Category: Climate chaos

 

The scheme is currently being debated in the House of Representatives.

Mr Carmody has been at the centre of many policy reforms in Australia, including the long battle to introduce the GST.

Now a private economic consultant, Mr Carmody has turned his attention to greenhouse gases and believes that without a big rethink, the push for a global agreement will be unsuccessful.

Mr Carmody told Jim Middleton from ABC’s Australia Network that emissions should be measured and restricted not at the point of production but at the point of consumption.

He believes the West should pay for the emissions embedded in products or services it buys from China and he says the only economic system that will work to cut emissions world-wide is a system based on “global consumption”.

In other words, carbon produced in the manufacture of a television set in China should be paid for by the consumer or consumers in the country where that television is purchased.

“I accept the science. My main concern is that we have a policy model that actually works, a policy model that maximises chances of getting a global deal where all countries do their bit to slow climate change,” Mr Carmody said.

“In the Australian context the CPRS is very much like the GST from hell.

“What I mean by that is it taxes our exports but not the exports of our trading partners; it taxes our import competing products but not our imports.

“It is not a big deal to fix it. If you look overseas, all other countries are looking at this too.”

‘Trade neutral’

 

China’s Department of Climate Change has argued that with up to a quarter of all Chinese emissions coming from the manufacture of products the country exports to the West, receiving countries should be responsible for dealing with those emissions.

Mr Carmody says “they are dead right”.

“If China keeps exporting emissions to the West by exporting goods and services to the rest of the world, it is incumbent on the rest of the world to deal with those exports and those emissions,” he said.

“It is up to other countries to do what China said they should do, that is, if they are importing products from China or from any country, they should be applying a tax adjustment to reflect the emissions in those imports.

“If every country did that we get back to the conventional version of the GST. This is a GST that doesn’t apply to our exports [but] it does apply to our imports and our import competing products.”

Mr Carmody says such a scheme would be trade neutral.

“Because it is trade neutral, every country that wants to act can do so without fear that all they are going to do is undermine their own competitiveness and cost jobs,” he said.

“A consumption-based approach for a carbon price or a carbon tax is protection neutral.

“It doesn’t give a country a competitive advantage; it doesn’t give a country’s trading partners a competitive advantage.

“The plan would be in line with requirements of the World Trade Organisation because exports would not be touched but imports would be taxed at the same rate as corresponding locally produced substitutes.”

Last month Mr Carmody gave evidence to the Senate inquiry into CPRS legislation.

 

The Government has already offered the coal export industry a $750 million compensation package over five years, after refusing its demand to be part of the free permits scheme for big greenhouse emitters.

The executive director of the Coal Association, Ralph Hillman, says the offer on the table is inadequate.

“The industry’s made it very clear that that does not meet the competitiveness problems posed for the industry by the CPRS (Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme),” Mr Hillman said.

The Coal Association has warned 10,000 jobs will go and 16 mines will be forced to close over the first decade of carbon trading, and has not accepted the Government’s offer.

Now AM understands the Government has left the door open to offer the industry more compensation instead of the free permits coal producers argue they are entitled to.

Climate Change Minister Penny Wong’s office is saying little, except that the $750 million assistance on the table is “substantial” and “appropriate”, and the Government is talking to industry about how best to target that money to the “gassiest” or highest-emitting coal mines.

Mr Hillman and senior industry representatives will discuss coal’s treatment under the carbon scheme with Parliamentary Secretary for Climate Change Greg Combet tomorrow.

Mr Hillman says nothing extra has been offered at this stage, but another $500 million would not be enough.

“We estimate the industry’s going to have to buy $13.5 billion worth of permits in the first 10 years of the scheme. Now you can see that the $750 million on the table is worth about 4 per cent of that; whereas the LNG industry for example is getting 66 per cent,” Mr Hillman said.

“You can see the inequity and the unfairness of the treatment of these two industries, or coal versus other trade exposed emissions intensive industries.

“So even if you were to double the $750 million, it would bring the assistance level from 4 per cent to say 8 per cent. Still not serious, not significant.”

Debate on the scheme began in Parliament last night and is expected to continue well into this evening before a vote is taken on the legislation tomorrow.

But it will almost certainly be defeated when a vote is taken in the Senate in coming weeks.

The Greens regard the current blueprint as a “dud” and are poised to vote it down.

As the Senate debate and vote approach, the Penny Wong is meeting the Greens today in a bid to find common ground.

Greens leader Bob Brown warns any more assistance to the coal industry would be unacceptable.

“It would be very strange for the Government to be approaching the Greens when there’s such a gap between their inaction and the appropriate action we want to see on climate change,” Senator Brown said.

“With a story about that at the same time they’re going with a big cheque to the coal industry, which is unwarranted, unnecessary and should be going to renewable energy – the green economy.”

 

This publication, from the Global Humanitarian Forum, of which I am a board member, constitutes the most plausible estimate of the human impacts of climate change today. The scale of devastation is so great that it is hard to believe the truth behind it, or how it is possible that so many people remain ignorant of this crisis.

Four main factors have contributed to the silence. First, while the world has been coming to terms with the ­science of climate change, the problem has moved from being a future threat to a current danger. Climate change is an evolving concern, affecting people now.

Second, 99% of the casualties linked to climate change occur in developing countries. Worst hit are the world’s poorest groups. While climate change will increasingly affect wealthy countries, the brunt of the impact is being borne by the poor, whose plight simply receives less attention.

Third, and worse, climate change hides its influence among a wide range of today’s key global problems. It impacts heavily on nutrition and diseases such as malaria, and increases poverty. But that impact can be lost among the many contributing factors.

That is why a fourth major challenge is the current inability to separate the impacts of climate change in specific situations. It is impossible to say, for example, how much the severity of any hurricane is due to climate change.

It is time, however, to break the silence. It may not be possible to pin-point specific situations, or to achieve unequivocal global consensus. It took the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 19 years to accomplish a consensus on the science in its 2007 report. But the general changes in the global climate system are clear: the number and intensity of extreme weather events, such as major floods and storms, has increased steadily in the last 30 years. Temperature changes show similar patterns, as do cyclone trajectories and rainfall patterns. From these changes it is possible to make good estimates about their global impacts on people.

That tells us who is worst affected: the poor, who are largely unprepared, and unable to cope with climatic change. Of course, wealthy countries are affected: long-term drought in Australia has caused certain crop yields to plummet. But the poor lack the resources to prevent disasters or adapt to changed conditions. Many already subsist on the mere threshold of survival.

Next week a series of UN talks will take place in Bonn – one of the last stepping stones in the effort to reach international agreement on how the world should tackle climate change, at the Copenhagen summit in December. Any post-Kyoto agreement must take into account the tremendous scale of suffering already being caused today.

There is a great responsibility for major polluters to protect the poorest populations from a problem for which they cannot be held responsible. Their silent suffering must serve as a warning signal of the greater suffering that lies in store for the rest of us if we fail to tackle climate change together.