all over the world, but in practice they are all about making a profit. This is why I'm totally opposed to all taxes in their current form - because they make everyone work harder and consume more resources to pay back that interest. That's wasted work, wasted resources, wasted time - all to pay private banks for the privilege of using money they created out of nothing. It's monstrous.

Heh, ok... I will try to be clearer. I am not sure I am managing to get what I am confused about across to you My basic argument is: Flaws in carbon tax schemes (and your wider point about taxation in general) do not have anything to say about the implausibility of man-made climate change.

To illustrate the point badly, whether or not you think the traffic lights change because you press the button at the traffic lights or because they are programmed to do so anyway, the light still changes.

In less cackhanded allegorical terms, the issue of climate change's scientific basis is entirely removed from whether economic measures such as carbon taxes are a practical means of dealing with it. Carbon taxes are predicated on climate change but climate change is not predicated on carbon taxes.

I think almost everyone who is arguing the point would agree that the financial system is ****ed, particularly in how the basic concept of a carbon tax stimulating greener approaches is being undermined by the usual spreadsheet balancing approach (or in other words how moving numbers around fails to actually change things in the physical world) to problems.

[The Legendary Shark]

For the purposes of taxation it doesn't matter whether MMCC is real or not - the government taxes hundreds of unreal things (for example, does not having a driving license affect one's skill as a driver or does paying for a passport affect one's ability to physically move through space?).

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My point was not that Carbon Taxes drive or don't drive, prove or disprove MMCC. My point was that Carbon Taxes in their present form are worsening the situation in a number of ways - including (if it's true, which I am not yet prepared to concede) Man Made Climate Change.

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So I guess we were really on the same page, or at least adjacent pages, after all.

[JPMaybe]

And yet we live on an island made of fucking coal. Were it not for the political baggage attached to coal mining, the Powers-that-Be would be all over new technologies like this.

The blog you linked to there is an awful rightwing libertarian shitpile and I'd take anything on it with a pinch of salt-"without burning" especially is a bit of a misnomer, given you're still reacting carbon and oxygen and making carbon dioxide.  That said, the technology itself looks promising- there's an interesting book on the technicalities here.  The key point I think is that you've still got to sequester that carbon somewhere that you can be sure it's not going to get out, otherwise you're just as fucked as if you'd just burnt it in the first place (apparently higher efficiency of this technology aside).

[Theblazeuk]

So I guess we were really on the same page, or at least adjacent pages, after all.

Well almost...

Climate change is a fact. Climate change is man's fault? Bollocks.

[The Legendary Shark]

Okay then - same page, different book; how's that? :-D

[Professor Bear]

I was just reading an article about Bitcoin - a totally made-up imaginary currency on the internet that is now worth actual money despite being conjured out of the ether - and immediately thought of poor Sharky's blood pressure.

[The Legendary Shark]

BitCoin is great. It's currency created by the people and cannot be controlled by the central banks. BitCoin and the plethora of other publically issued and controlled currencies are the way forward - at least until we realise that we don't really need money at all.

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"The economics of the future are somewhat different. We no longer work for personal profit; we work to better ourselves." Words to aspire to, what?

[Mikey]

My point was not that Carbon Taxes drive or don't drive, prove or disprove MMCC. My point was that Carbon Taxes in their present form are worsening the situation in a number of ways - including (if it's true, which I am not yet prepared to concede) Man Made Climate Change.

You've lost me a bit. If I understand it correctly, overall the thrust of what you're saying is that the anthropogenic contribution to a warming climate was made up so that a new tax could be imposed. So you don't like a tax making something that you don't accept worse? Think you're hitting the wood there!

And something else I meant to mention earlier - you said further up the thread that you accept the Greenhouse Affect. What do you understand that to be?

M.

[TordelBack]

While this is all quite correct it's very easy to criticise 'the rich' if you aren't one of them.

Well I hate to break it to you, but by most criteria the rich are us.  Rosling uses a simple 7-fold division of wealth, 1 group for each billion, and all of us here are in group 1 or 2 (and I've been out of regular work for 2 years, own virtually nothing and owe more money than I've ever seen: still in the top quarter of the world's population).  The super-rich are another matter, but it's you an me that account for over 50% of the world's energy usage. 

For example - what's the point of a Ferrari? Should we judge the rich for buying them or should we just expect the company to stop making them - or to start making electric ones?

This is the question at the heart of the phrase 'enlightened self-interest'.  What do we value in this life?  Is the carrot in this fake-capitalist society the only one worth having?  What and who are we prepared to sacrifice to get it?   And while I know you only mean it as an illustration, it's not really Ferraris that are the problem: it's unnecessary flights, it's unnecessary transport of goods to minimise costs when equivalents are available locally, it's (as TLS mentions) making new crap when old crap could be used instead. 

There'll be 2 billion more people living in Africa at the end of this century, that's way more than live there now. How is the current distribution of resources and consumption going to work in the face of that reality?  What does that mean for the world of 2100?  These are questions we need to ask ourselves, questions more important to our lives and our fellows' lives than can I afford the new iPhone.

[TordelBack]

Lawks, I've gone off on one again.  Please ignore, long day.

[Jim_Campbell]

I was just reading an article about Bitcoin - a totally made-up imaginary currency on the internet that is now worth actual money despite being conjured out of the ether - and immediately thought of poor Sharky's blood pressure.

All currency is imaginary. In that respect, it's quite miraculous.

Cheers

Jim

[JOE SOAP]

I was just reading an article about Bitcoin - a totally made-up imaginary currency on the internet that is now worth actual money despite being conjured out of the ether

All fiat currency is made up or conjured out of the ether unless it's tied to the flux of something that's actually worth something or has recognisable value -none of our money is- and Bitcoin is no different.

[Dandontdare]

BitCoin is great. It's currency created by the people and cannot be controlled by the central banks.

Oh don't worry, they'll find a  way.

Wish I'd bought some bitcoins as when they first came out though:  http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2013/oct/29/bitcoin-forgotten-currency-norway-oslo-home

[The Legendary Shark]

Not made up, exactly. Certain evidence, research and opinion was seized upon to present a 'solution' to the global phenomena of climate change.  The mantra of the architects of this scheme is 'never let a good crisis go to waste' and what could be a bigger crisis than Global Warming (as it was first trumpeted)?

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In Global Warming was an opportunity to cash-in on this 'crisis' irrespective of how great or small is the effect of human activity on the climate. That the climate changes over time is undeniable - in a dynamic system like the Earth's atmosphere, which envelopes a geologically dynamic planet orbiting a dynamic star in a dynamic galaxy, how could it not change?

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You can't tax the atmosphere or the sun or the galaxy, you can only tax people - so you have to emphasise the view that this is all our fault and that only we can fix it and that the only way to fix it is to tax carbon, because CO2 is one of the greenhouse gases and humans belch out clouds of the stuff. CO2 emissions are also something that can be measured, predicted, quantified and controlled - providing some lovely graphs to point at in UN briefing rooms. Also, if you can quantify something you can attach a value to it - which is where carbon trading comes in (which leads me to the stock market and a whole other can of worms I think I'll leave unopened - for sanity's sake).

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By drilling down to and focusing almost solely on the CO2 aspect, irrespective of its relevance or level of relevance in the overall situation, we have become almost blinkered to the wider issues concerning our stewardship of this world.

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Whether it be a conspiracy to brainwash a planet by a shadowy cabal of shape-shifting alien lizards, a tyrannical Master Plan by hidden Nazis to enslave every human being with debt, a corporate backroom-nod-and-wink arrangement between greedy corporate toads or just incompetent politicians desperate to be seen to be doing something - or some hellish combination of all of the above - Carbon Taxes are not the answer and, no matter which side of the MMCC argument one takes, are positively toxic.

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Imagine that tomorrow Professor Unquestionable turns up with some spectacularly impressive graphs, spreadsheets and Powerpoint presentations proving, even to a silly old git like me, that man's CO2 emissions were definitely and completely to blame for climate change and that the Carbon Tax is the only way to curb our emissions.

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Convinced, the world's population cuts its emissions by 50% in a year. Revenue from carbon taxes plummets right when it's needed most. Just because emissions have been halved that doesn't mean the problem's fixed.

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So, with all these debts to repay, tax revenue at an all-time low and carbon being so expensive to burn - where's the money going to come from to fund the projects we should already be on with? Projects like some proper inland water-management schemes. Every year it seems to piss down hard enough somewhere to wash people's lives away - and how hard would it be with today's technologies to fix stuff like that? Half of Holland used to be in the North Sea, for flip's sake - we can't stop a few housing estates from flooding? Use some of those abandoned coal mines as artificial aquifers, maybe? Build a sea wall or two? But no - the artificial debt must be repaid first.

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So the answer to your question is that my views on MMCC and the Carbon Tax are only superficially linked. My questioning of MMCC and my opposition to Carbon Taxes (under the current system) are separate arguments in their own right.

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And the Greenhouse Effect (as I understand it and without recourse to Uncle Google) is when solar (and geothermal, I think) radiation is inhibited from radiating out into space by certain gases in the atmosphere such as water vapour. This is why cloudy nights are generally warmer than clear ones, because the cloud layer traps and reflects a lot of the heat soaked up by the ground during the day.

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On Venus, the atmosphere is thick with sulphuric acid clouds and CO2 - so thick that traps a lot more heat than the Earth's atmosphere, giving it a virtually constant temperature on both lit and unlit parts of the planet.

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Conversely, as there is virtually no atmosphere on the Moon, no gases, very little solar radiation is trapped, leading to massive temperature differentials between areas of sunlight and shade.

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How's that? Do I get the CSE?