The Saturday Age
23 July 2011, Page: 17
IS IT any wonder that so many people are fed up with the climate change debate? Misinformation is rife you could fill a column like this most days wading through false claims and half truths.
Take just one example: this week a new body calling itself the Australian Trade and Industry Alliance launched an advertising campaign against the carbon price. On its web site, it says Australia's carbon scheme would be "by far the world's biggest" evidence, it says, that too high an impost is placed on business. It claims that the Australia scheme would haul in 14 times more revenue in its first few years than was generated under the existing European system $71 billion versus $4.9 billion.
But industry insiders say the only way it could reach these numbers is through a sleight of hand counting the large number of free carbon permits handed out to industry as revenue under the Australia scheme, but not under the European system. As one put it, this is "not exactly comparing apples with apples".
In interviews promoting the ads, Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry chief Peter Anderson said the government's proposal is the world's only "economy wide" carbon price scheme. Which would be fine, except it's not economy wide it covers only 60% of emissions. Regardless, the greenhouse targets submitted to the UN by more than 100 countries are all economy wide.
Tony Abbott has spent the week being challenged on the contradictions in his stance on climate change. Campaigning in the Latrobe Valley this week, he made a separate claim worth testing: that there was "no reason" why Australia should not build new coalfired power plants.
Putting aside consideration of whether it is justifiable to build new greenhouse intensive power plants when Australia has a target to cut emissions by 5% by 2020, this position ignores the widely held view in the energy industry that noone is going to build new coal in Victoria, under any circumstances.
Coal power plants are decades long investments, and even if the carbon price was to fall over, no companies believe there won't eventually be policies introduced that make emissions intensive plant unviable. In fact, the industry has warned for years that electricity bills will rise faster without a carbon price than with it, due to the uncertainty over where to make future investments.
The suggestion that Australia could build new coal appears to be based on two misconceptions that Australia may stop cutting emissions once it reaches its 5% target in 2020, rather than building to an 80% cut by 2050, and that the world is not moving because China and India continue to build new coal plants.
The faltering push towards global action on climate change has long been underpinned by agreement that wealthy nations have benefited from centuries of greenhouse polluting industry, and should move first. Developing nations, including a rapidly expanding economy such as China, have longer to act. As Malcolm Turnbull pointed out this week, each Chinese is responsible for about one fifth of the emissions of each Australian. Australia continues to have the highest per capita emissions of any major developed nation.
Despite this, China is acting. It this week again signalled it would pilot an emissions trading scheme, expected to expand nationally in 2015. And estimates suggest it is on track to meet its UN target of a 4045% cut in emissions intensity by 2020. At some point soon after that it is going to have to do much more, but government bureaucrats have said its 2020 target equates to Australia cutting emissions by 25% by 2020 far more than either major party supports.
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