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.