It's 3 days until the election and I still can't figure it out.
This site seems to have a lot of people who have made up their minds as to who to vote for. I, on the other hand, am still struggling with my decision. I've boiled it down to two fundamental questions that will make up my mind.
The Liberal Carbon Tax. I just don't understand the logic of a tax neutral carbon tax. In simple terms, as I understand it, they are setting out to raise the cost of fuel to drive a reduction in consumption (the oil companies are already doing this). Then they will lower my income tax to help me pay for this increased fuel cost. I don't get it, how will this significantly lower consumption. And please, don't tell me 230 economists say its a good thing...2300 economists said giving people mortgages they can't afford was a good thing.
The Green alternative energy platform. My understanding of global warming is that reducing carbon combustion will only reduce the rate of global warming. We would have to stop carbon combustion to stop global warming. Reducing carbon combustion is a stop gap measure until we switch entirely to alternative sources of energy. I also believe that nuclear energy is the only real alternative (and I understand some of the issues..waste, safety) we have today. Solar, wind, tidal will not entirely supply all our domestic and industrial requirements. The Greens are not supportive of nuclear power (OK I can somewhat understand that) but are not focused on long term alternatives (they seem to me to be focused on the stop gap stuff..carbon taxes, wind, solar, etc.). I could support a program that taxed carbon and put all the revenue into Rand D of real alternative energy.
Please help me to understand or direct me somewhere to gain a better understanding of these issues. Thanks.
5 Comments
There are countries using both carbon tax and cap and trade. Both work infinitely better than doing nothing at all as we have been doing so for.
The idea of the carbon tax is to make people pay X dollars a tonne to release CO2 into the air. If this price is higher than the cost of modifying the equipment, then businesses will naturally prefer to make the modifications to avoid the tax. However, it has to get up about $200 a ton for this to happen. The Liberals are calling for about $20 a ton and gradualy ramping it up. The problem with this is nothing happens to start. It is just a way of raising money, not reducing carbon. The liberals say they will reduce income tax so that the average person will come out the same as before. Heavy "polluters" /\consumers will come out worse. People with a light CO2 footprint (e.g. people who use public transport of bikes instead of cars) will come out ahead.
The problem is CO2 stays in the atmosphere for about 1000 years. The only way to stop the global warming from getting worse is to reduce CO2 emissions to ZERO. The only way make it better is to have negative emissions, aka sequestration, by capturing carbon and storing it as living trees or wood or as gas underground.
“It might take another 30 Kyotos over the next century to cut global warming down to size.”
~ Jerry Mahlman, director of the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory at Princeton, born 1940-02-21
I get spitting angry when uninformed politicians tell us the country can't afford even 1/10 of a Kyoto. The fools refuse to look at the cost doing nothing.
Corporate executives love to whine about the impossibly onerous 1% extra cost it will take to deal with global warming. Yet oddly, they have no concern at all about economist Sterns’ estimated 20% cost of the consequences of doing nothing.
Nuclear power has a number of problems. Many people feel developing it would be a distraction
from permanent solutions.
The problems include:
1. even after decades of working on the problem, we still have not got a way to dispose of or store the nuclear waste safely.
2. It requires huge amounts of oil to mine, refine and transport the fuel. This means as the price of oil goes up, so does the cost of nuclear energy. It is already very expensive. It it even more expensive when you factor in the decomissioning cost.
3. It not a suitable global solution because it leads to proliferation of nuclear weapons.
4. A terrorist attack on even a single plant is completely unacceptable.
5. It takes ten years plus to plan and build a plant.
What we really need in fusion power, which would give us more power than we need without pollution or radioactivity. Unfortunately, even after decades of research, we still don't even have a laboratory bench fusion reactor. Perhaps pouring hundreds of billions into research might crack it.
What about Cap and Trade?
This is what the New Democrats advocate. I like it because it starts reducing greenhouse gases right away. Every factory is told it must reduce its emissions by x % or face heavy fines. For factory A this might be fairly easy to do. For factory B this would be would be very
expensive. So factory A and B negotiate a deal. Factory A will reduce 400 tonnes of CO2 more than it needs to, and factory B will reduce 400 tonnes less than it needs to. The total reduction is the same. Factory B pays factory A a negotiated fee for the favour.
Factory A does this for other factories as well. The scheme thus has an incentive to get its emissions down to 0 right away, and to develop or buy the equipment to do it. This research
makes it easier for factory B to reduce its own emissions.
Each year the government lowers the bar on acceptable emissions. This increases the cost of a traded tonne of carbon, putting more pressure on everyone to lower their emissions so they won't have to buy any credits and so they will have some to sell.
This is a friendly system to industry since it lets them reduce CO2 in the cheapest most efficient places.
I have written an essay about global warming with links at
http://mindprod.com/environment/kyoto.html that might help get you started.