Carbon Trading, global wellbeing, intelligent governance, and other myths you shall buy.

Q. How many Liberals does it take to change a light bulb?

A. None, stupid – the free market will fix it.

Actually, the Free Market is more likely to work out how to turn a profit from the solution – you’ll need to hire a light bulb consultant, convene a bulb-changing committee, install interim lighting until a permanent solution has been approved, etc.

How unsurprising then that the Church of the Free Market’s solution to Climate Change, as finally being extolled by Australia’s parliamentary altar boys, is Carbon Trading. Let’s face it – what good is a crisis if the corporations and countries that have made the most money creating it can’t make trillions more dollars by delaying real solutions to it?

Think about it:

Problem A.

HIV is a life-threatening disease spread by risky sexual and injecting practices.

The sensible solution would be to

1. charge the HIV infected person $20 for every shared needle and bareback ride beyond their permitted monthly quota.
2. offset every new infection by sponsoring a drug-free virgin.
3. educate the public honestly, enable and fund non-transmissive activities.

Problem B.

CO2 emitted as a waste product from human activity is mutating the atmosphere of the planet. Although the precise nature of the consequences can’t be fully predicted, it is certain that they will be environmentally, socially, and economically devastating, and are best avoided.

1. well, let’s make money off CO2 – the more CO2 a company has produced to cause the problem, the more permits it is awarded, and the more it can therefore sell in future.
2. sabotage the only global effort to address the problem, remember to call it ‘European’.
3. produce less CO2 by deploying proven solutions, while addressing the consumption-driven hypocrisy that continues to exacerbate the problem.

And it is hypocrisy – as the corporations and politicians who masturbate synchronously to the mantra of ‘user pays’ scream in shrill alarm over the prohibitive additional 20 cents for ‘green’ electricity (while promoting the extra 50c for nuclear electricity). It isn’t paying extra that is the problem. The problem is when that ‘extra’ gets paid to ‘an outsider’, someone who hasn’t already been selling coal, electricity, and bovine methane for decades.

Imagine if the Ozone Hole (which is healing very slowly) had been met in the ‘80s with resolutions to monitor, consider, and further discuss. The final agreement – that corporations should try really, really hard to produce less CFCs and halon gases and pay $10 into parliamentary petty cash every time they produce more – could have been finally signed in 2004 in the desert formerly known as Melbourne where every second shopfront promises a ‘complimentary ’noma-scraping with every purchase’.

If any further proof is needed that the ‘Free Market’ solution to Climate Change is political and financial, as opposed to environmental or scientific, consider this; as even corporations act more progressively than the federal government by creating carbon accreditation plans, one leading group may have already shown their colours. Landcare CarbonSMART offers carbon credits for trees planted after 1990 on land cleared before that date. Doesn’t a tree planted in 1989 absorb carbon dioxide?

Yes, but it doesn’t contribute to the Howard Government’s claim of being on track to meet the Kyoto target – albeit the only target for a developed country which permitted a drastic increase in emissions, a target which we have now officially failed to meet. Hilarious.

The ‘new energy economy’ promoted as the only hope for manageable disaster was initially intended as one driven by innovative new industry, new ways of thinking and being. The business as usual model which looks set to be adopted is the equivalent of buying insulin from the bastards who gave us diabetes in the first place.

Q. Free Market, how do we slow the spread of HIV?

 

A. Go fuck yourself.