Taxes are a hefty financial issue and tho most of us don’t mind contributing our bit to the upkeep of this great nation – within reason, everyone really HATES unfair taxes!  This interesting read turned up in my inbox this week on the Carbon Pollution and tax debate.  Not being a scientist I can’t verify any of it – but it seems a whole lot of palaver over nothing when put into this context!
Carbon Tax 
Let’s put this into a bit of perspective for laymen!
The Carbon tax is just another tax! It is equal to putting up the GST to 12.5% which would be unacceptable and produce an outcry.
 
Read the following analogy and you will realize the insignificance of carbon dioxide as a weather controller.
 
Here’s a practical way to understand the PM’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
Imagine 1 kilometer of atmosphere and we want to get rid of the carbon pollution in it created by human activity. Let’s go for a walk along it.
 
The first 770 meters are Nitrogen.
The next 210 meters are Oxygen.
That’s 980 meters of the 1 kilometer. 20 meters to go.
The next 10 meters are water vapor. 10 meters left.
9 meters are argon. Just 1 more meter.
A few gases make up the first bit of that last meter.
 
The last 38 centimeters of the kilometer – that’s carbon dioxide. A bit over one foot.
97% of that is produced by Mother Nature. It’s natural.
Out of our journey of one kilometer, there are just 12 millimeters left.
Just over a centimeter – about half an inch.
That’s the amount of carbon dioxide that global human activity puts into the
atmosphere.
And of those 12 millimeters Australia puts in .18 of a millimeter.
Less than the thickness of a hair. Out of a kilometer!
As a hair is to a kilometer – so is Australia’s contribution to what the PM calls Carbon Pollution.
 
Imagine Brisbane’s new Gateway Bridge , ready to be opened by the PM.
It’s been polished, painted and scrubbed by an army of workers till its 1 kilometre length is surgically clean. Except that the PM says we have a huge problem, the bridge is polluted – there’s a human hair on the roadway.  We’d laugh ourselves silly.
 
There are plenty of real pollution problems to worry about.
It’s hard to imagine that Australia’s contribution to carbon dioxide in the world’s atmosphere is one of the more pressing ones. And I can’t believe that a new tax on everything is the only way to blow that pesky hair away.
 
To top that off…  The polls are in: on the back of the carbon tax announcement, Julia Gillard’s popularity has plummeted below Paul Keating’s record lows. So what does Federal Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey think of Labor’s policies for carbon, policing the big banks and immigration? 
Watch the video from Switzer TV here: Joe Hockey on Carbon