Australia Has An Obligation To Lead
By
Victor Bivell
Eco Investor
April 2009 Edition
As expected
the Government's Draft Legislation for the Carbon Pollution Reduction
Scheme (CPRS) has elicited a wide variety of public responses. Nothing
new there, as the CPRS affects many interest groups and many parts of
this debate are worth having.
So we watch
as environmental groups argue whether the reduction targets should be
5, 15 or 25 per cent and more. That's great. Please, argue on. We watch
as businesses calculate whether they will be net winners or losers and
how they can tweak the details to their benefit. Please, tweak away. We
watch as greenhouse gas emitters start to look seriously at their options
for reducing emissions. Keep looking, please.
But some of
the debate is just wasting our time. The squeakiest wheel are those who
oppose the scheme and want to either delay its introduction or replace
it with another scheme that they hope will take at least another decade
or two to set up and get going.
This squeaking
has got much louder now that the Government has called for feedback on
the Draft Legislation, but the arguments have remained weak. Let's look
at a few: Australia should wait for the big emitters or the rest of the
world; at 2 per cent of global emissions Australia can't make any difference;
that our coal and emissions will be replaced by those from countries without
an emissions trading scheme; that the coal and other sectors will lose
jobs.
Only one of
these has any merit, the last one about jobs. The others are subject to
principles greater than self-interest.
The Garnaut
Report illustrated how Australia has the highest per capita greenhouse
gas emissions in the OECD and the sixth highest in the world, in fact
over four times the world average. So we are not a "clean living" people.
But it's worse
than that. Our biggest export is coal. In 2008 we exported 261 million
tonnes worth $46.4 billion. That sort of money buys a very nice national
lifestyle. But coal has relatively more carbon than oil or gas. We don't
just export coal, we export pollution.
How we handle
these facts, what we do about them, will say a lot about what sort of
a people we are.
Are we just
amoral mercantilists with an eye only for the immediate bottom line, or
are we an ethical and responsible people who see the consequences of our
actions?
With our very
high carbon lifestyle and very high carbon exports, Australians, more
than perhaps any other people, have a responsibility and an obligation
to take the lead on climate change.
The countries
that have higher per capita emissions are Bahrain, Bolivia, Brunei, Kuwait
and Qatar. These countries may have some rich citizens but many are poor,
much poorer than Australians. As for the rest of the world, there is something
very morally uncomfortable about waiting for people who live on as little
as a few dollars a day to make the same sacrifice as us.
So let's do
what we should - take the lead.
Let's have
a scheme, and have it as soon as possible. Let's support the Government
in that decision and move onto the discussion that counts, the nitty gritty
- how we handle the transition.
That doesn't
stop us from helping the losers. Not so much investors, as equity investment
is risk capital and investors took the risk. The people we should focus
on workers and their communities. Helping them is a huge discussion we
need to have now.
How, for example,
do we help the communities in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria
who produce coal and coal-fired energy, or are in some other way economically
dependent on producing high carbon emissions? As the CPRS starts to work,
as our carbon emissions begin to fall, how do we keep the most affected
people in jobs?
Let's not follow
the example of the north of England coal miners who fought every inch
of their transformation from underground coal miners to above ground high
tech workers.
The Federal
Government's newly opened Clean Energy Innovation Centre at Newcastle
- designed to grow small and medium sized businesses - is one way these
regions can move from a high carbon economy to a high tech economy. We
need more of this kind of thinking.
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