Carbon Tax Hyperbolic Worries and Reality

Carbon Tax Hyperbolic Worries and Reality

By Dale Stam 18/10/11

Part One


‘I don’t think we are in Kansas anymore’ Asked Dorothy, breathing rapidly after crashing her house through a giant bubble.
‘Well no little girl, you are in Oz, and I’m afraid you went and broke our bubble’ said a Munchkin quickly before taking a large breath.
‘Why do you have a bubble around the whole land?’ Inquired Dorothy.
‘Well Dorothy it seems the merry old Land of Oz has implemented a tax on Carbon to keep the technicolour bright.’

Whether you like it or not, it seems that we will be implementing a Carbon Tax, this article will focus upon 5 hyperbole worries leading from the introduction of this Tax and tie them into the reality that spanned them. Just keep in mind, it could always be worse.

1. Electricity only supplied during peak hours.
The worry:
Electricity prices are going to go up with this tax. Why? Because Australia has a lot of coal which is made up of Carbon. You can’t eat it, you can’t wear it, its surface area is minuscule so it can’t be used as shelter, you can however do two things.
A) You can draw with it. It is messy and expensive, but that is all irrelevant because it has artistic merit, or
B) You can burn it, and provide heat.
We have developed B so that it boils water, which produces steam, which turns a turbine that gives electricity.

Now during peak hours, the vast majority of people are home from work and demand electricity, so for your share during this busy period you pay a higher rate. This is the section of the bill that is the highest, because the system is under the most stress, however after this period then it will have a long rest where preparations can be undertaken. This is the most lucrative section for energy companies, they would be able to reduce the amount of coal needing to be burnt because they did not need to provide electricity during off peak, or the unimportant people hours. Also because energy companies would not need to burn our dinosaur pals to supply energy for the minority, then they would release less CO2 into the atmosphere, and thus get taxed less. At $25 per tonne companies would be looking at ways to decrease the upcoming tax debt, and if they do this they are not passing the costs onto you, the consumer. Its win-win right?

How reality is almost there:
Electricity in the form that we imagine travelling the wires, does not store all that well. It is impractical for energy companies to charge up car batteries and then distribute them to everyone for personal use, not to mention astoundingly expensive. Solution, build a giant battery, but remember when your favourite song is half way through and your MP3 player beeps off dead. Batteries do not last long, are expensive, and only return roughly 2/3rds of energy placed within. But this has not stopped Australia from researching; currently we have a few avenues;
* Super batteries - they have worked for us in the past so just keep going, but making them more efficient and cheaper.
* Superconducting Magnetic Energy Storage (SMES) devices, which would use the dual relationship of electricity and magnets to create a perpetual field. Downside, it requires energy input to keep the magnets at the required temperature (relative to the beyond freezing temperatures of liquid nitrogen) to create the high quality superconducting effects.
* Mechanical or energy conversion - such as the turning of a windmill or turbine which can then release electricity with a hypothetical flick of the switch.

All of these various avenues will eventually lead to a realistic system that can be implemented and sustained at a country wide level. Then if we can store electricity we can also choose when it is released. So what leads to more efficiency of the company to save the electricity that they will be taxed on producing because of the essential fuel to start the process, could lead to them passing on the costs to the consumer, or the more likely the increasing of costs all around that people can only afford to use electricity when they need it, which would fall usually within the peak hours. If they can release electricity whenever they want, and the eventual demand will be during peak hours, why pay to have it flowing out during off peak hours. Who uses electricity after 8pm anyway?

Stay tuned for the other parts in upcoming posts.

If you liked this article you might enjoy my other article on the Carbon Tax;
http://dalesnewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/02/carbon-tax-and-what-it-means-for-you.html

Or continue onto part two of the worry;
http://dalesnewsblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/carbon-tax-hyperbolic-worries-and_10.html

Sociology and Problems Group Report

Dear Readers,

Today I treat you with some of my work from the past, today you will explore some group work that I participated in that involved offering up a question and proposing how given sociological theories would have tried to answer the question. Some of it might be confusing for the unitiated, but this is our summary of the whole 5 part process.

There are references at the end for those who would like to further enlighten themselves.

Enjoy;



Group D Theory summary

Rational Choice Theory Question: If Blau and Homans headed a new “Stop Teenage Binge Drinking” Campaign, what strategies do you think they would use?

The rational choice perspective essentially assumes that people are rational and base their behaviour on what they perceive to be the best course of action in order to get what they want (Wallace & Wolf, 2006, p. 303).

This approach is closely related to economics, with rational choice theorists adopting some basic propositions of economics:
"1. Individuals are rational profit maximizers ....
2. The more of something an individual has, the less interested he or she will be in yet more of it.
3. The prices at which goods and services will be sold in a free market are determined directly by the tastes of prospective buyers and sellers. ...
4. Goods will generally be more expensive if they are supplied by a monopolist ..." (Wallace and Wolf, 2006, p. 308).

* George Homans: A behaviourist

Homans states in the Rationality Proposition that when individuals are “choosing between alternative actions a person will choose the one for which, as perceived by him at the time, the value, (V), of the result, multiplied by the probability, (p), of getting the result, is the greater” (p. 316). Hence, teenagers view the social approval (result) as having a large value and high probability of positive effects. Homans believes ‘that people value (social) approval’, and this is a key factor in explaining ‘how conformity is created and maintained in informal groups’ (p. 315). Hence teenagers feel the need to conform to the wishes of the group to drink in excess, so that they can continue to access ‘approval and esteem’ (p. 315).

An anti-drinking campaign led by Homans would focus on trying to change the ‘social approval’ given by these groups. Homans would use a ‘shame’ approach, that would make the teenagers aware of the negative aspects of binge drinking, so that they would come to the ‘self gain’ concept at the centre of Rational Choice theory, similar to the ad for speeding, ‘No one thinks big of you’. A campaign of this kind would aim to help teenagers rethink the value/risk equation in order to decide if binge drinking truly delivers what they want.
* Peter Blau: A collectivist

Blau suggests that the two general functions of social exchange are: 1) for creating friendship bonds between people; and 2) the establishment of domination or subordination (p. 329). He emphasizes the importance of "impression management", i.e. "how people present themselves to others", stating that people wish to be seen as companions whose presence is both extrinsically and intrinsically rewarding (Wallace & Wolf, 2006, p. 340). Therefore, an approach based on social approval would be one aspect of Blau’s anti-drinking campaign.

An anti-drinking campaign led by Blau may also focus on trying to stop binge drinking through the implementation of rules and laws, e.g. no more drinks after 2pm, no drinking on the main street of towns, more security. The teenagers would then be guided by these laws and rules to correct their behaviour, and thus cease binge drinking.

Hence, Homans would attack the problem by getting the teenagers to change their perception of the situation and thus change their behaviour, because it was no longer an effective means to their goals, hence from the small groups to society. Blau on the other hand would attack the problem at an institutional level and implement laws that would influence people to change their behaviour.


Postmodernism Discussion Question: How would postmodern theorists view and deconstruct the various online social networking sites?

* Michel Foucault

Foucault believed that power essentially penetrates society through discourse, which is often sustained by institutions as a means of control (Macionis & Plummer, 2005). He also noted that the specific way in which the world is understood by society is through texts (Wallace & Wolf, 2006) and now with the social networking sites, everybody is a creator of text.

Social networking sites are similar to Foucault’s concept of panopticon- ‘in which each actor is alone, perfectly individualised and constantly visible’ (1977, p. 200). This panopticon played an integral role in defining power relations, maintaining order and subsequent discipline. Power relations on the networking sites can be seen by viewing who has befriended who, just as well as who has excluded who; with the added complexity of each actor having the ability to play the dual roles of prisoner within a group membership; and guard of their own profile or web space. This duality creates a false sense of reality, for an individual who guards their profile space may entrust that they have the power to protect while viewing those of others. Foucault (1977) may indeed have argued that this false sense of reality may provide an ideal environment to enforce discipline and punishment upon society.


* Jacques Derrida

A key concept for Derrida and postmodernism is Discourse; a way to emphasise the meaning and concepts words embody, while also exploring the rules that develop within a group (society) on ‘appropriate ways of talking about things’ (Wallace, & Wolf, 2006, p. 422). To understand this we need to understand that words and their meanings are socially produced, (e.g. slang, and the concept of the sign, signifier and signified).

On networking sites people represent themselves mostly through language (especially on Twitter's post based model), hence their identities are constructed for the world through language. Derrida wrote that identity is nothing more than the various cultural texts an individual is given (and therefore people are no more real than the texts they create). Hence, people are constructed through their use of language, and since language has no ‘centre’ (Bass, A, 1966), then a person can have no centre, thus the dynamic nature of humans and of their profiles. We are constructed by language and our construction is altered by language.


* Jean Francois Lyotard

Lyotard believed that social life is organised around 'language games'. Such games are made up of 'moves' or statements which, are the means by which participants try to influence others to accept their version of what is true or 'win the game' (Van Krieken et. al., 2000).

According to Lyotard, the postmodern era is characterised by the following:
1) People seem to have abandoned the search for truth; people have lost faith in science as providing truth.
2) Technical language games have replaced denotative language games; research is aimed at producing knowledge where there is a market for it. (Van Krieken et. al., 2000).

Postmodern society is no longer interested in theories of truth or justice and instead is based on the exchange of knowledge and the production of knowledge (Van Krieken et. al., 2000). The proliferation of information on the Internet and on networking sites supports the idea that we are living in a postmodern society. In the postmodern era anyone can be published, thus lending credence to Lyotard's views that the people in the post modern era are less interested in one great truth and more inclined to explore a multitude of truths.

References

Bass, A, 1966, ‘Jacques Derrida, “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of the Human Sciences”, Writing and Difference, pp.
278-95, On Literary Theory Dance Party, viewed 24 August,
2009, obtained through Google,
http://literarytheory.wordpress.com/2007/04/04/jacques- derridastructure-sign-and-play-in-the-discourse-of-the-human-sciences/

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison.
London: Penguin.

Macionis, J. J., & Plummer, K. (2005). Sociology a global introduction.
Essex:Pearson Prentice Hall.

Van Krieken, R., Smith, P., Habibis, D., McDonald, K., Haralambos, M.,
& Holborn, M. (2000). Sociology Themes and Perspectives,
Frenchs Forest: Pearson Education Australia.

Wallace, R.A, & Wolf, A, 2006, Contemporary Sociological Theory:
Expanding the Classical Tradition, 6th ed., Pearson Education,
Prentice Hall, New Jersey, USA.

Authors
Dale Stam, Sophia Grant, Josephine Gravina, Deanne Wright

Why Sociology can never be a 'hard' science

Printed in the Hungappa- University Magazine

Why Sociology can’t be a ‘hard science’.

Sociology sounds like it could be quite profitable to society; to be able to view, interpret and thus predict society would allow us to know what works and hence advance society to the Utopian ideal of Well’s and not Huxley. This would make it a good candidate to be in the same league as physics- to explain the universe and particles, chemistry- to explain and understand the reaction of elements, and biology- to understand how plants and animals (including us) work. Unfortunately sociology has a few problems;

1. Unlike the other sciences aforementioned, sociology has no laws to speak of really (I know in physics technically they’re theories, but generally accepted as right until something better comes along). Instead it has a lot of good ideas that contrast each other, which also often have a gaping hole that resembles the logic of some university assignments.

2. It has many factions that despise each other, and unlike the constructive criticism shown in the ‘hard sciences’, sociologists tend to berate each other because they see society differently- much like religious groups. Even though the foundations of nearly all of these factions can be traced back to a small band of people who definitely should be in the next summer buddy blockbuster. Imagine Talcott Parson’s, Emile Durkheim, Karl Marx, and Max Weber as the ultimate society analysing team, who then have to beat up their evil students for taking one of their ideas and then twisting it to all kinds of WTF. Or how about a collectable card game, either way it is not aiding in the self cohesion of their science, though neither did my ideas, but they would at least take their war of words to a different level.

3. The agency-structure dilemma. The major teleological paradox that has caused the splintering fanatical groups that tear each other apart thus reducing the possibility to forming laws. Basically do people construct society or does society construct people. Some groups go former, other later, in exams and assignments it’s a little of both. That’s right its one of the few sciences where you can fence sit and be rewarded.

4. Because of the previous debate we have either macro-structural: the bird’s eyes view of society, like Parson’s abstract Grand theory, or micro-interactional: the individual’s view, like the examination of common sense acts of the ethnomethodologists. Those groups that try to bridge them fail much like bridging astro and quantum physics. They usually commit the logical sin of teleology, that agency creates structures and then structures creates agency or the reverse. Creating the spin the wheel explanation of society, and links back to the previous point of fence sitting, that is incredibly looked down upon in the other sciences.

Hence sociology will not be taken seriously as a ‘hard’ science, and must retain its convoluted form in the ‘soft’ science till it gets its act together. But this need not be a bad thing sociology, you just need to believe in yourself, and make sure you build a few good strong fences, you’ll need them.

The Thinker. (aka Dale Stam)