If business decides that a carbon tax is inevitable and the compensation package really does no-one any harm and cost-of-living pressures are absorbed and normalised polling figures could easily shift.
The dams filling up is one factor that has taken the pressure off climate-change mitigation in the public’s mind.
The Australian editiorial says “The policy hurdles are enormous but the Prime Minister cannot retreat from her commitment to impose a carbon price. We have seen already that the politics are hazardous for her but she must quickly put flesh on this scheme. Australian industry needs certainty on carbon and voters need to see the fine print of Labor’s plan.” They also argue that “The government must ensure the price set does not lead to “carbon leakage” in trade-exposed sectors of the economy.” [Do we know what ‘carbon leakage’ is?]
The government has not fixed a price but it is speculated to start between $20-$30 a tonne rising to $40 by 2015-16. Morgan Stanley research suggests it will need to be nearer $60 a tonne to force electricity generators to switch to gas.
[We need to keep aware of the serious problems with the coal-seam gas industry’s potential destruction of our precious top farmlands and national acquifers.]
There is also the cost of reducing carbon emissions per tonne of carbon reduced. This is where we need figures we can trust teased out of the media biases and political biases. We need to know what are the effective ways of reducing carbon emissions and we need to know what they cost per tonne so we can accurately compare them. We need to understand accurately also what are the other costs and benefits in terms of jobs and international competitiveness.
More than anything we need to get very clear free of the media and politics and fear campaigns again what are the threats of climate change and what real steps we might possibly be able to take to mitigate it.
For example Nick Minchin is saying there is nothing we can do that will be effective and we have to focus on adapting to climate change. Ethically if we are destroying the world’s climate with what we our current carbon pollution I think this is profoundly immoral. Hope is acting today as if the future is possible and worthwhile. Not continuing to act today as if it doesn’t matter what we do no matter how bad.
It is definitely worth asking however what we can best do. What should we be doing now? Fast? Urgently?
For example the Beyond Zero Carbon project set out to see if it was possible to put forward a straight-forward engineering/ technology scoped project proposal using off-the-shelf currently existing technology. They have now done so and it is entirely feasible to get the whole of Australia’s energy use to below zero carbon emissions by 2020 within a decade. Technically feasible and affordable at $8 a week per household.