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December 10, 2009
It is time to turn away from the hype and noise surrounding the politics of greenhouse and shift beyond where things have got stuck with mitigating greenhouse emissions. Copenhagen is going to impact on Australia.
Let us put to one side the retail politics talk about climate change advocates becoming the bullies of policy-making; or the aggressive political street fighters and their "weather-vane" leader taking the battle up to Labor with Abbott's army (Rudd's working families) by firing lots of arrows on energy tax, industrial relations (Workchoices), and wars overseas.
The Rudd Government's attempt at a cap and trade system --the CPRS-- is a dud. It gives too much to the polluters, doesn't do much by way of mitigation and won't help to make the transition to a lower carbon economy. Why defend it?
Stuart Rosewarne and James Goodman make the case. On the first point they state that:
In agreeing to increase compensation for the energy-intensive, trade-exposed industries, maintaining the addition of the LNG industry to the list of deserving polluters, incorporating the coal-mining sector into the compensation package, and increasing the assistance to electricity generators, the cost of the CPRS has grown beyond all expectations. Add to this equation the cost of including the faux carbon permits, the Kyoto-non-compliant carbon offsets, and we are looking at a budgetary burden that would be carried by all Australians.
The GPRS does little more than reward the big polluters that have invested so little in emissions abatement over the years that have followed the negotiation of the Kyoto Protocol.
Secondly, the proposed "cap-and-trade" system isn't likely to have any real material effect in reducing Australia's contributions to global greenhouse gas emissions. Rosewarne and Goodman say:
To be brutally honest, it is unclear as to how it would do so; in fact, the scheme's design in accepting that economic growth will be sustained presumes that it will not do so. In some respects, expanding the acceptable forms of carbon offsets could actually exacerbate emissions pressures by rewarding polluters. This would be the case, for instance, when agricultural land is cleared, and no penalties imposed, and the land then reforested and the landholders rewarded with carbon permits.
It's a dud. We have to start again. Will our politics allow this? To discuss closing down the high-emitting South Australian station Playford B. T and the Victorian Latrobe Valley generators Yallourn and Hazelwood.Then replace them with geothermal gas fired turbines. Sounds sensible.
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Agree completely; the only people giving it any kind of enthusiastic support are the ones who are obsessed with politics-as-point-scoring and love to chortle about wedging and other juvenile matters.