Big Ball of Mud and Bob Brown on Australian Carbon Trading "Locking in Failure"

Bob Brown talks about Mr Rudd’s “Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme” saying it locks in failure with its unacceptably low targets and its $16 billion handout to polluters

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Source: Australian Greens

This ETS-lite deserves to be rejected

The Rudd Government’s carbon pollution reduction scheme (CPRS) is a thoroughly compromised version of an emissions trading scheme (ETS). It deserves to be rejected in the Senate even if it requires an unholy alliance between the Greens and the climate change deniers in the Coalition parties.

Australia (and other countries) would be better off with no ETS (Emissions Trading System). Two recent reports – The Brave New World of Carbon Trading by Australian ecological economist, Clive L. Spash, and A Dangerous Obsession by Friends of the Earth – spell out in detail why the attempt to deal with global warming by setting up ETS schemes have already failed, why they will continue to fail and also why governments, in thrall to financial interests, continue to persevere with them.

According to both studies, carbon trading is failing against its fundamental purpose – it hasn’t achieved the levels of emissions cuts promised nor is it driving the major technological innovations that are needed to shift our economies on to more low-carbon paths.

For polluters whose emissions exceed their permits, carbon trading makes lower-cost permits an alternative to the higher cost investments that they would otherwise be forced to make.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

A Big Ball of Mud

Over dinner I was contemplating the similarities between software architecture and legal architecture. After all — reading something like the Waxman-Markey Bill or the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme legislation is very much like reading source code. Then it dawned on me — in the field of software development, there is a way of describing the climate architecture that is being discussed in the UNFCCC negotiations. It is called a big ball of mud. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

In computer programming, a big ball of mud is a system or computer program that appears to have no distinguishable architecture. It usually features other anti-patterns.

Here is a definition:

A Big Ball of Mud is a haphazardly structured, sprawling, sloppy, duct-tape-and-baling-wire, spaghetti-code jungle. These systems show unmistakable signs of unregulated growth, and repeated, expedient repair. Information is shared promiscuously among distant elements of the system, often to the point where nearly all the important information becomes global or duplicated. The overall structure of the system may never have been well defined. If it was, it may have eroded beyond recognition. Programmers with a shred of architectural sensibility shun these quagmires. Only those who are unconcerned about architecture, and, perhaps, are comfortable with the inertia of the day-to-day chore of patching the holes in these failing dikes, are content to work on such systems.

A big ball of mud is the architecture you get when there is no architecture. This is why the legal architecture of a post-2012 framework is so important.

Source: ClimateDilemna, Dr Peter Wood, ANU