THE big news in Australia at the moment is yesterday’s Prime Ministerial announcement that Australia will cut its greenhouse gas emissions by 5 per cent of 2000 levels by 2020, but could cut up to 15 percent if other countries also sign up to stronger reductions.
In response to criticism that the target is too low, the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, has said this is really equal to a 27 percent reduction in “carbon pollution” for each Australian from 2000 to 2020 or a 34 percent reduction for each Australian from 1990 because of population growth.
I find it somewhat amusing that the government can get away with committing to something that won’t be achieved for 12 years – a few full parliamentary terms there – and something that can be explained away as just 5 percent or, as the audience changes, a significant 34 percent!
But what the average Australian would probably like to know is how much this economic intervention will push up prices, in particular the price of basics like the home electricity bill.
Well, that probably depends too – including on what the price of carbon ends up being traded at and that will depend on how the carbon market operates, how many speculators there are, and how the big banks manage to package up this complicated financial derivative.
Furthermore, according to the Minister for Climate Change, Penny Wong, speaking on 2GB this morning, many low income families and pensioners will be compensated for the additional cost of the trading scheme. Indeed it was suggested by the host, Jason Morrison, that some will end up ahead from the government handouts associated with the introduction of the complicated financial intervention – the ETS.
Mr Morrison called the ETS, another tax, but one key difference between a trading scheme and a tax is that a tax could be relatively easily removed, but an ETS would be very difficult to unwind.
The bottom-line is that an ETS is complicated financial engineering that will increase prices and, even Professor Garnaut has explained, that by moving ahead of the rest of the world Australian business will be disadvantaged and Australian jobs will go offshore.
The bottom-line is that an ETS will make Australians poorer while it is richer not poorer nations that are better able to protect their natural environment.
The Australian Environment Foundation is developing an internet campaign to oppose the ETS. Our new website is under construction: www.ListenToUs.org.au . But you can already register at the site with an email address to get updates and make a financial investment in the campaign.
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD is a critical thinker with expertise in the scientific method.
This is just another version of everyone taking in everyones washing for no good purpose whatsoever just to increase the price of everything and make us less competitive on the world market. What a mob of gormless fools.
Penny ‘s CRAP ie Carbon Reduction Action plan was described in yesterday’s telegraph as a tax and it is from this tax that the handout will be made.
“The funding will be raised from the carbon taxes under the emissions trading scheme, which is due to be up and running by 2010.”
http://www.news.com.au/dailytelegraph/story/0,22049,24800702-5005941,00.html
Your very brief appearance with Jason was good, keep him up to his promise to get you back for a longer interview.
we could always propose that the government have a Royal Commision into climate change.
“The bottom-line is that an ETS will make Australians poorer while it is richer not poorer nations that are better able to protect their natural environment. ”
yeah sure, we’re the worst polluters on a per capita basis, so your point is BS I’m afraid.
Tassie’s been diddled, the rest of the world is to reduce emission against 1990 base year, Australia is to use 2000, and then report on a national basis with a conversion to 1990.
For the nation, the 1990 figure was about 551 MT, for 2000 about 552 Mt e.g. virtually the same.
for Tassie 1990 was 11 MT, and 2000 8 MT e.g. a 30% reduction, in 2006 its still about 8.6 or a 25.9% reduction from 1990 but a slight increase from 2000.
e.g. if its Kyoto we exceed target, if its 2000 we must reduce and/ or pay to meet the target.
This means we will be paying the hot air tax based on dodgy numbers. Individual sectors that have also reduced emmissions from the Kyoto base year to 2000 will also be penalised.
A Proposition: The GFC and AGW together are the best things that could have happened to a KRudd Governemnt.
In 12 months KRudd has ditched surplus budgetting – all in the name of countering the GFC. He is still spending like a drunken sailor, the one thing all LABOR govts are good at.
So surprise surprise – KRudd will need lots more money to fund his socialist spendathon.
Now he could increase the GST (you remember the GST? That was the tax Howard won an election on but was opposed by LABOR; KRudd raving on about a “day of infamy” or the like.)
Apart from the fact that the LIbs in WA might(just might) oppose such an increase it would be unpopular and KRudd would die if he became unpopular.
So we have CC coming to his rescue. KRudd implements same(after all he has a mandate just like the one Howard did to introduce a GST), gets huge amounts of dosh and can go on implementing his socialist agenda – spend,spend,spend!
Now what’s that I hear you say? KRudd is going to give all this CARBON TAX back to us by way of compensation.
And how do you know this? Because we have politician’s promise that it will be so.
I rest my case.
Hmmm… 5% from 2000 levels. How does that stack up with 4% from 1990 levels?
http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/europes-climate-policy-for-dummies-4-by-2020-4791
Let’s see, naught into naught is… uh, 1990 guzinta… er…three take away two…uh…
Oh what the heck, we feel good about ourselves. What else matters?
Yes it is indeed CRAP, being nothing more than a major income redistribution exercise from the top 20% to the bottom 50% (mainly carers, the unemployed, pensioners), enabling the latter to maintain their per capita emissions for no net reduction (the middle 40% are about neutral) . It also has quite a few features of the Madoff Ponzi scheme: all have to contribute to the “Wong-I just made off with your Money CRAP” fund in proportion to their consumption of goods whose prices go up (not just electricity, since all food clothing etc embody energy liable to the Wong ponzi despite her lie that only electricity & gas will cost noticeably more), and the funds are redistributed to allow at least half of all households to maintain their spending on carbon-intensive energy, but over time the upper 20% will lose most as industry relocates overseas or simply shuts down once the free permits cease, just as in the Madoff scheme the biggest contributors eventually lost everything.
But there is a silver lining; Barry Brook, director of the Research Institute for Climate Change and Sustainability at the University of Adelaide, said the cut announced today was “such a pitifully inadequate attempt to stop dangerous climate change that we may as well wave the white flag now”. Let’s hope Rudd follows this sage advice, I can supply the white flag.
Wow, it has finally sunk into the collective (half?) wit of the Ruddocracy that fixed targets are actually continually reducing targets for any nation with an immigration policy. Fixed target plus rising population must equal shrinking individual quota.
So if one of your kids happens to find a life partner from another country during their future travels they will discover that the option of settling back in Australia has been cancelled by Climate Lord Wong and this pernicious extension of quota mania.
So you can look forward to a few meetings with grandchildren who are complete strangers and when you pass on you won’t be around to see their share of your estate liquidated and sent to your kids new home overseas.
But don’t worry about that folks, because long term intergenerational issues were not in the brief for the Treasury modellers, and no-one will be able to trace it all back to the bogans who implemented the policy. And Wong will have a cushy job at the UN by then, as high commissioner for gender confused whales.
I love the blatant lying coming from the “green” lobbies right now:
“5% not enough to stave off catastrophic climate change!”
“5% not enough to save the great barrier reef!”
To turn these into quasi-truthful statements, they would have to say:
“Australia cutting emissions by 5% will not be enough to influence China, India, the EU, or the US to take similar cuts and possibly stave off climate change and/or save the great barrier reef!”
Hmmm….I can see why they lie.
Further to my last I see that John Quiggin has also raised the white flag on behalf of the Rudd government’s allegedly abandoned commitment to fighting non-existent cliamte change – and that Barry Brook in his piece for the Adelaide Advertiser that riased the white flag on behalf of Rudd actually began by extolling the White Paper:
“I suppose most sensible people will be happy with the upper-end emissions reduction targets outlined today by the Australian Government in the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS) white paper – a 14% reduction by 2020 compared to 1990 levels, which equates to a per capita drop of 41%. These are ambitious and deeply challenging goals, and equal to or better than the per capita targets proposed by other developed nations such as the EU, UK and US. Australia’s 2050 target of 60% is unmoved from past policy, but it is the short-term targets that matter right now [why? not explained].” But he goes on after his white flag bit: “[The Rudd goal of 5% by 2020 or 15% depending on global agreement] – even if fully achieved (and it will take some mighty effort) – will still commit to global temperature rises of 3 or more degrees Celsius, setting in motion a slew of climate feedbacks that take the planet to a state unfit for humanity for all future generations, and for most species”. Cheerful chappie – but he missed his true vocation as a preacher of hellfire and damnation! The SA government should have found Brook some shack to serve as a chapel instead of providing him with millions to peddle this nonsense.
Hmmm lets promise something to be delivered when the current crop of drop kicks will most likely have moved on. Probably for “family reasons” you know. Came across this oh how I wish they would http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2008/dec/12/environment-climate-change-poznan.
ETS in a nut shell “raise the price of energy so that less is used, the revenue raised must not go back into the economy because that is counter productive”. At the level proposed it will do no more than raise tax a little. Wonder when it will sink home we are being mislead by religious zealots.
FYI:
President-elect Barack Obama has selected the director of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory to be his energy secretary.
Nobel-prize winning physicist Steven Chu is a leading advocate of reducing greenhouse gases by developing new energy sources.
Since 2004, Chu has been director of the Berkeley lab, the oldest of the Energy Department’s national laboratories.
He is also a professor of physics and molecular and cell biology at the University of California, Berkeley and former head of the physics department at Stanford University.
In 1997, Chu shared the Nobel Prize in physics for research into ways to cool and trap atoms using laser light.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/n/a/2008/12/15/state/n142630S02.DTL&type=newsbayarea
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Chu
I think the differences between a carbon tax and a trading scheme need to be better understood. A tax would be better for several reasons.
One of the main ones (as Jennifer mentions here, and I mentioned in my booklet on the issue published by CIS) is that it will be easier to remove a tax later, while a trading system will have strong vested-interest groups out there trying to keep it in place (and make it stricter).
Even James Hansen has opposed a trading system, and prefers the honesty of a tax.
Well dear oh dear – nobody is happy – greens are miffed. Righties and rednecks are outraged.
Anyway – pretty simple – just get the cool-ition or coal-ition/deny-alition to run against it next election. Problem solved? (well if they win!)
Or perhaps elect the greens and make a 40% cut.
Meanwhile in Queensland – the 4 C’s – climate, coal, cows and coral…..
In astronomy, the geocentric model or The Ptolemaic world view of the universe is the superseded theory that the Earth is the center of the universe and other objects go around it, espoused by the Hellenistic astronomer Claudius Ptolemaeus in the 2nd century AD.
The geocentric model held sway into the early modern age; from the late 16th century onward it was gradually replaced by the heliocentric model of Copernicus, Galileo and Kepler.
The view today is one of even greater insignificance.
Oh well at least we’re important enough to change climate. Or are we? Dammit!
This is just an outrage. Any compromise with this science fraud is locking in science fraud as a governing principle. No matter how small the restrictions it places a disastrous uncertainty on entrepreneurs since if policy is going to openly embrace irrationality as a way of life then businessman can never rely on rational policy when making long-term investments. All efforts must be made to overturn this cap-and-kill menace. Even now its caused malinvestments way ahead of its implementation. Investment in gas rather than nuclear or coal turbines. Investments in expensive pipelines to effect this.
Supposing that the way of the future is a nuclear power plant with a coal-liquification plant beside it. The shadow of a cap-and-kill system, no matter what the target, will be enough to destroy the intention of people to put this sort of thing into effect. Energy economics and peak oil theory tells us we are in serious trouble even without this cap-and-kill. And hence this is a strategic move to harm human beings. Very much akin to the DDT-bureaucratisation holocaust.
What are you talking about amused? Yes we can change the climate. We can cool it but we cannot warm it. We are on a planet with a one-way catastrophic-cooling bias. And there are very good ways to cool the planet and there isn’t any problem with that. There are however no good ways to warm a planet like ours. Thats a lot harder gig to manage.
Thats what the scientific evidence says and it says nothing else. Anyone who claims otherwise is lying. This is a movement of compulsive liars.
Humphreys you traitor. Why are you still promoting a carbon tax? Malaria may be worse than cigarette addiction. What is your point? You have never had a point to your obsessive CO2-bedwetting and your relentless promotion of the second-worst-alternative.
Your job, you mindless jerk, is to promote THE BEST POLICIES. Not the second-worst policy.
Imagine an economics graduate so incompetent that he thinks his job is to promote second-worst policy in all cases.
What on earth is your point jamama? Has Chu come up with any evidence for this science fraud? No he hasn’t. A research grant whore doesn’t stop being a research grant whore just because someone gives him a Nobels. In fact Al Gore got a Nobels also. And he’s still a whore.
” Yes we can change the climate. We can cool it but we cannot warm it”
Nup, you can’t. Geoengineering my @#$%.
The Earth’s too big. Climate momentum too great.
“Australian jobs will go offshore”
yeah, it’s gonna suck when all those coal mining jobs end up in china.
wait, hang on, the coal is physically located in australia. why are we compensating them, then?
If the greens are real about their anger at the Federal ALP Government and their concerns of climate change they must act now to back up their public denigration of Rudd, Wong and Garrett.
They must promise to withhold preferences and to campaign against the ALP at the next Federal and State elections. Without such a commitment, their protest is no more than cheap political grandstanding.
If they really believe Carbon dioxide will cause a disaster and that urgent action is required then they should put principles before political power.
There is no excuse, as reducing carbon emissions appears to have been the major reason for the sleazy backroom preference deal at the last election.
The greens and their cheer squads in the ACF and WWF etc must put up or shut up.
No amused you are talking nonsense. The fact remains that there are very good ways to cool the planet. But there are no cheap ways to warm the planet. Thats the fact of the matter as things stand on this planet with its one-way cooling bias.
The greens aren’t falling for that jive cinders. They are evil and crazy. But they aren’t stupid and they are not going to go for that sort of thing.
Even a simpleton can understand, Dave, that is the cost of importing coal is lower than the cost of local mining, the imported product will be preferred and coal miners will lose their jobs.
Look up the “law of comparative advantage” in any basic economics text.
Rudd is now trying to destroy Australia’s comparative advantages, and trash the economy.
Unlike Whitlam and Keating, on this occasion it is intentional.
hey settle down Birdie –
emotional outbursts are for the arts, but I must admit it could be accepted in science today because it’s getting that way isn’t it?
I was just linking to what I thought was important info – i.e who is the next US energy minister. Obviously you already knew it.
but over time the upper 20% will lose most as industry relocates overseas or simply shuts down once the free permits cease, just as in the Madoff scheme the biggest contributors eventually lost everything.
Tim, i simply love your solid, entirely fact based analysis.
surely switching to production of “green” products will not provide a single job.
and all production will immediately be moved to all those other countries. you know, to those that joined Kyoto a long time ago…
We can cool it but we cannot warm it. We are on a planet with a one-way catastrophic-cooling bias.
this is total nonsense.
obviously just burning the fossil fuels is a pretty good way of warming the planet. cooling (via darkening the atmosphere, i assume?) isn t that easy either and has all kind of side effects…
again i am rather happy, that your claims are supported by soooooo many facts and scientific papers. i m sleeping well in the knowledge, that you have it all well thought out…
Just filing this here:
The Climate Change Minister and the Minister for Families, Housing, Community Services and Indigenous Affairs visited the Westburys’ small rented flat in Bronte, in Sydney’s east.
They enjoyed a relaxed conversation and Ms Westbury, whose combined family income is about $60,000, was happy to learn that tackling climate change would leave the family with an extra $6 a week from tax cuts and family repayments.
Ms Westbury and her husband, Joe, believe climate change is a problem, and both want to do their bit. But Mr Westbury, a furniture designer who has run the design company Red Rocket for the past 10 years, worries the ETS might simply be another tax.
The transition to a low-emissions economy is predicted to cause a 1.1 per cent rise in inflation. For Mr Westbury, this means his furniture will cost more to produce — an unnerving prospect given his overall costs have already jumped about 25 per cent this year due to the decline in the Australian dollar.
“If they are making furniture in Malaysia or China, and they don’t have to pay these extra costs, then more work will be going offshore,” Mr Westbury said from his office yesterday.
He said the ETS struck him as system where government money went to big business, with the average Joe playing the middle man. “My feelings would be it was just another tax where the poor people get poorer and the rich richer.”
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24811993-5013871,00.html
“obviously just burning the fossil fuels is a pretty good way of warming the planet.”
It’s just as imposible to warm it, as it is to cool it.
What you are suggesting is as equally absurd compared to what bird is saying.
filing this here:
“The only sensible way to measure increases or decreases in Australia’s CO2 emissions is per capita. With our population growth rates, doing anything else will penalise us vis-a-vis those countries with stable, or declining, populations, like most in the EU.
Population growth of somewhere around two percent per annum, depending on immigration levels, means that a zero increase in national emissions actually means that by 2020 in twelve years’ time, every one of us would have to emit about 24% less CO2. Add Rudd’s five to 15 percent reduction to that, and we’re talking reductions of 29 to 39%.”
http://ambit-gambit.nationalforum.com.au/archives/003434.html
More filing:
“THIS was the only way Australia was going to price carbon: with huge household compensation, help for trade-exposed industry, a modest absolute target equating to an ambitious per capita target and locking our effort into the global agenda.
“John Howard, where are you now? This is a deft policy in which Kevin Rudd is Howard. Put precisely, Rudd is a green Howard. He has made climate change into a magic pudding. It is a work of political genius that would make Howard proud.
“This is a huge fiscal churn: pricing carbon from just the top 1000 companies is a classic top-end revenue base with the proceeds distributed to households with a bias to the poor and families, where low-income families are over-compensated at 120 per cent, petrol is quarantined from price damage, new funds are created to assist small business and big businesses at risk win healthy protection money.
from Paul Kelly
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24811094-12250,00.html
This AGW religion comes from people whose minds are disconnected from their own biology, their own environment and from geography. To express CO2 emissions with the per capita CO2 method simply removes people from their geographic reality. This is madness. A natural consequence of this disconnect is seen with our prime minister who from all reports is looking at 300,000 immigrants per year … a million in his first term? This may lower per capita emissions but have diabolical effects on the environment. e.g. There is the increased demand for finite water resources in the Murray/Darling basin plus increased demand for food, infrastructure and energy.
Ruddy Kevvy is using this closed circuit AGW religion to strip Australia of more wealth, rather than concentrate on preserving the health of our environment.
Barry Brook at his blog bravenewclimate was amongst those who on Monday were running up white flags to indicate their belief that the Rudd government sold out on climate chnage with its emasculated ETS, even though that will in time result in closure of coal or gas fired power stations and transfer to cement production to countries like Indonesia.
I have to confess to schadenfreude when 5 minutes ago I read the following pearl from Brook’s raptures over the possibility of replacement of crude oil and gas by microalgal production:
“At present, microalgal biodiesel production requires a concentrated stream of carbon dioxide [!!!!], such as from a gas-fired power station or cement factory.” Oh frabjus day, CO2 is going to be the saviour of all our SUVs aircons and TVs (but only until all CO2 emissions and microalgal production cease in accordance with the Garnaut-Wong CPRS).