KEY POINTS:
Climate change warrior Al Gore has put carbon taxes on the international agenda again by using his Nobel Prize acceptance speech to promote them, in conjunction with emissions trading schemes, to reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions.
Gore's call is eminently sensible.
It should not be long before Helen
Clark - given her own desire to forge an international profile in the climate change space - wakes up to the logical necessity of using a direct mechanism (which taxes are) to shift polluting behaviour.
This was the Government's preferred option before it lost its bottle after the 2005 election and caved in to demands by its junior partners NZ First and United Future to dump the proposed tax.
The farming industry defeated Labour's pre-election plans for a "fart" tax. But if both those taxes had been introduced, New Zealand would already be strongly into emissions reduction mode.
The upshot is that New Zealand has wasted another two years. Emissions have grown and will be substantially higher than in 2005 when, as the United Nations recently assessed, they were 23 per cent above 1990 levels (a return to which is NZ's Kyoto target).
The reliance on emissions trading schemes to reduce greenhouse gas emissions has always seemed rather lop-sided.
For Catholics like myself, the notion that companies or people can offset polluting behaviour by buying credits in the hope that another company in some distant place might plant trees or use the cash to invest in technologies that reduced their footprint (but not yours) has always seemed rather medieval. A bit like the old process of buying papal indulgences - where if you paid or prayed enough you could wipe years off your time in purgatory and go straight to heaven.
Or more likely keep sinning in the knowledge that you could simply make another investment to wipe the slate clean when the personal tally gets too high again, as air travellers are asked to do when they pay a little offset fee before they get on their planes.
Gore hasn't lost the plot on the use of market mechanisms.
But he wants to see world leaders establish a universal global cap on emissions to underpin a trading mechanism which would be used to efficiently allocate resources for speedy reductions.
Instead of prattling about post-Kyoto mechanisms (these will not go into effect until 2012 anyway and have been honoured in the breach by far too many developed nations) Gore wants a new treaty ratified and brought into effect by the beginning of 2010 - two years earlier than presently contemplated.
He says the pace of "our response must be accelerated to match the accelerating pace of the crisis itself".
In reality, Gore is acknowledging that the current Kyoto agreement has in practice been a crock (my words - not his).
Inevitably, the 180 nations party to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which have been meeting in Bali this week, have opened up the old North-South divide which bedevils negotiations at the World Trade Organisation.
But unlike the WTO, there is no international body to act as an enforcer to keep Governments to their commitments.
Canada - which has exceeded its Kyoto target - plans to ignore its commitment to financially offset its emissions.
UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon now believes that it will be necessary to adopt mandatory limits on greenhouse-gas emissions because "our experience tells us that voluntary capping has not been efficient".
If past is a fore-runner for the future (as it tends to be) it would appear that simply relying on market mechanisms (a fully-fledged international market will take some years to develop) won't be enough to change behaviour at sufficient pace.
"We need to put a price on carbon - with a CO2 tax that is then rebated back to the people, progressively, according to the laws of each nation, in ways that shift the burden of taxation from employment to pollution," Gore said. "This is by far the most effective and simplest way to accelerate solutions to this crisis."
He's also suggested a moratorium on the construction of coal-burning power stations - until carbon sequestration is in place.
This is hardly likely to cut any ice with China, which is constructing such stations at the rate of one a week to power the factories which produce consumer goods for the world's markets.
It's yet another example of US clunkiness when it comes to assessing the sensibilities of Asian developing nations that are playing catch-up with their developed nation competitors.
There is no way global emissions can be reduced now unless the developed world adopts binding targets - similar to the agreements countries make to reduce trade protection when they join the WTO.
Trade Minister Phil Goff - who attended a trade ministers' mini-ministerial on the fringe of the UN summit - said the meeting's focus was on how action taken in the area of trade could contribute to the goals of reducing global carbon emissions and increasing environmental sustainability.
"Recognition of the compatibility between trade and environmental sustainability is not new. Both the WTO's founding agreement and the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change recognise the relationship between the two," Goff said.
"The two documents are compatible, and it is important that climate change negotiations have built into their mandate from the outset the WTO principles of non-discrimination, transparency and science-based rule making."
It might be uncharitable to point out, but the WTO's own Doha Round discussions became marooned over North-South issues. It will obviously prove very difficult to get a meaningful result from Bali.
Taxes anyone please?
