Tag Archive for 'emissions targets'

International climate change policy after Copenhagen

Published
by
Mark
1 month ago
in International, Media, Politics and Polls
. 43 Comments

Last night on Lateline, Ross Garnaut pointed out to an apparently taken aback Tony Jones that 57% support for the ETS – as a major reform – was actually extremely impressive. Today in New Matilda, Ben Eltham rightly says that “the Government is not in nearly as much trouble as many believe. It leads in the polls on nearly every issue that matters, including preferred prime minister.”

The clear implication is that this isn’t the impression people would form if they went by the coverage and commentary in the Australian media.

Similarly, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Copenhagen spelt doom for any concerted international action on climate change (despite the fact that the Coalition’s policy is still tied into setting emissions targets, no matter how ineffectual it would be; and that it also provides Liberal moderates some leverage if the Abbott truck hits an electoral blackspot). There’s been nary a word published about the targets that states agreed to submit post-Copenhagen. It’s as if the event’s only significance was its ramifications for Australian domestic politics.

The Economist links to The Sustainability Institute’s interactive Climate Score Card, which enables a picture to be drawn of the probable impacts on average temperature of the various nations’ commitments. The paper also points out that:

countries can express their intentions in different ways, and that many have provided two or more levels of commitment: a low one that they say they will pursue regardless, and one or more higher ones that they will try for if enough other countries are also going high.

For those whose horizon is wider than the prism of the Australian partisan debate, the whole thing, as they say, is worth reading.

Where now for the CPRS?

Published
by
tigtog
7 months, 1 week ago
in Climate change, Environment and Government
. 74 Comments

So, the Greens aren’t too sad that the Rudd government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) was blocked in the Senate – indeed they were a key component of that blocking. From the GreensMPs website:

“The collapse of the Continue Polluting Regardless Scheme provides Australia with a great opportunity to move ahead with ambitious action on the climate crisis,” Australian Greens Deputy Leader, Senator Christine Milne, said.

“The CPRS would have locked in failure on the climate crisis with its inexcusably weak emissions target and its $16 billion handout to polluters. Three in four Australians support the Greens’ decision to reject the bill if the Government refused to toughen it up.

“The collapse of the CPRS opens the door to a suite of other measures that can be implemented immediately, before an amended CPRS returns to the Parliament, in order to begin reducing Australia’s emissions without delay.”

The Greens are probably mostly correct that the proposed measures were too timid, but was their strategy of blocking this bill in hopes of getting a more effective one the right strategic choice? Xenophon agrees with them that the targets were too low, with extra opprobrium for what he considers unnecessarily expensive plans.

Family First’s Fielding voted with the Greens to block because he still isn’t convinced that human activity is causing global warming at all. (Question for the Senator: is it possible for humans to ameliorate the effects of phenomena they don’t actually cause? e.g. floods, fires, earthquakes? Yes? Why not do something in this situation then?) The Senate Nationals seem to be of the same mind.

So now the Government have to turn to the Senate Liberals to get this bill through, and those Senators appear to favour waiting to see what the rest of the world has to say in Copenhagen (at the U.N. Climate Change Conference) rather than have Australia show any initiative in implementing our own effective scheme.

So there’s two camps of people standing on separate principles arguing that the CPRS was wrong wrongitty wrong either because it gutlessly didn’t do enough to make a difference or was recklessly diverting scarce resources into a non-existent problem, while various pragmatists are mourning a lost opportunity to at least take a first step in cutting emissions. What can we expect regarding emissions targets now?

Monbiot, air travel and targets

Published
by
Brian
10 months, 2 weeks ago
in Climate change, Energy and Environment
. 59 Comments

In the discussion thread of the post Climate crunch carbonsink @ 131 linked to Monbiot’s 2006 piece on air travel. Here’s an extract:

…while the mean distance travelled by car in the UK is 9,200 miles per year, in a plane we can beat that in one day. On a return flight from London to New York, every passenger produces roughly 1.2 tonnes of carbon dioxide: the very quantity we will each be entitled to emit in a year once the necessary cut in emissions has been made.

Also he says that the other stuff emitted by planes means you have to multiply the CO2 output by 2.7 times.

So even if air travel may be competitive with multiple people travelling in a car this is blown out of the water by the facility with which we can flit around the planet in a plane for serious or trivial reasons.

You’ll notice that he talks about a personal entitlement.

Monbiot’s piece must be seen in the context of his 2006 book Heat. The commonly accepted notion at the time, and you still see it, is that the earth system can absorb 5gt pa of carbon benignly. That’s 18.35gt of CO2e (C times 3.67). Monbiot found a research piece (Jones, 2003, from memory) that said the carbon sinks would reduce to 2.7gt by 2030, that’s 9.9gt of CO2e, say 10. He divided this by the projected 2030 population of 8.2 billion and came up a personal allocation of 1.2 tonnes of CO2 per capita pa.

As it happened this was exactly what India was putting out in 2004, ranking 133 out of 206 countries.

Continue reading ‘Monbiot, air travel and targets’

The politics of the White Paper

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 3 months ago
in Climate change
. 151 Comments

There’s already been a fair bit of commentary on the carbon emissions White Paper here at LP. Bernard Keane sums up the substance accurately and concisely:

The surrender is virtually complete. Our biggest polluters have won, and the rest of us will be paying for it under a joke of an emissions trading scheme that encompasses a significant transfer of wealth to our largest polluters.

Also writing in Crikey, Mungo McCallum acerbically targets Rudd’s mantra of “balance”:

The search for balance is in essence a policy of appeasement, an attempt to please everyone and avoid making a hard decision. In the short term this may appear to be good politics, but in the end the balancer is revealed as an equivocator, someone with out the courage of his convictions — if indeed he has any real convictions. But worse still, attempts at balance at the expense of genuine commitment almost invariable lead to bad policy.

Kevin Rudd has shown his true colours with the White Paper. We’re seeing a combination of the tawdry managerialism of the public policy wonk – split the difference and get the most ostensibly powerful actors onside – with Rudd’s own desire to rub the Liberals’ nose in their poor standing. As far as the politics goes, that’s about it.

What we’re not seeing is the other side of Rudd’s dialectic – the supposed attacks from the right. Rather, industry and polluters have had their wildest fantasies fulfilled while right wing bloggers are delighted that the left are unhappy. Reading between the lines, the fiction of denialism stands exposed, ideological bollocks which itself masks uncritical worship of big business.

It may well be the government’s view that those opposed to the targets set have nowhere else to go. All the silly rhetoric about “the latte left” ignores two political realities. Continue reading ‘The politics of the White Paper’

Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two

Published
by
Mark
1 year, 6 months ago
in Climate change, Energy, Environment, Howardia and Markets
. 25 Comments

The Fin Review reported yesterday that a host of resource company execs are descending on Canberra on Friday for a pow wow with Martin Ferguson. Initially this meeting was being presented as a way of circumventing the BCA, who released a doom and gloom laden report last week basically threatening a capital strike. But it’s now clear that it’s nothing of the sort, as Marn’s department have also sent the BCA an invite. Industry sources expressed pleasure at Ferguson’s involvement, telling the Fin that they found him easier to deal with and more amenable to their views than Climate Change Minister Penny Wong. Hardly surprising…

Further reports today (as well as Stephen Mayne’s piece in Crikey) reinforce what was being said yesterday – that the polluters and the “skeptics” are making the running on the business response to the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme Green Paper. What looks like being the outcome is, in my view, a default back to the Howard position. Continue reading ‘Emissions trading and rent seeking: round two’