Larvatus Prodeo

Weak. Pick up the phone now and call up a Green Power provider ’cause the government has bought into the electricity generation and ‘trade exposed’ industry blackmail about blackouts and ‘moving offshore.’ Lenore Taylor and the guy from Australian Science nailed it in questions: if they’re true blue about lobbying for a truly global agreement they should call these bluffs or follow the UK’s lead and start formalising some supply chain pollution controls. For the record, all of the $500m supposedly earmarked for renewables will be going to Coal and today’s signals are that the Rudd Government’s travesty of renewables policies continues fatuous.

Judging from the balance of questions at the Press Club, Petrol is going to get disproportionate media coverage, but the biggest failure is learning from the EU’s experiences: (1) They only implemented emissions trading in the first place because tax bills could be blocked by a single member - it was implemented out of bureaucratic expediency rather than economic/environmental expediency. The Rudd Government isn’t faced with such dilemmas and has the mandate to implement broad ranging reforms rather than a ham-fisted neoliberal damp squib. (2) There is overwhelming support in the EU for auctioning 100% of permits. See this paper from Regina Betz (who worked on Germany’s National Allocation Plan in the early 2000s) and Iain MacGill for why.

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Update: Elsewhere: Joshua Gans calls for border tax adjustments (he winces at calling it a ‘carbon tariff’).