Greater Security Threat Than War

The Government’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS is so weak that it will do nothing to reduce emissions produced in Australia and hence nothing to promote investment in new industries or processes which will reduce Australia’s carbon footprint. Kenneth Davidson on the war path.

Kenneth Davidson in The Age (28 September 2009):

In a blistering attack on the Rudd Government’s “commitment” to climate change policy, Kenneth Davidon says “Canberra appears to be managing the climate change issue, but it is not”.

As result, the Government has the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), which is so weak that it will do nothing to reduce emissions produced in Australia and hence nothing to promote investment in new industries or processes which will reduce Australia’s carbon footprint.

Arguably, the Rudd Government sees climate change opportunistically as a weapon with which to beat the Opposition, rather than as a greater threat to Australia’s security than either the Great Depression or World War II.

The Government has failed to develop a coherent policy on climate change. The failure has been disguised by a dysfunctional Opposition which has no policy at all apart from ”let’s see what comes out of the climate change meeting in Copenhagen in December”. This has allowed the Government to appear to be managing the issue responsibly. It isn’t.

Underneath the political argy-bargy, the policies are the same. The policy priority on both sides is to look after the interests of the largest polluters in the interest of protecting jobs by not undermining the competitiveness of the coal, aluminium and other big polluting industries against their competitors overseas.

As result, the Government has the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme (CPRS), which is so weak that it will do nothing to reduce emissions produced in Australia and hence nothing to promote investment in new industries or processes which will reduce Australia’s carbon footprint.

Rudd is big on rhetoric on the world stage. It is effective in generating good headlines at home. But there is nothing in the content which offers an example for other countries to follow.

Neither the Government nor the Opposition appears to understand that by adopting stringent environmental policies which are ahead of the pack, Australia can develop a competitive edge in the environmental industries of the future – as has Denmark which, because of tough environmental regulations adopted over the past decade, has become a world leader in the development of wind energy. It is why the crucial climate meeting will be held in Copenhagen.

The Rudd Government signed on to Kyoto mark I at Bali in 2007. It reached a framework agreement requiring Bali signatories to commit to 25 to 40 per cent cuts in emissions based on an International Panel on Climate Change consensus on what constituted a safe level of emissions.

A subsequent meeting of 2000 scientists at Copenhagen in March this year said the earlier scientific evidence was redundant and much bigger cuts would be necessary if the world was to have a good chance of avoiding catastrophic climate change.

Even so, Australia committed to a 5 to 15 per cent cut in emissions extended to 25 per cent if a firm commitment to substantial cuts could be extracted from developing countries, even though their per capita emissions are only a fraction of Australia’s and other developed countries.

Even based on the earlier scientific consensus with only 0.8 degrees of warming, the Great Barrier Reef and the Murray/Darling/Goulburn Basin are dying and Victoria and NSW face another drought and longer and more intense bushfire seasons. With another 0.6 degrees of warming in the pipeline due to historic emissions already in the atmosphere, it is clear that ”business as usual” is no longer an option.

And yet we have a corporate establishment intent on maintaining the status quo, obsessed with short-term profit rather than long-term sustainability, defending an outmoded market ideology which refuses to contemplate incorporating carbon pollution taxes into the cost of production and naively believing that technology such as carbon sequestration will solve the climate problem.

Even worse, the Labor Government has evolved into a self-perpetuating oligarchy whose defining purpose is retaining power. In this moral and intellectual vacuum, the Government functions as the servant of the old corporate establishment and other rent seekers such as the private schools lobby in the case of education, the private health funds in the case of health policy, the roads lobby in the case of transportation and the big polluters and the finance industry in the case of climate change.

The Government should be using its considerable political capital (as evidenced by the opinion polls) to adopt the Scandinavian regulatory and tax regime to promote positive structural change which recognises that sustainable economic development must conform to the latest science on climate change.

Rudd claims he is opposed to neo-liberalism. Neo-liberalism was unleashed on the world by the deregulation of financial markets, which allowed its agents to invent complex financial instruments such as derivatives that led directly to the financial crisis.

Why should the Government create through the CPRS opportunities for new financial derivatives which have proved ineffective in reducing emissions, are easy to rort because of their complexity, and are hideously expensive compared with a straightforward carbon tax? With a tax, all the revenue can be used productively instead of creating a new class of rent seekers who, in the case of the high polluters, will be compensated, will exacerbate global warming and, in the case of financiers, will profit from the new derivative, increasing the likelihood of another financial crisis.

Kenneth Davidson is a senior columnist at The Age

Kenneth Davidson has been writing for the  Age on economics and public policy since 1974. He was winner of the Walkley award for best news story in 1977 and National Press Club/Ford Australia Award for Canberra Press Gallery Journalist of the Year in 1980. He remains a committed Keynesian and opponent of economic rationalism. In his spare time he is co-editor of Dissent magazine.

Source: www.nationaltimes.com.au