Labor has commissioned Ross Garnaut to do Rudd’s Stern report exercise.
Garnaut is to report by mid-2008.
So Rudd, again acting as though he was in government, says that Howard has his head in the sand so Labor will just have to do his job for him. The states are to provide “data, expertise and funding”. Anna Bligh points out that the state treasurers asked Costello to do it and he refused.
Turnbull said that he objected to Rudd:
asking Australians to vote for him on the basis of a very definite climate change policy that commits Australia to unilateral action when he does not know what the costs of that unilateral action will be.
He’s asking Australians to vote for him in blind faith.
Now if he’s serious about being Prime Minister, he should not be putting forward climate change policies, economic policies of this kind, unless he knows what they will cost. And by commissioning this report, he’s admitting that he doesn’t know what it’ll cost. And by saying the report will come in after the election, he’s indicating that Australians should vote for him in blind faith, they should vote for him without knowing what the cost of his policy will be.
Apparently the report on carbon trading will tell the Government all it needs to know.
Rudd said that the first task was to work out the cost of doing nothing.
Mark Colvin’s interview with Garnaut threw up some interesting points.
Garnaut is clearly going to fill in interim targets on the way to 2050.
Also he saw world growth moving at about 5% pa or about double what Stern assumed. By the Rule of 72 this means that world GDP would double every 14 years. By the back of my envelope that puts world GDP at about 8 times its current level in 2050. That would be spectacular!
Mention was also made of Richard Tol’s criticism’s of Stern. Tol, a Dutchman now in Ireland, is
interested in the application of economic, mathematical and statistical techniques, such as time series analysis, valuation, decision analysis, and game theory, to environmental problems, in particular climate change, natural disasters, and river basin management. He is known for his work on impacts of, and adaptation to climate change.
If you want to follow up Tol’s views, he initially dismissed Stern’s report as alarmist and incompetent. (pdf) On reflection he didn’t change his mind all that much on the quality of Stern’s work as this article with Gary Yohe demonstrates. (pdf)
Lest you think they are suggesting we consign Stern to the dustbin and relax, I’d suggest you read carefully their Conclusion.
I can’t leave this without mentioning that Tol made his presence felt last year and this at Quiggin’s site. It would be fair to say that Quiggin and Tol didn’t agree on much at all, especially the quality of Stern’s economic analysis.
It’s my belief that the economic issues are secondary, which is what Howard and Turnbull have yet to learn.
Ah, to KR turns to an old Labor friend for a re-run of the late-80s. It does say something of how steeped he is in that Hawke-Keating milleu. I have to say, Garnaut’s previous report, “Australia and the North East Asian Ascendancy”, hasn’t stood up especially well over time. It didn’t really understand the economic and political fractures which would appear in East Asia through the 1990s, and of course it was filled with questionable assumptions about the nature and politics of Asian modernity and modernization.
On a related note, Ol’ Monkeybot MacFarlane came out with some unbelievable claims on Lateline. Highlights include: ‘1 in 3 scientists are climate change sceptics’ followed closely by ‘we need a debate based on science and economics;’ and ‘we’ve pissed away $3bn on emissions reductions solutions’ (but haven’t spent anything on modelling Australia’s vulnerability so this is basically a figure of “blind faith”, to borrow a term).
What a farce.
I mean, at least have the cajones to make the Bushist argument about ‘creating your own reality.’
Labour’s $300m spending spree on environmental solutions for the family home looks pretty slap-dash too. I fail to understand how so much expertise can be dedicated to IR, taxation, health and education but when it comes to environmental issues, the politics of gestures is so seldom backed by any substance.
On Garnaut’s forecasting, he may not have got North Asian politics right in the 1980s but in the mid-1990s he made accurate (and influential) forecasts of strong and sustained Australian GDP growth accompanied by near-full employment for the first decade or so of the new millenium. He even picked - against a strong consensus at the time by other economists - that Chinese growth would drive commodity prices up strongly.
On his personal views, I really don’t think he’s a natural Labor person. He has quite a strong ideological commitment to free markets, for example, which we may expect to see reflected in his report. One suspects he voted for Hewson rather than Keating.
But it’s a bit rough for Turnbull to whinge about the reporting date being after the election. If it had been before the election no doubt we’d have been hearing terms like “hatchet job” and “election stunt” from him. This is a point the interviewer should have made to him.
DD, Jones exposed McFarlane for the lightweight that he is. On the other hand McFarlane has been given (and embraced) the portfolio of the advocate for Established Energy Interests. But this subject has turned out to be a moving feast (not unexpectedly) and so exposing McFarlane as a slow-moving sloth:
Even Big Coal doesn’t want a dud mouthpiece. Robert Cameron in his phone call to the prime minister immediately after the broadcast: “Is this what we’re paying you for?”
Forget what he said to Laurie Oakes. This is his very first statement in the interview:
He’s in a complete muddle. This is the bloke who had five differnt stories within a week about electoral funds in his electorate before the 1991 election.
Garnaut seems to have already ruled out nuclear power which made me wonder. Is this a wank?
A fair bit of the work in Australia has already been done.
The success of this report depends who Garnaut gets to work with him. I don’t think Garnaut alone could carry through this sort of exercise. He is a generalist economist without particularly strong technical capabilities.
Its irrelevant if he was a old Labor supporter. I always find him worth listening too - its ‘grand theme’ ‘big picture’ stuff but this is a necessary type of economist.
Politically he is as smart as anyone.
Thanks for your perspective, Harry. But why do you say Garnaut has ruled out nuclear? I’m pretty sure I heard him say it’s an option as far as he’s concerned. Here’s a quote from Alan Mitchell’s article in the Fin Review today:
It is clear from the Mitchell article that Garnaut is against picking winners. He wants to set a price signal for carbon, give support to R&D, but let the market sort it out.
He also says
One point of interest is that he seems to favour an international carbon trading scheme where each country is allocated a certain quantum of credits.
Warwick McKibbin last night was favouring separate schemes in each jurisdiction in order to maintain credibility and to cater for local circumstances, then stitch all the schemes together over time.
Brian
page 7 today’s Australian. ‘Nuclear too expensive’.
I’ll check to see if he was misquoted.
I’ve thrown out my copy of the Fin, but I’m sure the thrust of the story was that it was a potential embarrassment for Rudd that Garnaut wasn’t ruling out nuclear.
Mark, not sure that’s fair. The thrust of Mitchell’s article was captured in the title Market key to climate change.
Angus Grigg did a companion news item titled Garnaut review will cover all the options where the feautured quote was
Grigg did say in para 2 that garnaut’s inclusion of nuclear was potentially embarrassing to Rudd, who had explicitly ruled it out as being too expensive (NB, no mention of too dirty or dangerous). The article if anything was critical of Howard on balance quoting the CSIRO as saying
Then Sir Nick got a run who said that immediate action in Oz would not cost jobs or send industries overseas.
Garnaut’s special interest in farming was also mentioned as he currently chairs the International Food Policy Research Institute in Washington.
The key paragraph was the middle one;
A pity it won’t be finished before the election!
Sorry, Brian, I was scanning the paper quickly over lunch at work and I’ve obviously mixed up the two articles.
It may be a positive. It shows that the issue, impacts and solutions are under serious examination and consideration compared to policy on the run and rabbits and rhetorical backflips pulled out of hats.
Mark, yes I think this thing is positve for Rudd. What I’m particularly interested in is the cost of doing nothing, or nothing much.
Howard and Turnbull keep banging away about Rudd’s irrespossibility because he doesn’t know what his policies will cost. The cost of Howard’s policy of doing nothing much is not nothing and it would be good to shove it up Howard’s nose.
Harry, I look forward to your report.
Brian, I think voters in Queensland, at least, when looking at Turnbull’s record on an issue of pressing and urgent concern to us, water, know full well that he delivers nothing but rhetoric.