It's madness to sacrifice ourselves for nothing

The Australian
"Let's have a simple rundown of what the rest of the world is doing. In Europe there has indeed been an ETS for some years. But more than 95 per cent of the carbon permits in its first years were given out for free. The scheme had little effect on reducing greenhouse emissions. It was widely regarded as a joke, although European officials who come to Australia are inevitably interviewed reverentially by uninformed ABC personalities who never hold them to account for this. ....Let's be quite clear. China is engaged in a massive, yes massive, increase in carbon emissions. As Gary Banks from the Productivity Commission has made clear, the implicit carbon price exists only in Combet's dreams. China does not impose a carbon price across its economy. Banks has concluded that you simply cannot work out an economy-wide implicit carbon price from the carbon-reduction measures for economies that do not impose direct carbon prices.

But despite the Gillard government's propaganda, and its many slyly misleading convolutions, Beijing has never, ever promised to cut its carbon emissions. It is indeed decommissioning old coal-fired power stations and replacing them with new coal-fired power stations. These will be more efficient than the old. So China can claim it's reducing its carbon intensity, that is, the amount of carbon per unit of output. But overall it plans huge increases in greenhouse gas emissions. .....India, which accounts for about 5 per cent of global emissions and rising, has no plans for an ETS or an economy-wide carbon price."