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1. Putting a price on carbon is not only about the climate.Yes, humans are affecting the climate and reducing carbon dioxide emissions is a key commitment of this government, and indeed the stated views of the opposition. But there are other reasons to price carbon, primarily to put Australia at the forefront of a global energy technology revolution that is already underway.In future years and decades the world is going to need vastly more energy that is secure, reliable, clean and affordable. Achieving these outcomes will require an energy technology revolution. The purpose of pricing carbon is to raise the revenues needed to invest in this future, just as we invest in health, agriculture and defence.

2. A price on carbon raises revenues to invest in stimulating that energy technology revolution.Australia emits almost 400 million tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year. In round numbers, every dollar carbon tax per tonne on those emissions would raise about A$100 million. A significant portion of the proceeds from a carbon tax should be used to invest in energy technology innovation, using today’s energy economy to build a bridge to tomorrow’s economy. This is exactly the strategy that India has adopted with a small levy on coal and Germany has adopted with a tax on nuclear fuel rods, with proceeds in both instances invested into energy innovation.

3. The purpose of a carbon tax is not to make energy, food, petrol or consumer goods appreciably more expensive.Just as scientists are in broad agreement that humans are affecting the global climate, economists and other experts are in broad agreement that we cannot revolutionise our energy economy through pricing mechanisms alone. Thus, we propose starting with a low carbon tax - one that has broad political support - and then committing to increasing it in a predictable manner over time.The Coalition has proposed a “direct action plan” on carbon policy that would cost A$30 billion over the next 8 years, which is the equivalent of about a $2.50 per tonne carbon tax. The question to be put to the Coalition is not whether we should be investing in a carbon policy, as we agree on that point, but how much and how it should be paid for. The Coalition’s plans leave unanswered how they would pay for their plan.A carbon tax offers a responsible and effective manner to raise funds without harming the economy or jobs. In fact, to the extent that investments in energy innovation bear fruit, new markets will be opened and new jobs will be created. The Coalition’s plan is not focused on energy technology innovation.The question for the Coalition should thus be, at what level would you set a carbon tax (or what other taxes would you raise?), and how would you invest the proceeds in a manner that accelerates energy technology innovation?

there is a deeper issue here that spans political parties across nations:  a lack of recognition among policy makers of their dependence on experts in making wise decisions.  Experts do not, of course, determine how policy decisions ought to be made but they do add considerable value to wise decision making.

The deeper issue at work here is an open secret in the practice of democracy, and that is the fact that our elected leaders are chosen from among us, the people.  As such, politicians tend to reflect the views of the general public on many subjects - not just those subjects governed solely by political passions, but also those that are traditionally the province of experts.  Elected officials are not just a lot like us, they are us.

It is both misguided and dangerous to push unobserved risks further into the statistical tails of the probability distribution of outcomes and allow these high-impact, low-probability "tail risks" to disappear from policymakers' fields of observation.

Such environments eventually experience massive blowups, catching everyone off-guard and undoing years of stability or, in some cases, ending up far worse than they were in their initial volatile state. Indeed, the longer it takes for the blowup to occur, the worse the resulting harm in both economic and political systems.

Seeking to restrict variability seems to be good policy (who does not prefer stability to chaos?), so it is with very good intentions that policymakers unwittingly increase the risk of major blowups. And it is the same misperception of the properties of natural systems that led to both the economic crisis of 2007-8 and the current turmoil in the Arab world. The policy implications are identical: to make systems robust, all risks must be visible and out in the open -- fluctuat nec mergitur (it fluctuates but does not sink) goes the Latin saying.

The history of Western moral philosophy includes numerous attempts to ground ethics in one rational principle, standard, or rule. This narrative stretches back 2,500 years to the Greeks, who were interested mainly in virtue ethics and the moral character of the person. The modern era has seen two major additions. In 1785, Immanuel Kant introduced the categorical imperative: act only under the assumption that what you do could be made into a universal law. And in 1789, Jeremy Bentham proposed utilitarianism: work toward the greatest happiness of the greatest number of people (the “utility” principle).

Many people now think projects to build a reasonable and coherent moral system are doomed. Still, most secular and religious people reject the alternative of moral relativism, and have spent much ink criticizing it (among my favorite books on the topic is Moral Relativism by Stephen Lukes). The most recent and controversial work in this area comes from Sam Harris. In The Moral Landscape, Harris argues for a morality based on (a science of) well-being and flourishing, rather than religious dogma.

I am interested in another oft-heard criticism of Harris’ book, which is that words like “well-being” and “flourishing” are too general to form any relevant basis for morality. This criticism has some force to it, as these certainly are somewhat vague terms. But what if “well-being” and “flourishing” were to be used only as a starting point for a moral framework? These concepts would still put us on a better grounding than religious faith. But they cannot stand alone. Nor do they need to.

Five years ago, a group like Studiomates probably wouldn’t have been a group at all but rather two dozen strangers in search of a Wi-Fi signal at Starbucks. The 26 members, who each pay $500 a month for a desk, are mostly engaged in independent projects in unrelated fields, and have no practical reason to work together. But as the new media pundit Clay Shirky said at the South by Southwest conference in March, “we systematically overestimate the value of access to information and underestimate the value of access to each other.”

“Sure, we could all be home doing what we do, but why would we?” Tina Roth Eisenberg (a k a swissmiss) said as her studio mates clacked away at their MacBooks. “I just like being around nerdy creative people all day long. It helps make sense of all the information coming at us.” Studiomates is an especially information-oriented bunch, and an influential one, too. In addition to her swissmiss blog and Twitter following of 200,000, Ms. Eisenberg is the founder of Creative Mornings, a popular monthly speaking series that has young designers in four cities talking.

Much of the content for her blog and Twitter feed comes from the casual conversations at Studiomates. “The day-to-day distraction level may be slightly higher,” Ms. Popova said. “But in terms of the influx of the building blocks of productivity — ideas, story tips, the interesting people who come in — an environment like this is priceless.”