CSIRO bid to gag emissions trading scheme policy attack
THE nation’s peak science agency has tried to gag the publication of a paper by one of its senior environmental economists attacking the Rudd government’s climate change policies.
The paper, by the CSIRO’s Clive Spash, argues the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme is an ineffective way to cut emissions, and instead direct legislation or a tax on carbon is needed.
The paper was accepted for publication by the journal New Political Economy after being internationally peer-reviewed.
But Dr Spash told the Australia New Zealand Society for Ecological Economics conference that the CSIRO had since June tried to block its publication.
In the paper, Dr Spash argues the economic theory underpinning emissions trading schemes is “far removed” from the reality of permit markets. “While carbon trading and offset schemes seem set to spread, they so far appear ineffective in terms of actually reducing GHGs (greenhouse gases),” he says. “Despite this apparent failure, ETS remain politically popular amongst the industrialised polluters.
“The public appearance is that action is being undertaken. The reality is that GHGs are increasing and society is avoiding the need for substantive proposals to address the problem of behavioural and structural change.”
Dr Spash said trading schemes did not efficiently allocate emission cuts because their design was manipulated by vested interests. For example, in Australia, large polluters would be compensated with free permits while smaller, more competitive firms would have to buy theirs at auction. The schemes were also flawed because: global warming was caused by gases other than carbon; emissions were difficult to measure; carbon offsets bought from other countries were of dubious value; and the schemes “crowded out” voluntary action by individuals. He concludes that more direct measures, such as a carbon tax, regulations or new infrastructure would be simpler, more effective and less open to manipulation.
Dr Spash could not be contacted by The Australian.
However, his presentation to the ANZSEE conference in Darwin last Wednesday stated: “The CSIRO is currently maintaining they have the right to ban the written version of this paper from publication by myself as a representative of the organisation and by myself as a private citizen.”
Dr Spash said CSIRO managers had written to the journal’s editor demanding the paper not be published.
CSIRO spokesman Huw Morgan said the publication of Dr Spash’s paper was an internal matter and was being reviewed by the chief executive’s office.
Read the complete article here at the Australian
Roger Pielke Jr. has an interesting discussion of it also, with some conclusions that blow CSIRO’s defense out of the water.
How could you talk about CSIRO and not post this!
Peter Spear (21:39:10) :
Brilliant – never seen it. I was expecting it to be to the YMCA tune from the Village People but this was just as good.
Gail Combs (12:44:29) :
First I am a Capitalist not a Marxist, it is Corporatism I hate.
I’m a vegetarian it’s just I like eating meat. Corporatism is capitalism. Cooperative pooling of spare capital is the essence of capitalism. You may not be a Marxist and in this I grant I may have been rash in my assesment but you are a very confused person.
You make the mistake most people make in thinking banks and corporations are pro-capitalism, they are not.
You do not know what capitalism is and this is why you make these ridicules disjointed statements.
From your link:-
This is a truly warped assessment. The aim of most legislation in this regard is to acknowledge that the government does not have the resources to oversee the safety aspects of all goods produced for public consumption. As such it is for producers to formulate a best practice frame work for each industry and present their findings to the regulatory authorities so that they can then ensure that all players abide by the guidelines.
It does not “constitute a cost-prohibitive barrier for small players to remain in business” unless you want you baker to mix his dough in a washed out cement mixer.
The rest of your post is just a confused mass of diatribe and has nothing to do with science. You have a scatter gun approach to the various complexities of society and you will achieve nothing with long lists of things you think are unjust but have no understanding of the intricate nature of life much less any formative remedies.
Believe me I have intimate knowledge of the impact of regulations on business. I have written entire manuals for the drug industry, I have seen the effects of regulations first hand when they increased the cost of doing business and put the plant I worked for in financial straits. I have seen regulations drive a number of my friends who operated small businesses bankrupt. Regulations are a weapon used by multinational cartels to create a no competition monopoly.
This is what the UN (FAO) had to say about HACCP driving small businesses into bankruptcy:
“HACCP rules mandated across an industry will have different impacts on the industry, depending on the market structure of the industry. In general, HACCP rules will likely impose higher costs on small firms than on large firms. An example of this is provided by estimates of market structure change on the United States meat and poultry slaughter and processing industry predicted to result from HACCP. Industry leaders predict that the regulation will drive small producers out of business. The actual effects on small producers will depend on the cost disadvantage faced by small firms, and the degree to which small plants can raise prices in the event they face a cost disadvantage. It will also depend on the ability of small plants to occupy small market niches that allow them to pass along higher product costs. For the United States meat and poultry industry, economists predict that if small producers do exit the industry, the pattern will be an increase in the rate of exits and decrease in the rate of entries” http://www.fao.org/DOCREP/003/X0465E/X0465E08.htm
This is what the European Union Committee has planned for Poland:
“Farmers stand in the way of land acquisitions; so they are best removed. Corporations thus join with the EU in seeing through their common goals and set about intensively lobbying national government to get the right regulatory conditions to make their kill…
“After clearing her throat and leaning slowly forward, the chair-lady said: “I don’t think you understand what EU policy is…To do this it will be necessary to shift around one million farmers off the land and encourage them to take city and service industry jobs…
There in a nutshell you have the whole tragic story of the clinically instigated demise of European farming over the past three decades. We protested that with unemployment running at 20 percent how would one provide jobs for another million farmers dumped on the streets of Warsaw? This was greeted with a stony silence, eventually broken by a lady from Portugal, who rather quietly remarked that since Portugal joined the European Union, 60 percent of small farmers had already left the land. “The European Union is simply not interested in small farms,” she said.
…That ’game’ was all too familiar to me. Spend hours out of your working day filling in endless forms, filing maps and measuring every last inch of your fields, tracks and farmsteads; applying for ‘passports’ for your cattle and ear tags for your sheep and pigs; re-siting the slurry pit and putting stainless steel and washable tiles on the dairy walls; becoming versed in HASAP hygiene and sanitary rules and applying them where any food processing was to take place; and living under the threat of convictions and fines should one put a finger out of place or be late in supplying some official details” http://thebovine.wordpress.com/2009/05/11/clearance-of-polish-peasant-farmers-makes-way-for-the-smithfields-of-this-world-will-these-e-u-methods-be-coming-soon-to-a-country-near-you/
…The sheer amount of paperwork and restrictions on what farmers can do is a problem – it takes up around 60 per cent of Mr Lawton’s time. “It’s difficult particularly for us family farms who don’t have a huge staff for administration,” he said
.http://www.thisisswindon.co.uk/display.var.2166378.0.tough_times_for_the_farmers.php
“This is a truly warped assessment. The aim of most legislation in this regard is to acknowledge that the government does not have the resources to oversee the safety aspects of all goods produced for public consumption.” MartinGAtkins
No that is a real assessment based on 25 years of experience of uncovering liars and cheats in industry. I can compare quality before and after the implementation of ISO. I have been FIRED four times for exposing industry malpractice. The last was connected to three airline crashes due to the cheating going on in the plant I worked for who made aircraft engine parts. The time before was connected to gross negligence resulting in an explosion and fire. I was fired three day before that for going to the president of the company with my evidence and trying to get him to authorize the needed maintainance.
In 1987 the methods used by Deming and the other leaders were quantified as a set of quality manufacturing standards called ISO 9000. I was one of the first to get training in ISO 9000 here in the USA. I was impressed by the first half of the presentation and during break started discussing what I had learned with my seat-mate. He was not at all impressed. He was originally from Russia, and he told me that the Soviet Union had used the same kind of system for years, and that it generated paperwork, not quality. Twenty years later I, along with other quality professionals, agree with him. That assessment is based on years of real life experience on the plant floor.
…”I’m wondering if there might be a silent majority of Quality [magazine] readers out there on the topic of ISO 9000. The response to my July editorial, “Eliminate ISO 9000?,” was the heaviest that we have received in some time…What surprised me is that the July editorial elicited no ardent rebuttals in defense of ISO 9000…” http://www.qualitymag.com/Articles/Letters_From_the_Editor/65730ee7f4c38010VgnVCM100000f932a8c0
Bean counters, looking only for immediate additional profit, found some of the concepts of ISO 9000 very attractive:
1.Do not duplicate effort by repeating testing that’s already been done. This means that incoming inspection can be eliminated, saving some labor.
2.Develop a relationship with a single source instead of wasting resources on qualifying several sources
3.Use “Just In Time” Since the source is pre-qualified, the raw materials can arrive on the same day as needed, eliminating warehouses and jobs.
The third item is particularly is interesting. If the method fails, that is, if the supposedly pre-qualified material is no good, there might be no choice but to use it anyway! The result can be anywhere from a minor inconvenience to a total disaster, I have seen both.
So what does this have to do with the HACCP? First, because of the “Quality Revolution” a version of ISO was developed for the food industry. It was called HACCP and was published as an international standard in 1993 by Codex Alimentarius. In 1995 Mil Std 105E was declared obsolete and in 1996 HACCP was adopted by the USDA and FDA.
Pathogen Reduction/Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point (HACCP) Systems rule was implemented on July 25, 1996: Under the HACCP rule, industry is responsible for assessing potential food safety hazards and systematically preventing and controlling those hazards. FSIS [Food Safety Inspection Service] is responsible for verifying that establishments’ HACCP systems are working ..www.fsis.usda.gov/PDF/Evolution_of_RBI_022007.pdf
Notice how this ruling has shifted the focus of audits, both government and private, from testing for contamination to checking the paperwork documenting the “Quality Management System”. Secondly, rigorous incoming inspection has been drastically cut‒if not eliminated‒by the companies that receive raw materials. For example in buying peanuts from the vendor, Peanut Corps of America, Kellog relied only on a third-party auditor who reported on the integrity of the suppler. Twenty or thirty years earlier Kellog would have sent their own quality professional to work at the vendor’s facility to assure the product quality. Gillette did this all the time with outside contract vendors.
The change in mind set from test to trust the paperwork is why food safety auditors could give a “superior” rating to Peanut Corps of America’s Blakely, Georgia plant that a few months later would poison hundreds. The outrage would then be used to push more regulations to put independent American farmers out of business.
Even the New York Times is finally getting the picture.
“While the USDA fiddles, spending countless millions of taxpayer dollars forcing their NAIS “Mark of the Beast” agenda onto traditional farmers and their livestock, Industrial Ag is busy torching Rome (Washington politicians and bureaucrats) with the product of their unfettered greed: dirty campaign contributions, payoffs, lobbyists, etc. To the point that Walmart, now the largest retailer in the US, can buy so-called burger from Cargill, now the largest privately held company in the US, and label this swill as American Chef’s Angus Beef Patties allegedly containing only one ingredient, beef; when in point of fact it’s a deadly international blend of slaughterhouse floor sweepings, cereal and spices laced with E. Coli bacterium.
E.Coli from feedlot cattle around the world, living(?) up to their bellies in feces; H1N1 Swine flu from confinement hog operations in Mexico; Salmonella from fresh spinach grown downstream of acres of manure pools at confinement dairies in California; MSRA in pigs and people at CAFOs in the Midwest. What is it we don’t get about the obvious source of our poisoned food?…”
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/04/health/04meat.html?_r=1&th&emc=th
alternate for nonmembers http://nonais.org/2009/10/01/bulletin-board-200910/
Bio-fuel laws in the USA resulted in corn being diverted to fuel, food riots in third world countries and record profits for Cargill and Monsanto in 2008. It did not hurt that Dan Amstutz (VP of Cargill) in 1996 rewrote the USDA policies on food stockpiling so by 2008 the “cupboard was bare”
As far as “Capitalism” is concerned I do not consider the Corporate/Government collusion seen to day through out the world as “Capitalism” As Ayn Rand stated ” Government “help” to business is just as disastrous as government persecution… the only way a government can be of service to national prosperity is by keeping its hands off. ”
One definition of “Capitalism is a social system based on the rejection of the initiation of force or violence against others.” http://laissez-fairecapitalism.com/
If capitalism is defined as private ownership of property and wealth, as opposed to state control, then there is truly a problem on our hands if a leading intellectual believes capitalism accurately describes our economy….
The existence of a central bank which adjusts the money supply, such as the Federal Reserve, cannot serve as a back-bone for liberal capitalism. Only a currency system in which the private banks individually control interest rates can serve as a back-bone for a capitalist economy. Otherwise, the state has control and can manipulate the markets, and the market is doomed to instability…
Countries that have flourished have done so only by exploiting the laws of economics by adhering to liberal capitalism. Countries that trend toward planned economies have not flourished.” http://mises.org/story/3658
I realize this site is more about “global warming” and the regulations poised to be put in place, however the multinational corporate shenanigans with worldwide food regulations shows how multinational corporations collude with politicians in first manipulating a well publized “Crisis” and then use that crisis as an excuse for regulations designed to crush competition and fleece the consumer. Any and all increase in “cost” to the major corporations will be passed on to the consumer but the new regulations put smaller and new companies at a financial disadvantage especially when the regulatory agencies target the small companies for elimination.
“Regulations are a weapon used by multinational cartels to create a no competition monopoly.” Gail
Gail,
You blow me away. I am very glad and proud to be on the same side as you. We “get” it. The other side doesn’t.
Keep at it though I doubt anyone could stop you!
“Any and all increase in “cost” to the major corporations will be passed on to the consumer but the new regulations put smaller and new companies at a financial disadvantage especially when the regulatory agencies target the small companies for elimination.” Gail
Bingo! When will folks learn that if we won’t play fair we will just loot each other to death.
Hey, you so-called winners, there is Judge after this life. Will even your children prosper considering that children are a gift from Him!
Oh, Gail. You and Lucy have reset my standards in women to “Impossible!”
“You do not know what capitalism is and this is why you make these ridicules disjointed statements. “ MartinGAtkins
I suspect you do not know the difference between “money” and “capital.” If you understood fractional reserve banking in a government enforced monopoly money you would realize that banks and borrowers LOOT capital via money creation.
Gail,
I agree with most of what you say. I believe that in government there is a presumption towards large employers – corporations – and against small businesses. One of the main reasons why, is to get as many people as possible on the PAYE ticket – that is, their tax is deducted at source by the employer and there is nothing the employee can do about it. Compare that with all the little dodges the self employed and small business people can come up with, with the aid of a good accountant.
Governments may mouth words of praise for small business, but it is a janus faced lie.
suspect you do not know the difference between “money” and “capital.” If you understood fractional reserve banking in a government enforced monopoly money you would realize that banks and borrowers LOOT capital via money creation.
I’m not going to get involved in an economic debate in a science blog. I know the difference between money and capital. It’s not the banks and borrowers who loot your capital via money creation. It’s your government.
As far as “Capitalism” is concerned I do not consider the Corporate/Government collusion seen to day through out the world as “Capitalism”
You’re right but Corporatization is not the problem. The problems arise when goverments try to use Corporations to impliment national policy through kickbacks and subsidies. At best this is blatant corruption at worst it is Nationalist Socialism.
What you see in Europe is not corporate control of government but government control of corporations.
Europe is embracing a specific form of socialism. By regulating and dictating what products can be produced and who produces them they aim to control all commerce. This is not capitalism it’s National Socialism.
“Europe is embracing a specific form of socialism. By regulating and dictating what products can be produced and who produces them they aim to control all commerce. This is not capitalism it’s National Socialism.”
In that we are agreed. In the USA the large corporations buy the politicians. A check of the USDA and the FDA shows a revolving door between Cargill, Monsanto and the rest.
For Example Mike Taylor was counsel to FDA, then worked for King & Spalding (representing Monsanto) and that is where we got the ruling that GMO is the same as regular crops and needs no testing.
History, HACCP and the Food Safety Con Job http://farmwars.info/?p=1565 traces the influence of the Council on Foreign Relations influence of farm legislation since 1942. The Council on Foreign Relations is “Composed of chief executive officers and chairmen from the federal reserve, the banking industry, private equity firms, insurance companies, railroads, information technology firms, publishing companies, pharmaceutical companies, the oil and automotive industries, meat packing companies, retailers and assisted by university economists…” and was formed to influence domestic US policies.
That and the Federal Reserve is what I mean by corporate/bank/government collusion.
A PRIMER ON MONEY: by the Congressional COMMITTEE ON BANKING AND CURRENCY
http://famguardian.org/Subjects/MoneyBanking/Money/patman-primer-on-money.pdf
is where I got much of my information on the federal reserve and the bankers influence on government.
In 1933, Congressman McFadden introduced House Resolution No. 158, Articles of Impeachment for the Secretary of the Treasury, two assistant Secretaries of the Treasury, the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, and the officers and directors of its twelve regional banks. Subsequently he was shot at twice, poisoned and had his stomach pumped, and poison a second time so he reportedly “died of the stomach flue” on Oct. 3, 1936.
Here is part of McFadden’s speech http://www.apfn.net/Doc-100_bankruptcy29.htm
“Mr. Chairman, the United States is bankrupt: It has been bankrupted by the corrupt and dishonest Fed. It has repudiated its debts to its own citizens. Its chief foreign creditor is Great Britain, and a British bailiff has been at the White House and the British Agents are in the United States Treasurymaking inventory arranging terms of liquidations!…”Mr. Chairman, the Fed has offered to collect the British claims in full from the American public by trickery and corruption, if Great Britain will help to conceal its crimes. The British are shielding their agents, the Fed,…
It is amazing how many presidents and other political leaders end up dead, killed by “a lone gunman” after defying the banking powers, Ain’t those numbered swiss bank accounts handy? Nine American Presidents have been the targets of assassination http://theruthlesstruth.com/wordpress/?p=742 The latest was Ron Paul, just a few short weeks after he had assure his supporters he was in the Presidential race to the end, he abruptly quit a couple of days after the Bildeburgers met he in the USA.
Money buys votes and politicians whether it is Global Warming, Food Safety or bank bailouts. If you follow the thread you keep coming back to the same people.
“It’s not the banks and borrowers who loot your capital via money creation. It’s your government.” MartinGAtkins
Well, I’ll give you partial credit, the government shares in the loot too.
But when a fractional reserve loan is extended, new money (credit) is created by your local bank. The purchasing power for that money is stolen from all existing money holders including and especially the poor.
Correction Council on Foreign Relations should have been Committee for Economic Development CED.
Re what Gail said:
I am surprised that Ron Paul would be put off by a mere assassination attempt.
Maybe he is like me, I can be broken but I won’t stay broken.