Australia's Mini-Kyoto Protocol Debate Cools

When John Howard, Australia's Prime Minister, decided not to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol, mass hysteria among the Greens and other enviro-centrics deploring the death sentence on Mother Earth erupted.  Unlike the United States, the Australians tried to cobble together their own carbon credit trading scheme among their states.  But with all ponzi schemes, the ones who buy in later, usually the poor, get hurt.  And this is exactly what the states developing the plan found out.  Here's the most cogent analysis in the piece:

John Howard said the state scheme was "doomed to fail" because it would suffer the same fate as the wildly fluctuating European system.

Carbon emission trading has always been a scheme to slow down economic growth by making energy production and manufacturing more expensive.  If any government wants to lower carbon dioxide emissions, the incentive has to be a carrot, not a stick.  If there were other alternative fuels that produced as much energy as cheaply as fossil-fuels, we would have switched.  Oh, wait a minute, there is, but we can't use it because we're scared of it: nuclear.  The Greens' culture is so rabidly against it because nuclear power is tied to the idea of the military industrial complex.  The energy debate will go nowhere until this alternative fuel is back on the table.

The added benefit of encouraging nuclear power is private research and development.  Look at the auto industry now, trying to fill a demand for fuel efficiency with hybrid engines.  Still using fossil-fuels though, because we are still using fossil-fuels.  The vast majority of power production in any industrial nation, with the exception of France, comes from burning oil and coal.  Hydro-electric power is in trouble because we can't build any more dams because we need to "preserve" the environment, and water grows more scarce because of unchecked housing development.  But if nuclear power were more readily available, private research would have more incentive for developing fusion cell technology, where its fuel would be sea water.  I think we have a lot of that, don't we?

The environmental movement suffers from being too philosophically tied to social welfare movements.  Socialists fail to take into account that most people are hardworking because they are motivated by acumulating more.  We are not totally motivated by some "greater good."  When most of the world is still motivated by hunger instead of world peace, even Christian Socialism cannot take root.  Idealism is good, but we still have to be grounded in reality.  Make something cheaper and better, and people will buy it.  Trying to scare people into doing something when that scary thing is non-tangible or even unproved, will not get you anywhere.