...and the poms, page-3

Yes agreed 2ic. What has always alarmed me is we try and keep our environment clean with user-pay type fees for dumping rubbish and cleaning up contaminated sites and waterways etc but when it comes to the atmosphere its a free for all. We treat it as a sewer but any form of carbon tax aimed at cleaning it up and regulating emissions is seen as an unnecessary extra tax imposed by the government and an invasion of our civil liberties. I guess we must all have the fundamental right to pollute the atmosphere!

So we end with an emissions trading scheme (eventually) with all the associated monitoring and compliance costs and complications. In the meantime we continue to subsidise the fossil fuel industry which uses the atmosphere as a free dumping ground. I can't help thinking that if the playing field were level then greener forms of energy generation and storage would be much more cost effective than they are now.