But of course the only real way to reduce CO2 emissions is to pump less oil and dig less coal from the earth. This will happen soon anyway but not because of taxes or whatever wealth extracting scheme.
BTW, 110 billion by 2050, if one believes the inflation numbers, is less then 50 billion (and more like 15) in todays dollars. Still, it is just tax and the burden will be shifted on to those unable to avoid it. Politicians!

Nick Smith keeps talking on responsibility, well I wish he or someone was prepared to do the responsible thing and dump the ETS. It's a fraud. And Cunnliffe can't talk, it was his party in cohoots with the Greens that brought this nonsense in the House to start with.

And it's official, Al Gore is retracting, and retracting fast: http://blogs.news.com.au/heraldsun/andrewbolt/index.php/heraldsun/commen...

Al Gore is now saying carbon dioxide isn't actually to blame for most of the warming we saw until 2001:

Gore explored new studies - published only last week - that show methane and black carbon or soot had a far greater impact on global warming than previously thought. Carbon dioxide "“ while the focus of the politics of climate change "“ produces around 40% of the actual warming. Gore acknowledged to Newsweek that the findings could complicate efforts to build a political consensus around the need to limit carbon emissions.

Which suggests not only that was Gore wrong to claim the science was "settled", but that the hugely expensive schemes to "stop" warming by slashing carbon dixoide emissions will be less than half as effective as claimed.

In fact, Gore now realised it's no use following fact based science, AGW will have to be turned into what it has been for some years now, a religion:

http://blogs.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/timblair/index.php/dailytelegrap...

Al's Gore's much-anticipated sequel to An Inconvenent Truth is published today, with an admission that facts alone will not persuade Americans to act on global warming and that appealing to their spiritual side is the way forward.

This is from the Guardian, which explains both the misspelling of "inconvenient" and the dumb assumption that Gore has been trading in facts even up to this point. It also explains the claim that this book is "much anticipated".

In his latest book, Holy Moly It's the Rapture! The Rapture, People! I Can See Poley Bears Huggin' in Heaven, Yes I Truly Can! [actual title: Our Choice: A Plan to Solve the Climate Crisis "“ ed], the man who won a Nobel prize in 2007 for his touring slideshow on disappearing polar ice and other consequences of climate change, concludes: "Simply laying out the facts won't work."

Correction: laying out your "facts" hasn't worked. Those of us in the "“ what's the phrase? "“ "reality-based community" are quite happy to argue science and data and such.

But anyway, the man in these threads who figured out the Credit Crunch was going to happen thirty years ago based on mineral extraction rates (despite there being no connection - that's why I stopped on 'that' thread, insanity) will no doubt remain unconvinced. Once he finishes watching the movie 2012 for the fourth time, unable to wait for the end ...

Australian agriculture is out of their ETS, ours remains in. The ETS has to be stopped,
because the only thing it does it take us all closer to the poor house. (And what is Nick Smith doing in National - you've got entirely the wrong party Nick).

No worries Mark, nicholarse ridicularse and his mates plan on having an immigration splurge to pump the national party membership and use up all the spare citzenship glossy awards that Helen had printed ready for her favourites.

Kate,

No I mean the implicit price of carbon as defined by the market. For example, if the supply of fossil fuel was reduced by x% in order to meet a pre-defined emission target and thereby a specific reduction in temperature then the rise in price of fossil fuel (ceteris paribus) would indicate the price of carbon emission.

Pricing emissions from agriculture is somewhat harder but a price can be derived from the remediation/sequestration of x kg/co2 or other emission and that price added into the cost of the output.

Having worked on this for 10 years my feeling now is that we should just get on with adapting and any solution, other than controlling the extraction of fossil fuel, is a gargantuan waste of time and money. Regardless of the arguments around global warming, it seems very likely that we are going to experience severe climatic challenges in the next century. Each country will experience these differently and this will pose huge challenges in terms of resource conflicts (primarily water based), population movements and economic and ecological collapses.

I guess we will just have to face those. Attempting to control the climate is a bit optimistic since we're still trying to understand how it works in the first place.

A population policy may be a good place to start. 3 strikes and you're out :-)

"Well, it's not really all about me. But methane has figured strongly in a couple of stories recently and gets an apparently-larger-than-before shout-out in Al Gore's new book as well. Since a part of the recent discussion is based on a paper I co-authored in Science, it is probably incumbent on me to provide a little context.

First off, these latest results are being strongly misrepresented in certain quarters. .............."

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2009/11/its-all-about-me-t...

Kate,

Actually I am a great fan of limits. i am rather sanguine about the condition of Mother Earth as she will always regenerate in her own time. I am more concerned about the conditions we may have to live in at some future point and therefore rather anthropocentric in my view. Having said that our treatment of our environment often mirrors our internal self and so a destructive bent may not be good for our own well being as Don Corleone notes!

I do believe the abandonment of limits, both morally and financially, have led us to where we are (i am no saint by the way). The cult of the individual, dressed up in the cloak of freedom, together with the leverage of credit (5% down pay us the rest over a zillion years) has delivered a world where immediate gratification is a basic need.....why save up for something when you can have it now?

The only limit to this new moral imperative is the availability of physical resources to provide the goods and services we desire. Must we really wait for the physical system to collapse? Have we lost the will and the discipline to live in a way that sustains our system rather than drives it towards an obvious end (technological development aside).

When the Bank of England stepped in to Northern Rock I realised this wouldn't happen. As much as Melanie Phillips said "All must have prizes" it seems no one can have losses........when you remove risk you create an insidious form of moral hazard.

Essentially that's what we have done. There are no more boundaries......imagine raising children without boundaries.......one day the Piper will come....and where will we be then?

We must return to a framework of limits.....not limits to creative and artistic endeavor but limits to ourselves.