Posts by Angus Robertson
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The best analogy I could come up with is in there - a local residents' association.
A better analogy would be the customer relations department of Telecom or Vodafone. Neither a telco customer or student has ability to influence governance of the entity they are purchasing from. The analogy to ratepayer or shareholder fails because those do have direct imput in electing their governing council or board.
The universities farm out customer relations to a bunch of generally incompetent, self important, drunkards in the form of a student union. The telcos have automated call waiting transferring to a call centre in Bangalore. The "inexorable advance of human liberty" by analogy shall therefore entail students spend more time on hold?
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A damn good idea, why should churches be merely the preserve of the religious.
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Mark Steyn notes an interesting point on American Healthcare:
America is the Afghanistan of the Western world: That's to say, it has a slightly higher infant-mortality rate than other developed nations (there are reasons for that which I'll discuss in an upcoming column). That figure depresses our overall "life expectancy at birth." But, if you can make it out of diapers, you'll live longer than you would pretty much anywhere else. By age 40, Americans' life expectancy has caught up with Britons'. By 60, it equals Germany's. At the age of 80, Americans have greater life expectancy than Swedes.
Basically American healthcare fixes up rich people better than most and older people are richer than young people.
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Well, the usual suspect turned up, Bremner that is and I don't necessarily disagree with some of what he says... for a change.
Yeah it is funny eh?
The majority of the local PA leftist crowd want a global market in carbon pollution credits. Even though it will be open to private investment & thus manipulation by Western multinationals. Even though it will privilege (on the basis of pre-existing wealth) access to something as base as air, allowing the rich to exploit the poor wholeheartedly.
Conversely the libertarian James is against that market being created.
The world truly is about to end.
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China will never be onboard.
James is right about this.
Forget all the platitudes about it being in their own best enviromental interests and try thinking about it from the Chinese perspective.
On a purely economic basis. The Chinese produce 3.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide per capita, the British produce 9.7 and the world average (which needs to be halved eventually) is 4.2. The British have US$36,500 per capita GDP and the Chinese US$5,900. Under a global ETS the Chinese would need to purchase 1/4 as many credits with 1/6 as much capital as the Poms. That means purest economic suicide for the Chinese irregardless of the amount of clean tech available and is quite unfair.
On a social basis it is grossly unfair, because the West has been polluting for 200 years and we have the data to prove that this has caused climate change. During that 200 years the West has accumulated great wealth. The Chinese do know this in great detail, they aren't stupid. Now today some Westerners (the EU and apparently most of the Western left) come up with a plan to spread the burden of climate change evenly across the whole world through a global ETS.
Hmmm, exploitative much? The West craps out pollution for 200 years and then suddenly its China's fault for not coming on board with the "solution" - when the "solution" being offered is an ETS. China (& India & Brazil & Indonesia & Malayisia) are about to deliver the West a politely worded, discreetly, diplomatically put FUCK OFF on the ETS idea.
Lets move past the misguided ETS concept and find something workable.
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James,
NZ's market is too small to justify anyone making an effort solely to satisfy any NZ regulations.
Assume I was talking about the royal anglospherical "we" - NZ, Australia, Canada, USA. Consumer societies that have yet to dead end themselves into EU styled ETS bull pucky.
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Tom,
I agree with you, but think the failure to reach agreement will be a good thing consigning the exploitative Kyoto approach to the dust bin.
Sequesterisation is good idea, but to motivate its introduction in the absence of a Cap'n'Trade reckon we need sky high consumer carbon taxes on rich world consumers.
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It is a tough situation for a country like NZ. Nothing NZ could ever do will make even a speck of difference, no matter how badly NZ damaged its own economy, but there is the global pr aspect.
That is untrue James.
We could impose carbon taxes based upon the actual carbon footprint of goods consumed in NZ. This would be local action to create impetus amoung local and foriegn suppliers to improve their carbon efficiency. The most efficient producer having a price advantage to the consumer. This willl impact positively on the worlds climate and not cost our industry much at all, because taxes do not get placed on exports. It will however require ditching Kyoto, this will be bad PR.
Or we could follow the Greens* preferred methodology and put in place a rigorous Cap of 40% reduction or greater on emissions. All our future requirements in consumerable products and a lot of food stuffs would then be imported from 1000s of miles away. Tonnes of additional carbon would flow from Chinese smoke stacks, bulk carrier freighters and 747s. And it would deliver us great PR in the EU where such polluting policy has sustained by a thriving Green movement. Oh, it will kill the planet quicker, but great PR will be derived suckling to the EUs exemplar.
* Green politics on climate change are a Greenwash - they look good and sound good as long as no one takes off their glasses, looks behind the curtain.
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Regrettably, we are not an entirely sane species.
As witnessed by the fashionable solution whereby the EU has increased its carbon footprint and increased global pollution.
Or I'm not naive enough to assume everything gets done at once, and (gasp!) there are circumstances and parts of the world where climate change really really isn't top of the list.
That part of the world would be the Europe where the most important thing is to move all the dirty industries to the developing world and plant pretty trees. Then import all kinds of consumerable luxury back and expose the planet to 15 - 20% increased pollution. This is done to minimise cost under the Kyoto Protocols irregardless of the enviromental consequences.
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Like it, but do hope they use another colour sail material.