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Climate change, and industry in itself?

The world is overheating and we're all going to die if we don't pay more money in tax.

That, in a nutshell, seems to be the message from governments to their citizens.

Thousands of scientists have consumed goodness knows how much money investigating the causes, outcomes and possible remedies to global warming and, despite this huge cost, nobody's still able to give us answers to the more detailed questions.

Indeed, there are some who claim that the human race is not a major cause of the problem and that instead, we're just going along for the ride as influences such as solar emissions and a concurrence of other cycles conspire to heat up the planet.

But one thing is certain, global warming has become a very real business and lots of people stand to make a fortune out of it.

And I'm not talking about ethical, productive industries such as those which provide cleaner energy alternatives to fossil fuels, or those who offer to provide ways of scrubbing industrial emissions.

No, I'm talking about those paper-shufflers and bureaucrats who see this "crisis" as a tremendous opportunity to earn a fist-full of dollars for doing very little at all.

Take this whole carbon-credit situation. It's crazy!

Not only do we take money from those who most need it to "clean up their act", we then give that money to those who least need it, because they're already "clean and green".

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As if to show just how entrenched this kind of bureaucratic mindset is here in NZ, we look set to be one of the first countries in the world to set up a carbon-trading exchange, modeled along the same lines as the stock exchange.

This whole carbon credit concept relies on the fact that some people don't use all their allocation of "get out of jail free" cards when it comes to the pollution they cause.

If you're a good wee boy and don't pollute as much as you're allowed to, you can sell your excess "right to pollute" (ie: carbon credits) to someone who's not quite so good and actually exceeds their own allowance.

On the face of it, this sounds like a good way to regulate the levels of carbon emissions to a known maximum - but I have some questions that I've not seen the answer to:

Who determines what constitutes a benchmark emissions level for any given company or trader?

Are these credits indexed to an "industry standard" or to each individual polluter's existing emission levels?

I wonder how much opportunity there is to start up a company in a high-emission industry (perhaps dairy farming) and then ramp down your production to the point where your carbon credits earn you more than the actual product you produce.

Imagine if the price for dairy products fell to record lows. The way things are set up, I could see a lot of marginal dairy farmers scaling back (thus reducing their costs and emissions), then perhaps living off the sale of the now available carbon credits.

While this might be great for the farmer, what would it do to our export receipts and the country's balance of payments ledger?

I'm sorry but I just can't help but get the feeling that the whole system has been designed by a bunch of bureaucrats and politicians to who the answer to every problem simply involves the introduction or raising of taxes.

Let's hope I'm wrong -- or we'll see even more of our valuable human resource channeled into even more unproductive activity, at great cost to the country's international ranking and the overall standard of living in GodZone.

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