And who may this institute for sustainable futures be?A cheer squad for the AGW theory?Do I need 2 guesses?
you said
"The renewable energy target, and the feed-in tariffs, don't need government funds (but they do push up electricity prices). There is no ''magic pudding'', but a place to start would be to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels, which the Institute for Sustainable Futures estimated at between $9.3 billion and $10.1 billion in the year to June 30, 2006."
So we are really talking about the replacement with one subsidy(depending on how one defines subsidy) with another but via different mechanism, electricity tariffs. Is that right?
you said
"I am not happy that my hard earned taxes are being spent subsidising a highly profitable industry that is also potentially causing irreversible damage (at least irreversible by humans on human time scales) to the environment."
Irreversible damage? Irreversible until a tree eats the CO2 molecule. Then it becomes tree, easy.
You talk alot about pollution BB, but the air is much, much cleaner now. When I were a lad(break into the Four Yorkshiremen sketch about now) growing up in Yarraville in Melbourne, there was a gasworks virtually at the end of my street, ICI fertilizers was about a mile away and everyone burned briquettes in the winter. No one worried about anything then. Sure it stank, but it was such an improvement on what was before. Think London pea souper fogs but people accepted it, but they were much tougher then. So to put pollution into context, just by being alive we pollute so should we apologise for our existance? I'm not about to, nor should anyone. Every living thing "pollutes" by its existance(and death eeeek , more pollution!!!)What to do? Kill everything before killing ourselves? That is the logical extension of pollution hysteria(as silly as it may sound, though akin to those that want to somehow eliminate or at least reduce human numbers)
As we talked about last night, subsidy is in the eye of the beholder, so isn't necessarily wrong. It all depends who's doing the counting and who are they counting for. Subsidies were attacked in the 80's as uncompetitive from an economic rationalist viewpoint.
Also mentioned last night, we are lucky to live in a relatively benign climate, but in China and Europe and North America, if one doesn't have heating one dies. As simple as that, So, do you want to be the one to tell half a billion Chinese that they should just curl up and die this winter, or should we sell them some coal?
