Two pieces this afternoon sum up what I’m thinking but am too disenfranchised to write. Bernard Keane of Crikey captures my feelings:
The carbon price is dead. Australia thus slips back into its pre-2007 role as an active opponent of serious action on climate change, having removed a functional, effective and low-impact carbon pricing scheme and replaced it with nothing except the promise of a witless policy of handouts to corporate mates.
In doing so, we undermine the chances of meaningful global action on climate change. We’re one of the world’s most emissions intensive economies — in fact, we’re a carbon junkie, hooked on cheap coal for power, and flogging coal to the world even as the price slides and the mines shut.
…We’re also imposing higher costs on our children and their descendants; the longer we delay the process of decarbonising our economy — and one day, we will need to decarbonise it, like it or not — the higher the costs. Or at least, that’s the view of environazis like the Federal Treasury and the International Energy Agency.
…Future citizens will thus look back on the actions of this government and the senators that supported it and see an intergenerational economic attack on them, in which we used the trivial costs of a carbon pricing scheme as an excuse to saddle future generations with much greater costs from climate change and decarbonisation — for all the Coalition’s incessant rhetoric about not saddling future generations with debt. It’s an attack, primarily, of old white men, men in complete denial about climate change, on the future and on the young.
And from Phil Baker at the AFR comes the depressing reality:
Thursday’s vote in the Senate may have abolished the carbon tax but it has also reset the policy battle back to square one.
…The minute the carbon tax was abolished, Bill Shorten recommitted Labor to taking to the next election an emissions trading scheme as policy.
At Thursday’s press conference heralding the demise of the carbon tax, Tony Abbott kickstarted the scare campaign…“Whether it’s a floating tax or a fixed tax, it’s still a tax,’’ he said.
