The Carbon Tax Tapir - Melbourne World Environment Day 2011

Melbourne World Environment Day 2011

In Australia, they’ve recently started taxing carbon. But if you blame the carbon tax for price increases unfairly, your business could be hit with a million dollar fine.

Time will tell if the law is misused to bully businesses from also telling the truth about the impact of the carbon tax on their pricing.

In the meantime:

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“the total cost for a family of four of implanting a carbon dioxide tax will exceed $2,500/yr* – whereas even eliminating all of Australia’s emissions might prevent planetary warming of 0.01 deg. C by 2100.

*Assuming a tax rate of $25/tonne of CO2, and Australia’s emissions being 550 million tonnes, indicates a total cost of $13.8 billion. Spread across a population of 22 million persons, that equates with $627/person/year. ”
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What could possibly be wrong with this picture? Well, aside from the fact that it will accomplish next to nothing, metamars know that a very promising, dense, zero carbon energy source – viz., Eric Lerner’s focus fusion – is UNDERFUNDED, and Lerner is having to waste time and energy scrambling for dollars. A small fraction of $13.8 billion would more than adequately fund Lerner’s research, but ole metamars expects exactly zero dollars and zero cents to come his way via the Aussie carbon boodle. This near-tragedy is compounded by the fact that Lerner is no spring chicken.

Why is metamars so pessimistic about carbon tax schemes? Long story, but let’s just say that not only does metamars not trust lying governments, power-hungry beauraucrats who want to supercede national sovereignty, Goldman Sachs’ fingerprints, and lying or deluded climate Cassandras, he knows also that efforts to suppress alternative energy sources is an old story – and sometimes involves murderous opposition. As was reported by yours truly. (metamars first learned of energy-saving suppression when he was a 17 year old freshman in college, from his residence advisor. But that is another story.)

The climate catastrophists, apparently focussed on the clear and present danger of us cooking ourselves via CO2 production, and blind to science telling them that their worst fears are wrong, don’t seem terribly interested in systemic forces that suppress cleaner, cheaper energy. E.g., they don’t press for even investigations into what energy related patents are held by the oil companies, purely for the purpose of suppression, much less press for nationalizing such patents. Pushing to crowd fund alternative energy sources with revolutionary potential – not just Eric Lerner’s fusion effort, but also so-called “cold fusion” (and making sure that the technology is not suppressed even after being developed; has Siemens already developed workable models of LENR’s???), is apparently beyond their pay grade.

Strange, eh? With the fate of the entire world “hanging in the balance”, they choose myopia. Whatever became of “necessity is the mother of invention”, “can-do”, “look before you leap” – all manner of common sense that would favor them actually solving what they claim is a critical problem?

Is our problem (according to the climate catastrophists) that we lack a carbon taxing scheme? Or is our problem (again, according to the climate catastrophists) that we are going to cook the planet due to anthropogenic CO2 production?

Those two propositions are not the same; not the same, at all…..

Photo from Takver licensed under Creative Commons

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I’m shocked – an pleased – to see this diary front paged. I’d just like to emphasize that, even if you can’t believe that the climate is not in great danger from anthropogenic CO2 production, or that the chance of disaster from allowing CO2 level to rise to 500 ppm, and more, is just too great to take, that doesn’t mean that you can’t channel your environmental activism in a direction that will more realistically tame rising CO2 levels. IMO, that means you should support big hot fusion projects, small hot fusion projects (like Eric Lerner’s), and so-called “cold fusion” (LENR) technology. You should also be supporting investigation into oil and auto companies hoarding energy saving technologies, and building a movement for nationalizing those technologies. Indeed, why aren’t there RICO suits against the auto companies?

When I was 17, or so, I couldn’t fathom why an auto company would suppress technology that would make an auto burn less gasoline. This is less mysterious, now, as Gary Null has uncovered the interlocking boards that run American corporations. Environmental activists – even if they can’t or won’t abandon the idea of an anthropogenic CO2 catastrophe – should be looking to make corporations accountable; as well as looking to get the government to support revolutionary technology (instead of helping suppress it); as well as not just relying on a deeply corrupted government (whose strings are pulled by corporations), by crowd-funding the likes of Lerner and his ilk.