Renegade Economists Podcast 108
As broadcast on www.3CR.org.au 30/09/09.
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Free Trash of Freeport: We finish off our climate friendly policy overview, then interview Nick Chesterfield (Manukoreri) and Nicholas Taylor (Outcrop) to discuss the immense wealth and destruction flowing from West Papua’s $40bn Freeport mine. Photo – Freeport’s tailings, thanks SkyTruth.
Key Articles:
Red River: The blacklisting of Rio Tinto:
Will Australia Allow Another Balibo at Freeport
Show Notes
Carbon Trading Controversies – speculative middlemen aka the bankers bonanza implicit in Australia’s Emissions Trading System
Contraction & Convergence – Aubrey Meyer. Also his book
Carbon Tax – James Hanson (NASA) supports
Tax Upstream
We propose to tax fuels as far upstream as practicable, i.e., at the point where possession of the carbon-bearing fuel passes from the “producer” (e.g., coal mine; oil wellhead or tanker; gas wellhead) to the immediate next entity in the supply chain (e.g., coal shipper or utility; oil refiner or importer; natural gas pipeline). Presumably, each such transfer will be codified in a contract, or at least a bill of lading, specifying the attributes of the fuel.
This will minimize the number of points in the economy at which the tax would be levied. It will also simplify tax treatment of potential downstream carbon control technologies such as CCS (coal capture and sequestration), as discussed below.
Carbon Variability Requires Taxing by Btu, not by Fuel Weight or Volume
The tax rates will be stated in dollars per million Btu of heat content for each fuel. A more familiar approach based on physical quantities of fuel isn’t tenable, due to wide natural variations in carbon content within each fuel type. These variations are most stark for coal. A ton of lignite typically contains around 40% less carbon than a typical ton of bituminous coal, for example. To tax the two respective tons at the same dollar rate would be grossly unfair since combustion of the lignite ton releases 40% less carbon into the atmosphere than for the bituminous ton.
Freeport, West Papua
Caroline Lucas (MEP – Greens) West Papua speech – October 17th 2008
Just as they have never received a penny of the massive profits turned over by Freeport, whose Indonesian subsidiary last year paid the Indonesian government over 1.8 billion dollars in tax.
Genocide by Demographics
According to Dr Elmslie, highland Papuans who allegedly have gonorrhoea are being treated in UN-funded family planning clinics — but not for gonorrhoea. They are being injected instead with long-term contraceptive drugs. As Dr Elmslie notes, this goes some way to explaining why the 1.67 percent population growth rate for Melanesian Papuans in West Papua is so much lower in than over the 2.6 percent population growth rate for Melanesian Papuans over the border in Papua New Guinea (PNG). (Meanwhile, the growth rate for the non-Papuan population in West Papua is 10.5 percent.)
Music
Songs for West Papua – Kelly Newton-Wordsworth
War is not over – Kelly Newton-Wordsworth
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