Comments on: Carbon emissions, consumption omission

By: SPC

SPC — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 04:20:48 +0000

Of course including the carbon rating of the transport used to deliver the product to the market place.

By: SPC

SPC — Thu, 29 Dec 2005 04:19:10 +0000

I suppose it’s possible one has a liability to carbon tax “rating” on all international tradedable goods. But who would assess the rating? And who would collect the carbon tax?

An international body?

By: bjchip

bjchip — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 22:03:27 +0000

Local products are my first choice - where they exist at a reasonable premium over the import. They seldom cost less. “Pams” honey and pears should not be cheaper than the domestic product, but they are…. in some places I have seen as much as a 30% premium on the domestic products. There are other things that are simply not available from any Kiwi manufacturer or producer at any price.

The economies of scale are to blame for this, and the barriers erected to keep our products out of foreign markets contribute to the scale issues. With 4 million people and far fewer actual consumers of any given product the market has severe structural restraints on it, because we can’t get economies of scale EXCEPT through export. We have to pay the freight to export, and our product at the outset, is already more expensive due to the scale of production, so how in the world can we “grow” our way out of this? Physically we are limited in scale. Products that we can produce for export at global scales typically require imports of raw materials (alumina ->aluminium) or come off the farm and straight onto the ships.

I don’t think we can. Not really, and growing our way out is not the right answer for the future in any case. Living within our means and increasing those means by truly increasing our investment in efficiency instead of our investment inefficiency.

Sorry… I am rambling a bit far from the topic today…

respectfully
BJ

By: katie

katie — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 10:05:32 +0000

The problem is easier to solve than just whacking tax on imports - buy local, and the products have less “air miles” in the production stream; also, buying LESS is more efficient here; less processed, less packaged, and most of all, less travelled.

Not exactly the easy choice at this time of year, but do-able. Make your own presents, anybody? Then there’s DIY vouchers for “experience gifts”; promises to use your expertise for a loved one, on demand, or to refrain from some contentious behaviour, etc (the list is only limited by our imagination).

The other thing that works is to actively choose not to buy in to the over-consumption treadmill, which is driven by “the market” requiring ever-increasing profit, which must come from ever-increasing consumption.

Frog, my answer to your question is leaning towards saying *both* production and consumption need to be addressed; because like a dog chasing its tail, one follows the other.

same old hippy mantra: reduce, reuse, recycle

By: stuey

stuey — Tue, 20 Dec 2005 08:22:00 +0000

Consumes. Won’t peak oil and an increasing cost of transportation make it all academic anyway?

By: idiot/savant

idiot/savant — Mon, 19 Dec 2005 22:56:36 +0000

The reason we work on production is because it is easier to measure. But yes, it obviously causes problems because of leakage. But this can be solved by whacking a carbon tax on imported goods from non-Kyoto jurisdictions.