Yes, a PETA member can refuse to sell you meat, if they own the butcher shop, just as a newsagent can refuse to stock pr0n. The butcher might go out of business, but that doesn't mean they can't do it. Shopkeepers are not under compulsion to stock products they disagree with.

I'm not advocating for judgementalism, but an important aspect of freedom is the ability to stick to your personal convictions in the course of your trade. Your customers also have the freedom to go elsewhere if you refuse to supply what they want.

Because Europe started with an ETS and it achieved nothing for the first few years. Essentially it is an ETS, (the 'Tax' thing is a red herring that the government should have squashed quickly). The fixed price means it can be phased in in a controlled and predictable way (incremented each year), rather than having too many/too few permits in the first few years.

(Too many = low price, ineffective: see European ETS experience. Too few = high cost of permits, big hit to the economy, everyone suffers).

That doesn't make the concept useless, but the implementation.

Three words:

Triple bottom line.

The cost of "everything" won't go up. The costs of products made using high emissions will go up. That which is produced with less emissions will become more competitive. It is a matter of taking the externalised costs (pollution) and internalising them to the producer, which is how it should be, period.

Coal fired electricity will get more expensive. Wind power (relatively) will not. Wind power will become more competitive.

Externalised costs mean you, me, the environment, our grandchildren and our health (now - look into the effects of coal smog) suffer. Internalising them (via emissions trading) means someone has to pay cold hard cash for those costs, now. Which means those companies who don't externalise the costs can now compete - which is fairer outcome for everyone. It might mean the cost of living goes up in the short term, but as a wealthy nation we can afford it. If it bites hard, interest rates will drop accordingly. Or people can skip a few coffees each week.

Anti-greenies seem to forget that what keeps an economy going is not the act of making stuff, but of moving money around. If you are spending money on making your cars/roads/factories/public transit/whatever more efficient, you are creating jobs, which means money is going into bank accounts and out again into coffee shops or tax coffers or farmers or whatever, and from there on into the next place and so on and so on. When money flows, people have jobs.

Getting a massage doesn't use (much) stuff but it keeps the economy moving.

Getting someone to mow your lawn doesn't use any more stuff than if you did it yourself but it keeps the economy moving.

Building a wind farm doesn't put another widget in your hand but it keeps the economy moving (and as fossil fuel costs continue to rise, it will save you money in the long term, not to mention the huge health benefits over coal smog).

War is good for the economy (if you can afford it). Apply the same principle to your dirty infrastructure, in a way that saves you money long term, and your economy be much better for it.

Your local experience is not indicative of the rest of the world. Many countries maintain excellent public schools, roads, etc. If your local infrastructure and services suck, it's probably due to limited funding as well as socio-economic factors (particularly income inequality). Pay more tax (and don't spend it all on the military), get better services.

You get what you pay for, regardless of how you pay.

China is currently putting together five pilot projects for different ways of pricing carbon emissions in different provinces. One of them will be based on the Australian emissions trading scheme (which has been erroneously labelled a 'tax').

Perth, Western Australia has recently upgraded and extended their train network. As far as I know it is now just as fast (and much more efficient) to get to the CBD by train.

It is also one of the most sprawling cities in the world.

The idea of the tax (which in Australia will increase each year before being market-based with a diminishing amount of emissions allowed) is to make big business and energy producers (which contributes a massive proportion of our emissions) change where they get their energy NOW because they know in a couple of years it will be ridiculously expensive to use dirty energy sources. That 'paper shuffling' is actually attached to a big incentive for business to change.

It may be too little, too late, but it's at least worth trying. Unfortunately people have forgotten that incredibly fast transitions that happened during WW2 - that is more or less what we need now.

If you read the comments on TFA, it appears it was written in the author's on time.

the smallest mining/waste footprint per joule, lowest fatality count per joule, lowest land-use per watt technology we have, renewables included

Does this take into account the cancer deaths from Chernobyl (between 30,000 and 985,000, depending on who you talk ask) and ultimately Fukushima, and the land degradation from nuclear fallout in both cases (which might be considered under both waste footprint and land-use-per-watt)? If so, do you have figures to show this (I am genuinely interested)? How do you calculate land-use-per-watt for roof-mounted photovoltaic systems (which effectively don't require developing any more land)?

For the record, in asking these questions, I am not implying that nuclear is worse than fossil fuels. I think they all have to go, and we already have the technological resources to replace them, at least for electricity production. What fossil fuels we have left should be saved for their more long-term uses such as creating steel, plastics, and (until we can get large-scale sustainable agriculture in place) fertiliser.

It's fine to disagree with someone's sense of humour. It's not fine to abuse them as a response. And, in case you missed it, there was actually someone playing the bagpipes in one of the photos.

Any serious study on the application of 100% renewable energy (and there are many) recognises that you need a combination of technologies, which, along with smart grid demand management, can generate enough energy when the other sources are less effective. If you include stored energy sources such as hyrdroelectric, solar thermal with salt storage, biomass generators, and in some places, geothermal, and your grid is geographically broad enough to be in multiple weather regions, you can cover you bases even on a still night with no waves. Studies in Germany, Catalonia (Spain), Japan and Australia have shown exactly how this can be done using current technology and real-world, year-round data on energy demand and weather conditions, including peaks and base load. (Sorry I don't have a link, I went to a lecture on this a few years back by a German professor who headed up three of the studies mentioned but I can't remember his name!)

Not necessarily. If you look at how they work, with multiple devices attached to a single hydro turbine, they may need to be installed in parallel to maintain a fairly even output and peak efficiency.