Environmental catastrophes will continue to not happen. Nature is remarkably resilient. Furthermore, as we get richer and smarter we will get better at remedying or adapting to natural adversity. [Emphasis added]

But you will note, patrickm, that “remedying and adapting” when the planetary climate system is out of whack is not a walk in the park.

BTW who is saying that we are going to become poor through fixing the planet? Apart John Howard, that is.

is the sort of thing I would have in mind!

You will note that unlike Flannery’s books you may read it free on the net.

Naturally petrol, electricity, and air-fares etc are at issue - or these ‘price signals’ mean nothing and as this is very easy to understand if one is battling, I say that swingers ought to be able to be convinced that the best bet is currently to do nothing that would put their living standards at risk. When in doubt doing nothing is often best.

Can we just be clear about what you think we should do, patrickm?

Nothing, is that it?

Well you all may be right; Tweedledum might get elected. But I believe that the masses just listened to Howard on ‘Work Choices’ and by election time it will not swing votes to the ALP. Howard spoke loud and clear and early and is now moving on to the Budget.

Brian however detects a slight problem from the ignorant working classes and general battlers and is trying to face in both directions at once, loosing all face in the process.

Brian wants carbon ‘price signals’ from the government (for the sake of the planet no less we just have to be fed the medicine) and Brian believes that the ALP will deliver more of them than the ‘denialist’ Howard Government would. No doubt not as much medicine as the Greens would force feed us but nevertheless more than the alternative Tweedles.

In another thread he yells ‘Act now’. What action other than put a price on Carbon. Brian means push up the price of petrol and electricity and water and food etc Force people to use less then sooner or later their living standards will improve again. But first the medicine!

Then in another comment Brian complains that Howard will try to scare the swinging voters with the thought idea that the ALP would do just that!

The big issue of global warming and the carbon taxing (read living standard cutting) ALP is going to start to bite in the face of the twaddle about pricing signals that Paul and Brian are trying to flog.

The battlers will be heading your way with the baseball bat once they twig to what putting a price on carbon will mean for their ability to aspire and struggle to use ‘more for less’ as history has shown humans continuously capable of.

The ALP will be widely seen to be right of the Coalition and left of the Greens after this election. Nevertheless they are only marginally so (accept on the important issue of fighting the revolutionary war against the enemy of all humanity that are conducting their sectarian / racist bombing in ever diminishing circles in Iraq etc.)

He’s promised an Australian equivalent of the Stern report so we can find the best strategies for achieving the necessary cuts. Such a report would also examine the cost of doing nothing, or doing very little.

Howard has discovered that the electorate cares about climate change and, even worse, that the opposition has a reasonably coherent approach to doing something about it. So he is casting about for stuff to do. But at base he believes that if we do nothing then the economy will sail along at about 3% growth, which means we’ll double our wealth every 25 years or so. He’ll do some carbon trading, but since the polluters are in on the design it won’t be enough to make renewable energy competitive.

Stern has told us that if we don’t take the whole thing seriously the economy will most likely go pear-shaped. And that’s speaking only about the economy.

It seems to me we have a clear choice. If you are looking at both from a position where they both look the same, I’d suggest you are a long way from where the action is.

” The Australian Greens said that by putting coal ahead of renewable energy, the opposition leader - like Prime Minister John Howard - remained stuck in the past.

“Every time he mentions climate change, he finds it necessary to reassure the coal industry that they will continue to be protected even while the world changes around them,” Greens senator Christine Milne said. ”

Exactly as I predicted 2 hours ago.

A carbon tax scheme can be designed to be revenue-neutral so that the proceeds of the tax can be redistributed to the taxpayers in the form of, amongst other things, incentives and subsidies for people and firms to adjust to low-carbon behaviour, or abolition of taxes such as payroll tax which discourage employment.

Firstly, if one accepts the scientific consensus on projections of climate change, people will be paying more than the current market price for fossil fuel usage regardless of whether or not measures such as carbon taxes or an emissions trading scheme are introduced. The argument is about who pays, and in what currency: do we make consumers of fossil fuels pay an amount which incorporates the external social and environmental cost of their consumption (and therefore brings it down to a level where the marginal external cost of consumption does not exceed the marginal benefit), or do we persist with fossil fuel, etc., prices which allow emissions to continue at a level which will result in negative externalities whose costs will fall on, amongst others, poor people in developing countries whose access to water will suffer, whose crops will fail and who will be most at risk from increased environmental health risks, natural disasters, etc.

Secondly, the Australian working class consumers for whom patrickm presumes to speak are not interesting in purchasing quantities of factors of production (such as fossil fuels). They are interested in purchasing the goods and services which are produced using those factors of production, and the utility which comes from those goods and services. The family which drives from Brisbane to the Scenic Rim on the weekend does so because they want to see the Scenic Rim, not because they want to consume the X litres of petrol the car will use on the trip. If the price of petrol per litre increases due to a price being placed on carbon, the family will look for ways to travel to the Scenic Rim using proportionately less petrol and paying no more than before for the trip. The whole point of pricing carbon is to stimulate a myriad of micro-economic adjustments like this which will result in the population as a whole finding ways to enjoy much the same level of economic activity and quality of life whilst burning a lot less carbon.

Kim, and Christine would like to distract attention from the issue by once again (it never gets tedious for them) shooting the messenger.

Oh dear, patrickm has tumbled onto our little counter-revolutionary ruse. Look! Over that way people! Gaze not upon patrickm’s revelations lest you discover our cunning plot to have the workers wallowing in pig slop as the rest of us jet to Hawaii.

In other words, dickhead, your pathetic whining about shooting the messenger doesn’t deserve to be taken seriously as long as you deride anybody who doesn’t agree with your far-right arguments as a “pseudo-leftist.”

Can’t speak for the pirate queen of course, but as for me I reserve the right to keep sending you up mercilessly. It’s like shooting fish in a barrel. Tres fun.

Climate change policies which might (or might not) affect the living standards of battlers are entirely hypothetical at this time. If people are going to vote on the basis of a scare, it is more likely to be the scare that is enacted in law, and that is Work Choices.

In any case, Tim Flannery isn’t presenting himself to the electorate to be Prime Minister. Kevin Rudd is. Rudd isn’t Latham. As each day passes, he puts more and more policy daylight between himself and the Greens. Some might try to paint Rudd as Bob Brown’s handpuppet, but the electorate won’t buy it. Garrett is irrelevant.

And further in any case, the electorate does care about climate change. There’s a reason the Liberal Party is falling over itself to be seen as doing something about it, and it’s not because they’ve all just read David Suzuki’s web site. In about a month’s time, Howard’s task force will report and recommend emissions trading as a least cost way of cutting back on greenhouse gas emissions, and will say at the front of their report that the science unequivocally says that greenhouse gases are causing climate change in general and global warming in particular. Howard will accept their recommendations, as he hinted the other day.

The next election will see each major party competing to see who can cut greenhouse gases the most, and they will both do it within the framework of the economy as it is. Rudd will ostentatiously support the coal industry, just to reinforce the point. The major parties will cancel each other out, and the Greens will scream loud and long that Labor is selling out on climate change, which will suit Rudd just fine. The election will be decided on other issues.

Maoists for Howard - dude, start a new party! Folks would flock to your overworded and incomprehensible banner.

Actually, I think that the old argument from twenty-five-years ago about leftists having to pick the lesser-of-two-evils (founded on the notion that the ALP was left of the Coalition), is now answerable, not by explaining that the differences are not sufficient to be stuck behind the ALP, as it was all those years ago when the ALP were selling out the East Timorese, but by explaining that the ALP is now clearly to the right of the Coalition and left of the Greens. Pseudo leftists are a bigger threat to working peoples interests than Howards more straight forward conservatives. Take the ALP / Green proposal to abandon the Iraqi peoples to mass-murdering bombers rather than render them assistance; but I digress.

Kim is aware that realist ALPers like Ferguson etc wants the Greens appeased sufficiently to get their preferences meanwhile after the election they can be dudded and the Coalitionesque policies followed. The ‘realists’ have always argued that Greens etc have nowhere else to go with their all important preferences, but it may be that the Green tide has peaked (except for the wealthy electorates where the ‘Doctors Wives’ may still have some room for growth) now that consequences are coming to be tabled. Green association has not got the ALP elected for some time now and the timber workers in the last election showed that there is a price to pay if you cuddle up to close. The timber workers were not dudded by Howard so they are unlikely to come back to the ALP despite Work Choices.

Obviously the ALP will not admit that they would impose ‘price signals’ on the people (and if the Ferguson types had their way perhaps they wouldn’t), so voters will have to work out (as usual) what is most probable and take their punt.

Just like Paul N, Flannery is quite clear - as is Suzuki. etc I think that people (swinging voters) will understand that the Garrett ALP is closer to these Greens than the Coalition is. I think that no matter what either of the Tweedles say the people will have concluded that the train has already left the station for both of them. Brown and Flannery and the rest of the Green reactionaries are noticeably on the back of the ALP train and the ALP can’t effectively throw them off.

Naturally petrol, electricity, and air-fares etc are at issue - or these ‘price signals’ mean nothing and as this is very easy to understand if one is battling, I say that swingers ought to be able to be convinced that the best bet is currently to do nothing that would put their living standards at risk. When in doubt doing nothing is often best. Tweedledee could well appear to be the safer bet or Tweedledum may get over the line.

We are still seven months out from the elections. That means that people will have had that much longer to get across the Work Choices legislation as it affects them personally. 32 year lows in unemployment, and a low number of disputes etc would suggest that the issue might cool in the face of a looming direct threat to hike prices to ‘save the world’. Honest Greens will be arguing that coal and oil etc has to be ‘put behind us’ ie energy prices have to be pushed up to blazes, as they are already saying about water and that means food prices up. But because it is electoral poison many of them will become more dishonest.

This issue has been the sleeping giant that the Global Warming (now Climate Change) cranks have avoided all along.

The masses of people have become convinced by the fear mongering so ‘something must be done’ but that something is push more research money at the issue as Howard will, rather than adopt the Flannery ‘time to act by attacking peoples standard of living with price signals’ while pretending that that’s not what you’re doing to people.

Spiros; you could be right, but here is why I discount the work choices ‘issue [that] is huge in the electorate’ at the present time.
Work choices is more a theoretical fear that falls away day by day in the face of peoples practice, while ‘price signals’ are a genuine threat that is looming. Once it is clear that the Greens/ALP are lying when they start to say price signals and higher living standards they will be thought of as exaggerating over what Work Choices means to battlers.

Howard has a long way to catch up - but he has Bob Brown and Peter Garrett to help him. Anyway one year of Rudd pretending to be PM might be enough to warn off most swinging voters. Polls beginning about a month after the budget will give a better indication of which of the Tweedles will get to run the two party dictatorship for the next swing.

The battling voters will vote Labor into office to rid them of Work Choices and will get Labor’s climate change policy as an incidental by-product.

so even though I’ll be voting informal, being left of the ALP and hostile to it, my early money is on a Howard win.

Rewind to 1933:

so even though I’ll be voting informal, being left of the Social Democratic Party and hostile to it, my early money is on a Hitler win.

A searing manifesto from the Maoist forces!

Onwards! A steel furnace in every backyard!

patrickm should get a job as a staffer for Mar’n Ferguson.

The truth is that Paul Norton wants to make it more expensive for working people to fly and to drive and to run an air conditioner and when that point is clear to everyone we shall see what swingers in the marginals will vote for your type.