Climate change tax: it is serious — and it is imminent
Bill Buckley - production engineer. Buckley Systems is investing in climate research.
The era of climate change carbon dioxide offset credits and its associated bartering is hurtling toward the production-engineering sector, which lies flush in the full path of this astounding new and imminent taxation regime procedure.
New Zealand is the only country to even contemplate exposing the economy to the full cost of the volatile world price of carbon in the proposed
emissions trading scheme.
Agribusiness has several years grace. Production engineering though lies directly in the path of this revenue-generating locomotive of legislation. Basically, it will work like this. Individual components of production engineering, i.e. factories will have a permissible limit on the amount of greenhouse gases they can emit.
Once this is exceeded, they will have to pay a punitive tax unless they can prove that they have an indulgence or offset in the form of a carbon dioxide credit which itself will be in the form of a carbon dioxide sink.
'Sink' is the jargon term for a piece of the planet's surface, which absorbs carbon dioxide rather than emits it. The best example of such a sink is a piece of rainforest. But it could just as easily be acreage of native bush or other such untouched reserve.
So what happens is that the chunk of rainforest, or natural flora indemnifies the polluter and allows them to continue polluting. Without such an indulgence, credit, or indemnification counterbalance, the polluter, i.e. the factory will have to pay a penalty thus compensating for its emission.
We must wash our hands of the argument about whether the climate is in fact changing in the dramatic way we are told it is by the warmists.
We must cleanse our minds of the equally confusing argument centred on the notion that if it is warming, then the warming is man-made, and thus artificially induced by the industrial emission into the atmosphere of greenhouse gases, which means in this context, carbon dioxide and methane.
It is enough to know that the proprietor of one of the nation's two or three most high technology production engineers, Bill Buckley, of Buckley Systems has co-endowed a chair at Auckland University that is fleshing out at this very moment fact from fiction about climate change/global warming. We may be encouraged also by the fact that Mr Buckley's co-philanthropist in this venture is renowned applied physicist Dr Hilton Glavish, the Aucklander who assisted in putting Buckley Systems, among other such advanced technology ventures, onto the world map.
Similarly we must banish obfuscating societal-fashion arguments about middle class religions and non-productive sector guilt transfer.
It is enough though to keep the following in the back of our minds. It is that when the global warming argument in 2003 migrated soon after to the one that we now call by the rather more voguish description of Climate Change, the Labour-led coalition saw an opportunity to reprise its anti nuclear policy that saw it become the party of the middle class, and thus the natural party of government, as it saw it, in the 1980s.
In the strength of this concept, lay its weakness. The scientist who first identified global warming/climate change Dr James Lovelock, and who first identified the presence of residual man-made pollutants in the atmosphere, and who propagated the Gaia Theory of the planet as a living organism, had already defined nuclear power generation as one obvious solution to atmospheric contamination.
Even so the Labour coalition pressed on, and certain industry organisations, notably the Auckland EMA, believe the quest to be at the very least a dangerous distraction.
One reason is that in the production engineering sector the polluting factories were eliminated anyway. We are talking here about the auto plants for example which were simply and quite literally blown away by competition from Asia.
Much of the factory corridors of the Hutt Valley and Penrose, for example, now resemble garden cities.
All this though is just background. Carbon dioxide bartering enforced by legislation could be in force for production engineering by the end of this year.
Carbon dioxide offsetting with its United Nations style of foreign capital labeling which once characterised international trade and tariff treaty rounds now has a momentum of its own - a momentum that will continue even if there is a change, this time of government, before the end of the year.
It has taken on a life of its own. It is a new industry created by the flourish of several strokes of several global pens. In spite of all the bluster about global leadership, being an example to everyone else, being a universal force-for-good, first with social engineering, etc. etc, New Zealand in fact is being propelled along in a global current of such torrential velocity that the vortex is inescapable.
All production engineers regardless of whether they believe themselves liable or not, should now get a certified analysis of their emissions and thus of their liability. This one is not going to go away.
From NZ EngineeringNews, July 2008, Vol.39 No.6 Page 6, NEWS
