A persistent myth about the role of the Greens in carbon pricing legislation has emerged in recent years. It’s argued even by some of the best journalists in the press gallery, such as Phil Coorey and Laurie Oakes, that the Greens, in their ideological purity, doomed Australia to years of wrangling over a carbon price by not voting for Kevin Rudd’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme in 2009.
If they had, the myth goes, Australia would have had an emissions trading scheme up and running that could never be removed.
Wrong.
The CPRS was bad policy that would have done nothing to curb greenhouse emissions. In its final form, there would have been no carbon price of any kind. So generous were the handouts to industry that the CPRS would have actually cost the government money for over a decade. Indeed, free permits to trade-exposed industries grew over time under the CPRS, with households paying the bill.
Moreover, the Rudd government had no interest — until Malcolm Turnbull was replaced by Tony Abbott in the climate denialist putsch of November 2009 — in getting Greens support for the scheme. Labor was primarily interested in securing bipartisan political cover and using the CPRS as a tool to wedge the Liberals, until Abbott boldly and cleverly turned the tables. That’s why the then-government refused to even discuss the CPRS with Bob Brown.
When it comes to the debacle that is Australia’s current position on climate action, there are plenty of villains — and they’re mainly in the Liberal and Labor parties, in business and trade unions, not among the Greens.
Maybe, but the Greens are certainly guilty of the idiocy of “reduction“. They would have us believe that without any alternative baseload power, carbon pricing would induce industry to reduce its (carbon-based) power to zero. Further, that token reductions in carbon usage by one billion rich people would allow seven or nine billion people to live an industrialised lifestyle with no further damage to the greenhouse.
There is no sustainable level of carbon emissions for us to reduce to, carbon fuels must be replaced. And dont believe them saying that wind-backed-by-gas is non-carbon. We have to go nuclear.
Nice that you state the plain truth but why did you omit from the dishonourable list BK who has peddled that line in his tired, and tiresome, by-the-numbers denigration of anything Green?
Also pleased to see Crikey clarify their position on that. I argued on the crikey web pages quite a lot that the Greens were doing the right thing by rejecting the first model CPRS. It was always about Rudd playing politics, and Bernard Keane was a vociferous opponent of the Greens policy.
He was wrong.
Thanks Roger Clifton, a mindless contribution about a non-policy that the Greens don’t hold. Brilliant insight
Dogs B* – The greenhouse crisis is caused by “carbon fuels”, so the cure is “non-carbon fuels”. The Greens admit the crisis but deny the cure.
Instead we get the non-sequitur “renewables”, an irrelevant cure to an imagined shortage of mineral resources. However any practical application of renewables requires a limitless supply of mineral gas to back up the windmills, solar panels etc. Any assertion of “low-carbon” is code for “more gas”.
That’s a windmill salesman’s dream, but environmentally it’s mindless.
What total crap!
The CPRS DID have a price on carbon:
“The Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme would have put a price on carbon in a systematic way throughout the economy” (Department of Climate Change Green Paper, 2008, 13).
“The price of emissions would increase the cost of those goods and services that are most emissions-intensive” (Department of Climate Change, 2008, 13).
“Since carbon pollution permits will be tradable, the price of permits will be determined by the market” (Department of Climate Change, 2008, 13).
And The Greens, along with the Climate Action Summit had already rejected it for “not going far enough”. The Greens of course went on to agree to a scheme that didn’t go as far and destroyed Gillard’s Prime Ministership in the process. Having already created the space for Tony Abbott to become opposition leader.
Some evidence is required to support these ridiculous claims!