Wednesday, April 04, 2007
PM Howard’s anti-carbon trading strategy revealed
Economics commentator Ross Gittings has accused the PM of playing us for fools on global warming: “It's clear from John Howard's disillusioning behaviour last week that his attitude to global warming is utterly cynical, short-sighted and selfish. On the one hand he repudiated British economist Sir Nicholas Stern with the claim that serious emission reduction targets would ‘do great damage to the Australian economy’. On the other, his Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull, rolled out another low-pain scheme to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, this time by paying poor countries not to log their old-growth forests,” he wrote in the Sydney Morning Herald.
“The know-it-all Mr Turnbull further distinguished himself by dismissing the latest United Nations report on the shocking extent of possible economic damage from global warming as nothing new. If it's nothing new, how come the Howard Government's been taking climate change seriously only for the past six months?
“Make that pretending to take it seriously. It's now clear Mr Howard's motive in professing to be a late convert to the cause of greenhouse gas reduction is quite phoney. His overriding concern is no more than making sure he doesn't lose many votes over the issue.”
Gittings has detected the PM’s two-pronged strategy: 1. “a stream of worthy but piddling measures to create the appearance of action - fluorescent lamps one week, anti-logging funds the next.” 2. Attack the Opposition at every opportunity. Howard is politicising, trivialising and misrepresenting the issue. “ The political survival of John Howard comes first; the survival of the planet comes a poor second,” says Mr Gittins.
Mr Howard's claim that significant reductions in emissions could not be achieved without "doing great damage to the economy" is dangerous and wrong. Emission trading schemes minimise the economic cost of reductions. Besides, doing little to prevent climate change that would itself do untold economic damage.
Either Howard is still a closet climate-change denier, or he is claiming that the economic cost of action would be too high is short-sighted selfishness. “Why should I pay a price to ward off climate change? I'll be gone from politics long before the chickens come home to roost.”
Gittins reads the Riot Act: “You just can't put the economy in one box and the environment in another. The economy exists in the environment. So if we stuff the environment, we stuff the economy. It's the planet, stupid.”
“If Mr Howard really were a late convert to the need for global action to forestall climate change he'd ratify the Kyoto Protocol, even at this late stage. His refusal to contemplate such a move just underlines the suspicion that he's putting face-saving and vote-saving ahead of saving the planet.”
Exhibit 5: The Howard Conspiracy Against An Australian Soil Carbon Trading Market
Economics commentator of the Sydney Morning Herald Ross gittins reveals why John Howard will never introduce a carbon trading scheme:
"If you think the cost of greenhouse gas abatement is high or uncertain, whereas the marginal benefit of abatement is small (because greenhouse gases are a stock that has built up over many years and one year's worth of abatement doesn't make much difference to the total stock), then you'd probably favour a carbon tax because that would give you control over the price and thus the economic cost you were incurring.
"Alternatively, if you accept that the cost to the economy of not achieving a significant reduction in emissions - such as Sir Nicholas's target of achieving a 60 per cent reduction in annual emissions by 2050 - would be unacceptably high, then you'd favour a carbon trading scheme because that would give you direct control over the quantity of emissions."
"If you think the cost of greenhouse gas abatement is high or uncertain, whereas the marginal benefit of abatement is small (because greenhouse gases are a stock that has built up over many years and one year's worth of abatement doesn't make much difference to the total stock), then you'd probably favour a carbon tax because that would give you control over the price and thus the economic cost you were incurring.
"Alternatively, if you accept that the cost to the economy of not achieving a significant reduction in emissions - such as Sir Nicholas's target of achieving a 60 per cent reduction in annual emissions by 2050 - would be unacceptably high, then you'd favour a carbon trading scheme because that would give you direct control over the quantity of emissions."
Bush's Global Warming position rejected by US Supreme Court
On Monday, the U.S. Supreme Court finally smashed the Bush
Administration’s defences on global warming.
In a 5-4 vote, the Court decreed that carbon dioxide and other global warming emissions are "pollutants" under the Clean Air Act. The court ruled that the Environmental Protection Agency has the authority to start curbing those pollutants, which are wreaking havoc with our climate. It dismisses the Bush Administration's leading excuse for doing nothing about global warming: namely, that it has no power to control carbon pollution. The Supreme Court has now ordered the EPA to stop relying on illegal excuses and to start getting serious about the problem of global warming pollution from new cars, SUVs and trucks.
It also removes the major obstacle to measures in California and ten other states that would slash greenhouse gas emissions from car exhaust.
Fundamentally, the EPA has always had a constitutional duty to act on global warming and it has been subverted by the Bush Administration willing to defy the Consitution in order to protect the fossil fuel industry. Even the President's stacking of the Supreme Court with ideologically-selected judges, as has been done in this country, was not enough to save him.
