Let's review the illogic of carbon schemes:

- Prices will be raised enough to alter behavior and, hopefully, provide incentive for innovation.

- Society will just have to grin and bear it.

- The costs aren't costs since . . . well, that doesn't make any sense but just go with it.

It doesn't seem like this has a ghost of a chance.

Concerns were growing last night over a summer of coordinated European fuel protests after tens of thousands of Spanish truckers blocked roads and the French border, sparking similar action in Portugal and France, while unions across Europe prepared fresh action over the rising price of petrol and diesel. . .

Jérôme Cordier of Unostra, the French union of small and medium haulage companies, said yesterday's protests marked a new phase to coordinate strikes across Europe for maximum impact, a development that could threaten widespread disruption during the holiday season. "We're taking this up a gear and focusing on the European dimension," he said. . .

Protests at rising fuel prices are not confined to Europe. A succession of developing countries have provoked public outcry by ordering fuel price increases. Yesterday Indian police forcibly dispersed hundreds of protesters in Kashmir who were angry at a 10% rise introduced last week. Protests appeared likely to spread to neighbouring Nepal after its government yesterday announced a 25% rise in fuel prices. Truckers in South Korea have vowed strike action over the high cost of diesel. Taiwan, Sri Lanka and Indonesia have all raised pump prices. Malaysia's decision last week to increase prices generated such public fury that the government moved yesterday to trim ministers' allowances to appease the public.

How did we get to the point where governments make such dumb policies? Slimebag scientists and economists.

The purpose of the stabilization wedges paper was narrow and simple – we wanted to stop the Bush administration from what we saw as a strategy to stall action on global warming by claiming that we lacked the technology to tackle it. . .

I saw it as an unhealthy collusion between the scientific community who believed that there was a serious problem and a political movement that didn’t. I wanted that to stop and the paper for me was surprisingly effective at doing that. I’m really happy with how it came out – I wouldn’t change a thing.

That doesn’t mean that there aren’t things wrong with it and that history won’t prove it false.

This can change political fortunes, for a while, but since it blinks reality it won't hold up.

Policies based on the argument that putting a price on carbon will be "not costly' are a house of cards, and based on a range of assumptions that could easily be judged very optimistic. Looking around, what you will see is that the minute that energy prices rise high enough to be felt by the public, action will indeed occur, but it will not be the action that is desired by the climate intelligencia. It will be demands for lower priced energy. And policy makers will listen to these demands and respond. Climate policy analysts should listen as well, because there will be no tricking of the public with rosy scenarios built on optimistic assumptions.

There's something seriously broken about our "intelligencia". They do and say stupid things. Their only hope for avoiding retribution is for policy makers to remain mired in partisan conflict that prevents policy formulation and implementation. That's also the best hope for society since any policies based on the misinformation being provided will be harmful.

I have a suspicion that this is how it has always been. Histories may extol the wisdom and virtue of past government decisions, but they aren't realistic. It's always been a mess, and the more power governments have the bigger the mess they make. We would do better with less powerful governments, but it's not at all clear how that might come about. It's like organized crime, it is organzied crime. The only thing that ever changes is which mob is on top.