Only three weeks after the official close of submissions (many businesses asked for an extension) it looks like we might see a White Paper as soon as the 3rd of October. This suggests the government has a clear idea of the short-medium term trajectories they want to pursue. If the volume of shrill, anti-innovative blackmail sentiment is anything to go by, my guess is that we’ll see yet another ETS that doesn’t do a lot of, well, Carbon Pollution Reducing.
Elsewhere: Peter Browne writes at APO:
A new [previously reported by Mark] analysis of the attitudes of people who swung to Labor at last year’s election suggests that acting to reduce climate change can be a vote winner – in fact, according to the data, it might be the vote winner. In two quite different surveys [including one where “young people were under-represented in [the] sample”], the single most important issue nominated by vote-changers was global warming. In both cases, it rated ahead of the other issue generally regarded as a vote-changer, industrial relations.
UNSW is hosting a forum today on how to allocate the emissions permit auction revenue pie. As a central plank of climate mitigation policy, the value in the first 10 years is expected to exceed the total value of government bonds on issue (~$100bn+ TCI reckons more), so every vested interest is lobbying to get a piece of that under the guise of ‘national interest’. (The forum will run until around 1pm. Jack Pezzey has just delivered an excellent paper on ‘who wins with free permits’)
Update: I’ll be clarifying things below and providing links to presentations as they become available.
Update: PDFs of presentations available here
Continue reading ‘Liveblogging Emissions Trading Allocation Challenges Forum’
While it’s reasonable to ask, as Lyn at Public Opinion does, whether tracing every twist and turn of the opposition’s twisted trajectory towards some sort of agreed position on an emissions trading scheme, is to pay too much attention to a “policy cycle of sometimes less than 24 hours [which stretches] the notion of novelty a little far.” However, it could also be suggested that the interest lies in watching the moment that a “media narrative” switches, and as with the Costello crud, observing the process of constructing one, as a few bits and pieces of disconnected nonsense get tied together by assorted columnists and reporters and woven into a new thread that will then become - hey presto! - conventional wisdom, dignified as such on Sundays by the usual Insider suspects. You can shine a light on the way the press gallery mob do “the wisdom of crowds each other” by building a story arc, which then shapes the way the story is moved on.
Continue reading ‘Liberal media lunacy III’
Brendan Nelson’s office is denying reports - discussed on an earlier post - that he will be having a “showdown” with Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt over the Coalition’s stance on emissions trading.
Some were reporting yesterday that Nelson would next week “take on” Malcolm Turnbull over climate change. His office claims that is “nonsense” and, given his tenuous hold on the leadership, it does seem unlikely he would be seeking a showdown with anyone. But he and Turnbull are “consulting”, which suggests he is trying to inch the party as far as he can towards a more sceptical line, in a bid to keep everyone happy.
However, Nelson is apparently “negotiating” with Turnbull to “harden” the Coalition’s position, and in an attempt to keep the denialists in his ranks happy, came out with this gem:
Now Nelson’s rhetoric is sounding more sceptical again. “I see there is an emerging body of scientific opinion which questions the role of carbon in all of this, but I’m strongly of the view that we give the planet the benefit of the doubt,” he said yesterday.
Sure, scientists differ about the degree and speed of global warming, but if it is not caused by carbon, why on earth are we contemplating support for an emissions trading scheme at all?
Quite. And that difference is between more catastrophic and slightly less catastrophic outlooks. Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy II’
Tim Watts has posted at Tree of Knowledge on Andrew Bolt’s claim that the forces of the hardline right in the Liberal Party are planning to monster Malcolm Turnbull and Greg Hunt and push for an oppositional stance to the Rudd Government’s emissions trading scheme. Brendan Nelson’s latest confused comments about delaying the ETS might be some confirmation of this, but on the other hand Nelson’s line on climate change is a moveable feast at the best of times, and Turnbull was singing from the same song sheet today. Watts is no doubt right that such a stance would be political stupidity on the part of the opposition, but it’s just as likely that the story represents wishful thinking on Bolt’s part, obsessed as he is with climate change denialism. However, nutty calls from the Nats for a Royal Commission to examine the science certainly do highlight the continuing divisions within the Coalition.
Continue reading ‘Liberal lunacy’
Peter Martin has an excellent column today pointing out what’s wrong with the dollops of dollars which are to be handed out to polluters under the Rudd government’s “Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme”.
Australia’s existing coal-fired power stations won’t need the compensation anyway. They will be able to pass on the extra cost of the emission permits. They will be encouraged to. It is how the scheme is meant to work.
Eventually the higher price of power will prod some of us to use less of it, and eventually wind and commercial solar power generators will become competitive against coal because they won’t to buy emission permits.
Martin effortlessly and elegantly skewers the arguments for compensation.
He also refers to the GST. It’s interesting that this whole exercise has been framed as “economic reform” and compared so often to the GST. It would seem that it’s that template and that framing which has given overt permission for a rent-seekers’ paradise, and as Martin argues, has created the extraordinary situation where the profits of pollution are essentially being treated as property rights.
Continue reading ‘ETS or business welfare?’
It sounds like some dumb reality tv show, doesn’t it? But we all know who didn’t get voted out of the house.
As almost everyone in the world knows, it’s election year in America.
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (don’t ask, you already know the answer!) might be in trouble. Iraq might be - kinda, sorta - an election issue. But if - like me - you’re following the American Election via either the blogosphere or (oh noes!) the MSM, you’d notice a huge disconnect between how big an issue climate change is here, and how totally miniscule it is in the U S of A.
I hope Al Gore might have something to say at the Democratic Convention.
But that might not occur. And even if it does, and that and all the Arnie stuff aside, it’s going to be pretty much a side issue. Lord only knows what we can do, but those of us who, like me, are Democrats Overseas, might consider a bit of lobbying. But we might think as well about remembering that climate change is a global issue, and trying to get the Australian government to use whatever leverage it has to get it treated as such. Continue reading ‘The World’s Top Emitter’
dk.au’s quite right that from a policy angle, the ETS Green Paper is highly problematic. In the short term, politically, obviously what Kevin Rudd is doing is stealing Malcolm Turnbull’s clothes on petrol, adopting his proposal of an excise cut. This snookers the Libs on petrol, but then, they were hardly getting any political traction on that issue anyway. It’s a missed opportunity in more senses than one - it plays to the populist narrative and avoids the much more important task of communicating why an ETS - and a rigorous ETS - is necessary. You can’t do short term populism and long term policy at the same time. Ross Garnaut made that point effectively last week. The government might have done well to take note.
More broadly, I think the context for this is that Labor is looking to cut the Greens out of the Senate equation on emissions trading. Continue reading ‘Bait and switch’
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.
Continue reading ‘Emissions Trading Green Paper thread (& links post)’
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