Carbon Tax Mark 4? A Stealthy Cancer

A tax is a means of raising revenue, regardless of the “vehicle” (excuse) used to levy the tax.
A carbon tax would very reliably increase the cost of fossil fuels and everything made from and with them. It would not reliably and predictably reduce carbon emissions. Reductions would depend on: the cost of the alternative energy sources; the cost of emission reduction approaches; the relationship of these costs to the tax; and, the price elasticity of demand. The higher the costs of practical alternative sources, or of emissions control equipment, the higher the carbon tax would have to be to achieve some level of emissions reductions. Lower demand elasticity would also require the carbon tax to be higher.
One can only imagine how effectively the incremental tax revenues would be applied.

“Tax.”
Remarkably, it is ultimately a stealth cap and trade. Read the plan. And that plan was not whipped up overnight, and probably written by lobbyists working for the Aussie likes of Goldman Sachs. There is only a tax for three years, then it makes a “transition” to cap and trade. Which would mean the Aussie government giving up tax money in order to increase the profits of City of London type traders and those who can best invent carbon credits to sell. Via the UN’s certification mechanism, over 40% of the offsets come from China, and if more than 10% of those are legit, I’d eat my hat. The mention of specific targeted cuts by 2020 have nothing to do with a tax, but with cap and trade accounting, and calibration with Europe’s 2020 deadline. The 2020 tells me City of London owns the Aussie Labor party much.
When have politicians lied so much, risked so much, for a tax that they will give up in three years? Nope, I smell money on the backend, from the traders, maybe even China. Maybe guaranteed “investments” for the Greens. The only way I see why a cap and trade must be preceded by a tax is to give cover to Green purists who know cap and trade is a scam. There is no way personal money or power in the future from financial interests is involved. This is not a scam that comes from greenies yelling about pollution, but bankers. Maybe China owns Gillard??

As bad as this is, it seems better than the fiasco that California has with un-elected state agencies (primarily the Air Resources Board) forcing a cap-and-trade regulation on the state, rather than a carbon tax. Californians have essentially zero chance of overturning this very bad regulation at the ballot box. We tried, unsuccessfully, this past November (2010) with the ill-fated Proposition 23.
The same arguments from above apply:
Cap-and-trade is supposed to start out gently with little to no harm, then increase gradually “as the economy improves.”
It is supposed to combat the predicted evils of CAGW – shoreline inundation from rising sea levels, reduced or non-existent snowpack which is the source of most of California’s fresh water, more frequent and intense heat waves, more hazardous air and the health impacts, and others.
It is also supposed to stimulate technological innovation so that California invents the technologies and devices to solve the world’s problems related to CAGW. This is supposed to create jobs in California and boost the economy. Yet California’s economy is very near the worst in the country.
Meanwhile, California’s entire energy usage – read CO2 output – is approximately 2 percent of the world’s output. Cutting California’s CO2 output by 30 percent is like removing a thimbleful of water from an ocean, not nearly enough to make any difference.
The stark realities are that the ocean level is not rising off of California, instead it is decreasing. The snowpack has not declined, indeed, there is a near-record snowpack this year. The rivers and streams are thundering as fresh water pours into the ocean because there are not sufficient reservoirs in which to store the water. Heat waves are few and far between. The air is cleaner than ever before due to other regulations under the federal Clean Air Act and various state regulations designed to meet its requirements.
Words to a song from the 60’s come to mind: We’re On the Eve of Destruction. (1965 by Barry McGuire)

I remember a Liberal hopeful stand at my door and tell me that there would be exemptions and the carbon tax wouldn’t hurt the ordinary citizen so this is exactly the strategy the (Dion) Liberals tried in Canada an election ago. Canadians, thankfully, didn’t fall for it – or perhaps the party was unable to sell it.

This is just the latest program of all too many brought to the unsuspecting public by the Good Intentions Paving Company. It is, of course and unfortunately, not limited to Australia. It starts out with a small beginning, sometimes seeming so innocuous, whether it be retirement programs, health programs, environment programs, educational programs, etc. It sounds so good, filled with goodies for everybody…and everybody then line up to get a piece of the action they never knew they needed. All of a sudden, a modest $10 billion program explodes to $250 billion, and nobody knows what hit ’em …
Ask the people of Greece how they like their decades of freebies, now that the Piper has called to collect while the country is dropping of a cliff into depression. Who’s next … Italy … Spain … Portugal … Ireland?
And when all such programs fail, as they always will, the blame will fall on: people are too selfish, too greedy, BIG (and it’s always big) [fill in the blank] sabotaged a good plan.
Notice that the politicians that foist their plans on an unsuspecting public never accept their blame for the mess they create by exceeding the bounds of good common sense. They never admit it but they really do think they rule a country, rather than hold their position as a servant to each nation’s many sovereigns

Yes, BC now has a tax on carbon dioxide and as the only ones in North America to have it, I can honestly tell you IT SUCKS!!! The sucking noise is from the economy and the bone headed BC Liberals who brought it in. I switched to the BC Conservatives because they promise to throw it out.
It’s freezing up here!!!

heh- if you don’t want it rammed down your throat, first, don’t get on your knees, then don’t open your mouth and close your eyes.
oz is getting what they have paid for.
it is just.
now if you want better – be better. to do that, you first have to know better. are we there yet?

>>Ed Reid says:
>>A tax is a means of raising revenue, regardless of the “vehicle” (excuse) used to levy the tax.
Interestingly, it’s supposed to be switched to emissions trading in 2015. Perhaps this is the bribe for businesses, to allow them to shut manufacturing down, sack the workers and move manufacturing offshore, earnings millions in credits, in Pachauri fashion ?

You have to PASS the bill before you can know what’s IN the bill…
Familiar schema. Sort of like issuing thousands of waivers in order to get companies to endorse a convoluted bureaucratic morass of health-care regulations.

Ww says:
July 10, 2011 at 1:46 pm
I remember a Liberal hopeful stand at my door and tell me that there would be exemptions and the carbon tax wouldn’t hurt the ordinary citizen
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You mean like re-defining who’s rich every 1- seconds, if you like your insurance you’ll be able to keep it, and the most transparent government that has to hurry up and pass it so you can read what’s in it?

One thing that not mentioned is that the legislation for all this has yet to be written or even introduced to parliament. If it is voted into law it will then not come into effect until July 2012. This is a big if. Eleven months is an extremely long time in politics, some 330 24 hour news spin cycles.
All it will take to destroy this tax is one major industrial player to withdraw from Australia with the attendant loss of jobs for us to have a labor party back-bench revolt and an election before then.
Fortunately here in Australia we have a robust democracy that is being tested by our first real minority government. People are slowly coming to realisation that the Greens are really watermelons, and not an alternative government.

While Juliar Gillard sat before the nation on Sunday stating the CARBON TAX would be set at $23/tonne, she neglected to explain the Treasury modelling on the effects of the tax was set at $20/tonne, was this a deliberate lie by someone who has form, or an inadvertent mistake? I know on which horse my money rides.

Ross says (July 10, 2011 at 2:41 pm): “I have supported the ALP all my life – they were once the party that represented workers, they provided Australia with many social policies without extremism and they were usually honest – as a working person they were the logical choice.”
The more government can do FOR you, the more it can do TO you. Australians brought this on themselves by giving politicians so much control over their iives.
I’m not casting stones; we’ve made the same mistake in the USA and especially here in the People’s Republic of Kalifornia. It’s just so much easier to gambol in the sunshine and let the Morlocks handle everything…

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUTLUC1ve8&version=3&hl=en_US%5D

Safari time, Aussies. Get Crocodile Dundee and go hunting. Very good varmint picking in your capital.

An indication of the money involved in the tax. Quantas alone ~$ 125 million in 2013…
http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/07/11/idUSWNAS256920110711
Can you just begin to get a handle on the quantity of new tax money in the hands of the government and the wild spending on new programs to result? Do you think there is any opportunity for graft, corruption, skimming, fraud, abuse or cheating that could possibly result?

Good letter to the editor, I send heaps, most are published. I thought Chris Huhn was under
police investigation regarding speeding fines? We had a judge who did that and lied saying the person driving his car wasn’t him- she was already dead. He was jailed for a S70 fine. How come
Canada, the US of A and China will not be renewing their Kyoto agreement 2012. Wind turbines
I thought UK was trying to push some on Ireland? Maybe we anti-AGW should print T-Shirts
with a pile of anthracite burning with the catch phrase ‘Burn baby – burn!’ LOL

AussieDan: Just Google the Australian Fabian Society (Socialists) Gillard, Swan and Wong are
paid up members, then look at their beliefs. She is a socialist. In my book the difference between
socialism and communism is that a country can vote their socialist governments out.

Dr T G Watkins, I have to disagree with your assessment of Bob Hawke, a very good head of a very good government, to which I was an economic policy adviser. However, it’s been all downhill for the ALP since Keating first challenged Hawke.

Come on Australia, Vote Gillard OUT. You know it makes sense.

Peter Miller says:
July 11, 2011 at 1:23 am
“On behalf of all expensive and pointless bureaucrats everywhere, I welcome this new tax……
We need more professional politicians in power and I fully support the move to outlaw anyone with business experience or the so called ‘real world’ to ever again be allowed to hold high political office.”
Is that you, Mr. Obama?

Here is an e-mail my father (a retired project engineer) received from Julia Gillard.
“Dear Colin,
The time has come to move from words to deeds – from a climate change debate to action on climate change.
That’s why I have announced the Government’s plan for a clean energy future.
Under our plan, five hundred big polluters will start paying $23 for every tonne of carbon from 1 July 2012. By 2020 this will cut pollution by 160 million tonnes.
Some of the cost will flow to consumers, which is why we will provide nine in 10 households with permanent tax cuts, pension increases and higher family payments, plus 20 per cent extra for most lower-income households and pensioners.
The carbon price will drive huge investments in clean technologies like solar, wind and geothermal – bringing $100 billion worth by 2050.
Pricing carbon is a big change for our country, so please continue your activism and commitment because it has never been more important.
Keep telling your friends and family about why climate action is so important for our environment and for creating the jobs of tomorrow.
Make sure they get the facts by visiting our cleanenergyfuture.gov.au website where they can find details of the Government’s plan and what it means for them.
Australians are a confident, creative people. Together we can build a brighter future for our nation.
Julia”
Here is his response:
“Dear Julia,
Thank you for your message below. As a self funded retiree I will happily receive whatever allowances your plan provides for me. However, I despair over the way your carbon tax issue has arisen. I guess it’s been driven by your perceived need to reduce Australian emissions of carbon dioxide. I think your conclusions are premature,
I understand your perception that anthropomorphic emissions are causing global warming (AGW). But despite what your advisors say, the SCIENCE IS NOT SETTLED. It never is on any subject. In the case of climate science there is a lot of evidence that global temperatures have stopped rising (despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels) and that the impact of CO2 may not be as severe as the IPCC would have you believe.
Before using the state of knowledge as it is currently known in order to make far reaching policy decisions, you need to carry out Due Diligence studies in order to verify that what you are being told is correct. The level of detail required to execute proper Due Diligence for something as complex as the dynamics of climate change is truly enormous. Peer review is not due diligence. Neither are the IPCC reports. Certainly not the Garnaut reports.
Peer review of published papers is in general a coarse filter to ensure that if the evidence which the paper examines is valid and if the writers have done their sums correctly and if the results appear to make sense and add to the body of human knowledge then it’s OK to publish. Peer reviewers are unpaid experts in the same field as the writers of the paper. They seldom see all the basic data, the computer codes, the corrections, deletions and adjustments, the instrument calibration details, full details of all assumptions, etc, and their judgements are often coloured by their personal prejudices. Also they don’t get to see the experimental equipment and test environments or the actual samples that form the basis for the paper being reviewed. Usually none of this matters because scientific progress is self correcting. If a rocket scientist gets it wrong the rocket may crash or wander off course or fail in some other way. Oh dear, what a shame. Well, we’ll get it right next time round.
Predicting climate change is not rocket science. It’s much, much more difficult. And the consequences of getting it wrong may be much, much more costly. So what do you do, given that there may be something happening that could cause humanity immense harm unless we change something? You conduct proper Due Diligence studies – engineering quality, not academician quality.
You need to get the protagonists – those who claim we have a severe, looming problem – to assemble their best arguments and evidence to support their case. They should only offer papers which have been published with full public disclosure of all the data and computer codes so that the claims made within the paper can be reproduced by others. Then you appoint a Due Diligence Team (DDT) and give it a proper briefing (a Scope of Work). In the commercial world DDTs are usually independent disinterested contractors. They will need to see all of the things that peer reviewers usually don’t see as described above. In fact for proposals which will cost the community billions, the DDT will want to see a lot more. For example, many academic papers cite other previously published papers. These citations may have to be examined too. They will want to see the ‘bad’ data as well as the ‘good’. Also, published papers and other evidence may be invited for positions purporting to be contrary to the protagonists case. There is plenty of evidence which appears to throw doubt on many aspects of the IPCC case for climate change (the politically acceptable expression for AGW) and this will need to be subjected to DDT examination too.
Unlike the authors of the IPCC reports who are nearly all climate scientists, the DDT should comprise physicists, economists, engineers, mathematicians (especially statisticians), geologists, biologists and climate scientists. But no more than 25% of the team should be climate scientists. It’s doubtful if the DDT will ever be able to achieve certainty on any matter but they should be able to come much closer to the truth than has the IPCC.
Contrary to what you may have been told, the IPCC reports comprise the assessment by no more than 40 or 50 climate scientists, of all the published papers that in their opinion support in some way, climate change outside the realm of natural variation. Reviewers of each chapter in the reports were not permitted to see data which was not expressly provided in the relevant papers. In fact one reviewer was threatened with dismissal because he kept asking to see data. There is no audit trail for positions taken by authors of each chapter. None. In the business world, if a financier were asked to commit billions for some project on the basis of a report of the quality of any of the IPCC Assessment Reports he would tell you to “Go away – don’t waste my time”.
I’m a retired engineer with a background in project management. Many of my peers agree with me about this.
Colin”

Brian H,
“As Lindzen observed to Bolt, it’s really an attempt to make people WANT to give the gubmint more money. Nice scam, if you can sell it.”
And they just might succeed. In a recent experiment, a lady set herself up in the parking lot at a Californian shopping mall, with the task of selling ‘carbon offsets’ to gullible shoppers. Amazingly, the shoppers were falling over each other to give away as much money as was asked of them, in order to relieve the terrible guilt they suffered after being lectured on the size of the carbon footprints their purchases had inflicted on the poor planet. One shopper insisted on giving even more than was asked.
Carbon tax to offset guilt? It’s a shoe in.