As I observed in an earlier post, the instant response from Australian industry and business groups to the Copenhagen schemozzle was to call for a delay of the CPRS or yet more handouts in the guise of compensation. They’re unlikely – one hopes, at least – to get what they want, as (unfortunately) are The Greens with their call for negotiation over Australia’s climate change response.*
Rather, the Rudd government will continue on its course.
That course now appears if its settings were too clever by half. The Copenhagen deadline for negotiations with the Liberals succeeded in widening the ambit of the government’s scheme, but also had the probably unintended outcome of installing Tony Abbott as Liberal leader. It won’t be so easy now for the government to make hay with the Coalition’s divisions on climate change, as the moderates seem to have fallen into line behind the right in exchange for a few symbolic prizes, and Malcolm Turnbull looks a very isolated figure.
Having said that, I’m not too sure at all that Abbott will get all that much traction with his “great big new tax on everything” line. Even if a supine commentariat don’t get around to calling it what it is, it’s still a lie, and one that won’t be too difficult to rebut.
In today’s Crikey, Bernard Keane concluded a useful review of the path ahead for the domestic politics of climate change thus:
Where to from here for the government? It is committed to the reintroduction of the Rudd-Turnbull version of the CPRS as soon as Parliament returns. There’s a summer break to go before we get to that point. “Living on the Earth’s driest and hottest continent, we are already seeing the harsh impact of climate change with devastating droughts, heat waves and bush fires,” Malcolm Turnbull wrote in the pages of one of his old employers, The Times, on Saturday.
The perspective on climate change might look very different six long, hot weeks from now.
It’s certainly already a different political game, whichever way it’s played out in 2010.
* Any amendments negotiated with The Greens would still fail to pass the Senate, but a bill embodying them could be presented twice, and still give the government the scope for a double dissolution at its preferred time of late next year. If Labor subsequently won the election, it would be almost impossible for such a bill not to pass in a joint sitting of both Houses.
Indeed. Re: Abbott’s ‘super-tax’, Peter Brent made an excellent point in that cool new ANU website we’ve seen links for here and there that scare campaigns against incumbents never work in Australia because incumbents just aren’t that scary.
You can use a lot of adjectives about Rudd’s govt, but scary ain’t one of them. My own issue is that I keep thinking, “what’s Labor’s plan?”; I can’t divorce the game-playing from the policy. I think, “did they wait for what they know will be a very hot, if not record-breaking summer deliberately?”; “Are the libs (bullshit) amendments what they secretly want?”; “Will they negotiate with the Greens post-election using the excuse of ‘new evidence’ or something?”
Ignorance, as always, makes effective democracy really hard. I would love to take Labor on faith, but I just can’t based on form (though I really, really want to), and thus either way I’ll be voting Green for the first time (who are lucky in that their constituents’ interests happen to dovetail with the best policy response on this issue. Will be interested to see what happens when there’s an inevitable conflict; may they learn from the mistake of the Dems).
I think Rudd has more than a few problems – he’ll need more than the useless CPRS to get anything above 5%, and it does make it tougher now there’s no shred of bipartisanship, I reckon the green noegotiations are still on – because my take is Rudd hasnt got the bottle for a DD. Seems to radical for his “Im reminding you of a boring safe state Premier” chic. Id be surprised if he doesnt float fixed terms instead.
That said, Abbitt is a hiding to nothing with his nonsense. WTF is this “rebuff to Rudd” and “world didnt jump on Rudd’s bandwagon” idiocy? does he rally imagine the Asutralian people are so thick they dont understand that was a global meeting, at which Rudd was a bit player? Talk about contempt for the punters. The great big new tax line seems positively sane by contrast.
Rudd framed this issue as a wedge for the Coalition, and now the wedge has done it’s work, he’s stuck with it. He can’t turn to the science for support, because in wedging the Coalition he’s carelessly abandoned basing policy on evidence. For example, he can’t point to the likely rapid demise of the Great Barrier Reef as support for his policy, since his proposals will doom the reef just as sure as the ‘no tomorrow’ policy of the Coalition. Abbott will, with the cynicism we all know so well, tirelessly point this out.
Rudd’s policy aims at an outcome only slightly less appalling than the Coalition’s. Why would voters opt for a – thanks to the bucketloads of exemptions and freebies – irredeemably complex system to achieve very little, when they can get much the same result from doing nothing?
Nothing to do with ‘bottle’ everything to do with the ‘numbers’.
Haven’t seen it, I don’t think, patrickg. Can you enlighten me?
I agree wpd. The failure to call a DD shows that if there was an election today Abbott would probably win. Otherwise he would do it.
Apart from the big lie (I can’t remember nowadays when the Libs weren’t telling a big lie) Abbott’s going nowhere because the vast majority of Australians know 5% is definitely not a big enough cut.
Rudd is also going nowhere. His supporters think he’s sold out (as if he wouldn’t have) and the people who hate him think he’s doing too much and selling Oz out for some pie in the sky scheme.
Neither party is in an enviable position on global warming.
I predict that whatever the next election will be about, climate change will play a very small part. The only party that can win something out of it, and they will, are the Greens.
I doubt that any poll numbers show Abbott winning the Lower House. The numbers that concern Rudd are how many Upper House seats, especially those currently held by Liberals, would fall to Independents and Greens. Labor doesn’t want the Greens to have an effective balance of power in the Senate – they’d rather do deals with the Lib/Nats when possible to get their legislation through.
“My own issue is that I keep thinking, “what’s Labor’s plan?”; I can’t divorce the game-playing from the policy.”
That also worries me, patrickg. Politically their survival is assured, but where are they going with all this? I know they can’t get too far ahead of the mainstream, but in the meantime the concerns pile up. One of the biggest, which is just on the edge of climate change but at least is visible to the punters is water supply.
There doesn’t seem much urgency attached to getting something going about saving the Murray-Darling system, especially the feed-in irrigation. But Adelaide and SA are in deep trouble if nothing substantial is done, as is a lot of the rest of the country. If we want to know where Labor is going, well the states don’t have a good look. Qld and NSW are the worst at hedging on upstream restrictions. Vic and SA have settled for media grabbing items like desalinisation which cost a lot for what they achieve.
Unless the feds are a lot better than them, it’s going to be a hard ride. Me, I’m starting to lean Green too.
Mark, I’m sure you have, Lefty E’s been linking to it left right and centre (well, mainly left). Here’s – not the piece I was thinking of but one with a similar point.
http://inside.org.au/safety-in-incumbency/
Hal9000 @ 3, I’m not sure you’re exercising the appropriate degree of cynicism. Should Kevin Rudd wish to present a new ETS with stronger targets that would allow some chance to save the Great Barrier Reef etc, he’ll simply ignore the previous CPRS, present a new proposal, and say (and repeat as many times as necessary) that he’s not interested in rehashing the past. This position will have no integrity, but that doesn’t actually matter. I don’t think you get many points for actual integrity in the Australian political system. Witness Tony “the weathervane” Abbott being described as a conviction politician, without gales of laughter following every use of the phrase.
What incentive is there to make the scheme tougher? If anything, the failure of COP15 reinforces the (political) wisdom of the Government including the very weak 5% target in the CPRS in the event there is no international agreement.
It shouldn’t be necessary to have to point out, yet again, that talking about “ignoring the science” is nonsense since the science prescribes global reductions targets, not Australian ones. In the absence of a global agreement, Australia could cut its domestic emissions by 90% to no avail.
It seems to me that Rudd is in a position to argue that, in the circumstances, a weak, tentative scheme that has little short-term impact, but which puts the institutional mechanisms in place for future reductions, is a prudent policy approach.
Introducing a scheme with much stronger targets in the absence of a global agreement would actually add plausibility to the Coalition’s claims that the Government is jeopardising the Australian economy for no environmental gain.
In a perverse way, I kind of agree Tim. It would be very hard for Rudd, given his previous posture, to adopt the Green position, which is why he is disavowing it expressly. I’d be in favour of him stating his 2020 target — perhaps 15% and leaving the legislation until after the next election (say in late July) when a new senate can clear out the deadwood, and allow him to negotiate something with the Greens that will stick.
@10 – thanks, patrickg. It’s actually Swinburne, which is why I was confused.
@6 – I very much doubt that, tssk.
The latest poll, like all the others, still has Labor in a position to improve on the result from the last election:
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/pollytics/2009/12/23/essential-report-christmas-edition/
@8 – tigtog, I think the ALP could live with The Greens having BOP in the Senate. It’s also highly likely that Labor itself will pick up more Senate seats – particularly from those seats where Senators were elected in 04, the residue of the vote which brought the Coalition control.
I think it’s more likely that Rudd will go for an election in the second half of next year than not, because of caution about whether going early would be perceived as cynical.
The problem may be that with Copenhagen a ’3 out of 10′ in the words of a good friend who spend years working in climate change policy, Abbott will get real traction from claiming that the Rudd insistence on passing a scheme here prior to Copenhagen was a mistake. And the size of the gap between worlds at the conference, including the clear strategic use made of this process by India and China, both extraordinarily powerful nations that choose to spend up big on their bristling military arsenals while crying poor at the climate change table, will suggest to much of the populace that Australia’s ability to ‘lead from the front’ is questionable.
I’m not arguing it’s a lost cause, just that things got harder- stating the obvious I know. But the consequence is that Labor face a run towards the election with a couple of options:
- Going toe to toe with Abbott over the CPRS;
- making the CPRS go away so they can focus on his real weakness in the marginals; the taint of work choices.
Good policy and smart politics may not be as dovetailed as they were pre-recession and pre-Copenflop.
Armagny, I’m inclined to agree. As I said in the post, the strategy of making Copenhagen D Day for the ETS looks a bit too clever by half in retrospect. I expect you’re right, and Labor will be pushing the issue down the electoral radar if they can. The theme for the election will be “don’t vote for those lunatics, they’re worse than Howard”. Any attempt to paint the Coalition as the past will require Rudd to paint himself as the future, and it’ll be interesting to see how they do that.
Alan Kohler has some interesting thoughts on the domestic politics post Copenhagen:
Next year we’ll hear a lot more about the CPRS (aka the “Great Big New Tax”) from Tony Abbott than Kevin Rudd. Rudd will be desperately trying to make the CPRS go away. Rudd will still win of course, despite his climate change policies and not because of them. He’ll win because Australia avoided the worst effects of the GFC, nothing else.
Kohler concludes…
What chance the CPRS will be a hot issue leading up to Mexico? Zero.
Kohler doesn’t know what the hell he’s talking about – he’s swallowed the Libs’ talking point kool-aid.
If cuts were 25% in five years maybe – maybe there would be a smattering of the economic apocalypse he’s talking about – though that would contrast very strongly with what these companies are telling their shareholders, a fact he should bloody well know given that he covers it.
Furthermore, there’s a lot of numbers between 5 and 25. He’s built a silly strawman. It’s like saying if Rudd campaigned in undies he would be voted out. Sure, but what’s it got to do with anything?
He’s gives no due to popular feeling around climate change – esp which electroates are strong on it and which are weak, nor what these feelings might be after a bloody hot summer. Nor the Liberal’s general incompetence.
Disappointing, unmodulated piece from Kohler, he’s usually a bit better than that tossed off crap.
I’d like to echo Brian Davey’s point about our tendency to grossly overestimate the ability of governments and corporations to manage complexity. This has large implications for the implementation of climate change policy.
I fear the Rudd government (whose policies I broadly support) is, like most centre left outfits in the developed world, coming from a mindset and a heritage in public administration that leads them to greatly underestimate the difficulties of managing complexity.
I’m in IT and I see this sort of thinking come a cropper all the time. See the horrible $50M IT failure at RMIT a few years ago for a classic example.
I think Davey’s idea of a carbon tax at the supply end, that is oil companies and coal miners, might be one the few things that is simple enough to be administered effectively. Of course it would be incredibly gutsy politically.
Tony will be easily painted as an extremist. Just because he is. Only trouble then, for Labor, is how to brand The Greens.
patrickg @ 19:
I wish I could agree with you, but the recent by-election results and decline in support for action on climate change suggest otherwise. As very wise man once said: “In any two horse race always back self-interest. At least you know it’s trying.”
In this case, self-interest is on Abbott’s side … and to hell with Grandkids!
Strange that you would wish to hold onto two by-election results in Liberal heartland and deny the other substantial evidence, a little quite current information Mark has drawn attention to @15, Carbonsink.
Abbott is well behind and Alan is talking through his hat. The mood for action on climate change is unlikely to be properly gauged by a finance commentator.
Yes, I thought the tone of Kohler’s commentary suggested he had been out to a long lunch with some of his buddies from BHP.
I do wonder how many more times Tony Abbott will get to use the ‘nobody else has emissions trading’ line before someone points out to him that the world’s largest single market economy, the European Union, has been trading emissions for 4 years now…
Back in reality, though, the Senate numbers will probably be a big theme of 2010 election coverage – the focus will be on the crossbenchers (will Fielding finally vanish? How about those extreme Greens in the sole BOP? etc etc) while the government seems so unassailable.
This does leave open the interesting possibility that the Greens will try and replicate their 2007 campaign in the ACT to replace Gary Humphries with Kerrie Tucker. Given that the territory Senators take their seats immediately, they could paint the ACT election as the best way to get a Green into the Senate immediately for action on climate change – rather than waiting for July 2011 to pass a climate bill, the government could negotiate immediately post-election with the 6 Greens and Xenophon, Fielding having been made irrelevant by the removal of Humphries on the right. I don’t think that Ms Tucker is going to throw her hat in the ring again, but the closeness of the result last time would suggest that the Greens – and Libs – will be looking pretty closely at our Canberran friends next time around.
Who’d have thought that voters in two of the safest seats in the country would get so much attention?
Kohler may well have been out with some mates from BHP. Equally he may well have been out with a “Howard battler” with three kiddies under 10, and an air-conditioned McMansion mortgaged to the hilt. The last thing they need is a “Great Big New Tax”.
Climate change? Isn’t that something “they” should be fixing that with solar panels and wind farms. Why on earth do we need to pay more for electricity? Do you really believe the average person’s understanding of the issue goes any deeper than this?
We need Turnbull to do a Chipp.
Sorry, I can’t see any other way for the ultra-cautious government we have to want to tighten up the CPRS. They need a non-Green greenish party to give them cover in future senate negotiations.
Labor could be the first party to win more that one hundred seats in the federal Reps and they’d still only ratchet up the minimum objective to 6%.
Nickws, I’d like to see Turnbull do a Chipp.
Labor might also start thinking about threats from the Greens to Tanner, Plibersek and Albanese. I have no doubt they’ll be doing electorate level polling (or perhaps combining seats vulnerable to a Greens insurgency in one sample) and watching it closely. That may have some effect on the target, and what happens to the CPRS.
Labor should parachute Tanner to a safe seat. The blokes the best talent they have.
Agree Joe2. OTOH if Tanner wasnt there, the Greens would win it more easily. I suspect decent incumbents are the only thing holding back the inevtable in the inner cities. Tanner wants to roll Mar’n – thats where the left ALP gravity is shifting.
As for the CPRS – why not link in with NZ’s scheme, EU style? Thats right Tones, NZ has one too.
Rudd’s real problem is once he explains the CPRS, people will realise it doesnt cut emissions even 5%. An ETS per se can work – but Ruddd’s CPRS cant.
Robert Beswick @ 20,
Consider this:
“Australia consumes 220 billion KwHrs (units) of electricity annually. Our electricity bills have just increased 20% with further increases published to take that to 75%. 20% is roughly 3 cents per unit times 220 billion which represents 6.6 billion dollars per year. At 75% increase this is 22 billion dollars per year. Now at 20% to 2040 this means 198 billion dollars available to build alternative energy infrastructure. At 75% this represents 660 billion dollars extracted from the economy, over the same period, for some purpose. The purpose appears to be to discourage the use of electricity and fund some form of ETS with a market forcing mechanism.
My research suggests that 6.6 billion dollars (20% electricity levy) per year applied completely to the building of renewable energy infrastructure is more than sufficient to completely replace Australia’s current coal fired energy infrastructure (even if the replacement price is 6 billion dollars per gigawatt baseload capacity) with a combination of solar, wind, geothermal, wave, biofuel, and others, in a fully “paid up” system which therefore delivers electricity at prices comparable with coal.”
The thing about this thinking is that the 20% electricity price increase has already been pulled off without raising even the slightest amount of comment. This is now putting 6.6 billion dollars per year of additional “income” into the pockets of the corporate electricity distributors. My guess is that the nett consequence of this price increase move (remember that the price increase is one third of and increase set in preparation for the consequences of the CPRS) will see a bidding war amoungst the distributors as they attempt to dominate the market in 12 months time, if not already though quietly. What should be happening is the revenue raised triggers a massive commitment to renewables. But allas in private hands it sim[ly represents extra “wel deserved” profit. As a minimal electricity levy, on the other hand, this process potentially completley bypasses the primary need for an ETS/CPRS, achieving a 50% reduction in CO2 emissions over a 30 year period.
A huge opportunity has been lost here, infavour of political grandstanding. As a commentator yesterday said of the failure of the renewable energy certificate thing is that we “have been too clever by half” and have created failure where there should have been success. Global warming solutions require solid engineering, get the politics out formula.
Prompted by the apparent timourousness of the arrangements coming out of Copenhagen I have of late been considering why it is that apparently large numbers of people seem so indifferent to the challeneges posed by climate change. Some of it, as I’ve saiud elsewhere, is clearly cultural. People like things how they like tham and for some, the idea of community is threatening. They don’t feel connected with amny others, and even the people they do fell some connection with aren’t entirely trusted. They just don’t want others messing in what they consider their own social bubble. There’s not muuch one can really say to such people. The wisest thing is probably, as far as it is possible, to simply leave them alone.
Yet there are other people who clearly want to be part of a community — to belong and have significance but who are desperately poor at going about realising the dream. For many, what is widely considered ‘consumerism’ is probably better seen as compensation for their failure. If you can’t actually be as significant as privileged people, adopting the trappings may be the next best thing.
Not the least of the problems with moving action on any goal-directed program is what economists call “the discount rate”. The less socially advantaged one is, the higher the discount rate, and vice versa.
One sees this phenomenon when teaching all the time — I’m in the habit of using the term the window of significance when coaching other teachers about classroom management. The lower the academic stream band one is teaching, the closer in time something has to be to children in that class to be significant (either in a positive or negative sense).
In the wider world too, socially disadvantaged people’s cultural preferences are skewed towards immediate gratification far more than those who are somewhat more privileged. (At the very top of the privilege band one sees some reversion because the long term penalties appear less for the opposite reason to that of socially disadvantaged people). That’s why poor people commonly make such poor decisions spending their money — eating large amounts of cheap but poor quality food, buying something they can’t afford on a “no repayment until 2012 and 27% interest afterwards” or gambling/drinking the rent money. The benefit seems salient but the cost seems invisible. They regret their decisions after it’s too late to alter them.
Trying to get action on global warming mitigation is the same kind of problem. If we invite people to go without now so they (or maybe even worse, their grandchildren) can be better off in 2050, many will say they aren’t interested (or they will think it because saying it sounds bad in the here and now) — and indeed, many of that tranche won’t be interested until its 2049 or 2050. Unless we can make it seem that the tangible benefits start today or at worst within their windows of significance then most of them won’t want to act.
That’s tough to do. We want to be truthful and we are bound to be so. That’s why IMO the best way to go about this is to impose the costs now and match them with benefits now. If we can use the costs we impose to protect and augment forests now, supply cheap near zero energy now and celebrate these successes now then support for the programs should increase. That’s one of the reasons I think building nuclear capacity ASAP makes sense. The problem of long term storage of waste in the future will be discounted heavily by people at the bottom of the scale. In this case their flawed and exaggerated discounting rate for future harm is advantageous, because the scope of the problem is exaggerated — so one widespread myth is subverted by a widespread reasoning error. The errors cancel each other out.
This is also why I like the idea of a cap and trade system with vehicular traffic on main connecting roads, or bridges. The positive behaviour we want — getting private vehicles off the roads when there’s not a pressing reason to be there — is rewarded within a timeframe that the relevant demographic sees as significant. (A side benefit could be that if more people ride bikes or use public transport and spend less time commuting, they are less likely to buy take-away convenience food). And once the capacity to adopt a longer term perspective is reinforced and pushed to its margin, we ought to see improvements in the proportion of the populace that will feel connected to benefits or prospective harms further into the future.
I suspect we could apply this same principle to a lot of what we socialists want to do about inequity. If it is the case that inequity is substantially driven by a preference for short term gratification over sustainable long term satisfaction, (and we prefer the latter condition) then making it harder to act on a high discount rate of prospective harm or benefit makes sense. Buy now pay later should be made unenforceable. If we think that some goods are necessary for social justice but note that disadvantaged people have inadequate access to them we should assist them in paying the market price with non-liquid subsidies and by ensuring more such services are provided at the market clearing price at the quality standard we think apt.
We might for example, fund housing co-ops that rent out their space to members of the co-op and allow less advantaged people to compete with more advantaged people by giving the former non-liquid rent-subsidies paid to the co-op. If the co-op has a large enough membership, it might include childcare and laundry services and common tended recreational grounds allowing us to lower the cost of giving people access to more distinctively private living space.
One might think this all sounds a bit nanny-state-ish but ewven in Alaska, the home of Sarah Palin, royalties from resopurce harvesting are given as dividends to the populace, with the assets themselves retianed in public hands. Attempts to sell this off have been consistently voted down. It seems even the right knows that modest sustainable benefit is preferable to a binge.
I really do think that we socialists need to rethink how we can build constituencies that will support sustainable and equitable societies. The sentiment is admirable, buit without a vehicle to get there, we will always be disappointed.
There is also another factor that most people have not addressed.
Perhaps ten years ago, a 25% cut might have been ‘horrendous’ and ‘the end of our lifestyles’. However, with technological improvements in both power generation (coal and gas) and transport, a figure of 25% is not really threatening at all. (Just think, ten years ago you saw very few priuses on the road – now they’re everywhere and getting cheaper and competitors are coming out).
Thus the Government can do what it has successfully done several times before with the tax system at budget time – blow out its chest and trumpet how tough it will be, then deliver something much less threatening to gusty sighs of relief from the public.
So, cut back to carbon reductions – announce a 25% reduction – and then enough detail to soothe the Oz electorate that it will not mean them having to give up the car (and the power price increases have already been announced with little electoral pain), and ‘business as usual’.
The tragedy is that 25%, being so painless because of technological advances in the past ten years, should and could be a base cut with further cuts being mooted on the basis of undoubted technological advances in the next ten years.
So Tony Rabbot could easily promise to cut 5% merely by advocating, well, nothing. The reason for this is that generators in NSW and Vic need to replace old and inefficient plant in the normal course of business, and they will easily get thirty or forty percent if they apply known technology.
You could cut 5% by closing Hazelwood
Exactly.
So we need to shift the argument from ‘Wow, how huge is 25%!!!???’ to ’25% is an easily achievable ‘business as usual do nothing outcome, let’s move to 30% practical with 50% aspirational’.
The huffing and puffing about targets seems merely to be posturing to allow plenty of fat for buying off big business.
Maybe the political reality is that the Govt needs to get big business support for re-election, but we need to call it for what it is and move on from previous targets which are now really ‘business as usual’.
A blog post on the huge reduction in water use in Queensland. Just for comparison, you know. Can anyone really argue that it’s easier to live without water than electricity or petrol?
Paul Burns @ 7: “Abbott’s going nowhere…Rudd is also going nowhere…The only party that can win something out of it, and they will, are the Greens.”
The blog on Possums Pollytics about “Swing States” seems to me to bear these claims out admirably. I’m not a political analyst, so would be glad if someone would verify the following conclusions.
Check out the sidebar on Pollytics Demographics. The ALP two-party preferred has increased significantly, whereas the ALP primary vote has hardly moved. By contrast, people have fled in droves from the Coalition primary vote (what a surprise!).
Sooo, if people aren’t increasingly backing the ALP primary, and they are abandonning the Coalition, where are they going??? The Greens vote has been increasing nicely.
Unless I am mistaken, the ALP is not so much a winner, as the Coalition is a loser.
Furthermore, perhaps the ALP 2PP is not being won by the Rudd government, so much as supported by the Greens vote?
In summary: “”Abbott’s going nowhere…Rudd is also going nowhere…The only party that can win something out of it, and they will, are the Greens.”
Carbonsink @18: “Rudd will be desperately trying to make the CPRS go away.”
So he damn well should.
The assumptions underlying the CPRS projections for emissions reduction are the biggest load of crap you ever saw. Total fantasy land. Dependent on technology that won’t be implemented except as a limited PR exercise.
If Rudd/Wong continue to push their CPRS as the best answer, they had better hope that the Coalition don’t get hold of that bone and chew it into small fragments.
Elise, seeing as the Coalition pretty much don’t even believe in climate change, it’s likely they’re collectively too dull to see and exploit the massive problems with the govt’s scheme.
Yep, now is the time to either reform, or dump the useless CPRS. Say something about ‘game shifter at Copenhagen, yada yada’ – whatever, then dump it. No one will miss it, certainly not anyone who cares about emissions reductions.
Its entire “reductions” consisted of permits bought elsewhere, or as Elise says, were totally imaginary cuts, marijaunishly premised on inventing “clean coal” sometime after 2030. Oh puhleaaase.
Next! How about some real action.
It does appear we have to take things into our own hands. An other indication that the major parties are lagging well behind the the active and participating political demography as well as reality of sustainable industry, is the recent two major developments in relation to Gunns pulp mill.
According to an email from GetUp:
DI(nr) @39, I should have linked to the previous LP thread on CPRS Rage:
http://larvatusprodeo.net/2009/11/18/cprs-rage/
The You-Tube clip of Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute (in the lead blog) clearly explains the core problems of the claimed reductions from CPRS.
It is in fact “business as usual” with negligible reductions, but buried in a pile of spin that Rudd/Wong’s ETS and CPRS would actually be achieving something.
Indeed, Elise. It’s very clear that Rudd doesn’t actually believe that climate change is a significant problem.
Believe it or not, if the Libs had a credible climate change policy (and if I believed I could trust them to actually carry it out – a big ask after the Howard Miracle), I’d preference them ahead of Labor (but after the Greens, of course).