Cprs

On Monday, March 28, the Department of Climate Change offered a briefing on carbon pricing and business executives flew in from around the country to get longed-for insights.

They were ``peak stakeholders’’ from 45 companies and organisations in a liaison group plugged directly into the Government. This would be the big moment for a run-down on the carbon tax big picture for representatives of the biggest energy generators, retailers, and users.

It was a case of so many questions, so many points of interest, so few chairs.

Continue reading "Carbon pricing: We’re being treated like mushrooms" »

There won’t be mass lay-offs of lawyers, advertising executives and journalists if policy makers get it wrong on climate change. Trade in skinny lattes is not tipped to move offshore. Sales of Birkenstock sandals are also expected to remain unaffected.

Inner-city proponents of tough action on climate change don’t always get it. That’s because middle-class professional jobs and communities aren’t the battleground of climate change policy.

If you wear steel capped boots to work and drink instant coffee you might not spend much time talking about climate change; but it is the blue-collar workers in Western Sydney and our great industrial regions that have a real stake in the debate.

Continue reading "Yuppies have nothing to fear from a price on carbon" »

It gives me no pleasure to say this. But cataclysmic climate change is going to happen, with all its promised attendant devastation, and neither you nor I nor anyone in power is going to do anything about it.

People don’t fix predictions. People fix problems. And until the western world truly feels the burn, then climate change is a prediction, not a problem.

Lethal floods in Pakistan haven’t swayed us.  Drought in Africa hasn’t swayed us.  The worst heatwave in Russia in a thousand years hasn’t swayed us. Even our own murderous Black Saturday bushfires in 2009 haven’t knocked any sense into our heads. Perhaps if Sydney’s waterfront mansions plunge into the harbour, taking property prices with them, we might demand action.

Continue reading "Climate change: we’re cooked." »

I’m just trying to work something out here. Since December, the Rudd Labor Government has been under siege from the Abbott-led Liberals for pushing ahead with a “great big tax on everything” in the form of an ETS.

The Liberals blocked the ETS. The Liberals urged Kevin Rudd to drop it on the grounds that it was the wrong policy for Australia. The Liberals argued that the rest of the world wasn’t taking such drastic action on climate change and nor should we.

So today Kevin Rudd dumped the ETS, not just because of the political reality that he can’t pass it anyway, and noting also that the rest of the world wasn’t taking such drastic action on climate change. As a result of all this the Liberal Party is now attacking Kevin Rudd for breaking his promise. There are days when the adversarial nature of our effective two-party system delivers point-scoring so transparent and juvenile that it’s an insult to our collective intelligence, and today is such a day.

Continue reading "Liberals should cut the crap on climate" »

If Kevin Rudd made a New Year’s resolution he could have done worse than vow in 2010 to only say something is his number one priority if indeed he really means it.

But to do so would throw a spanner in the works of the Labor spin machine, which remains obsessed with the 24-hour news cycle and opinion polls. A quick search reveals that Mr Rudd has nominated more than half a dozen issues as his supposed number one priority over the past two years and there are probably more. This tally does not include climate change which he of course described as “the great moral challenge of our generation”.

It would seem Mr Rudd’s top priority changes according to the issue of the day that is running in the media, or the audience he is addressing. It is an extremely cynical practice and the most absurd thing is he must think nobody notices.

Continue reading "How many “number one priorities” does one PM need?" »

Google ‘Google’ and you break the Internet – or so the urban myth goes.  Google ‘emissions trading’ and ‘Liberal Party’ and you almost have the same effect. 

News articles, blogs, superseded media releases and the random night thoughts of IT addicted insomniacs await to take you on a virtual walk down memory lane – like one of those ‘best and worst of 2009’ montages we endured before New Years Eve.

But just as relying on fake emails to mount a political case has its pitfalls, Googling facts and peddling them as truth opens up more cracks in credibility than a last-day pitch at the SCG.

Continue reading "You can’t Google your way out of climate change" »

Yes, the Australian Government might have flown a few AFL teams worth of people to Copenhagen in a big stinking jet plane for the Climate Change summit but rest assured, Penny Wong is “actively encouraging” them to catch public transport while they’re there. So you can stop the ironic groans now thanks very much.

While this gesture of carbon reduction behaviour is commendable, The Punch can’t help worrying about the “baggage officer”, who’ll be ferrying bits of luggage all over Princess Mary’s home town, presumably on the Copenhagen Metro (his/her plight was first brought to out attention by @GregAtkinson_jp on Twitter).

Hopefully Senator Wong also “actively encouraged” the delegates to pack light. You know, two pairs of undies - one on, one slung over the hotel shower rack after you’ve hand washed them in the sink.

Continue reading "I hope you packed light Copenhagen delegates" »

While Kevin Rudd desperately reschedules his attendance at the Copenhagen Summit in a craven attempt to ensure he’s in the presence of US President Barack Obama, there are very interesting parallels in the political scenarios on either side of the Pacific.

These are two political leaders elected in almost Messiah-style euphoria.

Their elevation was supposed to ring in “change” after long periods of conservative Government that the elites and media had openly grown to loathe.  There was little public scrutiny of the substantive skills each man would bring to the job – their popularity was a triumph of style over substance.

Continue reading "The mirror ‘Messiahs’ dogged by bad policy" »

IF YOUR job involves one of Australia’s major export industries such as mining or manufacturing, then you probably return home to your family content in the knowledge you are being well paid for a hard day’s work.

You help build the profits that keep the shareholders happy and you are making a valuable contribution to your nation’s economy.

But what if you came home from a hot day at the coal face, the aluminium or steel smelter, to kids accusing you of killing off the planet?  That would never happen, right?

Continue reading "This is close to brainwashing kids on climate change" »

IF climate change really represents a threat to our civilisation comparable to the Nazis than it is time for us to stop backing off in half-hearted surrender and instead tell Mother Nature to shove it.

Recently in arguing against the “disaster track” of a Copenhagen UN compromise agreement on reducing emissions, NASA scientist James Hansen - in many ways the granddaddy of climate change theory - said global warming should be treated like an evil enemy.

“This is analogous to the issue of slavery faced by Abraham Lincoln or the issue of Nazism faced by Winston Churchill,” Hansen said. How did Winston Churchill and more broadly the Allied powers defeat the Nazis and their Axis partners?

Continue reading "If climate change is a battle, let’s have a war" »

Hardline conservative Christians helped orchestrate the flood of correspondence that convinced Liberal MPs to ditch support for Malcolm Turnbull and the emissions trading scheme.

One site that published repeated calls for direct lobbying of politicians was Catch the Fire Ministries, a church whose pastor earlier this year said the Black Saturday bushfires were divine vengeance for liberal abortion laws.

It has also emerged that Cory Bernardi, one of the Liberal senators who led the revolt against Turnbull, called on supporters in late November to wage an email campaign to persuade his colleagues in the Senate that the public was outraged at the ETS. His email was published and endorsed by a website popular with fringe conspiracy theorists.

Continue reading "The holy war on climate change" »

A lot of my comrades on the Left of politics are walking around as if the ascension of Tony Abbott is an early Christmas present, but I’m not so sure.

While some see the rise of the Mad Monk as the Tory version of Latham’s 2004 election car crash, I think the risk is we are gearing up for a re-run of the 1999 Republic referendum.

That was the ballot where Abbott, as executive director of the ‘No’ vote managed to convince battlers to keep the Queen as Head of State because the alternative would be to have the nation run by a bunch of wankers - like Malcolm Turnbull. A decade later and the Left is still coming to terms with the anti-elite backlash that the Republic Referendum – and arguably the 2001 Tampa election – unleashed.

Continue reading "Left should beware Tony Abbott’s war on wankers" »

Tony Abbott has rejected the dominant ETS paradigm. He says he wants, though, to re-balance business and household behaviour and incentives to move the economy to new, cleaner, climate adjustment technologies, but not cripple employment in key industries in the process.

Here’s one suggestion – turn payroll taxes into ‘climate adjustment’ levies, at neutral total cost to business. Then expand business and household rebates on all expenditure on green technology – tax avoidance based on positive, environmental citizenship.

Instead of taxing jobs – always a stupid tax arrangement – treat carbon emissions as an externality and turn the tax into a levy, but allow people to neutralise this levy only through investment in emission reduction technology.

Continue reading "Power to the people on an ETS - without a new tax" »

I arrived in Copenhagen, usually a pretty, peaceful Danish city on Thursday.  As the Copenhagen Climate Conference has approached – starting tomorrow morning – a tension has been building in the air.  It feels like the calm before a storm, when the wind begins to whip up and you can just feel something coming in the air. Walking around the city there are accents from across the world, posters displaying climate change events, protests and technologies, and groups of people closely discussing and speculating.

Over the weekend I have been participating in the 3rd Annual Conference of Youth attended by approximately 1000 youth from over 150 countries. 

The youth movement has been growing exponentially over the last few years – in Australia the Australian Youth Climate Coalition has grown ten fold from 5000 to 50,000 in one year – and this is beginning to represented at the United Nations with a large youth presence at these negotiations. 

Continue reading "Youth delegates have no time for skepticism at Copenhagen" »

Australia, congratulations. We now boast a brand new opposition leader from the far-Right, who proudly declared, say, eight or nine times in a single interview on Tuesday that he would not support climate change legislation, terming it a ‘big new tax’ on the Australian people.

So here we have the new political tactic of our Right- simple, snappy, and to the point- “that other lot want to TAX you!”

This tactic is nothing new, of course. Ben Chifley once observed that the Australian public ‘votes from the hip-pocket reflex’. The Right is simply banking that this is still the case.  Shrewd.

Continue reading "Can the West really be ‘taxed’ on climate?" »

The current debate is not about the science of climate change.

The climate has always changed, it always will. At some level man must be contributing to it.  I strongly believe that reducing pollution can only be a good thing not only for the environment, but also for the Nation’s productive capacity and our kids’ future.

However the ‘debate’ over man-made global warming has now been hijacked by those who claim that if you are arguing against the Rudd Government’s Emission Trading Scheme then somehow you are arguing against the environment.

Continue reading "The carbon tax debate Australia never had" »

“Australia generates 1.5 per cent of global greenhouse emissions and this ETS will reduce world levels by the smallest sliver, which self-evidently will have nil effect on global climate whether you believe in climate warming or not.” Barnaby Joyce – The Innate Problems With Labor’s Emissions Trading Scheme, 17/12/2008.

Using numbers to lend credibility to a flimsy argument is not a new tactic. In the case of those opposing serious action on climate change however, one statistic about Australia’s proportionate global emissions forms the central flimsy plank of their argument. The argument goes that given Australia is responsible for only 1.5% of global emissions, anything we do to reduce CO2 levels is hardly going to make a dent globally. We can’t save the Great Barrier Reef, so the rest of the world is going to have to.

It must test well in focus groups because everyone opposing action on climate change has been trotting it out ever since the debate began. And let’s be honest, as a message it is working.

Continue reading "If we can’t lead on CO2, we shouldn’t in sport or science" »

IT is almost two months to the day since Malcolm Turnbull defiantly proclaimed he could not lead a party that failed to act on climate change.

It could well be his epitaph because it looks increasingly likely they will be his famous last words. His war-like comments in a radio interview on October 1 will come back to haunt him tomorrow when a leadership challenge is expected to try to finally resolve the Liberal Party’s internal angst and division over the Emissions Trading Scheme.

Aside from internal manoeuvrings and mutinous rumblings within the party, the Liberals have a bigger problem. They are sending mixed signals to the electorate about where they stand on climate change and this is worse than death by a thousand swords for a party hoping to win Government at the next election.

Continue reading "Confusion reigns online over ETS and the Liberal Party" »

THERE is a hilarious moment in the Hitchhikers’s Guide to the Galaxy when it is explained to one of the last remaining humans, Arthur Dent, that things are not what they seemed.

Shattering his life-long assumptions following the Earth’s destruction - that’s intergalactic progress - a higher being explains to the hapless Dent, that all those white mice in labs that humans thought were part of various experiments, were in fact, conducting an experiment on us. Humans were not as wise as they thought and now, their planet had been obliterated to make way for a hyperspace bypass.

I thought of this on two counts in recent days. First, there is the parallel with what Malcolm Turnbull, has been telling his troops: do nothing about climate change and the Earth as we know, will be destroyed.

Continue reading "Libs adrift in a hostile galaxy" »

Australians expect their political leaders and their political parties to take effective action on climate change because it is an important issue for them and their children.

The Opposition has always had significant concerns with the Rudd Government’s CPRS legislation. That is why we fought for changes to the proposed scheme, to improve its design and protect Australian jobs.

As a result of the changes secured by the Opposition, tens of thousands of Australian jobs have been saved, farmers have been protected by permanently excluding agriculture from the scheme, $1.1 billion in direct support to small and medium businesses will be delivered, and the threat of blackouts and interruptions to the electricity supply has been removed.

Continue reading "Climate debate a turning point in Liberal Party history" »

The honour of being elected as a member of the Federal Parliament carries with it very serious responsibilities.  Each of us are charged with seeking to do what is right, to listen to the views of our constituents, to represent the political parties that endorsed us, and ultimately determine what is in the nation’s interest. 

My decision to resign from the Shadow Ministry yesterday is one I did not take lightly. I felt compelled to do so because I reached the conclusion that it is not in Australia’s interests to support Labor’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). 

This is a position which was only strengthened by the fact that there was a clear majority in the Coalition Party Room in favour of voting against this legislation, despite what our leader concluded.

Continue reading "Why I quit shadow ministry and won’t back Labor’s ETS" »

The Liberals are currently staggering around the corridors in Parliament House like a bomb has gone off. In political terms it kind of has. The past 36 hours has smashed Malcolm Turnbull’s authority, failed to produce a viable alternative candidate for the leadership, transformed manageable differences of opinion into bitter personal hatreds, left the frontbench a mess with three resignations already and possibly more to come, not to mention a looming reshuffle just to add further fire to an already incendiary situation.

Liberal MPs are openly talking about their sadness at the way the whole thing crashed around their ears. They are worried about their seats and had wanted one of two things to happen - to achieve a quiet consensus on a CPRS deal and to quietly pass the legislation, or for the talks with the Rudd Government to fail and to vote against it. Instead they have got open internal warfare.

Their biggest fear is how it will play out with traditional Liberal Party voters who cannot fathom the logic of what the party has done in embracing a lose-lose situation, whereby people who believe in climate change will give full credit to the Government for introducing a CPRS, while people who do not believe in climate change will punish the Opposition for backing it.

Continue reading "Grass roots revolt the biggest fear for battered Libs" »

Malcolm Turnbull has survived to fight another Question Time. At a Liberal Party meeting this afternoon a motion, moved by Wilson Tuckey, to spill the leadership was defeated in a secret ballot 48-35.

This result denied Kevin Andrews the chance to make his own run at the leadership. It does, however, mean that 35 MPs in the Liberal Party room expressed their wish to be given the chance to dump Mr Turnbull. The Opposition Leaders still faces the herculean task of getting some kind of cohesion in his party on the CPRS.

You can see our blow by blow coverage after the jump.

Continue reading "Question Time Live: 25/11/09" »

Last night Malcolm Turnbull announced his party’s support for the ETS bill with the resigned cheerfulness of a man who knows his days are numbered.

He looked more like a defeated leader at the end of a campaign thanking his supporters than someone who had just prevailed over the Opposition old guard.

It was a pyrrhic victory and nothing he said could disguise that fact.

Continue reading "Malcolm Turnbull: ideology’s latest victim" »

Malcolm Turnbull has retained his position as leader of the Liberal Party after winning a secret ballot on a motion to spill the leadership by 48-35. Punch editors will be posting the latest developments, commentary, pictures and video here as they come to hand. Times are AEDT. Refresh this page for updates.

4pm: Question Time over, the Libs limped their way through it the poor sods, they looked like a footy team that had just got thumped in the GF. Read our coverage of the day unfolded below. I will post a new piece later today wrapping up Turnbull’s two days of hell, and his future from here.

1.55pm: Time for Question Time. The Punch will be covering it live here - join in, should be fun.

1.50pm: Battered Libs limping their way towards chamber for QT. One MP just told me this is their equivalent of DLP split. Total and unabiding fury between the two camps. MPs also talking up hockey as best consensus candidate for leadership change in new year.

1.41pm: News round-ups of the events at the partyroom meeting now available at news.com.au and The Australian.

1.33pm: It’s certainly a better result than yesterday on the CPRS - but it won’t give Turnbull any security. Almost half the party still out to get him…

1.31pm: Joe Hockey speaking after the meeting. “Clearly this issue has done us incredible damage and I hope the Australian people forgive us…”. Emphasises the Liberal Party is a progressive party. Says given the mood of the party the 48-35 result was a good result for Turnbull.

1.29pm: It’s understood Joe Hockey was sounded out by the right for leadership on condition he opposed the CPRS. Said he’s not interested in starting his leadership career by selling his soul.

1.28pm: Kevin Andrews says he accepts the result of the ballot, but 35 is a significant number in the party room, which makes a strong point about the position on the CPRS. He says of Turnbull: “of course he has my support, he’s the leader of the party.”

1.23pm: No spill. Motion lost 48-35 in a secret ballot.

1.14pm: Cannot find a single Lib who is taking Kevin Andrews’ candidacy seriously or as a genuine threat. With Abbott not in the mix Turnbull shouldn’t get rolled.

1.13pm: Parliament security, at the request of the Opposition Leader’s office, are preventing journalists from congregating near the party room. Not sure why, as people inside the meeting will text developments to the press gallery anyway.

12.56pm: Samantha Maiden of The Australian writes on Twitter: turnbull has just walked into office with dep COS credlin. looks really upset

Continue reading "Live blog: Liberals in crisis" »

Highlights from this morning’s newspaper coverage of the Liberal leadership turmoil.

The Australian
Lead story: MALCOLM Turnbull last night threatened to quit the Liberal leadership ... Kevin Andrews, who has declared himself a leadership candidate, will today confirm his intention to stand against Mr Turnbull ... It is understood frontbencher Tony Abbott will also stand but Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey reportedly will not. Read it here.
Matthew Franklin: How Turnbull staged his own destruction
Dennis Shanahan: Leader enters the dead zone
Peter van Onselen: Turnbull now leader in name only

Continue reading "Reading roundup: Turnbull’s leadership in turmoil" »

HIS voice hoarse and breaking from arguing his case over 12 hours of solid meetings, a haggard Malcolm Turnbull declared “I’m the leader” six times last night at a defiant but probably futile press conference aimed at asserting his authority over a political party which is split almost exactly in half.

By the end of the press conference he looked like a doomed man, almost resigned to his likely demise as he faces betrayal by members of Shadow Cabinet, abandonment by the National Party, with almost half the party now canvassing a leadership spill as early as this Thursday - or protracted sniping ahead of his execution at a later date.

The press conference started in bullish fashion. Flanked by deputy leader Julie Bishop and chief climate negotiator Ian Macfarlane, Mr Turnbull declared he had won “overwhelming” party support for his deal with Kevin Rudd over the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.

Rubbish, rebel MPs were saying to reporters via SMS and in corridor chats, explaining that 40 MPs had spoken against the package and just 33 in favour - and that Mr Turnbull had inflated the numbers by arbitrarily including Shadow Cabinet in its entirety in the yes camp, getting him the paltriest possible majority at 47 to 46.

Continue reading "Last plea of a doomed man" »

UPDATE 8.20pm: Total chaos as meeting ends, set to resume at 8am tomorrow, strong talk that he will be challenged, massive press pack outside Party Room, Turnbull apparently has 41 MPs behind his ETS Plan and 33 against, MPs saying it is not a strong enough mandate to back the ETS, Turnbull has apparently blown up inside meeting, says nothing to press on way out. More to follow.

Update 8.15pm: Sky News reports the back bench vote actually came out 41-33 against the CPRS, but Turnbull declared with the shadow ministers he could get a majority in favour. According to David Speers he made this announcement while some Senators were outside the room. To say they’re unhappy is an understatement.

Update 8pm: Apparently the No vote disputes the party room numbers on the CPRS and are going to move a leadership spill. Kevin Andrews confirms he would put his hand up if the spill gets up.

Update 7.40pm: Malcolm Turnbull says he’s won the support he needs in the Coalition party room. But they’re reconvening at 8pm and there’s rumours of a leadership spill.

Update 5.10 pm: Perhaps not surprisingly Tuckey couldn’t get enough hands up for his motion.

Update 4.50pm: Wilson Tuckey has just moved for a spill of the leadership in the party room. The motion won’t get up without a majority show of hands. But it’s sure to make Malcolm Turnbull’s day just that much worse.

Continue reading "Next two hours could seal Malcolm Turnbull’s fate" »

Just when you thought climate change debate couldn’t get any more hysterical, polar bears start falling out of the sky into city streets. (Warning: this may upset you if you really love polar bears.)

In the ad by climate change campaign Plane Stupid, the message after dozens of polar bears plummet to violent deaths is: “an average European flight produces over 400kg of greenhouse gases per passenger ... that’s the weight of an adult polar bear”. So the logic seems to be: belch 400kg of gas, kill one 400kg animal. Simple.

Actually it’s nonsense of course, but this kind of non sequitur has come to typify both established orthodox sides of the climate change debate in leaked email exchanges and the climax of negotiations over critical environmental laws today in Canberra.

Continue reading "Falling polar bears: Losing the plot on climate change" »

Update 10:55am: Shadow Cabinet signed off this morning on Malcolm Turnbull’s deal with the Government over the CPRS, and it is now being debated by the Coalition Party Room.

No. But he’s the Right Faction’s stalking horse should Malcolm Turnbull falter in his handling of the CPRS - which in the eyes of the more skeptical and conservative Libs he is already doing. And if there is a blow-up in the Party Room today, Kevin Andrews is expected to run for the leadership.

In what is looming as a chaotic and unpredictable day, the Right Faction is positioning itself to inflict a potentially mortal wound on Turnbull by moving a spill in protest at his excessive concessions over the carbon pollution reduction scheme.

Kevin Andrews is not the Right’s preferred candidate - but he is the one who has volunteered to go over the top on behalf of the party’s conservatives. He told SkyNews ominously yesterday that “At the moment we have a leader but I am a loyal servant of the party and I will do any job that I am asked to do,” Mr Andrews told Sky News.

Continue reading "Is this the next Leader of the Liberal Party?" »

Today The Punch celebrates the ground-breaking policy work being undertaken by visionaries within the Coalition party room in an effort to address global warming.

With 31 per cent of the population now signing on as climate change deniers these fine Australians are leading a national movement that can make us all feel better in the face of those flighty Nobel Prize winners who insist on preaching Armageddon.

In saving the planet by denying there’s a problem, the likes of Nick Minchin, Tony Abbott and Barnaby Joyce are contributing to a global body of work that has cured cancer, ended domestic violence and prevented the Holocaust.

Continue reading "Elvis has left the building: a brief history of denialism" »

Momentum is a fundamental concept in both physics and politics.

It’s a concept climate change skeptics like Barnaby Joyce just don’t get.

As Penny Wong and Greg Combet shepherd the sensible people in the Australian Parliament towards a bipartisan agreement on a CPRS, Barnaby is still out there howling at the moon to his diehard audience of deniers.

Continue reading "Climate challenge missed by Coalition howlers" »

The introduction of the CPRS Bill or the ETS, whichever you choose to call it, is a mechanism where the Government will collect in excess of $70 billion tax revenue in the first six years and potentially hundreds of billions of dollars thereafter.

The commission earned by bankers and brokers will amount to multiple billions of dollars and the financial imperative for them to support the scheme is overwhelming.

This new tax will not save the Great Barrier Reef; it is not going to end the droughts; it will neither contribute to Greenland freezing nor thawing.

Continue reading "Why I am still voting no to this ridiculous CPRS" »

The patrons leaning on the bar at bustling country pub Flannery’s and Gore were shocked when a wild-eyed man with a slide-rule in his pocket burst in the door.

The man leaps on the bar and shouts: “Everybody, this pub is about to collapse.

“I’m an engineer and I’ve just been looking at the walls outside - they’re about to give way.” In the stunned silence, some punters think they hear a faint creaking noise from the walls, but can’t be sure it’s just not the crickets.

Continue reading "A climate change parable, where you write the ending" »

We are in a very interesting time in politics where malleable positions are starting to solidify.

The position on the Government’s Save The World policy, the indomitable ETS or CPRS, the Cunning Plan to make the economy RS, will in the near future no doubt deliver us another acronym so we will have a form of rolling acronyms to keep the truth at bay all the way to the second vote in November.

All the polls on the ETS prior to this period have been rather pointless because no one knew what on earth it was beyond a thought bubble that they hoped would pop and go away.

Continue reading "People won’t cop a tax on food, so won’t buy the ETS" »

Don’t worry if you don’t understand what the ETS is supposed to do or what the letters even stand for. You’re not alone.

Peter had no idea what the letters E, T and S stood for when we asked him, but did manage his own summary of the policy:  ‘It’s gonna cost extra. You don’t get anything for free. Soon they will be taxing the air that we breathe.” Well they kinda are actually Pete, at least what we put into it.

With all the debate about Climate Change and the focus very much on the ETS, here at The Punch we decided it would be a good idea to go out and see what people actually knew about it.

Continue reading "Punch survey: 15% of us know what the ETS is" »

In 2007, Chris Goodall contended that walking may cause more environmental harm than driving.

A noted that a 5km drive would add 1kg of carbon to atmosphere while a walk would seemingly add nothing if you just looked at its direct effects. However, Goodall contended that for many people, they would need more energy to sustain a regular 5km walk. To make up the 180 calories would likely generate 3.6kg in carbon emissions. The trade-off wasn’t even close.

What is significant is that Goodall wasn’t some member of an anti-environmental think tank but himself a strong environmentalist and the author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life.

And it was he who was suggesting, contrary to one of Al Gore’s dicta in An Inconvenient Truth, that substituting driving for physical transportation might not be environmentally-friendly at all; even if it is friendly to your physical health.

Continue reading "How and why the ETS could cost you" »

Big retailers are scared, it was reported this morning, to say what they think about the checkout-counter effects of the Federal Government’s plan to help save the planet with its emissions trading scheme.

The supermarkets are worried they will enrage environmentally-conscious customers if they dare to so much as suggest there might be some unpleasant side-effects to the ETS.

In case you’ve missed it, The Australian reported retailers are worried the cost of groceries will go up, by about 5 per cent, under the Rudd Government’s plan.

Continue reading "Food for thought - will the ETS hit us at the checkout?" »

A funny thing happened on the weekend: the world’s second largest greenhouse gas emitter - the US - took the first step towards establishing a carbon reduction scheme and almost nobody wanted to talk about it.

The Obama-endorsed scheme passed the US House of Representatives and only has to clear their Senate to become law.

In Australia, a few people welcomed the vote and applauded the move, but almost no-one dared to lift the carpet and comment on the design of the US scheme.

Continue reading "Looking to America for some sense on emissions" »

A review of the United States’ Waxman-Markey climate change bill by Australia’s Parliamentary Library has exposed some interesting facts on safeguarding industry.

Handed down on Monday, the parliamentary report on the US Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) says: “Industries with proportionally high import or export values are potentially fully shielded from the scheme until the majority (greater than 70 per cent) of global production in that sector is subject to emissions pricing.

“The (Waxman-Markey) bill allows for up to 100 per cent compensation for all direct and indirect costs to industries that are assessed as emissions intensive and trade exposed.”

Continue reading "ETS will cost jobs - just ask Barack Obama" »

The Australian Government likes to claim we are doing our part to avoid dangerous climate change. Australia’s current target is to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by 5 to 25 per cent by 2020, compared to 2000 emissions levels, with a 60 per cent drop by 2050.

This sounds impressive enough, and there is no doubt that this will require transformative changes in energy use if it is to be achieved. Other developed countries have similar targets. President Obama’s aim for the USA, for instance, is to get back to 1990 levels by 2020 and 80 per cent lower by 2050.

So we’re doing our bit. But is this bit enough, or fair, or feasible? In short, no, no and no. Let me explain.

Continue reading "Even halving our emissions won’t be enough. Here’s why" »