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May 7, 2008

Emissions Trading Schemes: A Few of the Costs

BrookesNews.com provides an Australian perspective on some of the extravagant costs that will be imposed by emissions trading schemes (ETS). Highlights:

Staggering estimates of the costs of forcing industry to purchase permits to emit CO2 are just starting to emerge: Germany (100 billion euros), Australia (up to $22 billion), New Zealand ($4.5 billion). The amazing fact is that even though consumers in many countries will bear oppressive costs, there may be no reduction whatsoever in CO2 emissions, and no beneficial effects on the world climate.

That's only the direct cost.

But to administer the whole complicated scheme, with tentacles into every business in the land, will require a stifling bureaucratic overhead of administrators, consultants, regulators, statisticians, tax collectors, auditors, inspectors, enforcers and prosecutors. At a time when real industry is suffering from a shortage of labour and services, all of these people and resources will be sucked into an ETS black hole. This bureaucratic burden is yet another hidden tax.

Then to cope with the vast increase in green/red tape, the business world will build a matching unproductive empire of corporate bureaucrats charged with complying with all the new laws, statistics, reports, taxes, regulations and audits. All these morbid results will be followed by the growth of a parasitic class of traders, speculators and bankers already gearing up to profit from the creation of paper carbon credits — another addition to the hidden ETS tax burden paid for by consumers, taxpayers or shareholders.

Government's greenwashed greed will continue to hit us in the stomach:

The Ethanol Obsession is already diverting grains and other foods to produce motor fuel. This stupid policy of subsidising or mandating the use of ethanol and biofuels will gobble up rapidly increasing quantities of corn, wheat, oils and sugar. Farmers all over the world are diverting land from food production and destroying forest land to produce motor fuel.

An even more ominous threat to future food supplies is the growing plague of sterile carbon-credit plantations which are already smothering food farm land and native pastures at an alarming rate. Every farming community is watching with increasing alarm as families leave, food production ceases, farm houses are abandoned and the land is covered by a monoculture of unproductive artificial plantations. Once the ETS becomes operational, this destructive process will multiply. Some hungry future generation will have the job of eradicating this crop of woody weeds for a new race of pioneering farmers.

There is also the danger that emissions caps really will lower carbon emissions:

Even more insidious is the fact that schemes like carbon sequestration and carbon credit plantations will rob the atmosphere of the life-producing carbon dioxide. For 100 years, the green revolution has produced more food from the same land, partly because of the free carbon dioxide added to the atmosphere by burning carbon fuels.

An emphasis on inefficient power technology (biofuel, wind, solar, etc.) will lead to higher prices for electricity, essentially another tax. The economy will further suffer from the economic enterprises that are scrapped or mothballed because carbon taxes render them unprofitable.

Since international carbon trading schemes deliberately transfer money from productive countries to the Third World, those who are forced to pay for them will receive no benefit whatsoever — until their own economies have been reduced to Third World levels. Then we can all rejoice in our equality.

Hat tip: Dissecting Leftism.

Posted by Van Helsing at May 7, 2008 10:28 AM

Comments

Posted by: Refuter Of Liberal Vermin at May 7, 2008 10:44 AM

Posted by: conservativeteen at May 7, 2008 11:10 AM

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Posted by: bustoff at May 7, 2008 10:01 PM