The Greens oppose the CPRS not because it is too weak, but because it will point Australia in the wrong direction with little prospect of turning it around in the timeframe within which emissions must peak, says Senator Christine Milne.
The ETS is a dog. It will never pass
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There’ll be much debate, analysis and argument — much “argy-bargy”, in the Prime Minister’s quaint parlance — over the next few months over whether the Government’s ETS will navigate its way through the Senate. It won’t. No-one outside the Government thinks it is anything but a dog of a scheme. The Opposition, Xenophon, Fielding and the Greens only differ on the reasons why they dislike it. The multiple inquiries into the scheme won’t change anyone’s mind. They all think it doesn’t do much and does it very badly — and they’re right. If the economy was still booming and we were fretting about inflation and why it is so damn hard to get a tradesman to turn up these days, the Prime Minister would be well-positioned to prosecute his Mr Moderation agenda of responsibly addressing climate change. Voters are still concerned about climate change, but have other things on their minds at the moment. Penny Wong continues to try to score political points by claiming Malcolm Turnbull has been driven to oppose the ETS by Peter Costello. Time for a new script, Minister. Indeed, maybe it’s time for a new Minister, given Wong’s success in alienating just about everyone in the entire climate change debate. Rarely has a minister been so utterly at odds with every stakeholder in her portfolio. Moreover, the Opposition’s statement that the scheme will both cost jobs and do nothing to curb emissions is literally correct, even if not quite in the way they mean it. The Government scheme will not establish incentives to reduce emissions and will not drive any transition to low-carbon industries and the jobs that will emerge from them. And by offering such an unambitious target it will undermine efforts to establish a global deal that might prevent Australia from suffering the worst effects of climate change, with the employment consequences that will flow from that. So, scratch one ETS from the list of climate change options, at least for a couple of years. We might get lucky and see a comprehensive global deal emerge from Copenhagen in December, and an aggressive commitment to emissions abatement by the Obama Administration, which might in turn restore momentum to the debate in Australia, but Kevin Rudd has covered off that possibility by insisting that any stronger targets will only be after 2020 and will require a “mandate” from voters. So, there’s no danger of Australia actually doing anything much on that front. Meantime, annoyingly, climate change continues, without appearing to recognise that we humans are having an economic crisis. Last week’s Climate Congress concluded that “the worst-case IPCC scenario trajectories (or even worse) are being realised.” The worst-case IPCC scenario is a temperature rise of 4.0 degrees C, with a likely range of 2.4 to 6.4 degrees C, in the next 90 years. “Temperature rises above 2 degrees C will be very difficult for contemporary societies to cope with,” the Congress also concluded, in rather understated fashion. If only it were all a left-wing plot. The debate therefore needs to move quickly to a post-ETS level. A carbon tax, the next best option, is liable to be just as poorly-designed and influenced by big polluters as the Rudd Government’s ETS. We’ll therefore have to move the Australian economy to a low-carbon path the old-fashioned way, via government expenditure and incentives. This approach is far less efficient than market signals, it is rife with opportunities for winner-picking and pork-barrelling and it places politicians and bureaucrats at the centre of the transition, when it should be consumers and the private sector. But with the failure of the ETS, it’s the only one we’ve got. This means significant investment — in the billions — in accelerating the commercialisation of the one off-the-shelf renewable technology available — solar power; dramatically reducing the fuel consumption of Australia’s vehicle fleet, developing and rolling out biosequestration initiatives and extending energy efficiency measures to the country’s commercial building stock. Unlike the ETS, those measures would draw support from all the non-Government parties and most industry stakeholders. Further strengthening incentives for renewable energy — for consumers via a gross feed-in tariff, and for businesses via tax breaks for renewable energy firms — might enable the Government to have a serious chance of meeting and even exceeding its Renewable Energy Target. These are all second-best solutions in the absence of price signals embedded in the economy, but they look like the only solutions that will get through our political system. Given the urgency of the task, it’s a case of doing whatever will work. |
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22 Comments
Yet another characteristic of left-wing pseudo-intellectual pontificating is to fabricate or contrive a fanciful adulteration of any counter argument and then evangelise from that false premise whilst conveniently ignoring the true counter argument.
The ETS doesn’t guarantee a transition to a clean energy economy. Let’s be clear, this is a carbon accounting system complete with exceptions and loopholes that will be readily exploited to undermine its purpose.
It seems to me that the drive towards international carbon trading is being pushed by the same financial wizards responsible for the current corrupt and opaque global financial system.
Rather than resurrecting Enron, I’d agree with Bernard that the best alternative would be for the government to set renewable energy targets, energy efficiency requirements, and offer subsidies to bridge this transition from fossil fuels.
Germany is leading the world with this approach. We don’t have to be revolutionary or risky to follow their lead and get results.
Why are there so many messages here from denialists?
Are atheists this busy on Christian forums?
There is more than one “off-the-shelf” alternative to carbon fuel.
Off-the-shelf nuclear reactors are already commercially available.
They build in four years and the contracts include guarantee of supply and removal of fuel.
By the way, the important issue is “non-carbon”, not “renewable”.
The phrase is an echo of our hippie past, when we believed
that coal would run out tomorrow and that the soil would last forever.
Ho-ho-ho!
Hooray! More technical issues I can take umbrage with!
Marilyn, I note you say this:
“Because base load power cannot be stored. It is only generated on needs bases.
Are you completely and utterly stupid?”
One might wonder the same thing of you? Have you heard of energy storage? Quite a bit of it already goes on in Australia. Do some reading on Bendeela Pumped Hydro, Kangaroo Valley or The Snowy Hydro Scheme. Energy storage is a common tool used in electrical grids world wide to smooth the difference between supply and demand. Advances in ES tech will be the saviour of renewables. I should know, I wrote a thesis on them.
Base Load power is a myth, created to meet the output needs of the coal generators, not the other way around. Coal turbines have very narrow efficiency windows, so want to run at the same power all the time. To encourage people to use more power over night they introduced off peak hot water heating to use all the energy. Now the cart is leading the horse, and we’re trying to preserve something we introduced to solve another problem!
The supply pattern of wind and solar match the diurnal use curve pretty well. There’s no need to generate power over night any more.
Joel B1
I agree, that comment is possibly racist.
I fail to see though, how one racist comment makes another alright?
EB
ECS: I’m not being entirely honest with you. I do find this pun to be unpleasantly racist. Never-the-less, if you cop serious flack from many Labor voters, you’ll know the reason why, and hopefully you wont do it again.
Good reporting of the demise of the ETS. However you appear to have missed the essential point being that carbon dioxide is NOT a key player in global temperatures at current and higher levels (irrespective of what the IPCC suggests; which arguably ignores the most important bits of the science - that the impact of carbon dioxide decreases logarithmically with increasing temperature. All of which renders the ETS unnecessary in it’s form and justification as currently presented.
When you look at the reports from overseas, you have to wonder if the scientists are beating this up for funding purposes.
It has already been reported that the Artic ice cap has had more ice this year than ever before. It has also been stated by Scientific circles that the planet is actually cooling.
It is also a known fact that the science fraternity were asked to draw up various scenarios on global warming which they did. It included the current situation (definitely not the worse by any means) and decided that if they presented the worst scenario as the “fair dinkum” one then the government would panic and start pouring money into science unabated, and they did!
As for the Federal Minister for Climate Change, one must remember where her heritage lies and that particulat country is one of the worst polluters on the planet and we encouraged it with the signing of the Kyoto Agreement because it would make us look good!
One must also remember that two Wongs won’t make a White!!
Now, now EV,
“are you suggesting that Australias climate change policy is flawed because the minister is Asian?”
What? you’re taking the piss?
Have you heard what the Greens said?
(I’ll paraphrase but it’s on record.)
“The ETS is as thick as the Canberra phone directory, but it’s full of wrong numbers”
Did you pick that out? It’s the old Wong Number joke…
Racist as f#ck.
Bernard,
You are finally admitting that you and other “Climate Change” missionaries have been mugged by reality. Don’t worry - soon you will be able to discover another “good cause” - keep your chin up..
If this dog of an ETS, as Bernard describes it, fails to get up, does he seriously believe a half decent ETS would have faired any better ?…..For a cold hard look at the politics behind this, one should go straight to Mungo MacCallum……If the ETS does go down it means Australia will rock up to Copenhagen at the end of this year with diddly squat to put on the table…Other countries may not fair much better…..Which is a shame, because the Copenhagen meeting was supposed to lay the groundwork for the climate agreement to succeed Kyoto, which runs out in 2012…..With a bit of luck the proposed action by the little Maldives may shame the rest of the world into action.
Which part of it’s a fucking transition short term bill don’t you get yet Bernard?
The media have been totally cretinous over this whole thing and listening to Xenophone is like listening to the sound of chalk scraping on a black board.
He does not know what he is talking about.
And why are we to all demonise the people we have been happy to supply our power for decades? Did the coal companies cause the mess we are in?
Did they do it on purpose? Or are we greedy, ignorant and so pathetic we don’t get that using less power each day all of us help save emissions and reduce the emissions of the coal fired power stations?
Because base load power cannot be stored. It is only generated on needs bases.
Are you completely and utterly stupid?
There are actually no climate change deniers, just climate change solution avoiders. An interesting study in the supposed rationality of peoples decisions; if you put it to a right wing verbicane that the climate is changing and we must build nuclear reactors then its “yes, most certainly”. If you put it to the same person that the climate is changing and we must tax carbon and move to renewable energy, then its suddenly a left wing religio-climo-fascist plotto…arroganty….whatever. The hollowness of climate change deniers views is revealed by their dependence on political consequence. Political consequence is not a basis for arguing science. Holland did not get to argue the theory of gravity on the basis that it didn’t want to be below see level, because that would be really inconvenient and require expensive abatement programs.
“Meantime, annoyingly, climate change continues, without appearing to recognise that we humans are having an economic crisis” Bernard Keane pronounces.
I suppose even more “annoyingly” climate has always changed and the computer modelling between my ears predicts more climate change to come in the years, decades, centuries and millennia to come.
Putting aside my facetiousness and accepting that there was indisputably global warming for a period of a quarter of a century from the mid-70s, I followed Bernard’s hyper-link to: “Key Messages from the Congress” and I have to say that describing any of that extremely alarmist propaganda from the Congress as “understated” is just plain foolish.
There are only two recognized groups that measure mean surface temperature and only one that continues to show a rise over the past 10 years and that is James Hansen’s in/famous GISS data which has been changed and manipulated and for which he has received scathing criticism. Even then Hansen’s tainted data does not fit in with “worst-case IPCC predictions”. The other three groups measuring mean global temperature showed no such rise in the recent past.
Hansen is the ‘scientist’ who ‘scientifically’ equates coal trains with holocaust death trains and who suggested that people be brought up on criminal charges for spreading doubt about global warming.
And to suggest only a deluded conspiracy theorist could question this scaremongering propaganda as Bernard Keane has done (“If only it were all a left-wing plot”) is in the long left-wing “denier” pedigree of arrogant intellectual vacuous ad hominem name-calling.
ECS
My goodness, are you joking? I hope so. Ignoring all the other flat-earth/conspiracy stuff, are you suggesting that Australias climate change policy is flawed because the minister is Asian? That’s so offensive I want it deleted.
In this foul government there are two people I hold in some esteem.
The first is the “rock star” and the second is Penny Wong.
Where is Rudd on this one? “We’ve got a mandate” but Rudd the ubiquitous won’t comment.. SCum/
Stewart: Don’t bother. This is religion not science.
Marilyn
Monday, 16 March 2009 3:28:32 PM
Obviously you care about such things. Why do you go about saying such silly things that can only harm your cause. You’re Alan Jones in drag aren’t you?. @stephenconroy(Christ how old is that joke. @GreenJ must even get it by know) is boring.
You Marylin, do more harm then good
ECS,
Penny Wong’s background is Malaysian not Chinese, although one must remember that race baiters like you probably don’t know the difference.
As for your lame pun, in your case it’s clear that two wrongs do make a far right.
Presumably Ev your last, and typically for you, asinine comment is directed at me.
But where have I refuted the theory of anthropogenic global warming?
Even by your contemptibly low standards, it would seem requisite for your pathetically ignoble namecalling ‘denialist’ sliming.
However as I referred to in my previous post, such blind prejudice and intellectual hollowness is typical of ‘left-wing plotting’.
ECS: I was wondering when someone would come up with that one. It is an infamous pun which gained a lot of flack during the fifties or sixties. It was uttered by the leader of the Australian Labor Party, the late Arthur Caldwell. The infamy lay in Caldwell’s ability to read, write, and speak Mandarin Chinese. I daresay a man with this apparent love of the Chinese people, history, culture, etc seemed to be a bit of a Quisling.
This is nothing more than an idle piece of trivia for you.
Cheers
V.
We desperately need action, but the ETS is worse than doing nothing. It is inflexible, fixed to a target too high, that couldn’t be changed in line with any new research or industrial changes. The current projections are surely alarming enough, it is difficult to know what IPCC predictions would prompt a real response to the climate crisis.