I am disappointed that the Coalition and Greens refused to vote for the Rudd Government's emissions trading scheme in the Senate.
Don't they know how important it is to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases? Why are they playing petty politics with the world's future?
However, on closer inspection, the Rudd Government itself is as much to blame.
The proposed scheme is highly flawed and they are constantly offering ''compensation'' to affected industries, further undermining the point of the whole thing-to provide companies with a financial disincentive to use carbon-heavy production methods and to steer consumers away from carbon-intensive products.
Two major weaknesses are glaring at us.
First, low income households will disproportionately bear the costs, in the form of higher electricity and food prices.
Both must rise in the short-term-since the whole point is to reduce emissions but, perversely, the government's way of helping those who would be hurt is to offer ''assistance'' (lucrative permit handouts) to affected industries to avoid the need to lay off workers and raise prices.
Yet it's doubtful whether these jobs will be around in the long-run, or whether electricity companies won't just pocket the permits and raise prices anyway.
Second, if individuals make efforts to reduce their own carbon footprints, permit holders (eg, big polluting industries) will simply be able to pollute more to fulfil their quota.
This diminishes so many of the incentives that individuals could have been given to reduce emissions and it stifles innovation.
The Government must scrap its proposed scheme and replace it with a carbon tax.
Not only is this easier to implement (and sell to the electorate), but it would provide a steady revenue stream from which to compensate low income households directly. All polluters would be taxed at the same rate and there would be strong incentives for both individual emissions-reduction efforts and innovation in energy efficiency and renewable energy sources.
The tax rate could be set annually to ensure the desired reduction in emissions is brought about.
I believe this is much closer in spirit to what the Garnaut Review originally proposed, but is much more politically viable than emissions trading.
Brad Ruting, Castle Hill, NSW
Models do explain
John Penhallurick (Letters, August 17) claims that climate models explain nothing with regard to global warming.
I quote from Global Warming The Complete Briefing, Cambridge, 2004, by John Houghton, formerly Professor of Atmospheric Physics at Oxford University, and, more to the point, someone whose writings summarise the main findings so far of climate science. Referring to models that relate recorded global temperatures over the last 150 years to recorded levels of greenhouse gases and recorded phenomena such as solar radiation, volcanic activity and atmospheric aerosols, he writes (page 103) ''the inclusion of anthropogenic forcings provides a plausible explanation for a substantial part of the observed temperature changes over the last century (especially for the latter part of the century) but that the best match with observations occurs when both natural and anthropogenic factors are included''. What he states then is that these models do explain recent global temperature changes with regard to anthropogenic greenhouse gas levels. They certainly provide enough of an explanation to provide a warning, not of certainty of dangerous warming, but of enormous risk to the globe. Anthony Moore (Letters, August 17) says that C02 rises in the atmosphere since 1750 are not unprecedented, and that there is no evidence that the latest decade is the hottest in thousands of years. There is ample scientific evidence, for instance from the Vostok ice cores, described in Houghton's book, to contradict him on both these statements.
Paul Pollard, O'Connor
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