The Oil Drum: Australia/New Zealand

I have a few problems with the proposed carbon trading scheme. The total carbon limit will be met somehow, but by what process. The higher price for petrol could make us buy electric cars, except that there not many can afford a new car. The higher price for power could make us choose a nuclear power supplier, except that won't be allowed. Or a wind farm or thermal electric -- except that there will be hardly any of those by then. Or clean coal - joke. So what will be left is demand destruction. It won't need an election to kill that: just one opinion poll. What sort of prices will we need to actually pay for fossil fuel to get carbon emissions down? My vague memory of guesses from a little while ago are that they were way below the increases we've seen recently, but those increases haven't dinted demand yet.

So it's a joke. It isn't going to happen. We've seen that Rudd is good going forward. Can he conduct an orderly retreat?

Also, a lot of the talk about climate change is on the precautionary principle. In that regard I'd say this: the world has two modes; warm and wet (like the last 7000 years); or cold and dry (most of the last 1.8 million years). As long as the world is warm and wet we have some hope of feeding people. If the next winter in Central Asia is anything like the last one, with energy prices sky high as well, then we can imagine that a lot of people are going to have very little inclination to cooperate with the GHG reduction process. If we are really at the beginning of 10 years of cyclical cooling AND we're going to have world-wide demand destruction caused by peak oil, then the whole climate change bandwagon is just going to bog down in the snow (to extend the analogy to breaking point).