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June 04, 2007
So John Howard at the Liberal Party's federal council embraced the need to do something about climate change with a plan for an emissions trading scheme by 2012 .It involves the "aspirational goal" for reducing emissions to be set next year and short-term caps to be set in 2010, and so cannot be taken as a serious policy to address a key problem. There is a disconnection between any meaningful policy platform and the rhetorical objectives.
What the speech was about was developing a scare campaign--a Garrett recession resulting from cutting greenhouse gases at the expense of the economy.
Was there any modelling referred to? Nope. The proof is that Labor had set a target to reduce Australia's greenhouse gas emissions by 60 per cent of 2000 levels by 2050 and an 20% cut in emissions cuts by 2020. This would shut down the country's entire coal-fired electricity network and take every car off the road. As there were no targets or no measures Howard is addressing climate change as a political problem.
Trust me says Howard. I'm not a destroyer. I'll protect you from recession. But he doesn't talk about price to make the shift away from greenhouse emissions. The price will be set by the market. Price presupposes caps. There are no caps to to cut emissions.
Why trust Howard when the modelling that has been done does not produce doomsday predictions. Rather, it shows the size of the Australian economy will double by 2050 even with big reductions in greenhouse gas emissions:
Modelling last year by the Allen Consulting Group for the Business Roundtable on Climate Change estimated gross domestic product would rise at an annual rate of 2.1 per cent if Australia adopted a target of 60 per cent reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 compared with 2.2 per cent if nothing was done.The analysis showed the economy, now about $1 trillion, would reach $2 trillion by 2047 if there was no greenhouse gas policy change. But it will only take another 2½ years to reach that level with a 60 per cent greenhouse gas reduction target.Another way of putting it is that GDP will be about 5-6 per cent lower than it would have otherwise been by 2050, with an ambitious abatement scheme.
A paper by the economists Steve Hatfield-Dodds, of the CSIRO, and Philip Adams, of Monash University, built on the Allen Consulting Group modelling, says that with a 60 per cent reduction in carbon emissions the economy will grow by 169 per cent over the 45 years to 2050, rather than by 184 per cent.
So we have a Liberal campaign about fear on interest rates (the economy) the unions (IR) and climate change (economy). It's all been reduced to creating fear about managing the economy and scaring the voters. Not very future orientated, is it.
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Heard Howard on a.m. this morning, and he sounded awful.
His delivery has really left him.
As to the content, yep - this is going to be a pure fear campaign from the Coalition.
Every scary bogeyman they can drag up from the depths is going to be thrown at the ALP.
Will it work? Possibly, fear is a pretty powerful emotion. Labor has to be able to counter the fear effectively with a hopeful message that conversely plays on the fear of the consequences of inaction.