It seems Bart R must have had a few too many Easter bunnies, of forgotten to take his tablets. He sure knows lots of nasty adjectives, and is clearly xenophobic as well. But appear to be innumerate.
The criticism of Professor Henry Ergas is a classic case of ad hominem. Bart R hasn’t bothered to address the substantive issue; instead he’s tried to discredit th person who wrote the article that included the numbers. How pathetic is that?
The NPV Professor Henry Ergas quoted is the cumulative loss of GDP 2012 to 2050 from Treasury estimates. So tell Treasury they are wrong. I expect Treasury is more likely to have underestimated than overestimated the economic damage the ETS will do to Australia. In fact, I believe Treasury have massively underestimated the damage, given the assumptions they’ve used. For example, one of the assumptions is that the USA will have implemented a country wide Cap and Trade scheme by 2016. Furthermore, they assume the world will adopt an economically efficient ETS by 2020. That is totally unrealistic. But there are many other assumptions that are just as unrealistic.
However, anyone even half numerate could see that, even if you halved the Treasury estimate it makes negligible difference to the result. It would change the benefit/cost ration from 0.03 to 0.06.
Anyone with any sense of numbers, or any engineering judgement would see this. Instead, this clown rolls out abuse after abuse and shows he is a half-wit. And a xenophobic one to top it all off.