Bitcoin Forum

Carbon tax will not increase grocery shopping bills, says industry group

http://www.smh.com.au/environment/carbon-tax-will-not-increase-grocery-shopping-bills-says-industry-group-20111013-1ln4g.html


Want to know more about carbon taxes? What is the carbon tax and how is it being used to squeeze you dry?
http://www.hulu.com/watch/235716/trading-on-thin-air

"The finite nature of carbon credits and absence of a physical commodity leave it particularly vulnerable to speculation." - U.S. House Representative Bart Stupak

Couple quotes from the documentary:

"History records that the money changers have used every form of abuse, intrigue, deceit, and violent means possible to maintain their control over governments by controling money and its issuance." - President James Madison

"Let me issue and control a nation's money and I care not who writes the laws." - Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild (1744-1812), founder of the private International Banking House of Rothschild

I fixed that for you to fit the current subject matter better.

Related story: http://occupycorporatism.com/un-creates-new-more-powerful-global-environmental-agency/

Finally a responsible country.

You are being sold a bill of goods. This has nothing to do with the environment and everything to do with international government, taxation, the destruction of national sovereignty and the global economy. Its called cognitive dissonance, look it up. problem  - reaction - solution. Create a problem either real or imagined, the people react in mass, and then the same people who created the problem act as saviors and introduce a "solution" which is some thing the people would have otherwise never agreed to.

You best be trolling.

This is a non solution to a non problem that gives the government more power and more tax.

The carbon tax is a piece of shit!

Agreed. Just an excuse to sheer the sheep

yup, without the military industrial complex, there would be no dependeny on fossil oils and plastic. Because renewable resources would naturally always be preferred by markets:

* http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXW-W_F2MQ8
* http://www.hort.purdue.edu/newcrop/ncnu02/v5-284.html

Really? I mean, gosh darn, really? Always?

What about:

Chinese black market for Sumatran rhino horns.

Blue whales in the mid 20th century.

Amazon rain forests.

Old growth forests in the Pacific Northwest.

Ivory.

Tiger pelts.

Those resources might be renewable in one form or another, without factoring in timescales and proper management, but it's the free markets which have decimated them. Here's a little factoid for you: the more scarce a resource becomes, the pricier it becomes, and the effort to harvest the last remaining amount of them is ramped up, with increased competition and increased technology to find the last one.

So? I can't really picture the strawman that you seem to be attacking here, as I don't really disagree with what you said here.

(Though I admit I used "always" as a simplifying weasel word, let's say the extraction of fossil oil would no longer be economical as of today compared to renewable resources like hemp, were it not for the military industrial complex sustaining it because it's an important part of their power game).

An ethical and ecologic awareness and conscience concerning the rain forest etc is a factor that is independent from the economic structure of a society. A planned economic system might deplete their resources in a similar way as well (and in fact history showed they did). In a free market, aware parties can buy what they want to protect.

That is an interesting statement. And I think it's diametrically opposite from the truth. In actuality, it is precisely ethical and ecological awareness which should be guiding the economic structure of society. There are no other guiding forces which can accomplish anything but destruction.

Truly free markets will exploit inefficiencies and find the least costly way to put a profit in someone's pocket near term.

Constrained and regulated free markets driven by ethical and ecological awareness will yield sustainable solutions.

All of the following matter: net energy input to the Earth, microorganisms, trophic cascades, soil, water, atmosphere, ecosystems, edge effects, feedback loops, riparian zones, natural capital, biodiversity.

If we're 100% psychopaths, then the economic structure which we'd use to destroy ourselves would not matter much.

If we're only 1% psychopaths, then it's more like a game of probability. You want to centralize power and trust that those in executive position are incorruptible. However, history shows they're rather not.

Your approach is backwards. Forget about whether the solution is centralized or decentralized. Too many here hold fast to their political mantras, and insist that a method which upholds their political values must magically be the right solution.

The problems are enormously complex. The best that can be done is to understand the dynamics of the system, mostly by immersing oneself deep into the mechanisms that make it work. The more you understand, the better you'll be to evaluate what might be a good solution - centralized or decentralized.

nothing quite like ending a discussion with an appeal to authority.  :D

Facing today's "problems" that are "enormously complex" and "understand[ing] the dynamics of the system, mostly by immersing oneself deep into the mechanisms that make it work" is arguably the job of politicians. Apparently they don't do it very well.

I would say it's the job of biologists, ecologists, social scientists, and computer scientists, plus (and it's a big plus)...

A conduit to both the public and the politicians to allow the information the above discover and learn to be factored into decision making.

These enormously complex problems can only be solved by the market through the price mechanism. Price is determined be the subjective valuations of the individuals that make up the marketplace. So, in a free market, people get exactly what they think has the most value.

Carbon already has a cost. clean air already has a value. It's the government regulatory framework that prevents a price being set for carbon (limited liability of corporations. government licensing/sanctioning of polluting industries, etc). This is typical of the government: 1. make laws which hamstring the market causing resource miss-allocations and negative side effects. 2. make another law to fix the problems created by the first law.

The above statement is so utterly naive it blows my mind. Actually, no, I come to expect it, especially from the membership here. The free market does not accurately price natural capital, and as a consequence, does not accurately price any derivative products based on natural capital.

The subjective individuals that make up the marketplace are borrowing from the future with no intention or plan of paying it back. The free market is failing.

The carbon tax is a transfer of wealth to Goldman Sachs et al.

How does it not? Supply meets demand and a price is set. What other price is there for natural capital that would be more "accurate"? Why is natural capital different from capital in general, in this regard?


This has everything to do with government policies. Artificial interest rates, government spending, etc. To blame freedom for this is... naive.

It's not a difficult concept to understand. The harvesting of and consumption of natural capital (market driven) is based on the difficulty of harvesting, the knowledge (or lack) of the ramifications of harvesting, and the demand for it.

It is absolutely laughable that you think the free market appropriately addresses the long term future ramifications of over harvesting.

How can I make this simple for you to understand, given the near religious fervor you attach to the beauty and utility of the free market? I'll give it a shot, even though I can't nearly address all the issues. I'll just share a few, and hope you understand that there are many many more.

- Palm oil: is palm oil appropriately priced? Consider the costs: habitat destruction not just of the areas harvested, but adjoining areas due to edge effects. Destruction of habitat means species extinction. Species extinction means a reduced rate of bio-productivity on Earth, as well as a reduction of information, which can enhance our knowledge in the future. Biodiversity is information, useful for software, algorithms, material science, medicine. The study of biodiversity allows us to develop new materials (think spider silk), new drugs, new cures, new algorithms, new architecture, new methods useful for cultural growth. Biodiversity allows us to study systems and communities, and learn from those systems. Biodiversity allows the Earth's natural systems to engage in sustainability, soil turnover, atmospheric cleansing, water reclamation, etc.

- The Blue Whale: how did the market price blue whales in the mid 20th century? Did it accurately price blue whales? Ultimately, why did they not go extinct?

- Beef: what is the correct price for beef? Does the market correctly price beef, factoring in the extinction of numerous wolf species which were hunted to death? How do wolves contribute to the environment? Here's a hint: riparian zones and clean water.

- Burning coal and the cost of energy derived from such: what is the cost? Do you know?

- Agriculture: what is the cost? Do the crops use low-till or no-till techniques? What are the differences?

- Solar farms for energy production: what is the cost? Do you know?

I could go on and on.

The point is: any process to extract, harvest, or produce has costs that the market is ignorant of. I suggest you lose your religious fervor for the free market and your belief that it accurately prices things.  

Let's examine free market dynamics as related to Sumatran rhino horn. Sumatran rhino horn is currently priced at approximately $50,000 per kilo (maybe more as the news report was a year old).

What does that do? It increases the effort to harvest the resource. More technology, and more resources are employed to harvest an ever dwindling resource. It can only lead to one final outcome. That's the free market at work. The consumers and the harvesters do not care about long term viability. They care about near term satisfaction. The free market is a dynamical system, that when unrestrained, unguided, creates destruction, often irreversible, because the participants do not factor in future costs.

Note that the date of the article linked to below is after I made the above statement. In other words, progress continues on a daily basis through the study of the vast information available within the biodiversity of this planet.

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/06/07/this-psychedelic-shrimp-will-get-you-hammered-video/?WT.mc_id=SA_facebook

$50,000 per kilo?!? Just for the horn? Holy shit, We should go over there, buy some land, and start farming rhinos. At that price they would be insanely profitable than cattle (which are in no danger at all of going extinct).

Let's get some investors together and get to work in this right now. Since you said this is a free market there aren't going to be any arbitrary restrictions that would prevent entrepreneurs from increasing the supply of rhinos to meet the demand, are there?

Why would they be more profitable than cattle, if you're adding supply? Why do you think you can successfully breed Sumatran rhinos? By the time you have a rhino from which you can cruelly harvest the horn from, how you do know what the demand for horns will be, given the evidence that rhino horn is generally shown not to do what the superstitious consumers believe it will do? Why do you think that the free market, upon the introduction of your farmed Sumatran rhino horns, will suddenly cause poachers to cease their operations? In other words, why do you think your reply here is a defense of the free market? Why do you believe your reply here is indicative of any understanding you might have of the free market.


What do restrictions have to do with it? The free market finds its solutions wherever they may be.

Thank you for being absurd and pointless.

For palm oil, blue whale and beef, this is the problem of the commons: There is unowned or collectively owned property (an artifact of government), which prevents the market from pricing the destroyed resources. The problems is government, not the market.

For coal, agriculture, solar, I don't see your point. the market sets the price... actually, the price in all these cases is largely distorted by government laws, resulting in massive miss-allocations and inefficiencies.

Besides, what are you suggesting; that a collection of bureaucrats can know and set the "true price" of... anything? That the price should artificiality be set using threat of violence? What is the "accurate" price, if not determined by the subjective valuations of individuals voluntary transactions?

You sound like some socialist eco-hippy.

You keep making a false dichotomy between government and market.  You don't have a market without government because you don't have property rights without government.

If what you want to say is "Government policy needs to change" thats fine.  But its strange saying "market good government bad" since the market only works where you have a government.

Price of 1 gallon of gasoline in Netherlands: 

1.43 BTC

Price of 1 gallon of gasoline in Australia:

0.61 BTC

Care to clarify your comment?  :) 

Maybe create a video game where the Global Elites are the targets of a group of clandestine black ops special forces who have gone off the reservation on a take no prisoners mission, or use BTC to fund the real life version.

Of course the free market can solve the problem!

First, allow me to defend against polluting aggressors by either:
A. making it really easy to sue them, or
B. allowing physical force, just as I can defend against a mugger.

Then I will join the other free-marketers and oppose carbon taxes. We can even do it gradually, or compromise if that helps. I just don't think the existing legal system is efficient enough to internalize most pollution costs on a case-by-case basis.

That's actually how things worked in common law jurisdictions prior to the government getting involved in regulating environmental issues. During the early industrial revolution orchard owners in England were successfully suing factory owners for the air pollution they were creating until the government there passed a law exempting factories from liability for the property damage they caused. Factory owners paid more bribes to the politicians than the farmers so their needs were prioritized "for the greater good".

"rights" is such a loaded word. If you define rights as: privileges bestowed on the people by the government, then sure, you have no rights without the government.

Of course, you can still have a mutual respect for property, which can be enforced by market entities. Hence, the market can operate without a government framework of "rights".

We've discussed this before. You have yet to demonstrate why the market cannot provide the services that the government currently claims a exclusive domain over. Your position seems to be that people can't possibly protect their property without a monopoly institution forcefully extracting wealth to pay for such a service. Clearly, there is a market demand for protection of property. Entrepreneurs will supply this demand, just like they do in every other market (that isn't regulated out of existence).

It is you presenting the false dichotomy of government vs chaos.

Sadly, but typically, you are wrong, your ideals are misplaced, and your lack of knowledge on the subject shows. Regarding palm oil, it's safe to say you don't understand the details at all. Poverty is the problem. Regarding beef, again, you miss the mark. Ranchers own their land. With regard to the blue whale, I see you failed to really learn about the problem, its cause, and what saved the blue whale. And regarding the commons, I suggest if you want to cite something which you feel backs up your ideology, then perhaps you should really learn more about the well known document which discusses it. How much do you really know about Garrett Hardin and his colleague Herman Daly?


That's because you willfully choose to wear blinders. Your obtuse desire to remain ignorant on the complexity of the problem does not reinforce your point of view.


Would you mind telling me where I advocated price fixing?


I am an environmentally conscious individual who knows a heck of a lot more than you do, and I am not one who advocates price fixing, but I am also someone smart enough to know that unregulated free markets result in exploitation to make a quick buck by individuals with little more knowledge than you - thus resulting in unsustainable and irreversible damage to our planet's biosphere and ecosystems.

You are proof of the the damage the free markets can cause, by virtue of your willful ignorance.

Property requires something called legal title to be useful.  You can't raise a mortgage on a patch of land just by saying "A market entity will support me if I pay it" as someone else can pay a bigger "market entity" and take it off you.

A market requires enforcement of contracts.  That means you needs courts and lawyers.  If you rely on the free market, you will have competing courts giving alternative verdicts. 

Absent a government, these problems get solved by a single "market entity" overpowering all the others so that only land title it recognises and only contracts it validates count. 

That "market entity" is now a government - unelected; unrestrained and it will be a tyranny.  Congrats!

You are confusing your own lack of imagination for a immutable law of nature. You can't figure out how property is useful without a government-granted title. You don't know how to interact with people or resolve interpersonal disputes without a government.

That's fine - you're under no obligation to know or learn alternative ways to solve these problem but by stating these things as if you know them to be true you're just putting your own unexamined prejudices forward as fact.

When you have a moment to spare, google "ad hominem."  Its a logic error and your post is a classic of its kind.  After reading up on it, feel free to make a post in which you engage with the arguments.

He didn't attack your character. He specifically attacked a fallacious element of your argument: "You are confusing your own lack of imagination for a immutable law of nature.". You reasoning boils down to this: I can't think of how a market will solve these problems, therefore they can't be solved. This is false logic.

google: "conflict resolution in a free society". There's plenty of info on this.

That's funny. The words you're putting in Hawker's mouth are very expressive of your own views. Was it not you who basically said: "I can't think how a market would solve these problems, therefore, you must advocate price fixing."

The only thing you said which came close to a counter argument was "Ranchers own land". With the beef example, you're assuming the wolves have value worth saving. Also, the wolves are unowned, hence the problem of unowned capital (assuming anyone want's to own them). Likely, they are a liability, hence there is value in destroying them. They have been priced appropriately.

If you are so well versed in Garrett Hardin, perhaps you can condense his central argument into a short paragraph and present it here. After a glance at this http://www.garretthardinsociety.org/articles/art_tragedy_of_the_commons.html He seems to be highly critical of The Commons as the cause of social problems. Which is exactly what I'm telling you; all these social problems result from the concept of common property. The government is one big fat problem of the commons, preventing the price mechanism from allocating scarce resources properly, resulting in environmental pillaging.

I'm glad you don't advocate price fixing, but what then do you advocate? If the price of a commodity isn't set by voluntary trade, then by what mechanism would it be accurately priced? If you believe that the market pricing is "inaccurate" then you must be comparing it to something that you believe is accurate. Else how could you make this determination?

Seriously. Don't you think adding knowledge and educating yourself would make your arguments a little more palatable? Do you really believe the stuff you write?

Here's some advice. Please read it carefully: If you have gaps in your knowledge, then you have to assume that perhaps your view of the world and its systems might be too simple. Here are some key words: trophic cascades, riparian zones, balanced ecosystems, edge effects.


Garrett Hardin specifically said that those such as you misinterpreted his document. If you really want to grasp the content of his material, then study him in depth, and his colleage, Herman Daly.


The government does create problems. But private property ownership is not, and will never be a complete solution. Also, and as an example, you still haven't addressed anything I said about blue whales.


The mistake you're making is assuming that a buyer and seller have anyone's interest in mind other than their own. Once you get past that point, and realize that in addition to the buyer and seller, there are other parties involved, both current and future, then you'll be in a better position to see that there is no such thing as an accurate price. And again, it is explained effectively by the likes of Garrett Hardin, Herman Daly, Paul Ehrlich, and others.

Let me put it simply. Consider: Party A (the seller) has a certain set of knowledge about the world, and certain goals. Party B (the buyer) also has a certain set of knowledge about the world, and certain goals. Within this limited microcosm of likely incomplete knowledge, they engage in a transaction, trading goods at a certain price. To them, the price is "accurate". But their transaction has external effects, which translates to external costs to others. These external costs may have no effect on party A and party B, and thus they continue in their transactions, with further external costs to others.

You are a prime example of both party A and party B. Your gaps in knowledge cause you to value transactions which can be executed at a certain price (which you deem to be 'accurate').

Note the bold parts; that's an ad hominem .  

We've talked about "conflict resolution in a free society" here before.  It always comes back to the same problem.  You can think of clever and imaginative ways to do it but without a state, they are too inefficient and the nature of competition means that you end up with a single overwhelming entity.  A democracy is better.

I personally wouldn't be too quick to accuse someone of ad hominem. Accusing one of ad hominem itself is often a form of ad hominem, precisely because it doesn't address the statement made, but instead draws attention to the character of the statement.

As an example, I might say to another: "Your own obtuseness and lack of imagination prevents you from seeing the bigger picture." And then I might go on with further statements, possibly logical and truthful or not. It is the further set of statements which form the meat of the argument, not the accusation that someone is obtuse.

Or I might say to another: "You're obviously an idiot. I pity you." And then go on to make other statements that might indeed be logically false, but regardless, perhaps it is obvious and true that the person I have called an idiot is truly an idiot.

I think the problem with carbon taxes is that we're thinking of them in the wrong way. We're trained to believe that the choice is between increasing taxes and using the money to fund wasteful subsidies on technologies that will allow us to continue destroying the world's resources but in a more clean and shiny way on the one hand and outright denialism on the other. I think there's a middle ground that libertarians and environmentalists alike will find acceptable: add carbon taxes, but use them to replace other taxes. If the government earns $10 billion from the carbon tax, remove $10 billion from the income tax.

It's economically superior in every way - it helps protect the environment, does so in a neutral way that doesn't build in a preference for any one solution over another, and it reduces taxes that dampen the incentive to produce.

Hmmm.

Tax that which you want less of, and don't tax that which you want more of.

1. Tax extraction of natural resources.
2. Tax pollution.

Shades of Herman Daly and a steady-state economy?

http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/rethinking_growth/

http://www.theoildrum.com/node/3941

http://occupycorporatism.com/globalists-switching-gears-royal-society-lecturer-says-co2-not-effecting-earths-temperature/

Continually spamming all carbon-related threads with links neither helps your cause nor advances the discussion. We have Google too, and you're oozing with confirmation bias.

Spamming relevant current events in direct relation to the topic, which you just so happen to disagree with? Because you can find something on Google means you have knowledge of it already? That's a cool trick. By the way your refractory type of rhetoric is all too familiar. Sock puppet much?

Ok this is way too good to resist, sorry everyone else.

Whose sock puppet am I?

I don't know, but Fritz Vahrenholt (TECSHARE's link) is a chemist, affiliated with energy companies, and sat on the board of Shell. He has never published a paper on climate or climatology in a peer reviewed journal.

I have said over and over: all claims made by these charlatans can be refuted, and they can be tied to Big Oil or other organizations of ill repute, such as the Heartland Institute, the Cato Institute, etc. Think tanks are what they call themselves, and what they really are are nothing but fronts for conservative thinking masquerading as organizations which claim to be experts on climate.

It pretty much began with Frederick Seitz and his claims that tobacco smoke does not cause cancer, when he was on the payroll of RJ Reynolds, and then later, when he went on the payroll of Exxon/Mobil, where he then made claims about climate change. These windbags have continued spouting their fictions ever since.

Individuals such as TECSHARE find what they believe to be these earth shattering news items, and gleefully post them as though they were real science. Pretty sad.

You called it science, I called it a related current event. You really enjoy speaking for other people don't you.

lolz :D

So first you get called out on a bullshit sockpuppet accusation. Then FirstAscent completely destroys your source. And your response to both... is to weasel out of addressing either.

What a coward.

You guys are comical, what is to respond to? This is nothing I haven't heard 20 times from him. I just enjoy the complete total over reaction at the mere sight of an opposing view induces in your little circle, as well as the coordinated personal attacks never resulting in ANY actual empirical data being introduced. The over reaction serves to illustrate how your emotional motivations clearly over power your logical observations, as well as completely entertain the shit out of me.

Perhaps these three things share something in common:

1) I am using sock puppets.
2) FirstAscent and I are coordinating attacks.
3) Globalists are tricking the world's scientists about CO2.

http://occupycorporatism.com/climategate-scientists-governments-private-industry-conspire-to-fool-the-world/
http://junkscience.com/2012/06/22/hank-campbell-ipcc-gives-up-on-science-makes-grey-literature-official/
Have fun attacking me and not staying on topic, as usual.

25.905 cents per kwh. is my new electricity price. Up from 22.759.
So ok a bit extra for carbon tax, fair enough you think.....
That is not how Australian business works!
You see we also have a daily fee for the luxury of being charged that price, up from 28.787 cents per day to 65.9 cents per day.
125% extra!
And all of this for the same filthy coal we've always used.

And mining companies are working on shipping ever increasing quantities of coal to China so they can burn it tax free.

I'm sure this will really help the environment!