Why was it important for Australia to put a price — ANY price — on carbon? The Australian has a compelling answer today:
The head of one of Australia’s leading power companies has argued that the collapse of an emissions trading scheme and the subsequent lack of a carbon price means that Australia’s next baseload power stations are likely to be coal-fired.
Origin Energy chief Grant King told the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association meeting in Brisbane that having a renewable energy target of 20 per cent reduction in greenhouse emissions by 2020 “made no sense” without putting a price on carbon.
He said a carbon price of $20-$40 a tonne would be required to start making a gas-fired power station more economically viable than one fired by coal.
More dirty power generation — when Australia wants to lead the world in cleaning up its act.
Labor’s emissions trading scheme was a deeply flawed mechanism. But it was a start. And as Malcolm Turnbull — burnt and bitter by the ETS experience — pointed out last night, while both parties can achieve short-term emissions reduction targets they fail to “indicate a pathway to longer-term emission reductions beyond 2020”.
Like Turnbull’s prime ministerial ambitions, on climate change, we are nowhere.
Doesn’t this suggest that Labour which squibbed on the full CPRS should / could do an “CPRS Light” – a simpler policy like that recently proposed in the US that starts just with the electricity sector to get things going? Therefore avoiding all the hand wringing and job loss arguments for emissions intensive trade exposed industries and the transport sector; but building a workable structure for the future.
Energy only affects part of the problem, there’s lots of contributors, one of the major ones is transport. If you didn’t do a broad base aren’t you unfairly ‘targeting’ a particular sector? (The Super profits tax is ringing in my ears).
There are huge potential savings just by doing things better with energy efficiency, for this measure alone I think the insulation rollout actually has had some achievements that are not being heard. Since putting new batts in a few years ago in an old home my energy bill has dropped significantly.
Putting a broad base means it’s across the board and the negative externality of carbon pollution is correctly rectified in the economy at all levels.
While potentially politically expedient can we even be sure that even a CPRS light would get through our ridiculous senate? Remember the balance of power is held by Fielding who thinks the earth didn’t exist 4000 years ago.
Apparently ‘Climate change is crap’ and the alternative budget scraps nearly all green energy programs so I don’t hold out any hope short of rebalancing the unrepresentative swill.
Rudd is getting a lot of flack for ‘breaking promises’ but it should be remembered the government worked overtime with Turnbull to compromise and presented CPRS 3 times to the senate. The senate are the ones who should be held accountable.
The Labor spin has always been that their CRPRS was a good start.
Yet no Labor supporter has been able to justify the CPRS legislating certainty for polluters being able to continue to pollute and their “compensation” for doing so.
The CPRS was like introducing some anti-tobacco legislation which included promises that any future restrictions would be limited, and promised to compensate the industry for any losses due to these restrictions, and even greater compensation if one day further restrictions were to be applied.
With both the CPRS (and the tobacco example), a next step would then require either massive compensation or the government back-tracking on its legislated certainty. Doing the first is too expensive, and doing the second would create major business uncertainty which would effect all industries.
Putting a price on carbon emissions, even if it is small, is a good first step.
But the CPRS was mainly about providing “certainty” to the polluters. Certainty that they would be allowed to continue to pollute, and certainty that they would receive massive compensation.
Very disappointed that Crikey fell for this spin from a gas company spruiking its wares.
There is absolutely no chance that anyone will build a coal fired power station in the current uncertain circumstances. It is a massive investment – a 40 year investment – that will not happen when the investors cannot be certain what kind of carbon price, and what sort of compensation structures, they will face in just a few years’ time.
On the contrary, the CPRS would have given investors enough certainty to at least re-commission old coal fired power stations and possibly to build new ones, because it was designed so arse-about. The absence of a carbon price leaves far too much uncertainty for such a huge investment to be undertaken.
As I’ve posted elsewhere on Crikey over the last few days, if Rudd really thought that climate change was a serious environmental and economic threat, he would have started all the other massive changes needed to tackle the issue.
One of the simplest examples is public transport. A future price on carbon should reduce car use, and this requires significant increased patronage of public transport. In the case of Melbourne’s trains, it will take many years to repair the decades of neglect and fix the tracks and signaling. And it will take years to get new trains.
Yet if you look at all three Rudd budgets, it is business as usual with funding for roads and the huge job of fixing public transport has not even been started.
The billions spent on fuel subsidiaries and the subsidiaries for company cars also need to be ended. This cannot happen all at once. Once again, if Rudd believed in climate change the process would have started in his first budget.
Note that none of these changes are in the second or third budgets either.
There are also many other things which need to be done which are not part of a CPRS or Carbon Tax. And there are many things that can be done which would cut emissions now – fore example, ending old growth logging.
The first great myth of Labor was that the CPRS was a “good start”.
The second great myth of Labor is that action on climate change is only about what was in the CPRS.
Yes, a ETS or carbon tax is an essential and important part of the process. But many other things need to be done, and the almost complete lack of action by Rudd proves, at least to me, that to Labor climate change is only a political problem and not something that needs real action.
And finally, the Rudd government changing the solar cell rebate scheme so that installing solar cells is now BAD for the environment (ie result in more carbon emissions) speaks volumes.
(I have yet to read a comment from a Labor supporter justifying the lack of non-CPRS actions. Just like the Liberal supporters have gone very quiet on Hockey, Labor seem to have no answer to my issues.)