Net is for tax purposes.
Are you saying capitalism without taxes is an impossibility, John? New one on me. My understanding was that net was for determining profit, and that tax was based on profit.
Besides capitalism you also have a very different understanding of the carbon cycle from me. As can be seen in the second (green) graph of this figure, the Vostok ice cores show CO2 as varying between 180 and 300 ppmv for the past 400,000 years, a range of 120 ppmv, with the highest reading throughout that whole period being 298.7 ppmv 323,000 years ago. In particular the last five readings were as follows. BP = Before Present (in years) = Before 1999.
BP….PPMV
8113 259.6
7327 254.6
6220 262.2
3833 268.1
3634 272.8
2342 284.7
Fitting a trend line to this, the rate of rise was 0.43 ppmv per century throughout those 6,000 years. This gives some idea of how fast CO2 changes when there are only a few million humans and only biofuel consumption (wood burning), with no significant use of fossil fuels.
Contrast that with the 53-year period 1958 to 2011, lasting a mere 0.013% of those 400,000 years. During that incredibly short period (by geological standards) CO2 rose from 314 ppmv to 394 ppmv, a rise of 80 ppmv. Furthermore in 1958 it was rising at a rate of 71 ppmv/century (0.71 ppmv/year) while today it is rising at a rate of 251 ppmv/century (2.51 ppmv/year).
During that period human population rose from 3 million to 7 million, while human emission of CO2 into the atmosphere increased from 2.5 to 10 GtC per year (and that’s without counting the additional CO2 attributable to how we’ve been changing land use over that period). Hence each human has almost doubled their consumption of energy as measured by CO2 emissions over that period.
It is as correct to say that humans are only adding 5% of what nature is adding to the atmosphere as it is to list only the income of a company without listing its expenses, when deciding which company to invest in. Tax is irrelevant in that consideration assuming all companies pay their fair share of taxes. But to neglect the fact that nature is removing 100% of what she adds plus 53% of what humans add is to fail to realize that only by removing more like 100% of what humans add can nature stop this astonishly rapid rise in CO2, which today is 251/0.43 = 583 times as fast as during the period 8113-2342 Before Present, and at the present rate of increase will be twice that in 30 years time!
Note that I’m not claiming this breakneck pace is catastrophic, merely that it is much faster than anything shown in the ice cores over the last 400,000 years. My expertise is limited to the quantitative, and I have no idea how to quantify catastrophes.
