Climate Change Minister Penny Wong will be releasing the government’s Emissions Trading Green Paper today at the National Press Club. The Minister’s address can be seen on ABC1 at 12.30pm. The Green Paper will fill in some of the blanks left remaining after the release of the Garnaut Review’s interim report last week. No doubt it will also set the tone for the developing political debate over the next few months, and a key to how that debate will proceed politically is a poll by Essential Media [link to pdf] which suggests that the Coalition’s “wait for the world” message (if indeed that is their message!) is the wrong one.
As to the substance of the Green Paper, Crikey has set out a number of benchmarks by which the policy could be evaluated. These, of course, are open to debate, and indeed it’s worth recalling that the whole purpose of a Green Paper is to stimulate debate and consultation while signalling the parameters in which the government wants to shape policy.
No doubt there will be substantive contributions here and throughout the blogosphere and the media later on today (and links in the thread are most welcome), but you’re also most welcome to start discussing the Green Paper right now!
Relevant links over the fold.
Elsewhere: Public Opinion, An Onymous Lefty, Peter Martin, Blogocracy.
Update: The Green Paper can be downloaded here. Commentary at LP from dk.au and me. Crikey’s extensive coverage is here. Some Kiwi blog reaction from Idiot/Savant.
Update [by Kim]: More blogosphere commentary (on the whole underwhelmed and disappointed) from Woolly Deays, GreensBlog, and Peter Martin.
Another update [by Kim]: Tim Watts writes:
The reaction in the left-wing blogosphere to the Rudd Government ETS Green Paper’s cent-for-cent reduction in the fuel excise to compensate for tax increases in the ETS seems to have been universally hostile.
Indeed, and rightly so. Though that’s not the only way in which this Green Paper has wimped out.
Tim argues that those who dissent from government policy paint it as political opportunism. Well, it is. One wouldn’t expect anything more – or less – from the political process. But there’s good politics and bad politics. As Mark said in his post, there was no need to join the Libs in the petrol politics game – which all the pragmatic indicators suggest is pretty bloody irrelevant. We’re arguing here at LP that good policy could be good politics. Didn’t a certain Kevin Rudd also make that claim when he promised “evidence-based policy” and long term solutions rather than poll driven populism?
Another update: [by Kim] More commentary from Dave Bath and Joshua Gans.
Also at LP [Comments consolidated on this post]: More from Kim and Mark.
Update: Tim Watts replies to us.
Update: [by dk.au] Peter Martin comments on the handouts to coal-fired generators: “This is a handout resulting from lobbying. Nothing more. Much of it will go to the beleaguered NSW government which owns coal-fired generators.”
Update: [by Kim] Lots of reaction and analysis in Crikey today, with Bernard Keane on what it will achieve (nothing much) and on the lack of political courage displayed by Rudd. Clive Hamilton describes the Green Paper as political capitulation, while Guy Pearse thinks it’s reminiscent of Howard era politics. (The transcript of Pearse’s interview with Emma Alberici today is here. – dk.au)
Around the blogosphere, there’s comment from Road to Surfdom, Possum Comitatus, Public Opinion, Blogocracy, Politically homeless, Andrew Bartlett and Climate Dilemma.
Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda dubs the Green Paper “No Polluter Left Behind”. And Bernard Keane in Crikey on the invasion of the rentseekers.
Update: Harry Clarke has a summary of the Green Paper. John Quiggin sees “serious targets for 2020″ as the silver lining.
More from me on the politics of rent-seeking and the ETS.
So far we’ve heard that the ACTU met last night and supports the ETS, wants full compensation for low earners and says there could even be employment gains as a result of the scheme.
We’ve further been told that transport will be in but the extra cost of fuel will be fully offset by reductions in excise. This will be reviewed in three years time. It’s meant to signal to us that we need to buy more fuel efficient cars and make other plans in anticipation.
Swannie says the price of petrol has gone up by 30c this year alone and anyone who isn’t thinking of how to save using the stuff is not living in the real world.
Hunt says it’s just a cynical exercise and attacks the Govt for being stupid enough to agree with them.
I think there is much merit in McKibbin’s idea to focus on bringing in the ETS and getting the price signals accurate and firmly in place before moving to the debate on technological problems to be solved.
Any carbon use reduction policy that does not primarily focus on providing alternatives (where are the solar power stions mentioned in this”scheme”) to carbon use, is a total waste of time, effort, and money. If you fully compensate all of the carbon users while increasing coal exports (Queensland), continue to clear land (SA), and continue to commit large tracts of forrest to the axe (Tasmania), you have achieved far less than nothing.
Similarly any policy that focuses on providing alternatives but gets the price signals wrong will be useless. Getting the price signal right will allow alternatives to be developed, get them wrong and meet massive resistance.
I think its rather sad that the government would cave in to the opposition over the fuel excise. If they can’t increase the price on petrol now while highly popular, there’s little chance that it will happen in 3 years time. What happened to the argument that the more areas they exempt, the more burden the other areas will have to accept?
Mark – I think your link to the pdf file might be broken? Its directing me to world youth day stories
Oh, sorry, Chris, I’ll fix!
Elsewhere: Public Opinion, An Onymous Lefty, Peter Martin, Blogocracy.
Thanks Mark – interesting 10% are still climate change deniers, though the reasonably high percentage who think the media exaggerates the problem probably indicates there’s a few more skeptics as well.
I think it would be interesting to start asking questions about how much more (say 1%, 5%, 10%, 20%) people would be willing to pay for electricity/fuel/food in the short term to address climate change. I think it would be a good measure of how solid the support for change is, rather than just the standard “the government should do something!”.
Chris, there were some questions on that in a recent Newspoll. I don’t have the link to hand, but it’s probably easiest to track down at The Poll Bludger.
http://www.pollbludger.com/
The Newspoll survey of 1/07/08 is the one you want.
http://www.newspoll.com.au/cgi-bin/polling/display_poll_data.pl?url_caller=latest&state=Any&mode=file&page=Search
Thanks Steve and Mark. Very interesting reading – really quite encouraging.
What colour comes after green? White? Pink?
carbon
yellow or blue surely
caught a bit of PW on news radio, carbon taxes on fuel to be off set by reductions in current taxes on a ‘cent by cent’ basis to be reviewed in three years. is this becomming govt by review? sounds like ‘Muddling Through’, could be time to track down some Lindblom papers
I don’t think you’ll see too much land clearing happening in SA, BilB – we took care of most of those pesky trees more than 100 years ago.
Next is the white paper.
Interesting is the number of people who have forgotten, or never heard of, White & Green Papers!
Thinking back, did Johny ever issue green or white papers or was it all policy on the run?
The fuel excise is purely political and was to be expected.
A carbon price on petrol will in the short term not deliver any reductions in emissions.
All reductions in the transport sector will be due to rising oil prices.
hence the inclusion of transport with an excise cut does not just “exclude transport” from the scheme, rather it catches the likely demand reduction due to rising oil prices.
In the short term it allows labor to avoid the ‘tax on tax’ argument and provides a few cents/dollars leeway for families.
If families and business have not started thinking about revising their car usage and model, then they will soon. By 2013 the fleet will start to have turned over, and the govt will have less cause for concern to start rampin up the petrol price if emissions still haven’t budged.
The most worrying aspect of the green paper is the direct assistance to coal generators. While it is a ‘once and for all’ assistance, i’m not sure how they can avoid it being a direct windfall. it won’t actually affect their ongoing operating costs all that much, just perhaps make their balance sheets look a little nicer.
at least they do talk about structural assistance for those regions most affected – ie. latrobe and hunter valleys.
In short:
Huge handouts for “strongly affected industries” and “emissions intensive trade exposed industries”; technology barely gets a mention except carbon capture and storage; a 60% cut in emissions by 2050 is still proposed, so Australia will probably remain among the highest per-capita polluters; the trajectories will be determined by 5 to 10 year gateways which will provide certainty for industry but reduce our flexibility if we decide that we need reduce emissions much more quickly; petrol left out for the time being; emissions from livestock not included until at least 2015; emissions from forest degradation and grazeland degradation are not mentioned (except for in developing countries), so logging and burning old growth forests will probably continue to not be measured in Australia’s greenhouse accounting and reporting unless things are changed at the international level. There will be some compensation for low to middle income households but there may not be so much after the big polluters have been catered for.
The green paper is available here. They are seeking submissions by 10 September 2008.
Meanwhile over at the American Physical Society
Bang on Peter:
What a collisions of rhetoric and reality. You’d think the link between CO2 and Temperature was only made yesterday. For fuck’s sake – it’s even been formalised in the Carbon Disclosure Project for more than 5 years now.
I haven’t read the full paper yet, but part of the rationale for the high fuel excise was that it is harming the environment.
So it is in fact conceivable that rather than the current Government imposed pricing of environmental damage in the excise the Carbon Trading system might set the price of emissions from petrol lower than it currently is set by Government fiat (fuel excise).
Not saying that it will, but during the start-up of the new system this is an entirely rational though perhaps unexpected result of carbon trading when there are generous allowences and caps.
So the fact the Government is reducing the excise in line with the Carbon pricing is really neither here nor there for me.
Emissions Trading won’t be worth the green paper it’s written on if the price of petrol doesn’t shoot through the roof. If the introduction of ETS and the cutting of fuel excise produces cheaper petrol, then the Rudd government has failed completely and implemented Nelson’s boneheaded policies for him.
Revenue from Emissions trading should not be given back to businesses, it should be reinvested in public transport, active transport, renewable energies, etc. just like how we use the gambling tax revenue for community benefit. I’d support the idea of compensation for low income families but only if it’s a subsidy to cover the cost of the electricity.
Seriously; petrol driven cars have no place in a world which is trying to beat global warming.
Peter, I have read the linked paper. I don’t pretend to understand the calculations etc but I am interested in the conclusions. In particular:
“Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no “climate crisis” at all. At present, then, in policy terms there is no case for doing anything. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
Reactions?
“Seriously; petrol driven cars have no place in a world which is trying to beat global warming.”
Less idealism more realism please. No-one is going to give up their car and it would be a disaster of monumental proportions if they were forced to. In terms of consumer discretionary income – buying petrol for cars is a long way down the list of things people will give up when the going gets tough. The well-off won’t stop driving – they’ll just trim back a bit on luxury goods. The poor will bear the brunt of higher petrol prices because they’re not spending on other non-essentials that can be cut back on.
Higher petrol prices are incredibly regressive.
On fuel, I had half an ear on the radio and thought I heard that there will be a net cost to transport as in haulage. I was working on a bit of a brain dump, which is to be my next post. It kind of explains why I can’t get too raptured about what the Govt is doing, although I’m sure it’s progress.
wpd, I can’t read that stuff either and would appreciate Peter giving us a three-line explanation, which I suspect is all it’s worth.
Here’s the brain dump.
I think I’ll defrag the computer and have a little lie down now.
I think the real concern here is that the Australian government seems hellbent on making exactly the same mistakes the EU did initially and which undermined their ETS by turning it into a vehicle which delivered windfall profits to polluters. Massive free allocations may shield polluters from the full cost of their activities, but marginal costs still increase (because extra production requires buying permits), which justifies price rises to match, et viola! – massive profits for nothing. The owners of those polluting coal-fired power stations will be laughing all the way to the bank.
100% auctioning would have been much, much fairer, and ensured this problem didn’t happen. It would also have ensured that the windfall profits from the ETS (and there will be some, because the scheme basically creates new and valuable property rights) accrued to the public rather than to private interests. Instead, your own government has robbed you. Nice…
Why the desire for fuel to go through the roof? Since it already has the bejesus taxed out of it, you’re effectively asking for it to be carbon priced on top of a massive pre-existing price distortion. Worse still, rather than level up the playing field for carbon – one of the actual points of having a carbon MARKET – adding a carbon price on top of the excise punishes petrol greater than just about every other form of carbon emission.
All very good and well for the inner city dwellers with access to public transport and within walking distance of commercial and public services.
But if you’re one of those rare folks, you know, the other 70% of the population that doesn’t have that geographical luxury, increasing mobility costs (which is exactly what you are talking about) to the level some around here seem to think is such a grand idea would be disastrous.
Regional communities? Apparently they get to go fuck themselves! All that dam driving around to get from A to B to do things like buy groceries, go to work and other bourgeoisie excesses – what do you want them to do, ride a horse?
Outer metro suburban folk with poor public transport of a type which cant actually take them to and from their places of work and commercial services – what are they supposed to do?
And if we look at the spatial distribution of income in this country, the places with the least access to transport alternatives are generally the ones with the lowest incomes.
Wouldn’t that be a marvelously regressive income redistribution.
So we’d have the people that could least afford it, that happen to live in places where government urban planning and development has been poor or where public transport is not an economically viable proposition, getting slugged for having the audacity of trying to earn a living.
The real irony here though, is that many of those complaining the loudest about petrol not going up as much as they wished would be among the first longer term victims of the consequences of petrol being priced high – as the inner city suburbs they reside in would be gentrified beyond comprehension and they’d be priced completely out of the market. Ironically, probably resulting in many being forced to live in those nasty places where transport is shit and whose denizens seem to be treated with such contempt.
While there will be no price floor, the ‘preferred position’ is for a price cap until 2015. This means that the ‘cap’ is loose – it’s not even a cap-and-trade scheme.
Thanks Possum – you have said it for me. As one who has to travel 1/2 hr to get anywhere petrol has become a ‘watch it’ item for this household. Public transport is not an option in regional areas if you live outside the townships.
I am pleased that Wong has started slowly and measurely. There will always be things we don’t like but ‘frightening the horses’ is not going to get us anywhere fast. Surely the Govt. will achieve more co-operation by making a start and then ramping it up as it becomes necessary and as the voter understand it more.
wpd
We should all hope Monckton’s conclusions regarding climate sensitivity are correct.
But his conclusion regarding policy is effectively a non-sequitir. He may well be correct in saying that inaction is the correct response to a “non-problem”. But we don’t have a “non-problem” – we have one article by Monckton saying that MAYBE the IPCC’s climate sensitivity settings are too high.
Given the implications if the more pessimistic modelling projections are correct, the appropriate risk-management response is to take action. Inaction should only be the response if we are very confident that AGW is not a problem. One article by Monckton is a long way short of sufficient evidence for that proposition.
At the risk of sounding like Jack Strocchi, I PICKED THIS! (the reduction in fuel excise, cent for cent) and if I could be bothered going through the archives I’d link to where I PICKED THIS!
It’s excellent politics and politics can’t be divorced from policy (the two words have the same etymology).
Climate change policy will be with us for the rest of this century. What’s important is to get the thing started ASAFP. If that means some short term hold-your-nose pragmatism to keep the tabloid-reading, talkback radio-listening, Today Tonight- watching punters onside, then so be it. And for these people, petrol prices really do hurt. As it is, they’re already going to be cutting back with prices at $1.70 per litre, and they might go much higher anyway.
BTW, I didn’t query the substance of Monckton’s article in posting my last comment, but I note that the folks at RealCLimate have a rather low opinion of his analysis of climate sensitivity.
Mark’s latest post “Bait and Switch” says it all, really.
As soon as I heard on the radio this morning that petrol excise would be cut “cent for cent” with carbon pricing, I though “the Government really doesn’t want to negotiate with The Greens on this.”
It will be interesting to see if there’s a leadership challenge at the next Liberal Party meeting…
Update: The Green Paper can be downloaded here. Commentary at LP from dk.au and me. Crikey’s extensive coverage is here. Some Kiwi blog reaction from Idiot/Savant.
Yes, this is almost entirely political. While CC as a problem has entered mainstream, we don’t yet have a national conversation about it. This should kick that conversation off, to be played out now through all sorts of interests other than the Government’s. Outrage, though it won’t be yet from a general pubic, is also good as it helps focus the problem and some essential factors in public mind (including quandaries). These things all help to decentralise the problem from a Government (and, “big polluters”) to people. Once that process has happened – perhaps some years – the real policies can realistically come into action.
The danger is that people will turn away, lost to the figures, processes, conflicting voices and pressing size of the thing. Hence what this paper has done is light a fire, to watch how it burns. If the public turn away and the fire dims in the immediate future, no harm is done in addressing the problem as that outrage having shifted to the personal/family/small business won’t have been enacted, leaving the Government – as one player in a huge field – in an operative position to effectively move it all further along.
Rudd is criticised for not having a line to sell. Imaginably that will change once he gets a feel for how this went down publicly.
It’s all very positive, really. The simple advent of a green paper cannot itself be undervalued. The alternative had it been voted in could well have been a backroom policy – or, rather, an “announcement” – put forward through highly polished one line sales missives telling us what “most Australians” want.
Spiros,
If they were actually trying to do this right they would have made it a once off reduction in the excise to compensate for the difference at inception and then let the price go from there – up or down.
As they haven’t it is yet another confirmation that this is politics as usual. They are not willing to risk popularity even (as they see it) to save the planet. Ho hum. Keep voting for politicians, and what do you get?
38 Andrew
I don’t trust the general public either.
Like it or not – we do actually live in a political democracy. Once the scheme is in place you and I can lobby to our hearts content on a particular area. Without a scheme it’s just all pie in the sky stuff.
It’s much easer to get a bus load of people to go to a difficult environment when the bus picks them all up at their own door.
Job 1 – make sure the bus is full.
I am encouraged by the decision to not adopt the ideological malice of the Greens and their supporters, in designing the ETS.
Surely this 5 year reprieve on fuel prices will lead to a flurry of investment in public transport, in order to give all Australians – well a much larger percentage anyway – equal access to transport options before punitively pricing transport fuels.
The main barrier to investment in public transport is that ABARE thinks that the price of oil will return to $60 a barrel – this suits the road lobby (which seems to be a significant portion of the public service) quite well.
wpd at 24, I think Tim Macknay’s comments confirmed what I was thinking.
The last time RealClimate adressed climate sensitivity, the question of how much warming follows from the doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere, was I think in October 2007. Note especially Tim Chase’s comment, the first on the thread, which introduces Hansen’s notion the climate sensitivity is acyually about 6C from where we are now, rather than 3C as commonly thought.
As I recall the thread, no-one rebutted Hansen’s idea and a lot of people got very depressed.
On the other post I’ve just done I’ve given evidence that our leaders are heading towards 660ppm or higher.
Recall also that Caldeira said that coal fired power stations are warming-negative in the first 7 years of their life, and worry about what India, China are doing in their coal frenzy.
Ahh yes a flurry of investment in public transport… that’s about as likely as the Roads and Traffic Authority becoming an accountable, transparent organisation.
Regarding cutting the Greens out, it’s probably true. Rudd and Swan are much closer philosophically to the Liberal non-denialists than they are to Bob Brown, and you can bet that behind the scenes the business lobbyists, like the ubiquitous Heather Ridout, have been banging heads to get a bipartisan deal. The last thing the business community wants is the government forced into a deal with the Greens. The second last thing the government wants is to get the business community offside on this. (The last thing is anything, anything at all, that might take half a point off their 10 point lead in the polls.)
If this happens, Brown will have himself to blame. His absolutist rhetoric and insatiable demands give the impression that this is not a man one can do business with, to borrow in the opposite sense Margaret Thatcher’s description of Mikhael Gorbachev.
wpd @ 24:
The first thing that jumped out at me was in the same paragraph you quoted – we go from “perhaps”, “perhaps” to “no case for doing anything” about a “non-problem”. So, even if all of the mathematics and the reasoning attached to it is sound (it needs at least a couple of readings before I would be confident venturing into any critique of the details), that final logical leap is an issue. The argument appears to be, “the IPCC may have sounded more confident than they had reason to be, so we should completely ignore them.”
Er, like we have a choice about where petrol prices are going.
The oil market doesn’t care if higher petrol prices are “incredibly regressive”. The oil market doesn’t care if people living in outer suburban or regional areas can’t afford to drive to the shops. And the oil market won’t give us the luxury of 5-10 years to invest in public transport.
The oil market will do what it needs to do to destroy demand. Honestly, you’re carrying on like a bunch of, well, lefties.
The ETS was always going be irrelevant for transport, and even if Rudd grew a backbone and whacked on (say) 30c/L, its still largely irrelevant in the context of the $2, $3 or even $5/L we’re likely to be paying at the pump soon.
The fact is, the oil market will deliver a thumping carbon tax far larger than any politician would have the stomach for. What we really need to worry about with transport is what alternatives we opt for. If we go all out for coal-to-liquids, tar sands and shale, we’re pretty much screwed.
Well, lets think how oil could return to $60/bbl:
1. New oil supplies flood the market. Ain’t gonna happen.
2. We develop a fabulous new alternative to oil that’s cheaper, better and can be adopted quickly. Ain’t gonna happen.
3. Oil demand collapses due to high prices. Sure, but as soon as prices fall, demand will rocket back up again, and so will prices.
4. Oil demand collapses due to a sustained global downturn.
I’ve got my money on 4.
“Professor Ross Garnaut is a distinguished economist. Global warming is a scientific subject. Spotted the problem, yet?”
Carbonsink:Don’t make any bets just yet. Remember how biofuels were going to save the world(ok I’m sure that you didn’t bet on that one)
now they are are crime against humanity.
Oh well
spiros,
I take it you said exactly the same things about John Howard’s populist moves – its OK, we can blame the people, governments should be populist, yada, yada, yada.
Personally, I do not think he would be punished for it, as I do happen to trust the voting public. I think he was elected on a particular platform and he should move to implement it. All this shows is how the current government is about politics as usual – take no risks, don’t explain, just fold.
Yawn.
Tobias @ 45, the ‘coupled’ climate models which take better account of feedbacks that macintosh and Woldring were talking about (see this post) actually increase the uncertainty in both directions. That is for a given amount of emissions the warming might be either more or less than previously thought. But the odds are on the upside, and that’s where the risk is.
And the potential outcomes of this risk are so dire that you’d be nuts to sit on your hands.
Sam Clifford, to quote you, “Emissions Trading won’t be worth the green paper it’s written on if the price of petrol doesn’t shoot through the roof.” Well, if an emmissions trading system put the price of petrol through the roof, there wouldn’t be an ETS. It wouldn’t get through the Senate. What do you want elected politicians to do? Slash their wrists and use the trickling blood to sign their death warrant on a doctrinaire ETS that would see them lose the next election and then almost certainly be reversed?
If you are going to introduce an ETS, it has to deal with the fact that voters are more likely to respond electorally to petrol prices in the short term than to the consequences of global warming at some undefined point in the future.
You’ve got to convince people that some pain now will be in their long-term interest. But trying to convince them that being mugged today is the only way to save their children’s future isn’t the way to do it. There isn’t enough sense of crisis for that to work.
And wouldn’t that be fun. It’d make the 30s look like the 80s. Joy! It’d make North Korea look like NYC – yay!
.
The emissions tading scheme is a scam, um, scheme alright. Fantastic! If you’re Malcolm Turnball with a carbon tax policy.
.
Earth to the Left: Markets aren’t good, they aren’t evil but they do work. Force the fossil fuel concerns to reacquire their ‘externality’ and open the market up to renewables. But no. We need to ensure that certain things happen. And to do this we must forget (again) that other people will always screw your plans up with their own.
Andrew,
it’s a matter of degree. The ETS as announced does contain significant risks. The price of electricity will go up directly and the price of everything will go up indirectly. For a government that was elected on the basis of putting “downward pressure” on prices, that’s very risky.
Not that just, petrol is in the ETS. There’s a risk that the public won’t believe that the excise cuts will offset the ETS cent for cent, especially in an environment where the price of petrol is likely to go up and up anyway.
You gotta keep your eye on the prize. The price of petrol is much higher than at election time, and will remain higher. This means less fuel consumption and fewer greenhouse gases. That is what matters.
That’s exactly what they’re doing. Drive prices up so high that consumer confidence falls thru the floor and hey presto: Recession!
.
The best technique for getting prices to drop we know.
.
Um cept when energy costs remain high. Damn!
Thanks to Brian, Tim Macknay, Tobias et al.
I have read the link provided by Tim re Cuckoo Science. The name probably says it all.
I again admit I am not across all of the issues. But who is?
funny how a global disaster sorta kinda pulls us together as a species ,just look how our not so australian owned coal industry jumped up to the plate “hands out for more money from everyone”if we took all this carbon money ,set up and manufactured our OWN solar panels and put them on every house in the country ,emptied out all the useless corperate buildings and let people work from home.we would be halfway to making a sustainable contribution,just how serious is our energy industry about carbon and its affects well BP is the largest producer of solar panels of any worth integral energy has nothing to offer unless you pay for it and coal sales well who gets the money ?remember the long forgotten snowy scheme ,thats the kind of action we need not handouts !!
I tend to agree with Mark on the bait ands switch thread – there’s a deal somewhere, and neither Brendan nor the Greens are invited.
Nonetheless – consider how far we’ve come in a year. This time in 07 and Howard was still petulantly wabbering the do nothing Bush line.
With all the exmeptinos, compromises, phase ins – the greatest hurdle was getting business to concede they might have to pay their own submerged costs, instead of foisting it on future publics.
Has Labor advanced sufficiently for a deal to have been set up?
Preliminary talks, certainly, and for some time. Ideas floated. But gee it’s hard to see that any party here is confident enough to have moved into the deal zone. Of course a deal is there to be had at some time later, but this looks more like bait than switches at the moment.
Anything could switch, at this stage. Best guess would be a general expectancy has been arrived at, to be tested but again yet once more, with all doors open while that and other factors (including the completely unforeseen) can unravel over the many months ahead.
This is a very different political game in that the public have the hand. All manners of ploy we’re used to have merely a role, where on occasions before these have been determinants. It’s about the person who doesn’t even know this happened today, or has hardly the inkling. Their car is parked at home, completely forgotten, until keys are snapped and doors open and it’s another day yet again for them, after breakfast. It’s gone no further than that.
And with this in mind, nothing today or anything prior tells a parallel story of the future where environment, climate, far less carbon, has raised significance. The battleground there won’t be in today’s LP language, it will be fought on the fields of self-interest, wallet, lifestyle and the appointment in three years with friends at the holiday spot (and so on.. today’s not to dwell on such..).
Check it out. Watch people tomorrow in their cars. What are they thinking? Climate Change and emissions? Or an appointment in a busy life.
This is what each of our political parties are dealing with.
At the moment its all very confusing to me and until ideas gel in the brain I’ll keep quiet about the big picture and let the to and fro here and elsewhere sink in.
I suppose the simple questions are how much carbon reduction will this policy produce by what dates and is that enough?
I did note that Penny [and gee I reckon she is a polished performer] seemed to push the line that business was ‘consulted’ and onside [I think], which is somewhat at odds with the media report of some time ago that said she and the big polluters were at loggerheads.
Interesting times ahead and thank the gods Australia voted as we did a mere 8 months ago cos there is no way we would be having this discussion if the other mob had won.
Rudd and Wong have flubbed it. So much for the Garnaut report. Giving away free permits to the worst polluters is nonsense. A complicated bastardised emissions trading scheme that nobody will understand is inferior to a simple carbon tax (to quote Garnaut). And what about the government giving coal power stations cash?
Nelson’s antics on fuel excise have been rewarded by Rudd caving in. The excise should be spent on creating more low carbon emissions transport options.
The critical “will this reduce carbon emissions?” test has been failed already.
I say again; politicians and economists got us into this perilous situation, and are not capable of getting us out of it.
We need a science based and rational taskforce to tackle climate change and energy policy outside of the political circus and deals.
Update [by Kim]: More blogosphere commentary (on the whole underwhelmed and disappointed) from Woolly Days, GreensBlog, and Peter Martin.
Another update [by Kim]: Tim Watts writes:
Indeed, and rightly so. Though that’s not the only way in which this Green Paper has wimped out.
Tim argues that those who dissent from government policy paint it as political opportunism. Well, it is. One wouldn’t expect anything more – or less – from the political process. But there’s good politics and bad politics. As Mark said in his post, there was no need to join the Libs in the petrol politics game – which all the pragmatic indicators suggest is pretty bloody irrelevant. We’re arguing here at LP that good policy could be good politics. Didn’t a certain Kevin Rudd also make that claim when he promised “evidence-based policy” and long term solutions rather than poll driven populism?
Peter Martin on the coal-fired power stations handout; some stuff on forest degradation.
The Green Paper does say some good things household energy efficiency opportunities on page 287, this stuff should be a no-brainer by now but is good to remind the politicians about. There is a bit of good stuff on market failures but the GP is nowhere near as comprehensive as the Garnaut Review on this issue.
While there are many dodgy preferred positions in the green paper, it is probably better than the Task Group on Emissions Trading report and or the National Emissions Trading Taskforce report. It is in many ways similar to these reports (e.g the stuff about gateways) – this is not surprising, many of the people working on those reports would have also been working on the GP.
What is good is that a green paper on a carbon pollution reduction scheme has been released, and there are now opportunities to comment and make submissions and so on. It is a much better process than a the Howard government’s approach of setting up a rent-seeker task group.
The Economist daily roundup here has this to say….
Another update: [by Kim] More commentary from Dave Bath and Joshua Gans.
Also at LP [Comments consolidated on this post]: More from Kim and Mark.
Sorry spiros,
I would agree with the majority on this thread. Rudd has demonstrated what real principles he has, how fearlessly he will stand up to entrenched interests in the pursuit of a noble goal and how different a politician he is from the minnows that preceeded him. Answers: None, not at all and not at all.
What was that TV show last week on obesity? Maybe Rudd has to keep nicking pens too.
Update: Tim Watts replies to us.
Regarding the effective exclusion of petrol from the trading scheme – it’s NOT AN ISSUE. Tim Watts has it right on this one. The tiny price signal of around 4 or 5 cents this would add is easily swamped by the record pump prices we are seeing now, and will continue to see in the foreseeable future.
There is no point clinging to an ideologically pure position that will have little effect in practice.
Agee with Tim Watts, Poss, Sue H, Joshua Gans, and Brett. I find myself for the first time disagreeing with Mark,Kim and others.
In Melbourne Ross Gaunaut replied to an question on including petrol in the ETS, ‘with the petrol prices rising 30c/L since last year it is already doing what a cabon tax would on petrol.’
Joshua Gans agrees but if the price of petrol was to fall past this point, then all bets are off. Wong said yesterday that there would be reviews on petrol to make sure that petrol and the scheme was following the guidelines.
Sue H said that she’s glad that Wong will start measureably and slowly. I totally agree. With some State’s running top speed and others running under speed, the last thing Rudd and Wong want is to shock the economy with more pressure. Give the community and businesses time to buy fuel economical cars, and other products.
This is the right way to go. Rudd always said that he wanted to start a carbon emmissions scheme, but he also said that he wanted to be fiscally responsible. He is doing exactly what he said he would do. To go with the argument that he wimped or is piss weak, is to want him to do a Howard and go back on what he said pre election. He is bringing in a new big policy that hasn’t been done before. It will effect every part of the community. Some are saying that they want to have the ETS like medicine in one gulp and get it over. But what they failed to see, is that medicine was developed, tested and retested by slow increments in the lab first. The ETS should be developed the same way.
One point i will agree with you is the free permits for big emmitters is very hard to swallow. What I’m hoping for is that these companies or new innovations, will replace these products for low emmission products in the future.
Andrew @ 25:
I’m not saying we can’t have cars, I’m saying we can’t have petrol cars. People will replace petrol cars with more fuel efficient petrol cars and eventually with electric cars. We need to conserve petroleum for the things for which there simply is no alternative. International shipping, for example. Road freight which can’t be shifted on to rail. We need to use our petrol more efficiently than we are now and a big part of that is going to be moving away from petrol driven cars. Stopping petrol prices rising isn’t going to do much to help cut consumption.
“Paul Keating wouldn’t have caved.”
Paul Keating lost in a landslide which ushered in 12 years of evil and darkness from which we have only recently escaped. Mark, find a better example.
What exactly is the problem here?
1. Offsetting the ETS with excise cuts means the planet will fry.
Demonstrably false. If 6 months ago anybody had told you purists that the petrol would be $1.70 a litre after the introduction of the ETS, you’d have said “you beauty”. And by the time the ETS comes into play, in 2010, petrol might be $2.70 a litre.
2. Rudd has caved in to special interests.
Always distasteful when this happens, but that’s government in a democratic society. We aren’t Singapore, and just as well.
3. Rudd has caved in to the talkback brigade.
Always distasteful, but these people vote.
4. Rudd has given the Liberals (and Nelson in particular) a victory.
They and he don’t deserve it, but anything that keeps the nightwatchman at the crease for a bit longer has to be good for society. The Liberals are a mess on this issue. It will split them for years to come, which will be truly excellent.
I think aj expresses the case for what Wong and Rudd have done very well, and there is logic and good sense behind it.
We probably need more research on this, but people have been saying that there are already more people on public transport. I’m certainly thinking of trading my old fuel guzzling ute for a slightly more modern version and getting it converted to gas. Also we do need to radically redesign our public transport systems and spend money on measures that will make it easier to desert our cars.
On balance, I think I would have favoured something that put about 5c per litre on petrol, whether via tax or ETS, with some of that used to compensate the vulnerable but the majority used to prepare for a lower-carbon transport system.
That would have sent a very strong message while actually moving the system in the direction we want to go.
We are still mid-range for the OECD in terms of fuel prices, although the distances here are greater. In NZ, for example, you don’t go far in any direction before driving into the sea.
aj @ 69
I totally disagree. Less than 10% of Australian industry generates 90% of emissions. Giving free permits: equals no emission reductions.
Driving cars & tracks with fossil fuel is “driving down the road to ruin” (to quote James Taylor). Very fast transition to electric drive trains yields much more efficiency (and hence immediate reductions) AND allows transition of power generation from very dirty coal to zero emissions renewable energy.
Keeping fuel prices low – for political reasons – entrenches the status quo: equals no emission reductions.
Aluminium smelting consumes 20% of Australia’s energy. Our plants are not efficient. They built the brown coal fired Loy Yang B in the Latrobe valley to power Alcoa’s Portland smelter. There are 30% transmissions losses getting the elecriticity to it. They still have subsidised power (8c kWh I think) much cheaper than the retail rate. Supporting and shielding these types of carbon profligate industrys = no emission reductions.
A shock to the economy with more pressure to change is exactly what we need. Rudd has delivered the opposite.
They have no targets for declining emissions, or even reducing them (other than the nebulous 60% by 2050 game over one). The greenpaper is a political fix that does nothing to address climate change. Just look at who is endorsing it.
I heard Penny Wong on ABC radio this morning – she handled herself well despite being attacked from both sides by Kathy Bolan.
I always reckon a policy position has just about got things spot on when it gets attacked from both sides. I’m very happy to hear the climate change evangalists bemoaning that the ETS doesn’t go far enough, as well as the climate change delusionists complaining that we’re moving ahead with an ETS at all.
I’m becoming increasingly with happy with my decision to vote for Rudd at the last election. I wanted a change from the Coalition – 11years is too long in power (we should have a US style 2 term max), but didn’t want to elect a left-wing government.
Rudd’s handling of the climate change issue and introduction of an ETS has been extremely well handled. We’re moving in the right direction to address climate change but without trashing the economy in the process.
Completely in agreeance with aj @ 69.
Petrol excise adjustment is small beer in the face of the current petrol price – though I’d have preferred a once-only adjustment at the beginning of the ETS. The main thing here is that it doesn’t make petrol cheaper, so their cent-for-cent model would also have to work in reverse – but now that they’re back in the Howard-Costello deserving-middle-class paradigm that’s gonna be harder to sell.
But free permits & cash to big emitters is complete failure. As Garnaut said in his Melb forum – with remarkable frankness, I thought – the coal companies haven’t raised a sweat on innovation because they’ve known the govt will always look after them. Giving them a free kick, even before the negotiations get ugly, simply confirms that cushy business-as-usual is still firmly in place. They will only spend on R&D to the extent that the govt funds them, in contrast to other companies who understand you sink or swim on your R&D and they’ll keep betting that free kicks will keep coming their way.
Spiros,
But why are Rudd and Wong so keen to keep cosying up to these guys? They don’t have a ransom on jobs – coal, to take one example, doesn’t employ many people at all. Rudd hasn’t been afraid to work with Heather Ridout and the AIG, while cold-shouldering the ACCI so playing favorites shouldn’t be that much of problem. I wonder if they’re particularly big ALP contributors?
Can anyone shed any light as to how the Australian Industry Greenhouse Network is maintaining its influence?
PeterC@73
I agree with you on the big emmitters, I hoping that by by not including them now, by 2050 they should by replacement technologies in place and the big emmitters will have been included long before that year.
People will want to buy electric or hybrid cars, but Australia at the moment have very little choice. People are already willing, they just need the time to exchange out there old cars. I have just look at huffington post which has the top 17 electric cars. They have a more aesthetic body shape, than the Prius.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/07/14/electric-cars-take-over-1_n_112771.html
I don’t advocate shocking a economy. This will only panic people to think that it’s too hard. Give the people a little bit more choice on products and information on where to find them (market will probably work that one out), and clear guidelines on what they have to do and people will change to low emmission products fast. The Rudd govenment needs to be very clear on what they expect of individuals for ETS. I hope they get that message. Although I thought Wong came across confident and is on top of her portfolio, I think that for MR & Mrs Joe Bloe, they might have got a bit lost yesterday.
> If this happens, Brown will have himself to blame. His absolutist rhetoric and insatiable demands give the impression that this is not a man one can do business with …
Spiros, I call bullshit. The Greens have made it perfectly clear that they would, after trying for amendments, vote in favour of any half-reasonable scheme, and I reckon the current proposal would pass that test. The big problems in getting it through the Senate are Nick Xenephon (who’s an unknown quantity) and Steve Fielding, who doesn’t have a sensible bone in his body.
Much as I don’t like the proposal, the govt has obviously decided that the only way to get any scheme up is to get support from the Coalition, and that’s what they’re aiming for here.
It’s pathetic and really has me asking “what is the point?”. Fence has been met by the bum here.
I reckon the Green Paper is a reasonably solid effort. We don’t need any more petrol signals right now. If petrol pries go down then we will need something, but right now inner city types are saying a big ‘fuck you’ to outer urban and rural dwellers by saying petrol is too cheap. Everybody knows petrol is expensive and that is rapidly being seen in purchasing decisions. Or what Possum said.
Emissions intensive trade exposed industries definitely deserve protection. If we’re just going to close down factories here and import the crap from China, well no thanks. Anyone who thinks that sort of perverse outcome is sensible is at best an idealist, but really a total misanthrope.
The only serious issue is what they really mean about giving away some permits to strongly affected industries. Swannie on the radio this morning was playing it right down, taking about short term adjustments, minimal freebies, but I fear the door has been left ajar for the rent seekers.
I’m a bit embarrassed that I keep pointing to the other thread but part of the problem is that there is a dangerous complacency behind what Rudd and Wong are doing. I appreciate that they have to bring the people along with them, but there is little chance of them doing that when they are sleepwalking themselves.
Macintosh and Woldring found that we were heading for 660ppm CO2e and Woldring tells us that climate scientists they consulted told them that they were nbeing conservative.
Sheehan, Jones et al found that the actual emissions trajectories were so bad the we were heading for more like 900ppm.
Hansen, by looking at the paleo record and by recognising that long-term feedbacks are already cutting in has found that a 450ppm target will get us into 4C plus territory, and, over an unknown number of centuries, sea level rise of certainly 25 mters but possibly as much as 75-80. He says we are in overshoot now. NOW! Got that? We need to be heading for 350ppm and that is only stage 1.
The path we are on will make it hard for anything with shells or bones to live in the ocean.
Macintosh and Woldring say, forget 2050 and 2040, it’s what we do by 2020 and 2030 that matters.
The situation is absurd.
Yes, it seems this is the case. Hence Christine Milne’s observation on TV last night that John Howard would be proud of Rudd’s ETS. It is a political fix.
aj, the ETS will be meaningless to most individuals. It is too complicated and too political. And as currently structured, it won’t reduce emissions, which is what people clearly want. Bring on a nice simple carbon tax I say.
And the reason that we have no real choice on electric vehicles? Well, the market demands petrol cars, because they are cheap, and so is petrol (still). And there has been no goverment strategy to transition to more efficient vehicles – apart from the too little too late announcement about hybrids.
Ken Davidson hits the nail on the head [link]
Brian, even if we accept at face value these pessimistic projections (and if they’re true, we’re probably stuffed anyway) it doesn’t follow that what Rudd and Wong have done is wrong. For here is where the reality cuts in that what really matters for the world is what China, US and India end up doing.
The main purpose of Australia and other small countries setting up institutions, mechanisms and processes to cut back emissions is to help persuade the big polluters that this can be done, that we have made serious commitments and so we won’t sit back and do nothing if they start doing something. The details of what we do (forestry in or out, petrol excise offsets, cash to cement producers) is really not important in the scheme of things. These are details that can be finessed later. The important thing is to get everyone started.
Agreed, at least in the sense that in carbon terms surely it’s better to have manufacturing going on here where there will be some kind of amelioration of emissions going on as opposed to in China where there will be none for the immediate future.
That said, one thing that nobody’s really picked up on that I’ve seen, and that strikes me as in some ways the most important part of Australia’s ETS, is how it’s being / will be viewed overseas. Given the relatively small contribution of Australia to global emissions (accepting that on a per capita basis we are at the top of the scale) it seems to me that the diplomatic impact of our ETS, in terms of encouraging US, China, India to set up similar things, could have more of an effect than the actual emissions reductions caused by the scheme. Was wondering if anyone had any thoughts on how the ETS as it’s proposed has been / will be received overseas? Will what seems like a middle-of-the road compromise encourage other countries down that route (of more talk than action), or will the very act of getting the thing up (eventually) have a far greater impact?
Read my thoughts, Spiros.
(By which I mean to say, clearly, that you did read my thoughts…as opposed to the imperative, ‘make my day’ way one could read that last post…)
I can see that we are going to have to do something on the issue of risk, which I also addressed to some degree in the other paper. The real point, though, as a very competent economist called Weitzman has said, that the one in 20 to one in 100 risks are truly catastrophic but we are nuts not to regard them seriously. Peter Wood did a very nice paper on this and sent it off to Garnaut. Garnaut quotes Wietzman, but then turns back to the paradigm that his terms of reference inflicted upon him.
Weitzman is saying, in short, that when faced with a risk of something like 1 in 100 that civilisation will end, or struggle on in a vastly modified fashion after catastrohic interruptions, then the whole economic game changes. You simply have to throw out the window the business of discount rates and smooth transitions with minimum pain and do what’s necessary.
If you think I’m being alarmist, recall that Garnaut has said repeatedly that we have only a slim chance of getting through this thing.
I feel a bit like the woman I heard some years ago. She said that the only way she could get the boss’s attention was to lie on the floor and kick her legs up in the air. The problem with that is that the next thing she might see is white men in coats coming through the door.
Cheers, Brian
Peter Martin:
http://petermartin.blogspot.com/2008/07/whats-most-dodgy-part-of-emissions.html
Surely Labor realises that this will bite them in the arse when we get no emissions gains for pointless bureaucratic pain?
Make no mistake people – petrol arguments aside – generators have seen this coming a mile off. Let’s be clear about this – there is NO political or economic justification for giving them free permits if you actually want the scheme to work.
Also, a lot of the coal fired facilities in Victoria etc. are actually foreign owned. Why they deserve our cash for doing nothing is beyond me.
From Mark’s other thread
Ah, the good old days, formerly known as ‘these hard times’
I seem to recall that in the day there was some criticism of the respopnse to Mabo as containing unprincipled cave-ins for pragmatic electoral politics.
Having said that, the assitance for coal stations is obviously bad. I’m surprisingly sanguine about the petrol though. Long term pressure on petrol price is going to take care of any silly fiddling about with the excise anyway.
Spiros @ 82, that’s fine and of course China etc is what matters. What I’m saying is that if Rudd and Wong’s approach was being informed by a proper appreciation of the situation, and given their worthy desire to show leadership internationally, their actions and rhetoric would be different.
If you studied the signals that Garnaut was giving constantly and compared them with the more anodyne speech of Wong and Rudd, you’d get my meaning, I think. There just needs to be more urgency and a bit more bite in what they are doing.
I’ve just read a paper about changes forecast in tropical circulation patterns expected by 2100 according to the IPCC. Well scientists have found that it’s happened already! That was in a paper published in December 2007, when the ink was just dry on the IPCCC report and all the worthies were gathered in Bali to decide what to do about it.
We’re not all stuffed, and I think won’t be, but if we don’t wake up soon it might take something like white skies to fix it.
It’s a little strange that nearly all the discussion on this thread is about petrol, when the whole transport sector accounts for less than 20% of emissions. The big emitters are fossil fuel-burning electricity generators (of which the Victorian brown coal burners are by far the worst), emissions-intensive industries (eg cement, metals smelting) and agriculture. Transport is indeed significant, but even eliminating transport emissions entirely (which ain’t gonna happen) wouldn’t get us even halfway to the Rudd 60% reduction target. IMHO rising petrol costs will lead to voters in those outer-urban swing seats demanding a better deal on public transport and that will generate more of a political response than any amount of argument on the basis of mere principle. There’s obviously a delayed effect here: Brisbane is busily investing heavily in new road infrastructure just as commuters are abandoning their cars thereby easing the congestion that was such a political hot button issue. Perhaps fortunately, the fallout from this explosion in the Queensland white elephant population is largely going to be borne by the private sector under PPP deals, although the fine print here may well leave the taxpayers footing the final bill.
Massive investment in solar hot water would be a better start and would actually leverage one of the distinctive features of Australia’s built environment: the preponderance of discrete dwellings on suburban blocks. There is some funding in the Green Paper schema for ‘partnership’ deals under the Climate Change Action Fund whereby industry would be encouraged to invest in low-emissions technologies. There was a low-emission cement on the New Inventors last year, but I suppose it’s too much to hope that an Australian technology would get any kind of leg-up from the Australian government.
I suspect the politics are also global – here’s our ETS, starts very soon. What have you got, US?
I accept and agree with the criticisms made – but politically, we’re emerging from the stone age.
Im disappointed with many of the measures, but taking a mid-term view (10 years)my question is: can this new ETS system be ramped up by simply regualtatory changes within its current architecture.
If yes – then its a genuine start.
(knock, knock, knock….. bash, bash….. BANG…….draaaag)
The sound of Brian being hauled off by the men in white shirts for too much leg waving
Sam Clifford @ 70:
Sea freight and road freight are already super efficient in terms of fuel consumed per kilo of freight per kilometre. In the long term a lot of road freight can be moved to electrifed rail, and shipping can use sails to further improve efficiency.
The one mode of transportation for which there is no alternative to petroleum is aviation.
Not only that, jet airliners consume fuel at a stupendous rate, allow you to travel very large distances very quickly, and because they deliver a cocktail of CO2, water vapour and NOx into the upper troposphere, their have a considerably larger warming effect than other modes of transport.
Funnily enough, jet fuel is not taxed at all for international routes. The jet fuel excise in Australia is just 2.8c/L for domestic routes. Aviation emissions from international flights are not counted by country in any carbon accounting system, even the European ETS. Yet, no-one wants to know about it. If there’s one thing no-one, and I mean no-one, wants to give up, its affordable aviation. But in a carbon-constrained and oil-depleted world, the incredibly lightly-taxed aviation industry should be the first sector we hit.
Who here wants to give up cheap flights for the sake of the environment?
Try asking that question at your next dinner party, and tell me if there are any takers
Ummm, how exactly do you stop petrol prices rising? Keep slashing taxes as oil prices rise, and then subsidise?
From the tidbits of information I’ve been getting I think this is simply a political fix. Windfall gains for major emitters, compensation for low income earners for the unions and excise cuts to shut up the coalition.
Its bad policy but hopefully it will work. I think Rudd Wong etc just want to neutralise the issue so they still arent fighting on the ETS when the next election comes around.
If all these concessions work and the ETS is implemented than it allows future governments to work within an established scheme with considerable coverage of major emitting industries and the scope to reduce emissions. Smelters and Coal fired power stations will still get price signals and reduce emissions. The only real loser is the taxpayer who will provide the windfall gains for emitters and bear the costs of the scheme through higher prices. But I’d hazard to guess that most taxpayers wont even recognise they’re losing when faced with all the happy talking heads from the business council and ATCU.
I’m still here, Andrew, but not for long! Actually I’m due somewhere else.
I’ve just had an email from my stockbroker under the heading “A pale Green Paper”. In short, they describe it as a (very) softly-softly muted approach. So no great perturbations in the market and all is well!
Now get back to work, the lot of yuz!!
Barry O’Farrell must be the happiest man in Australia today, Kev and Maurice et al have done all the heavy lifting for him. The treasury he will inherit has just been bailed out, but it won’t help the dead government walking.
One problem of the fold-in on coal power stations is that it’s not just proven bad policy (as Idiot/Savant made clear), it is almost as bad politics. Windfall subisidies to power station operators was never likely to be the sticking point for Fielding and Xenophon and there are in any case opportunities to play off the greens against the sectoral lobbies while pretending to be strong and principled. I suspect the ugly hand of the NSW Right in this decision.
On the petrol excise issue, I’m not so disgusted. It would give an unscrupulous opposition a real opportunity and would indeed be a sticking point in the Senate. And it is not such a big issue in the scheme of things. As others have pointed out in the long run it won’t make much difference to petrol usage – peak oil will do that job. And exempting it for a while makes it a lot easier to build the low income compensation package.
I reckon it’s a worthwhile sacrifice of policy principle to political reality, though I think a cunning bastard like Howard would have done this in the White rather than the Green paper.
To those who say “well, it’s better than nothing; at least we are headed in the right direction”, the problem with “softly softly” approaches is much the same as the problem with Kyoto: it gives people the false impression that the problem is being addressed, and delays realisation of the fact that it is actually ineffective.
Brett Robertson @ 68, I agree with you to a degree that excluding petrol from the scheme per se might not have any impact due to the existing price signal. The problem, of course, is that the signal can only do so much in the absence of easily available alternatives.
And that is where I think the decision to cut the excise is wrong. In saving consumers a few cents at the pump (and, with a projected price of $20 a tonne in the early years, it’ll be about 4.5c), we’ll reduce government coffers by several billion dollars. A bit of balls on a decision like this would have meant that the government had billions more to spend on investing in mass transit infrastructure.
I mean, really, how hard is it to stand up to Brendan Nelson?
The Government might think it’s being clever on this one by taking the wind out of the Opposition’s sails. But, in fact, they’ve bought right into their argument and are now fighting on the Opposition’s turf. Foolish, in my opinion.
Global climate disaster and what we need to do to stop it. Yep, good or not so good.
The other elephant in the room is a possible world economic meltdown.
Already the the dramatic increase in the price of petrol has influenced government planning in this green paper. I just wonder how things will stack up in 2010 if unemployment goes through the roof and house prices crash.
If world economic activity drops dramatically, as is starting to seem likely, we might be looking at this matter very differently in the very short term. Chasing a local carrot, rather than an imported plasma TV, may become a preferred activity.
But steve from brisbane, I don’t agree that it is ineffective, and I don’t agree that the Australian populace is yet ready for the stiff medicine many of us think they need.
This flawed ETS proposal is only flawed at the edges, and in the short term. Overall it does what was proposed.
Making the Rudd government desperately unpopular and crash out after one term due to failure to implement climate change measures will not get us anywhere soon.
Wilful, perhaps the true answer is that no one can yet say how effective in the short term it will be: Kevin Rudd was pointedly being asked this question on Radio National this morning, and he was pointedly refusing to answer.
I note that in an opinion piece in a Nature journal last month, the point was strongly being made that the world cannot waste any time in waiting for the establishment of effective emissions trading schemes: to have any hope, there has to be an immediate push to clean technologies. And the need is so immediate, it has to be based on current technology; you should be investing in R&D, but you can’t wait to move until the R&D starts to pay off. (The R& D is really for what will need to start to kick in around 2040.)
Seems to me to be a plausible argument, but one which is not addressed by an ETS which only gears up fully in 5 (or more) year’s time. Based on the arguments in that Nature article, I would call Rudd’s plan ineffective in a “big picture” sense, simply because of the delays it entails.
The article is here: http://www.nature.com/climate/2008/0807/full/climate.2008.59.html
If the point of Rudd being re-elected is to have a scheme that (even if adopted internationally) is ineffective in achieving (say) 550 ppm this century, there is no real point to re-electing him at all. You would be rewarding ineffective compromises, not action that achieves anything.
My views over here:
http://www.roadtosurfdom.com/2008/07/17/saving-the-planet-rudd-style/#comment-346160
comment #4…
Ken’s post is worth taking in too.
Kevin Rudd was pointedly being asked this question on Radio National this morning, and he was pointedly refusing to answer.
I’m less concerned about politicians having all of the answers than the media insist I should be.
And I’m a ’second best’ kinda guy. Australia isn’t going to solve climate change, we’ve got to move pointedly ahead of the pack, but not so far ahead that we actually do destroy the economy in the way the naysayers have been predicting. We’ll need some resilience for adaptation. The thing about the prisoners dilemma that we’re in is that if we play straight and others cheat, we’re in a worse position than if we all cheat (and a much worse position than if we all cheat). The solution is demonstrable, credible progress where we drag the recalcitrants along. Which, despite its flaws, this ETS proposal is largely providing.
Sorry, logic gap in my above description about prisoners dilemma. You know what I meant to say.
Possum Comitatus and Antony Green were on the ball. Reading these posts, it seems there are at least 50 individuals who could have done better than Rudd or Wong and could have designed an initial scheme that would have passed through the Senate in a breeze while being applauded by the greens and climate sceptics. In the words of the old song: “Wake up to reality, Use your mentality”. On another tack, I’m looking forward to what the Coalition does when this comes to the Senate next year. Do they block the resulting legislation because there’s compensation for petrol rises? Oops, but that what their inspired Leader suggested. Do they block it because it’s too soon? Then, they are seen as obstructionist and, even worse for them, there would be no chance of any scheme coming into operation before the next Federal election – hence no scare campaign. And, by then a new US Administration may very well singalled a more rigorous scheme which will make their cries of “it’s too soon” or of economic doom seem ridiculous. Climate change sceptics are becoming increasingly irrelevant with their continuing false claims so apparent in the responses. Let’s spell it out for them – the overwhelming majority of scientists directly involved in disciplines relating to climate are warning about the dangers of global warming. There are few such scientistis among the climate change deniers – and most of those have been accepting grants from the polluters. In her National Press Club address, Penny Wong quoted statistics about Australia’s hottest years. The challenge to the sceptics is: Read it, digest it and show how she is wrong. If you cannot, have the moral courage to admit that your claims about temperatures dropping are false.
carbonsink – I believe aviation emissions are being added to the EU ETS.
Well I’ve finally gotten around to getting my own blog and some comments of mine of the Green Paper are there.
I think it’s most unfortunate that the huffing and puffing from the aluminium sector and other emissions-intensive sectors about moving offshore was been taken seriously enough to win them a big free ride on emissions reductions.
The empirical work on what drives corporate decisions to move offshore has found that increased costs from environmental regulation are a very minor factor in practice, contrary to what the firms say in theory. How the alumina/aluminium sector responds to a price signal from an inclusive carbon trading scheme with integrity won’t just be based on the price signal alone; there will be other considerations such as political stability, access to and price of skilled labour, access to infrastructure, access to the resource (and for the life of me I can’t imagine Australia’s bauxite reserves spontaneously uprooting themselves and relocating to Upper Volta in response to a carbon price signal), availability of support and inducements from governments, etc., etc., plus the desire to yield a return on the sunk cost of existing plant. It’s a great shame that the Rudd government hasn’t yet summoned the courage to call their bluff on the threat to go offshore.
I’m not sure a carbon price has been properly captured in those empirical studies of environmental regulation.
I don’t think bauxite deposits are located in SW Victoria.
But yeah, in terms of meeting emissions targets, closing Portland smelter would be an easy get.
I’m not sure it is second best. I think it’s most likely a complete waste of time:
Bernard Keane in today’s Crikey.
So, essentially, we’re setting up a huge bureaucratic quasi-market that will do bugger all, except raise revenue that can be redistributed for political kudos and political gain. It’s very Howardian!
Here’s the link to Keane’s article:
http://www.crikey.com.au/Garnaut-Report/20080717-The-Green-Paper-ever-get-the-feeling-youve-been-cheated.html
Not sure about the raising revenue Kim, at least if we’re following BK’s line of argument:
Keane is talking rubbish. The government hasn’t said free permits for electricity generators. And the price signal for petrol is already loud and clear, there right now. Petrol taxes are, what, $320 a tonne of carbon? While no one has really thought agriculture would ever be in this time round.
Again, Id ask (since really, I don’t know the answer): can the current architecture being set up by Ruddwong sauccessfully manage through regulation changes to ramp up reductions?
I can forgive a political hot potato being served tepid if it gains consensus on a mechanism capable of delivering substantial cuts later.
Because frankly, it wont be long till pacific Rim nations have to evacuate Kiribati Tokelau and other atolls en masse to our shores. I cant see Nelson’s position looking moderate, centrist or even sensible then.
There is another aspect of the petrol prices issue which hasn’t realy been touched on in this discussion.
Reducing the petrol excise across the board fails to differentiate between those who are able to either absorb higher petrol prices or switch easily to a non-petrol-fuelled alternative, and those genuinely needy people for whom neither of these options are available. On equity grounds it would be preferable for the government to leave the excise at its present levels and use the revenue which would otherwise be forgone to provide targeted assistance to low-income people and people with limited transport options, in the form of increased transfers and/or tax breaks to the former and improved transport services to the latter (and as some commenters have said, often the same people are in both of these groups). This would provide more help and more options to those who really need them than a cut in excise would deliver.
Update: [by Kim] Lots of reaction and analysis in Crikey today, with Bernard Keane on what it will achieve (nothing much) and on the lack of political courage displayed by Rudd. Clive Hamilton describes the Green Paper as political capitulation, while Guy Pearse thinks it’s reminiscent of Howard era politics.
Around the blogosphere, there’s comment from Road to Surfdom, Possum Comitatus, Public Opinion, Blogocracy, Politically homeless, Andrew Bartlett and Climate Opinion.
I must admit, having asked that question, which I do think is a relevant one – overall I find the package unacceptably pissweak.
Steve from Brisbane summarised the “Nature” opinion piece:
” to have any hope, there has to be an immediate push to clean technologies. And the need is so immediate, it has to be based on current technology…”
So if the price signals are muffled by subsidies and free permits, and hence ETS-Oz stays ineffective for several years yet, it remains for individuals, organisations, communities and corporations to TAKE matters into their own hands: and begin reducing emissions in every available way.
Bugger the price signals. Are the “Hollowmen” in charge? Whose polluted atmosphere is this anyway? Not Kevin’s I’d say.
Harrumph.
About bloody time!
Wilful, Wong’s made it pretty clear that they’re keen to shield the asset values of facilities above the threshhold that includes coal fired generation. Why not just call that what it is?
On Lefty E’s question, isn’t it unrealistic to expect the government to grow a political spine at a later date when it’s displayed none to begin with? That goes to the point about all the concessions to the rent-seekers and the political concessions being made right at the start of the process. It is a Green Paper, as Tim Dunlop says, but who really expects it to be hardened and made more rigorous as a result of consultations? Surely the normal result would be to water it down further, if the line hasn’t been held to start off with?
wilful,
on Portland.
A friend just came back from Iceland. Pop approx 300,000. Wide use of geothermal power. One use is to generate electricity and smelt aluminium. No greenhouse emissions. Anticipation of higher Al production costs in countries using coal-fired electricity. Cunning Vikings: using a natural advantage.
Now what are ours? Sunshine, coal, coral, beaches, sheeps, forests, coal, sunshine…. umm can we do anything with any of those?
Sure Kim, point well made.
On the other hand, I understand even the worst and (“trade-affected”) polluters are still having to buy between 10%-40% of their permits from the get go. That’s not great, but its hardly “no incentive” at their pollution volumes.
But my main point: in our system many secondary legislation/ regulation changes do not need to go through the Senate. ie. can these rates be upped by the government without the political hardball they face getting the architecture itself through?
If so – we know who to target.
We should remember that the Green Paper is a green paper – in other words a discussion paper. I hope many of the people writing in this comments thread end up making submissions.
123 Lefty
On targeting even if all this scheme does is target the ‘low hanging fruit’ in order to expose the real nature of the market, that might in itself be extremely valuable.
Is anyone considering the loss of income that the major emitters have to face by the rest of us cutting out consumption too? That’s still avoiding price favouring alternative power generation though.
I don’t know how the rest of you feel, but I think we’re partly stuck in the realm of discussing the principles as we understand them. Is it any wonder that Treasury have till October to model all of this?
Real implementation might actually change some of the principles we THINK we know at this stage.
Peter @124,
Yep – its a Green Paper. What almiost invariably happens from here is that the proposals get watered down. I will concede it would be difficult to water these down, but maybe a homeopath could. Perhaps they will move from 10-40% (per Lefty E) down to 0-10%.
“One use is to generate electricity and smelt aluminium. No greenhouse emissions.”
Not so, alas. Current aluminium smelting technology – the Hall-Heroult process – generates GHGs in the form of perfluorocarbons (PFCs) irrespective of how the electricity is generated. The question should be ‘how much more aluminium does the world need?’ since it can be efficiently recycled.
I read these posts with great interest.
If we were realistically living in a cocoon, we could say that Rudd has to be careful, and is smart in playing political parties off. That it is smart to take a softly-softly approach, and that communities in coal areas need to be eased into this etc etc.
Well, nice work if its all about an ‘Australian’ view that holds the way the world works. You know, all the things you need to know only happen in our own backyard.
Yes sure, he will probably get elected in a second term by patting people on the head and going “coochycoochycoo, I wont put you through any bother”
Hmmm, with the collapse of 2 major mortgage security banks, world wide oil prices going up as supply stays constant and demand increases like a zombie walking for days in need of brains, and more importantly, the seeming march on toward bombing Iran . . . meaning that we are choosing to stay dumb and insular in our political choices.
For one, why should Rudd change anything? Democracy isnt important to people. Its the same 2 parties each time. Why be different.
Another is that people were crying out to have Rudd reduce the excise. Why? Coz it hurts.
What hurts me more is that I hardly find any MSM analysis on why oil IS going up. That would involve getting people to think about what they do, and hell, why should he educate?
We’re all in the same boat here, and the Australian boat is about relaxation, anti intellectualism (something about ‘elites’) and insular short term interest. A truly operating ETS would involve pain! pain! pain!. That clashes with this, and most people wont have a bar of it, no matter how brave Rudd is. It just upsets the core way in which Australians operate.
Unfortunately, the Australian Way of Life is going to collapse to some degree, and no matter how many op ed pieces in the Herald Sun lamblast the greenies, its just going to happen like it does.
Worse still, no ideas or ground swell organising to grow vegies in the back yard. No ground swell to move people to working in their own backyard (with subsidies to set up own businesses), no move to make Australia a ‘transition town’. I dont mean ‘get a bike, Outer Dubboians’ I mean, turning ourselves away from a central location to travel to from 50km, and work on making villages again.
For its going to happen anyway, no matter how much we humph about it. If we dont do it, the opposite happens, and we end up having to do it.
Tell me how we can avoid change in the next 5 years.
SUMMARY: by our willingness not to read up and educate ourselves, we are willingly wanting to crash into the wall. Nothing will stop us until we impact. Then, people will demand that things change because it hurts. Want to wait til then? Sure! Go ahead. Want to start talking about what things would help us in a peak-oil world, then I am interested.
Many may knock greenies, but ever sit in a good 3am conversation with them about the world? They’ve been reading up on it all. Permaculture, transition towns, electric cars, avoiding consumer items, knowing how to shoot kangaroos and reuse/refuse. Honk all you want about them being greenie-idiots, sure, but hey, they’ll know where to go when food distribution decreases significantly when oil is $250 on NYMEX due to an Israeli bombing on Iran.
Do what thoust will, just dont tell me that you’re on top of it.
Lefty E
The emissions reductions will be achieved by reducing the number of allocated permits over time. The scheme as described in the Green paper definitely allows for that.
The issue of whether to auction the permits or provide handouts to the big emitters is really one of equity, rather than actually reducing emissions. The number of permits initially handed out will presumably be equivalent to the measured emissions in 2010, so no-one will be forced to reduce emissions immediately (unless they miss out on permits in the rush).
The downside of handing out free permits is that it effectively kills any effort to reduce emissions BEFORE the commencement of the scheme, as there’s no advantage in doing so. But it won’t effect the ability to reduce emissions AFTER the scheme has commenced.
According to yesterday’s Age (or maybe it was saturday’s) the Australian smelters have worked hard to reduce PFC emissions. If this industry was offshored, the implication/inference is that emissions would go up.
But you’re right, recyclign could go a long way. But I’ve heard said it’s pretty well recycled already.
Here’s some facts from their propaganda arm, suggesting that if we can it here (excuse the pun) it’ll jsut happen in worse countries. but they would say that wouldn’t they.
Well, with the projected energy price rises (even with this weak model) that the Feral-Hun was yelling about today, I can tell you my 20% green power will be cheaper per watt than standard electricity!
if that ain’t incentive to invest sustainably, I don’t know what is. As someone noted above, there’s also the old-fashioned, non-ETS market impact to consider.
I agree with all the criticisms on rent-seeking etc and I note that British Columbia just introduced a straight carbon taz (with compo) which seems all round simpler and better – its just that I do think the main game here is actually international.
This WILL put pressure on the US to do something. It DOES allow Australia to be taken semi-seriously in international fora – all great advances on the Howard era.
thanks for that info Tim.
On another note, and again I don’t know the answer: but wouldn’t the ability to sell a ‘free’ permit – part unused at end financial year owing to new efficiencies – in itself offer some incentive to reduce emissions?
wilful,
The emissions from Australia’s aluminium production are much higher per unit of production than from any other continent, mainly because our energy has more emissions, see here (pdf).
The Australian Aluminium Council (AAC) has been one of the worst industry bodies for crying wolf about relocating overseas, and also has played a major role in delaying action on climate change (see Hamilton, Pearse etc). It is interesting to read some of their submissions to the various government inquiries into emissions trading. According to the AAC, the capital replacement value of the
industry is in the order of A$30-35 billion – for them to want to relocate overseas, our carbon price would have to be much higher than the rest of the world for a long time. Otherwise the money saved would be less than the extra capital expenses incurred.
While I don’t believe the economists that reckon we can all just have service industry jobs, and Australia would be fine without manufacturing, the levels of subsidy provided to the aluminium industry are obscene, and that really would be an easy way of reducing significant emissions quickly.
Re #133:
Lefty E, you are correct. Firms which receive free permits still have the same price incentive to reduce emissions as firms which buy permits.
The issues with free permits include that there is a perverse incentive to be an emissions intensive industry; there is also an opportunity cost – the money that could have been raised from auctioning the permit could be used in better ways elsewhere; it also rewards rent seeking – there is more money to be made by undermining good climate policy than there is to be made by reducing emissions; there may also be a small income effect – while the a firm with free permits has the same price incentive as a firm which bought auctioned permits, the firm with free permits may have more cash in the bank that could potentially be invested in more polluting activity; free permits also contradict the ‘polluter pays’ principle.
The justification for free permits for trade exposed emissions intensive industries is that they fprevent carbon leakage. Carbon leakage may not be a big issue anyway, Harry Clark has some interesting comments on this. Free permits do not necessarily reduce carbon leakage, see Joshua Gans’ post here.
If they allocate free permits based on current emissions, then they end up punishing those companies that have already made an effort and already spent money reducing emissions.
Lefty E – one thing I’ve noticed with my “GreenChoice” energy is that it seems to amazingly increase in price at about the same rate as coal fired power. Amazing that. So much for technology and more widespread usage reducing the cost of renewables.
wilful – no way the Labor party will let that many jobs go in the aluminium industry. Have already seen that from the subsidies that the car industry gets. They’re just too many votes for Labor in those areas.
It takes a bit of courage to disagree with Antony Green and Possum Comitatus at once (not to mention many other worthy commentators), but here goes:
20% of car sales are currently 4WDs specifically designed for the capacity to kill pedestrians, cyclists and small car users and to guzzle as much petrol as possible. Perhaps a quarter of those are going to people who really need that sort of oomph (eg farmers).
Clearly the petrol price is not high enough to impact on behaviour of the other 15% of car drivers. There is no doubt that there are people who don’t have access to public transport, and can’t afford to dump their 20 year old falcon for something fuel efficient, but if you want to help those people the way to do it is targeted tax cuts or rebates NOT to keep prices to a point where people are still buying Hummers, with all the other externalities they involve beyond the carbon emissions.
feral,
how do you figure 20% are buying gas-guzzling 4WD and the other 15% of car drivers….
have 65% of former drivers already ceased to drive?? Jeez that petrol price rise really is hurting.
Many modern 4WD (medium size) have fuel consumption around 9litre per 100km. Comparable with family sedan. Not US-style hummers.
If car pooling takes off in big cities, it may not affect car sales much, but we’ll see petrol sales reduce. Car pooling may be a better option in rural areas than hoping for more public transport (low population densities).
Rudd was on TV tonight saying how much better his ETS is than anything the Liberals would have done. But this means nothing from a benchmark of rock bottom.
We are in a climate emergency, yet pandering to carbon intensive industry and giant 4WD drivers is still the main political game.
Wake up Penny, Kevin, Peter, Brendan and Malcolm. Or get out of the way. I would prefer something other than head on collisions with the effects of climate change; sea level rises, bushfires, drought, submerged Pacific islands and an artic 5 degrees warmer. Meanwhile, we have a “cap” and “free permits” coming in 2010, and zero commitment to reduce emissions within the next 12 years. Not good enough.
Forget about the deckchairs, we need to turn the ship around, shut down the coal fired boilers and hoist the sails.
Ambigulous – car pooling in rural areas makes a lot more sense than public transport. And even in suburban areas, you need about 7 people on a bus to get the same fuel efficiency as one person in a car, so even then car pooling is often the better answer compared to running more frequent bus services.
“Forget about the deckchairs, we need to turn the ship around, shut down the coal fired boilers and hoist the sails”.
Methinks, you have forgotten how much pain might be caused by any very dramatic change to the power supply. I am still feeling quite happy, that a good man is carefully holding the Rudder, even if the many might think it is a bad wind.
Bloody hell, you need to start somewhere.
The pain of a rapid transition to zero emissions will be nothing compared to that of catastrophic climate change. If we get going now, it is quite achievable without too much pain, if any.
If we keep pfaffing around with politics and business as usual coal burning – as Rudd is – then we are in for a world of pain. We really can’t afford to wait. He hasn’t really started – ETS is just smoke and mirrors. There is NO tangible commitment yet to reduce emissions in the next 12 years.
The Governer of Victoria David de Krester said so when he launched Climate Code Red at Parliament House [link]
Read the book if you want to find out how urgent things really are.
Yep, I don’t get the whole “this is politics as usual” and “Rudd has smartly bought off potential opposition” themes in this context – if what is proposed is going to be ineffectual in achieving what we’ve been told it should achieve – on an issue that completely transcends “politics as usual”, or should, what is the point of “clever” politics?
An excellent point about compromises by David Spratt, co-author of Climate Code Red, in today’s Age:
“”What the Government doesn’t understand is that when it comes to climate you are not dealing with social or economic policy, but you’re actually dealing with the laws of physics and chemistry, and trying to negotiate with the laws of physics is a really dumb idea,” Spratt said.”
Well said, tim.
Well, a fair bit of Greenland, which, with a bit of Antarctica would give us a lot of grief.
Kim’s notion that the green paper version of an ETS is worse than useless is looking good.
That’s Quiggin’s reaction to Spratt and Sutton.
Being reasonable doesn’t cut it anymore. That’s the dilemma.
What the Government understands only too well is that Australia’s actions are largely symbolic, so are deeply embedded in social and economic issues. If we adopt a radical path (which I agree is getting more and more necessary) we will destroy Australia’s capacity to adapt without providing any serious mitigation.
Do you really think that if we all put on hair shirts India, China and the USA will be so inspired by our sacrifices that they’ll suddenly see the light? Good luck with that.
Of course we have to be part of the solution. But not if we beggar ourselves in the meantime.
wiful, I said it was a dilemma. I’m with you in the practical world. I just wish I could be confident that Rudd and Wong realised what the problems really are. I’m not getting that from them yet. So I think we are entitled to keep going after them. The alternative seems to be to more or less join the cheer squad.
Gotta go. Seeya tonight.
wilful, while I wouldn’t describe Australia’s actions as largely symbolic, what you are saying does hint at a very important issue. What is more important than the direct impact of emissions from Australia is the question of what role do we play in resolving the prisoner’s dilemma that is central to achieving international cooperation on climate change?
At the moment we are the Annex I country with the highest per capita greenhouse gas emissions – until we do something about that we are among the worst of the free riders. If we can make deep cuts to our emissions in a non hair shirt sort of way we will set a good example for other big per capita emitters such as the US and Canada. If we do it in a way that has greater costs then we will set set so much of an example. The problem is that the time frame is becoming increasingly short.
IMHO the best post on this thread so far has been from Eric Vigo (#128). The fact that it has been studiously ignored by all subsequent commentators, seems to prove the point that he is making.
The basic problem is that the current political, economic and media driven world in which we operate is totally inadequate when it comes to confronting the challenges that face us. Rudd, being a product of the political system is obviously going to play by the rules, otherwise it’s a one term government and an oppsition promising a clearly illusiory pain free transition.
The other problem clearly is that the Australian population as a whole has grown fat and lazy on the recent and sustained prosperity, and won’t give up any of the now accepted necessities of life, or even consider challenging alternatives. Sure, most of us will change lightbulbs, maybe dump plastic bags etc. etc., but if the words deckchairs and Titanic don’t spring to mind you’re not paying attention.
It’s easy to blame Howard and now Rudd, but they are merely a reflection of what we’ve become.
wilful – I think you have a point there about symbolism. Given that Australia’s actions are rather pointless if no one else acts, and as people have suggested its not Australia’s absolute emissions (which are rather small) but the influence we have on the world stage (thus why we should have joined Kyoto earlier).
So in this case its much more important to be seen to be doing something useful to encourage other countries to jump in (and hopefully do something better), rather than actually doing something useful. So perhaps the question should be is from the outside does it look good? The EU scheme has significant flaws as well but has been held up as a model to aspire to.
I think that there are bigger international symbols than an ETS that could be done quite costlessly.
Easy wins
- don’t allow the new coal exports QLD just announced. They’re not missed yet coz they haven’t been factored in to people’s expectations, and if they ever do get built they’ll be stranded assets anyway.
- allow uranium exports to India. Apparently their plants are running idle due to fuel shortages (and promise/demand to take back spent fuel, at a price).
- rather than freebies for trade exposed sectors, tax their import competition. Only give support to trade exposed exporters, where we’re not a dominant player.
Time to elect a new people, eh Adrian?
That said, I’m surprised no one’s yet suggested imposing a benevolent dictatorship to sort this out. Are we really willing to stare down annihilation for the sake of parliamentary democracy?
(I’m sure I’m joking about this…right?)
Adrian in regards Eric Vigos comment
I dont think that Eric Vigo’s comment necessarily reflects what needs to happen. What we need is fundamental changes to our sources of energy. This doesnt mean abandoning cities, going to “transition towns” or permaculture settlements. I dont think this would be acceptable to the majority of society (or me) when theres other alternatives like technological fixes and increased efficiency.
Yes we need changes, but I dont beleive we need to move away from the urban model to do that. People will live closer to work when price signals are in place (or catch public transport/ carpool). The “vegie garden” in the backyard will probably actually be another house as urban areas infill. At the moment we have access to renewable energy sources at rapidly decreasing costs. In the next few years we’ll get plug in hybrids which wont use any fuel for the majority of trips (to and from work/school).
In short I think that yes we need changes but that doesnt mean changes to the basic framework of urban living.
In case you were wondering how much of a free rider we are, and how far behind we are, there is a news report today that the UK expects to miss by about 5% the target it set for itself of 20% less emissions compared to 1990 levels by 2010. Australia is likely to meet the target that we set for ourself of 8% more emissions than 1990 levels by 2010. In 1990, the UK emitted 12.6 t CO2-e per person – Australia emitted 24.2 t CO2-e per person.
Australia also exports 250 million tonnes of coal each year, equivalent to about 800 million tonnes of carbon dioxide.
Yes Peter, having a nuclear industry does help ones emissions profile.
And it’s not Australia’s poor management that we were sitting on lots of brown coal. Actually it took a deal of engineering skill to make it useful!
Peter – thats what I don’t get about why emissions are applied to exports. Surely its the country that burns the coal that the CO2 emissions should be applied to, not the country that digs it out of the ground. Or are you saying that if a power plant imports coal then it wouldn’t haven’t to pay for pollution permits?
Stuart said:
I hope not. I did read that you only need about 4sqm per person to get around 80% of the vegetable requirements. So if solar orientation is correct, even those in appartments would be able to produce a reasonable amount.
stuart, I hope you are right, but Peter Wood’s comment above shows how far we have to go and how addicted we are to our affluent and increasingly unsustainable lifestyles.
And other countries are actually making massive changes right now. What is happening in London at the moment is quite astonishing and seems to have bi-partisan support: [LINK]
Adrian – well lets copy the UK and produce 20% of our power with nuclear plants. Replacing those dirty brown coal plants would really help with reducing our CO2 emissions.
wilful, while nuclear power is responsible for 19% of the UK’s electricity needs, the main fuel is gas, responsible for 39.9% of electricity. In 1990 gas was responsible for 0.05% of electricity generation. Non-hydro renewables are responsible for 3.55% of the UK’s electricity. The UK also has about half as much agricultural emissions as Australia. I suspect that if we actually had a decent carbon price it would be difficult for nuclear to compete with gas. In the long term, renewables are decreasing in price quite significantly.
adrian, your link doesn’t seem to work.
Yes, you’re right, we do have a huge way to go. But I truly think that if anything this will involve a more centralised, urban lifestyle rather than the decentralised self sufficient communities envisioned by some.
I think the majority of people see urban living as a preferable alternative to small predominantly agricultural communities (some of you will obviously disagree). Because of this any solution must work within the urban model.
Yes, sorry – hopefully this will: [LINK]
Eric Vigo and adrian are absolutely right that we are going to have to become much more sustainable. I don’t think that we will go back to living in villages, or that we should, but cities will have to become responsible for much more of their own food production. This does not just mean growing vegies in the back yard, it also means growing vegies and having food forests in various forms of green space such as parks, golf courses, the side of drains and so on. Rooftop gardens also have enormous potential (as well as insulation benefits). Also, if the sh*t does hit the fan and food security cannot be taken for granted, then being able to shoot or roo or catch a fish will be a pretty useful skill to have.
Chris
Not sure what your thinking is there – there is no proposition to impose a requirement for permits on the emissions associated with the burning of coal or gas that is exported overseas – at least not under the scheme proposed in the Green Paper.
When you see references to the emissions from, say, black coal mining or LNG production, in the context of an Australian scheme, they are references to the emissions created by the relevant mining or extraction and liquefaction activity, not from the end use of the fuel.
Update: Ben Eltham in New Matilda dubs the Green Paper “No Polluter Left Behind”.
There’s another good piece by Bernard Keane in today’s crikey – here come the rentseekers.
Thanks, Peter, I’ve added that link to the post.
Oh, there’s an error in the title that links to my blog (“Climate Dilemma”), the link calls it “Climate Opinion”.
I’ve fixed it, Peter.
Tim – ah, thanks I’ve misunderstood. Though it does bring up a question about how imports are treated. Are we going to get to the distorted situation where imported aluminium is cheaper because locally produced aluminium has to pay for emissions, but aluminium smeltered overseas doesn’t?
Thanks Mark.
No worries, Peter.
At the same time that we are discussing a green paper that is full of handouts to big polluters to compensate them for a carbon price, Al Gore has given a speech proposing a transition to producing 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy and truly clean carbon-free sources within 10 years.
Thanks for the speech by Albet Gore, Peter. He sounds like he has large, long-term vision and a fair brain. Has he ever run for public office?
A good article in The World Today:
He also discusses the risk that the carbon price will collapse if the cap is too weak, and estimates that a $19 dollar carbon price would mean that about $3.5 billion worth of permits could be allocated for free.
Peter, Ambigulous, a bloke over at The Oil Drum, who clearly knows a lot more about it than me, reckons that Gore’s target is ,a href=”http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4316″>definitely a stretch and probably not achievable, but far from farfetched.
well that didn’t work. Here again:
http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/4316
Chris
That could certainly be the case if no form of compensation or assistance was provided to the Australian aluminium smelters. You’ve identified the clearest example of the rationale for handing out free permits to ‘Emissions Intensive Trade Exposed’ industries, although I think the aluminium industry is more concerned about its ability to compete for foreign buyers in the international market, as most of the aluminium produced in Oz is exported.
If the scheme as presented in the Green Paper comes to be, the aluminium producers will be given 90% of their permits at no charge (at least until 2020), and the coal power plant operators who provide the bulk of the smelter power requirements will also receive some form of structural adjustment assistance.
I second Ambigulous on the Goracle link, Peter.
IMHO, the most disappointing aspect of the Green Paper was the absence of Garnaut’s proposal to spend 20% of the permit revenue on renewables R&D. But I suppose the 20% MRET is nothing to be sniffed at.
It will be interesting to see how the Californians go in perfecting solar thermal electricity generation technology. If they can make it as cheap as fast as the optimists are saying, it’ll kill the coal industry stone dead, compensation handouts notwithstanding.
wilful #176 wrote:
That “bloke” is Jérôme à Paris, a European investment banker who finances multi-hundred-million Euro windfarms like this one. But he’s a peak oiler, ergo, he’s a nutter.
Chris, the emissions created by digging up coal, transporting it to port and putting it on the ship count as ours. I think no-one is owning the emissions created by the ship. Once it gets to the destination, it’s all theirs.
But the article peter Wood linked to pointed out that if you counted the emissions inherent in imports, but actually emitted in China or wherever, then Britain’s emissions would have gone up by 18%.
Our big interest ultimately in CCS for coal is so that others can keep buying our coal.
On international influence, I think what Rudd has done will give him all the credibility he needs to participate in discussions. It’s like a ticket to the dinner. But once there he won’t be able to leverage a change in the urgency which is lacking at present.
So there’s an argument that what Rudd’s doing is to reinforce the current complacency, which is not all that helpful.
The dilemma is that if he does any more, he’ll be kicked out and we’ll end up doing even less.
In the AFR today Laura Tingle pointed out that instead of setting up an independent authority to determine caps the Green paper sees this being done by the Parliament. They are to be reviewed every year.
It sounds a recipe for continual lobbying and political shenanigans.
She also says the Labor strategy is to paint the Greens as irresponsible nutters so that their left wing vote won’t drift to the Greens.
Excuse me Carbonsink, but I think branding Jerome a Paris a nutter is more than a little inaccurate.
Energise America, was so successful that the team behind it, including Jerome, have had meetings with several progressive Senators, and have had a nod from Obama’s advisory team too. If you read it, and his many diaries at Kos and European Tribune, he’s anything but a nutter.
Putting Jerome aside, I think you need to offer some sort of factual basis for labelling anyone who believes in peak oil a ‘nutter’ as the list of highly credible experts who support it is growing, not shrinking.
Tax on carbon emissions helps to progress in direction of decreasing an effect of a human activity on nature akin gambling requires the really educated, skilled and professional engineers capable to resolve this paradox of civilisation.
Although somewhere on a planet a vast majority of subjects still applauds to rulers’ decrees proclaiming the Earth as a plate resting on the elephants, it might hardly be interpreted as a way human society develops and modernises. Clearly, it is not here.
Harry Clarke has a comprehensive discussion of the Green Paper here.
John Quiggin raises some points on the Green Paper for discussion.
Update: John Quiggin’s take.
Sorry, Peter, didn’t see your comment til after I’d posted mine.
Myriad, as Carbonsink is a “peak oiler” him(her?)self, I suspect that characterisation of Jerome was intended to be ironic.
That is the Feguson faction line – maybe it will be adopted by Rudd and Wong too? Given the ETS as desribed in the Greenpaper has the main failings of the EU scheme replicated, they need try and paint others that point out they are scamming the 80% of Australian’s who want real action on climate change as “extremists”. Politicians are demonstrating a complete lack of ability to do anything of consequence about climate change.
A simple carbon tax is looking much more attractive; this would redirect the effort involved in the upcoming 2 years of industry lobbying and PR campaigns to get an advantaged position (in progress already) towards reducing emissions immediately.
The tax can be fine tuned (either up or down) as required and low income houselholds catered for with concessions. The simplest measures are often the most effective.
More from Peter Martin on handouts for coal fired electricity generators.
I’ve put up a post specifically on Peter Martin’s column:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2008/07/22/ets-or-business-welfare/
From the Department of Climate Change Green Paper web site:
Would have been nice to have had a bit more notice…