In a 1988 Dirty Harry classic, the belligerent Detective Callahan tells a colleague “opinions are like assholes, everybody has one”. Heaven knows what Callahan would say of Australia’s ETS debate. No angle is unrepresented. No player unheard. And many completely contradict one another.
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If you ask me, I think it's the modern-day equivalent of selling Indulgences. Remember your history lesson about Indulgences? Or did you go to a 'good' Catholic school where those things were conveniently forgotten? In the Middle Ages - and until a German friend of mine, Martin Luther, protested against it and started the Reformation - the Catholic Church sold Indulgences in order to raise cash and to get even richer. Such an Indulgence would expiate the purchaser from any sin he was yet to commit. Let's say you wanted to commit a nice little murder. Buy yourself an Indulgence before the dirty deed and you could do it with impunity! As the Church in those days was akin to today's judicial system, it was a bit like bribing the judge - even before the offense! If you believed in the concept of sin, well, buying an Indulgence didn't do away with the sin, it just made you feel better committing one. Same with carbon-trading: it doesn't do away with carbon emission; it doesn't even reduce it! It just makes you feel better spewing out more and more dirt into the atmosphere, and the ones who are selling you the carbon credits (aka Indulgences) get filthy rich - literally!
Of course, all this global warming is said to be due to anthropogenic activities - or in a language that both you and I can understand, human activities. So why is there no mention of population control? The world's population now stands at 6.8 BILLION - give or take a few hundred million - and rapidly rising. If 6.8 billion people can have such catastrophic effects, what will 10 billion, 15 billion people do to the planet? Population control? You've gotta be kidding!
Isn't it a wonderful world we live in?
