I noted recently that Business Spectator’s Robert Gottleibsen did not understand how a carbon price worked when he argued that cutting it would boost consumer spending (the boost is in not taking back the carbon price funded tax cuts). Today that obteuseness becomes a bald-faced pitch for inefficiency and corporate welfare:
The US is replacing its poor-quality coal with low-cost gas thanks to a remarkable technology — fracking…China has remarkable similarities with the US. It signed a massive agreement to buy low-priced gas from Russia (Putin delivers another vicious blow to Australia; November 12), and it has big LNG contracts with Australia. China is now a world leader in nuclear technology and I suspect it is making big strides in renewables technology.
So the US and China carbon reduction agreement will not affect job creation, because both countries were taking the required steps in the national interest for non-carbon reasons.
Both the US and China have seen what happens when badly a structured carbon taxes are introduced, as happened in Australia.
…Our direct action plan makes a lot more sense than the Gillard carbon tax because, like US technology, it combines private and public capital. We will achieve carbon reduction at an affordable price. Whether we achieve sufficient reduction is yet to be determined. Apart from direct action technology promotion, we have done everything else wrong.
…Australia has to become more like the US and China and use its brains and the technologies they use.
Yes, Gotti, we should use our brains. Here are few facts to consider:
- Direct Action works by paying high carbon output industries to shut and the reverse auction process means a few bureaucrats will decide what replaces them.
- Direct Action is accompanied by the scrapping the carbon price funded Clean Energy Finance Corporation or “green bank”, which was an explicit pursuit of public/private abatement technology investment.
- Does a policy of paying polluters to shut work better in rallying capital to mitigation investment than a carbon price that invokes profit opportunities for every person in the country?
- Direct Action has a funding commitment from the Australian tax-payer of $2.5 billion. The amount needed to equal the US cuts is as much as $30 billion in 2025 alone. This money will come from tax-payers instead of from from the polluting industries, as it would under the carbon price.
- The argument that the China and US examples are zero-job loss is silly. There are huge job losses in the displaced industries, just lots of new ones created in the rising green industries, which is what a carbon price would do much more efficiently that Direct Action. I note as well that both the US and China have and are developing carbon prices.
If Gotti is happy to describe supporters of a market-based carbon price as “extreme greens” what do we call his position in support of massive but unfunded corporate welfare, proposed gouging of the tax-payer and the mooted destruction of the Federal budget?
