According to Pavan Sukhdev, a banker working with the United Nations Environment Program, putting a price on the world’s trees, water stores and other natural resources will be the most cost-effective way of tackling the challenges posed by climate change — at least until cleaner energy technologies become available.

Treating nature and its benefits like other goods in the marketplace would also make it easier to carry out a more sophisticated cost-benefit analysis in sectors like fisheries, where resources are badly stretched, said Mr. Sukhdev, who is on leave from Deutsche Bank, where he headed the bank’s global markets business in India.

The Howard "New Order" made a lot of crap about the supposed issue of "choice" when there was no choice at all.  "My way or the highway".  How does he get away with it?

This person of this post has suggested at least an interim method of helping saving the planet.

What deeply concerns me Gus is that the danger of Climate Change is so real and the "money people" of the world are only worried with the next decade; the next election and have adopted the Howard attitude of don't worry about it now - it is not humanity at fault.

The followers of this stupidity are saying that the Rudd government’s debt to stabilize our economy will create a debt for “our children, grand children and great grand children” and to ignore it would…..?

I have never had any respect for Howard or his Murdoch/US supporters however, with all his lies and deceptions, he did admit (I think in 2006) that the planet was warming but – it was not due to human activity!  (That is so stupid that any accolade for his era should be remembered as that of his American controller – G.W. Bush).

But, he has a good chance of not being alive when the truth is learned – like I believe that Turnbull once said in a jocular fashion.

So, in some strange way, I suppose that the conservatives in this country are not prepared to reduce profits however, costs to the every-punished taxpayer are most acceptable.  So, their attitude of losing profits, excessive or not, for the sake of the planet, is not their responsibility – only that of the ultimate asset of any nation – the people – the taxpayers – who, even though they pay their taxes, will not receive a state funeral like Howard’s tax cheat Kerry Packer.

God Bless Australia.  NE OUBLIE.

Bankers who take "reckless" risks with investments could be stripped of future bonuses, the government has said.

City minister Lord Myners said banks must be "more secure", with taxpayers "never again" bailing them out.

The Tories called the measures, which would give more powers to the Financial Services Authority, "headline-chasing".

The British Bankers' Association warned that these changes could threaten the UK's future as a major global centre for finance.

The Financial Services Bill will be part of the Queen's speech - which sets out legislative plans for the coming year - later this week.

Lord Myners said the changes would not involve setting a cap on bankers' bonuses.

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Ahahah... That last line makes me laugh... and I believe bankers have ripples of giggles passing on the lard of their well-fed bellies... See toon at top.

Nick Clegg today issues a call for this week's Queen's Speech to be scrapped and replaced by an emergency programme of reform designed to "clean up politics once and for all".

Writing in The Independent, the Liberal Democrat leader dismisses the pageant as a "waste of everyone's time" as Parliament will only sit for another 70 days before it is dissolved for the general election expected in the spring.

The Queen's Speech this year will set out plans to boost parents' and patients' rights, tackle knife crime, improve social care for the elderly and trim bankers' bonuses.

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see toon at top...

The Bank of England has revealed for the first time that it lent Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) and HBOS £61.6bn in emergency funding last autumn.

Bank governor Mervyn King told a committee of MPs it "was to prevent a loss of confidence spreading through the financial system as a whole".

The money was repaid in full by January this year, he added.

A spokesman for the prime minister said it was "a powerful reminder" of how the banking system had nearly collapsed.

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Meanwhile one could still be starving on a taxpayer's bench....

When Michael Moore made his debut feature, Roger and Me, he set about vilifying the boss of General Motors, the now deceased Roger B Smith, for destroying his home town of Flint, Michigan. Charles Ferguson's film Inside Job attempts to blame a wider cast list for the banking crash of 2008 and explains why so little has been done to reform the financial world or bring criminal prosecutions against the main protagonists.

His villainous lineup includes bankers, politicians (many of whom were previously bankers), regulators, the credit ratings agencies and academics. When Glenn Hubbard, George Bush's chief economic adviser and dean of Columbia Business School, is shown as a partisan advocate of deregulation, we have one of the movie's punch-the-air moments. During the interview, Hubbard, who denies he was corrupted by his paid-for relationships with government, angrily barks: "You've got five minutes, mister. Give it your best shot."

The spotlight has largely bypassed academics in the UK. There are plenty of economists who believed the banks understood what they were doing and supported deregulation. Whether they took large slugs of cash for writing poorly researched, cheerleading reports on the economic miracle in Iceland (pre-crash), as former US central banker Frederic Mishkin is found doing, is less clear.

Over here, the relationship between academia and business appears to be more arm's length, though London Business School dean Sir Andrew Likierman sits on the Barclays board, while Howard Davies, who argued for light-touch regulation while head of the Financial Services Authority, has become director of the London School of Economics. The UK's chief villain, however, is probably the disgraced, but largely unpunished, banker Sir Fred Goodwin, the former boss of Royal Bank of Scotland, once the fifth-largest bank in the world.

Inside Job: How Bankers Caused The Financial Crisis