Emissions Trading

There was a telling first line from Professor Ross Garnaut during the launch of his latest carbon trading paper: “Well, here we are again.”

It was the release of what is now Garnaut’s sixth paper, and his tomes are beginning to take on the appearance of some tragic existentialist in terms of both their size and themes. “We are living through an awful contest of knowledge versus ignorance,” was one of his more memorable lines.

Like Garnaut’s previous presentations it was worthy, intelligent and held a message that the Government itself has been unable to articulate: that a price on carbon won’t raise your cost of living. Putting aside some problems with that theory, the real problem for Garnaut’s latest volume lies in the political realities it exists in.

Continue reading "It’s deja vu all over again for Garnaut’s carbon price" »

Tony Abbott is playing hard in his bid for power, but Malcolm Turnbull might offer his colleagues a more elegant solution.

In what appeared to be an orchestrated ratchetting up of hostilities this week, senior Coalition figures, one after the other, likened Julia Gillard, courtesy of her backflip on a carbon price (by her own admission, “effectively a tax”) to the murderous and delusional Libyan dictator, Colonel Muammar Gaddafi.

Intemperate? Certainly. But it was typical of a febrile atmosphere currently gripping Canberra. The personal vitriol directed at Ms Gillard is now extreme and she has responded in kind, accusing Tony Abbott of baiting on the race issue.

Continue reading "The Turnbull longshot that could stop the nasty rhetoric" »

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" »