Tony Wood insists that enhancing carbon (dioxide) pricing mechanisms is the only way to avoid the climate chaos that apparently awaits us, “as soon as 2060", according to World Bank speculation (“Carbon pricing remains the answer", AFR, December 12). There is, however, another perspective. Consider the scale and hubris of what is being proposed here: global climate control to be delivered by decarbonising the world’s economy.
Yet when a government decrees a worthless invisible gas is a commodity with de jure monetary value; when it permits this fiction to be embedded in financial markets and investment products, it ultimately gets itself and its citizens into a mess. Pricing carbon (dioxide) is a big public policy trick for other reasons. It will have no impact on the nation’s climate. How could it? Australia’s emissions are only 1.5 per cent of the global total.
Worse still, by signing Kyoto II, Australia now formally agrees that human-induced climate change� can be construed as the cause of any nasty atmospheric event; and endorses dodgy UN notions of climate debt – after Doha loss and damage – that are being used to justify unprecedented developed-developing world wealth transfer.
Michael KileCrawley, WA, Letters