G’day folks, this is the 2nd installment of the green spot coming to you from Australia’s beautiful Gold Coast. As I’m sitting here in a beautiful park, soaking up some sunshine, looking into the beautiful blue sky, and observing the people having a carefree, relaxed life, I can’t help but be reminded of the proposed Carbon Tax coming into effect down under early next year.
Under this new tax, the heaviest polluters will have to pay a special tax for their wasteful ways-or innovate.
More and more information is coming to light, which supports the notion that indeed the earth is warming up, and yes, it is through human actions. For this reason, Australia’s prime minister, Julia Gillard is taking this radical step to help reduce pollution. The plan is to reduce carbon output by 160million tons per year through the help of the new carbon tax.
The basic idea is to put a tax on carbon emitting fuel sources and companies, while “clean”, or “green” energy sources remain unaffected. This is all done in the hopes of shifting away from harmful carbon sources towards a cleaner, healthier and environmentally friendlier future. When companies see that keeping the current way of operating going will cost them more than trying to innovate and change their polluting ways, the proponents of this tax hope that more and more companies will finally consciously and wholeheartedly embrace the green movement.
While Australia is the first country to try this radical new approach, a similar proposition was made by the Obama administration in America. The so-called Cap and Trade Program was/is supposed to reward carbon efficient behavior of countries and tax the biggest polluters to try to reduce carbon emissions by 80% in the next 40 years.
Under the CaT program, every company/country has a certain “pollution limit” or permit. These permits would get lower and lower per year to reach the intended goal. If companies/countries stay under this limit, they can theoretically sell the remainder permits to others, thus the “trade” part. This all sounds great on paper, but as you can probably imagine with anything involving big name companies, there is a big catch. One of the strongest criticisms is that it would create inequality and provide incentives to cheat since bigger countries would have higher “caps” than smaller countries, and thus would be in a more favourable position to sell their leftover caps. Using offsets, they intend to sell their leftovers to other countries or companies, but that’s where the fairy tale world of intention ends and the grim reality of greed sets in. See, there’s no real way to check if real carbon is being removed to create the permit. If enough false offsets are created, it could actually increase, rather than decrease pollution. Some major cheating pertaining to this has already occurred in Indonesia. One of the biggest dangers of the CaT program is that it would create a false sense of security by telling people to just drive less and use more energy-efficient devices instead of trying to really get away from using fossil fuels and giving incentives to explore alternatives. This scares the living bejeesus out of oil companies and their supporters since cleaner energy sources would mean they have to either revise their business model or go under. More information about the CaT program can be found at: www.thestoryofstuff.com/capandtrade/
Back in Australia, Ms. Gillard’s proposal is a bit more straightforward. There is no selling of permits (as of this writing), which makes it much easier to implement and control than CaT. We’ll have to wait and see what happens from here. It’s a good first step in the right direction…at least on paper.
Mark my words, folks…. we’ll see these kinds of taxes and programs a lot more in the very near future…. which is actually a good thing, if they’re implemented with the right intentions….
Whether you’re for or against Carbon Taxing, the reality that our world is changing is hanging over us like a big, obscure cloud of smog. Will you take action now, or when it’s too late? Your choice! …. actually…. it’s not, and shouldn’t be, since we all share the responsibility of caring for our planet together. Let’s work for a better future! Heed the call! Take action! Become involved! Start making changes! Get others involved! Do something…. do anything to help out. How is this relevant to Japan? Japan has committed under the Kyoto Protocol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 6% from the 1990 level by the year 2012.
However, not only have Japan’s greenhouse gas emissions been increasing, the government hasn’t put forward effective policies to combat global warming. So you see, this affects us here in Japan every day. The fact that nothing is being done has consequences for each and every one of us every day. Time to act! Time to get involved!
“More and more information is coming to light, which supports the notion that indeed the earth is warming up, and yes, it is through human actions.”
Bullshit.The Aussie population is 20 million, the UK population is 60 million yet these 2 countries are strong supporters of carbon tax because they realize they tax their peoples whenever however they like,and once they have set the seed they are at fault,it makes taxing that much easier.However when last year the average temperature dropped,global warming fans became quiet,say fuck to the taxes fuck off to the politicians and the jobs they and their buddies will get in these companies.Stop these fucking taxes,and stop these politicians,they are making life impossible and miserable for people.Why care about our descendants the present Governments can not even find them jobs or a life worth living
Dear Gary,
That is a very interesting opinion you put forth. You are right in the assumption that politicians are making life more difficult for all of us, and that a lot of them are just out to fulfill their greedy intentions. I wholeheartedly agree with you that politics is not the answer to our problems. Quite the opposite, in fact. Politics is oftentimes the cause of many of the problems mentioned throughout the greenspot.
I’m not against carbon taxation of the heaviest polluters, if it is executed with the right intentions, such as Australia’s proposal rather than America’s Cap and Trade. As I said in the article, I commend the fact that someone out there is trying to take a step in the right direction.
However much I’d also like to agree with you that this global warming thing is B.S, I unfortunately can’t share your naivete of thinking that CO2 output, which is proven to have scientifically measurable heat-trapping properties has nothing to do with the FACT that the earth is warming up. For the last 1,300 years there have been no significant changes in overall climate pattern, up until about the 1950s, after which measurable CO2 levels have risen significantly….. So much so, in fact that Scientists started to pay attention.
Global Sea levels rose about 17 centimeters in the last century.
10 of the warmest years in Recorded History have occurred in the last 12 years.
More fun for you: Glacial Retreats, extreme weather events, acidification of our oceans… etc, etc, etc.
Here is a list of the sources used for this article for you to peruse through…. If you still think that somehow all these scientists, professors, and global climate experts are wrong and that you’re right with your “B.S hypothesis”, I can’t stop you. But if you do some serious research and pay attention to what’s going on out there beyond the confines of your computer screen in the real world, I think you’ll find it pretty hard to deny the fact that something is seriously amiss in the modern world.
1 IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, Summary for Policymakers, p. 5
B.D. Santer et.al., “A search for human influences on the thermal structure of the atmosphere,” Nature vol 382, 4 July 1996, 39-46
Gabriele C. Hegerl, “Detecting Greenhouse-Gas-Induced Climate Change with an Optimal Fingerprint Method,” Journal of Climate, v. 9, October 1996, 2281-2306
V. Ramaswamy et.al., “Anthropogenic and Natural Influences in the Evolution of Lower Stratospheric Cooling,” Science 311 (24 February 2006), 1138-1141
B.D. Santer et.al., “Contributions of Anthropogenic and Natural Forcing to Recent Tropopause Height Changes,” Science vol. 301 (25 July 2003), 479-483.
2 In the 1860s, physicist John Tyndall recognized the Earth’s natural greenhouse effect and suggested that slight changes in the atmospheric composition could bring about climatic variations. In 1896, a seminal paper by Swedish scientist Svante Arrhenius first speculated that changes in the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere could substantially alter the surface temperature through the greenhouse effect.
3 National Research Council (NRC), 2006. Surface Temperature Reconstructions For the Last 2,000 Years. National Academy Press, Washington, DC.
4 Church, J. A. and N.J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea level rise, Geophysical Research Letters, 33, L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.
The global sea level estimate described in this work can be downloaded
from the CSIRO website.
5http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/ anomalies/index.html
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp
6 T.C. Peterson et.al., “State of the Climate in 2008,” Special Supplement to the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, v. 90, no. 8, August 2009, pp. S17-S18.
7 I. Allison et.al., The Copenhagen Diagnosis: Updating the World on the Latest Climate Science, UNSW Climate Change Research Center, Sydney, Australia, 2009, p. 11
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/research/news/20100121/
http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/ 01apr_deepsolarminimum.htm
8 Levitus, et al, “Global ocean heat content 1955–2008 in light of recently revealed instrumentation problems,” Geophys. Res. Lett. 36, L07608 (2009).
9 L. Polyak, et.al., “History of Sea Ice in the Arctic,” in Past Climate Variability and Change in the Arctic and at High Latitudes, U.S. Geological Survey, Climate Change Science Program Synthesis and Assessment Product 1.2, January 2009, chapter 7
R. Kwok and D. A. Rothrock, “Decline in Arctic sea ice thickness from submarine and ICESAT records: 1958-2008,” Geophysical Research Letters, v. 36, paper no. L15501, 2009
http://nsidc.org/sotc/sea_ice.html
10 National Snow and Ice Data Center
World Glacier Monitoring Service
11 http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/extremes/cei.html
12 http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/What+is+Ocean+Acidification%3F (Note: The pH of surface ocean waters has fallen by 0.1 pH units. Since the pH scale is logarithmic, this change represents approximately a 30 percent increase in acidity.)
13 http://www.pmel.noaa.gov/co2/story/Ocean+Acidification
14 C. L. Sabine et.al., “The Oceanic Sink for Anthropogenic CO2,” Science vol. 305 (16 July 2004), 367-371