Right Pulse

There are some very good economic arguments for opposing the introduction of an ETS to ‘tackle’ climate change, assuming you accept that it is driven by human carbon dioxide emissions:

The Australian surveyed the entire Liberal Party back bench. It is something the leadership team should have done a long time ago. Of the 59 parliamentarians contacted, a staggering 41 said they did not support Turnbull’s desire to negotiate with a view to passing the government’s ETS legislation ahead of the Copenhagen conference on climate change in December. Only 12 MPs agreed with their leader’s position. That’s one in five….

Turnbull had had enough with soundings and consensus building, choosing instead to describe backbench colleagues critical of his leadership as “anonymous smart-arses”. He boldly declared that if his party didn’t support his position on ETS negotiations he didn’t want to be leader.

It is a shame that MT has been drawn into a false debate about how to modify an ETS to minimise its impact on industry, instead of arguing that an ETS is a poor way of addressing climate change. From Barron’s:

At Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus on Climate, an “expert panel” of five economists, including three Nobel Laureates, reviewed 21 research papers submitted by climate economists.

The results of the review indicate that ETS style legislation is the least effective way to mitigate problems caused by human induced carbon emissions -  assuming it has any impact at all. From their press release:

The Expert Panel found that high carbon taxes would be an expensive, ineffective way to reduce the suffering from global warming.

MT should focus on the top 11 solutions instead of pushing the bottom 4. If spending a few billion dollars to research and implement a ‘cloud reflection’ programme is what is needed to offset the nation’s carbon emissions and placate the unfilled masses, then so be it. Obviously it would never satisfy the most devout followers, but probably the rest of the country without impoverishing it.

An Analysis of Climate Engineering as a Response to Climate Change by Dr. Eric J Bickel and Lee Lane shows that we might be able to cancel out this century’s global warming by spending no more than $9 billion, and that climate engineering might be able to achieve as much for the planet as carbon cuts at a fraction of the cost.