King Street, Sydney
Climate Change – The Debate Rolls On
From today’s The Australian, a request for leadership in place of rhetoric and point scoring. Selectively quoted with added comment.
Richard Denniss, “Rudd should never have tied carbon cuts to Copenhagen”, The Australian, 7 January 2010, http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/opinion/rudd-should-never-have-tied-carbon-cuts-to-copenhagen/story-e6frg6zo-1225816748842
In 2007, the then opposition leader declared: “Mr Howard has a responsibility to act . . . on climate change. This is a challenge which goes beyond national boundaries . . . If we are to get countries like China and India to accept global targets themselves then developed countries must act . . . Australia must show leadership.” (My emphasis).
It’s unlikely we’ll ever know what the Prime Minister was thinking, but he was right then and is wrong now. Without the leadership Rudd once advocated, there is little chance of achieving a meaningful international agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Diplomacy aside, it’s in Australia’s interests to cut emissions as quickly as possible. … So where should Australia start? Surely it makes sense to stop paying the polluters before we implement a polluter pays scheme.
The second thing the government needs to do is to start shutting down Australia’s brown coal-fired power stations, which are among the most polluting in the world. …What we should do is increase the size of the renewable energy target and start building gas-fired power stations on the sites of the existing brown-coal power stations. This is simplistic; shutting down brown coal fired power and replacing with gas fired will take years and cause regional economic disruption hence will be politically unachievable.
Third, we should start taking energy efficiency seriously, in homes and commercial buildings. Ever wondered why there aren’t any doors on supermarket fridges and why it is so cold in the store? Coles and Woolworths know the answer; people buy more food when they are cold and when they don’t have to open doors. Given that Australians threw out $5 billion worth of food last year, perhaps redesigning retail spaces to reduce Australia’s energy use wouldn’t be such a bad thing. Frozen food and a number of other cabinets we observe do have doors; chilled food such as meat and dairy is in open cabinets. As an ex-Woolworths logistics person it is easier to restock open cabinets. And I have yet to see the research linking ‘cold to more purchasing and $5 billion in waste food.
Australia’s homes are the largest in the world. Every year, we build tens of thousands of homes with black-tile roofs, vast amounts of glass facing the afternoon sun and no shade trees. Who needs shade when you can air-condition? Does anybody really believe we are doing everything we can to tackle what the Prime Minister once called the moral challenge of climate change? An overblown paragraph; why weaken a sound argument with hyperbole?
Finally, we need to tackle the politically difficult task of introducing a carbon price. … No serious economist disputes the need to introduce a carbon price but there is much division about the how, what, when and where, and that is just among the economists. So, rather than argue about where we should end up in 2020, why not focus on where we should start? Denniss provides his own answer, no one can agree.
The CPRS legislation proposes that we begin with a fixed pollution permit price of $10 a tonne…. The advantage of a $10 starting price is it would raise revenue to invest in efficient technologies and send a signal to new investors that the old days are over, while not being so high that it would have a significant effect on our so called emission-intensive trade-exposed industries.
In the past year, the government has consistently linked the need to pass the CPRS with the need to get a binding agreement at Copenhagen. Rather than focusing on the real dangers of climate change and the benefits of early action, the government chose to suggest the fate of the world’s climate negotiations was in the hands of the Coalition. Now it is blaming the Coalition for blocking the domestic legislation and the Chinese for not negotiating in good faith in Copenhagen. When will it be time for the government to take some responsibility? Rudd was right before the last election. It is in Australia’s interests to reduce emissions quickly. Now is the time to stop hiding trivial domestic politics behind bad policy and get on with reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
Denniss has quite a pedigree hence my disappointment in his shift from analytical thinking to journalistic hyperbole. However, at last, it is a call for leadership. Check Denniss out on https://www.tai.org.au/
Today’s Podcast
“Mona Lisa: the history of the world’s most famous painting”, Artworks, 3 January 2010, http://www.abc.net.au/rn/artworks/stories/2010/2712810.htm
Today the story of the rise and rise of the Mona Lisa to world fame. The London-based historian Donald Sassoon is taking us through this five-hundred-year-long story. How did the portrait of the plain wife of a small-time nobleman rise to such celebrity and fame?