South Korea announces delay the day after Australia’s carbon tax repeal
Story submitted by Eric Worrall
In a sign that rejection of climate alarm is gathering momentum, South Korea has thrown doubt on its carbon plans. Significantly, the announcement was made the day after Australia abolished the carbon tax. According to the report;
“July 18 (Reuters) – South Korea’s finance minister has called its impending emissions trading market “flawed in many ways”, hinting that he would pressure other ministries to delay the planned 2015 launch, a local newspaper reported.
Choi Kyung-hwan, who is also deputy prime minister, said problems had been found with the scheme, which is due to start in January, and that the government would review them before deciding whether to delay it, modify it or implement it as planned, The Korea Times reported on Friday.”
http://af.reuters.com/article/commoditiesNews/idAFL6N0PT3CZ20140718
(h/t to WUWT reader Pat)
South Korea’s courageous stand against carbon madness raises hope that Australia’s rejection of carbon pricing will be the domino which topples any chance of global cooperation on CO2
Government ‘debt’ is government ‘equity’. It is not debt as you or I, or a business, state or local govt understand it. The federal government does not need to earn revenue. It ISSUES the currency, fercrissake. Everyone else USES the currency, and must earn income before we can spend (unless we go into debt for a limited amount of time, but not permanently). The ‘National Debt’ or “Debt Held by the Public’ as its called—that huge $17+ trillion number–is in the pension funds, university trusts, business bank accounts, and your grandmother’s savings bond TO THE PENNY. If we “pay off the national debt” everyone will not a dollar to their name.
What has frozen growth in this country is the refusal of Congress to enact fiscal policy and spend for the general welfare of the population (per the Constitution). We are $3.x trillion behind in fixing infrastructure. We need improved education, telecommunications (we are a 3rd world country compared to Asian capacity), scientific research, and health care, etc etc. Congress approved $29 trillion for the banks and nothing for the citizens of the US.
Policy critic
Then why does the government bother to tax anyone? Why doesn’t it just spend, because when you create something out of nothing you end up with nothing. The value of our currency is no longer based on gold it is based on the value of everything in this country and the amount of business done in this country. You can spin it anyway you want the government only has the ability to spend if we have the ability to pay.
As for growth I don’t remember the last time the government ever created anything growth comes from the private selector and I don’t no anyone other then the big corporation that are looking for the government to do anything other then get out of the way. Big corporation eat up the government regulation and intervention because they know they are the only ones that can afford to comply and if they can’t they just buy the government off.
Here is what is happening: With the “pause” now about the same length as the warming, economies having been ignored and mismanaged during heady days of green policy, the inconvenient chain of cold winters that Hadley Centre misforecast for ‘barbeque’ winters when snow would be only on christmas cards, governments have been showing some ambivalence toward gung ho carbon dioxide prevention policies but don’t know how to proceed to get out of the mess they are in. Australia strides in, abolishes all this CAGW policy nonsense. Korea, which was anguishing over, it got the shove it needed. Now there will be a domino effect rush to do the same thing. Perhaps only in the UK will the dominos come up against Stonehenge and stop unless the new UKIP party can take over. After all, UEA and Hadley C all but invented climate alarm and they’ve just decorated their chief scientist Slingo for her contributions to the panic.
“The value of what a dollar bought may have fallen individually, but not collectively.”
You complained at first that ‘boom and bust’ destroyed the wealth of the American people in the 1800s, so they needed the Fed to save them, now you’re saying that the Fed is wonderful even though it destroyed the wealth of the American people in the 1900s. Why should I care that the total number of dollars is worth more, if my actual saved dollars are worth far less than when I saved them?
The Fed prints money, which devalues all savings, which requires people to hand those savings to bankers to try to mantain their value against the best efforts of other bankers to destroy them, then the government taxes people on the interest paid on those savings, which further devalues them. Rather like ‘carbon taxes’ and ‘carbon trading’, it’s just a mechanism for stealing wealth from the people, and giving it to government and bankers.
“What has frozen growth in this country is the refusal of Congress to enact fiscal policy and spend for the general welfare of the population (per the Constitution).”
US National Debt has about doubled since the beginning of the ‘crisis’. How much more do you expect them to spend beyond their means, before admitting it’s the problem, not the solution? Japan has wasted more than twenty years trying to borrow-and-spend their way out of their own housing bubble collapse.
Mark G
For guy that really gets it I still can’t figure out why you won’t see the logic in my Alien argument.
John where are you?
You have to try really hard and squint your eyes to see the rise. It’s there. 🙂
http://www.drroyspencer.com/wp-content/uploads/mauna-loa-co2-1-percent-scale.jpg
Geologically we are at the low end of co2 in the atmosphere.
Now, I’m sure the following is a mistake but figure 7 appears to show Co2 levels were ~425 ppm about 12,750 years ago. Whatever the case 400 ppm to 500ppm is nothing to be worried about. We moved from 350ppm to 400ppm today. What happened? Logarithmic.
American Thinker, July 19, 2014
“Australia still has carbon taxation”
Carbon tax was replaced by the Emissions Reduction Fund/ERF, “Direct Action” climate change policy.
CO2 is far too lucrative to give up on. It’s much like the Hydra in Greek mythology with its many heads. One disappears another one pops up.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2014/07/australia_still_has_carbon_taxation.html
Great question. It doesn’t need to tax. (What it does need to do is spend for the benefit of all the people.) But let’s suppose you and I—and everyone else in the US–have a $billion in our suitcases. What do you think the price of housing is going to be? Will we be able to conduct trade with anyone outside the country when every US citizen has $2-3 billion in their bank accounts?
Our dollar hasn’t been based on gold domestically since 1934. You write, “I don’t remember the last time the government ever created anything.” What about WWII? Three government economists who did understand what going off the gold standard did for the American people ramped the country up for WWII, and put everyone to work producing planes for the British, produced armaments, and everything else the war effort needed. They used American dollars for American work. Yes, fiat dollars for American work, inside the country. (see military historian Jim Lacey’s book Keep from All Thoughtful Men: How U.S. Economists Won World War II, 2011, for a detailed account of this using documents misfiled in the National Archive.)
The deficit soared during the war years, meaning the govt spent way more in each year than it was taking in in taxes. Producing things. Because of war resource limits, American workers couldn’t spend their money on anything. Savings accounts were bulging. Government economists recognized this in 1944, and made plans. When the war ended, taxes on the super rich (1%) were raised to 90% to prevent their spending or hoarding while taxes on the middle class were de minimus to encourage them to spend on houses, cars, and other necessities. It created the great middle class, and marked a complete change in the living standards of all Americans.
To answer your question, you can’t just spend into oblivion. There is production capacity to worry about. When everyone is earning money and there is nothing to spend it on, then the price of those things that are still available for sale—from physical objects to engineering services to houses, travel, schools, landscaping, technology, science, and health care—will soar. That’s inflation. Taxes are used to control that.
It’s a balancing act. But it starts with Congress. Paul Ryan is a financial idiot. So are Obama and Lew. We need sound fiscal policy and we need it fast. All the mortgages in this country should have been written down in 2008 to the capacity of the mortgagee to pay; this is time-honored debt-relief that goes back centuries and centuries and has the effect of rebalancing overpriced “bubble” assets immediately. (In history, sometimes it’s been called a debt jubilee, or something like that.) Instead, we gave that assistance only to the banks whose profits have increased 30% since 2008. While 45 million languish in hell.
For example, nothing threatens Social Security or Medicare. People like Pete Peterson and Peter Schiff try to make you think there’s a problem because they want those dollars going to Wall Street. In point of fact, every senior citizen should be getting a minimum of $3,000/month—minimum!–to meet the production of the huge Millennial generation so that their output doesn’t lie idle.
The economy should serve public purpose, not a financial index. Unfortunately, we’ve bought the latter definition since 1980.
If I start explaining it, I’ll be writing a treatise and overtaking this thread. Suffice it to say, the government doesn’t have to worry about spending beyond its means. There are no “means.” It ISSUES the currency. The damn problem is that it is not spending on the people. The deficit is waaaaay too small right now for the state of the economy.
John Carter says:
July 19, 2014 at 10:02 am
I would think here there wouldn’t be much interest in posts that don’t specifically serve to try to discredit actual climate science
Au contraire, there would be plenty of interest in rational, fact-based, non-biased information on actual climate science. Got any?
How about a post on “why I believe manmade CO2 is a problem”. Be sure to include real-world evidence to back your claims, though. Remember, models are not evidence, nor are simple correlations. Be sure to include your
excusesreasons for the warming having stopped now for nearly 18 years. It would be mostentertainingenlightening.John Carter (July 19, 2014 at 8:27 am) “And the oceans have been accumulating a lot of heat energy, which is where much of the increased “trapped” radiation energy has gone.”
The measured increase in ocean energy would amount to roughly a 0.2C per decade increase in the atmosphere if there were no ocean warming at all. My question is why don’t the models show this accumulation of energy in the ocean and thus predict 0.1C or less rise in the atmosphere rather than continuing to predict 0.2C or more rise in the atmosphere?
Do the models not model oceanic heat transfer correctly? Or is it simply a weather fluctuation that has been going on for 17 years that the models can’t model? You have to choose an answer and then explain why we should still trust models going forward.
Exactly. But not for the reasons you think. Japan doesn’t borrow anything. Japan, like Great Britain, Canada, the US, and Australia, issues their own currency. They have a 100% sovereign non-convertible currency with a floating exchange rate. They can never go broke. Bond vigilantes can’t touch them. They denominate their debts in their own currency, meaning they can pay for anything for sale in their own country. Anything. With no debt transferred to children or grandchildren.
And yet, Japan has one of the strongest currencies in the world, extraordinarily high educational standards, a high standard of living, and they pay 100% for the health care costs of their senior citizens, something we don’t do because we’re mean and don’t understand how our federal monetary system works. We think the federal government is like a household that has to tighten its belt. The President says we’re broke; he’s an idiot.
The growth during World War II happened because of the capacity built from the 1880 through the early 30s from private economic growth. Churchill know the war was over as soon as the us joined, Yamamoto know his war was lost as soon as he bomb Pearl Harbor. They did know what fiscal policy we would excersize during there war they didnt have too. The reason we were able to meet the needs of the war was because government finanaly got out of the way and allowed business to work. Something FDR couldn’t and prolong the depression for 4or5years.
There was a recession after the war and it wasn,t monetary policy or fiscal policy that got us out of it. It was the demand from the rest of the world because we were they only ones with a viable economic system left. The debt was paid because we were the producer for the. If you doubt this look at our trade surplusses after the war. Fiscal policy didn’t create the middle class growth from the industrial revolution did. There was a huge a growing middle class before the war and only fiscal policy from the government during the depepression reversed the trend. This was the first depression or even the worst it was just the longest because of the government. During all other period the grew rapidly after the down turn and the middle class grew. The huge cities growing from the 1880 weren’t filled with the pitiful poor masses they were filled with a growing middle class the only real poor we’re the successive waves of imigrents. This country grew from a small backward power to the domination power in the world over the course of only 70 years long before your brilliant wwii economists. By the by 1944 the economy was already shift from a war footing and this had nothing to do with government policy it was because industry had total out produced anything the policy makers could account for.
I don’t disagree with you when it comes to the government shifting money to the banks, but this is natural when you allow the government to control so much of the economy. It’s government over control that is the problem. I am not achampion of anyone in the government either but i am also know that nothing they do will be for the benefit of the people. This is why the government is supposed to be limited. People only look out for their own self interest and only when you and I realize the for me to have freedom to take care of my self that I have to bound with you to make sure you have the freedom to take care of your interests can we hope to have a free world. When you let the government make the decision they will invariably make descions that benifit the only the ones how have the power.
Like AGW there is no evidence that supports governments spending helping the economy and even more importantly freedom.
Again the value of the dollar is based in the economic output of the economy, it is not the gold standard but the effect is the same over spending and over print devalues the economy as a whole. If you don’t believe this look at the price of oil. The is no shortage and there is more production here then there has been in 40 years yet oil is still over $100 a barrel on a supply a damned basis $30 would be where it should be. Food the same, gold the same, coffee the same almost all comdities and by the way the things normal people actually buy and need. Houses, cloths it goes on and on. Yet inflation is 2 percent, right.
We also not in a economic vacuum we are in a real world were other countries are eating are lunch because the stay out the way when it comes to business. We have every advantage here, resources, seamless environment, educated work force. The only thing we don’t have is a unobtrusive government.
Policycritic
Japan also has a stagnate economy, shrinking population and generation of kids that have no direction or drive.
John Carter says:
“Is it possible that there is a desire to avoid perceived economic harm, which is the real fear here…”
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Why would anyone in their right mind advocate for actions that will cause certain economic harm today to prevent uncertain economic harm tomorrow? For all we know, increasing CO2 may be net beneficial to the ecosystem and to the climate overall. Even if it turns out to cause more harm than good, it will be far less expensive to adapt to climate change than to try to prevent it. No matter how much a country spends to reduce CO2 emissions, it will do no good. That’s because another country, like China, will buy the coal and oil they are no longer using (probably at a reduced price) and increase their emissions. You can see that happening right now. So spending billions to reduce CO2 will harm our economy, have little effect on world-wide emissions, and leave us with less money to adapt to the future. That would turn out to be an extremely foolish move if we end up needing to adapt to a cooling climate as a new ice age begins. The 17-year pause proves that we don’t really know what changes in climate the future will bring. Making plans to adapt to whatever happens is the only sensible thing to do.
Policycritic
Its funny that the same policies you advocate brought us out of the depression during the war couldn’t achieve the same results before the war.
John Carter says:
July 19, 2014 at 1:40 am
Mario Lento says:
July 19, 2014 at 1:19 am
John Carter: If it’s intent is good it’s not fascism? Seriously?
It’s a pretty bold move to read only the short first sentence of a piece, and then comment on it as if you know what the piece was actually saying.
You should go back and at least read the second sentence.
Or here, I’ll save you the trouble:
“If the Intent is good, it’s not Fascism.”
The above statement is not true, as, unfortunately, Fascism ultimately doesn’t have to have anything to do with intent, and much of it’s formation, often, doesn’t.” http://theworldofairaboveus.blogspot.com/2014/07/fascism.html
I do recommend reading it of course.
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I do not get the point of both the run on sentences and the generalization of subjective phrases.
When people think the way you seem to think, we start losing a lot of freedom to thrive… and the majority starts taking more from the minority for a whole host of good reasons. Your thinking is not clever, and it’s dangerously naive.
I see policycritic is still pushing the idea of printing money for prosperity. Inflation, he says, won’t happen because it is controlled by taxation. He says “If I start explaining it, I’ll be writing a treatise and overtaking this thread.” Don’t worry, you have already explained enough and it is socialist crap.
policycritic says:
They denominate their debts in their own currency, meaning they can pay for anything for sale in their own country. Anything. With no debt transferred to children or grandchildren.
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If there is “no debt transferred to children or grandchildren,” why are we paying interest every year? If there was no debt there would be no interest. But if a country stops paying interest on it’s debt, its currency collapses and becomes worthless for buying goods, as happened in Weimar Germany. If we follow leftist money policy, our children will have to pay a large percentage of their GDP on interest alone each year, or they will default and collapse their currency. That would all be the result of the debt transferred to them by their irresponsible parents. The U.S. is currently paying about $420.6 billion a year in interest on the debt, and that is with current low interest rates. Think of what we could do with that extra $420 billion if previous generations hadn’t transferred those debts to us. If you think we can increase the debt as much as we want without any consequences to our children, I have a perpetual-motion machine I’d like to sell to you.
Hopefully it will also put an end to all those UN sponsored (but now private/secret) COP lovefests, and give the Club of Rome something serious to think about.
John Carter says:
July 19, 2014 at 12:31 am
John Carter, you are either very young, impressionable, credulous and idealistic, as are all teenagers, or you’re just an activist troll/stooge, having hijacked this thread with arrant nonsense, voodoo science and stunning faux political naivety and spin. All I really want to say is – it’s up to you to prove it, not us sceptics. Yours is not the null hypothesis. And yours is being repeatedly falsified by the patent failure of the models when faced with real data and observations. My greetings to your friends in Barsoom, they have a lot of CO2 there too, but bloody cold I hear.
Without wishing to bore regulars (apologies):
It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, it doesn’t matter how smart you are. If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong.
Richard Feynman.
“All governments are run by liars and nothing they say should be believed.”
I. F. Stone
John Carter and his alarmist ilk never say “I hope the ‘deniaists’ are correct and we’re all quite safe.”
Why is it alarmists would prefer a global catastrophe? So that they can be correct and save face?
Sir, you need a sandwich board sign -The end is near,The end is near
RobRoy says:
July 19, 2014 at 3:02 pm
John Carter and his alarmist ilk never say “I hope the ‘deniaists’ are correct and we’re all quite safe.”
Why is it alarmists would prefer a global catastrophe? So that they can be correct and save face?
Sir, you need a sandwich board sign -The end is near,The end is near
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Questions I would like to ask of Carter: What is wrong with a green earth? Does he hate life so much? Where does he think the “fossil fuel” came from? Think about it… where did most of that locked up carbon come from? Putting it back into the atmosphere where it can be RENWED while extracting the solar energy that put it there sounds pretty good to me. Just sayin’.
***a new member of the “trillion dollar” club:
19 July: Billings Gazette: Mike Ferguson: Former Chevron scientist talks climate change solutions
Linda Dismore “Diz” Swift, a former Chevron scientist and executive, told the League of Women Voters of Billings on Friday that they can lend a hand to help limit the effects of climate change.
But it’s bound to be expensive and it might not be too popular politically, she said.
After building her case for the human role in climate change — a proposition that some in the room of about 40 people, judging by their questions afterward, clearly weren’t buying — Swift said she favors enacting a carbon tax over such schemes as cap and trade, which the state she now lives in, California, is trying…
She said there’s a growing consensus among economists that a carbon tax is the least expensive as well as one of the most effective ways to address global warming.
***“The opportunity is huge,” she said, but will require a $45 trillion investment over the next 40 or so years to “decarbonize” the U.S. energy sector by 50 percent. That investment would add millions of clean-energy jobs, she said…
Swift has allies in unlikely places, including Hank Paulson, the former Treasury secretary in the George W. Bush administration. Paulson is co-chair of the Risky Business initiative, which explores the economic risks of climate change in the United States.
Paulson is part of a political process that Swift would like to see others join…
http://billingsgazette.com/news/government-and-politics/former-chevron-scientist-talks-climate-change-solutions/article_f4cadbc1-343e-5aff-889c-91c8f6fff53b.html
Bob, the banks have taken over the public domain and are charging the citizens for what used to be free. If you think of it as two columns just for ease of understanding. On the left, the federal government and what it has (should have) dominion over. On the right, businesses, households, state and local govts, whoever has to pay interest on debt (loans) over time, and provide collateral.
The federal government can build roads, broadband infrastructure, schools, hospitals, better education, research, health care, etc, with interest-free dollars. It does this by hiring the private sector to do it through government contracts. The government never builds this stuff, the private sector does with government money in a functioning society. JOBS. No debt to the population, and no debt to children and grandchildren.
The banks, starting in the 1980s in California, used propaganda campaigns to convince all of us that privitization was good, and that ‘we need to get government out of our lives’ as if US dollars come from someplace else other than the monopoly entity that has the only legal right to create them on planet earth. They convinced us that credit money was better than interest-free govt money. And we fell for it. And they loaded society down with debt, with real consequences. $30,000 student loans for an education you could get $500/semester in the 50s and 60s. Convincing us that property taxes were too high so we voted those down, which meant the shortfall (because states need property tax income for revenue, and the rich can’t deduct from property taxes) was made up by higher income and sales taxes on everyone and as well as all kinds of taxes to make up the difference. BUT. Guess who benefitted from that? The banks as a result of higher asset prices: e.g the cost of real estate soared, and so did bank interest income and earnings. (The banks got really creative with mortgage bank fraud in the early 90s, because only the NY Fed regulates mortgage banks and Greenspan and Geithner ignored it.)
I am *really* glossing over this. It’s such a far more complex issue than can be described here, and I don’t want to be accused of hijacking this thread. We have forfeited the public domain to the financial sector which now accounts for 40% of GDP, and the majority of the population is in hock to them. (Financial capitalism vs industrial capitalism.) They also now control the laws governing their own regulation and our congressmen go along with their interference because their campaign coffers are filled by their lobbyists. There has been a wholesale move of what used to belong to the people in the left column I described above, which benefitted everyone, to the right column. [This is no apologia for government. I’m just talking operationally, devoid of political stripe.] Only when people understand how the federal monetary system works will they have the wherewithal to tell our congressmen what to do and where to get off, and they won’t elect people who don’t understand it. I blame Clinton for the financial crisis of 2008 (lotsa’ reasons); god forbid we get Hillary as a president, she’ll repeat his mistakes, just as Obama is running a lot of them now with ex-Clinton staffer Jacob Lew.