Mar 6, 2008

Fallow On Government Emissions Trading Scheme

Brian Fallow analyses the Government's proposed emissions trading regime. He joins the list of seeing that the scheme is flawed.

All this makes a bleak contrast with the now-abandoned negotiated greenhouse agreements process which was being pursued when the policy was to have a carbon tax.

Instead of a one-size-fits-all approach, it allowed individual industrial emitters - there aren't all that many of them after all - to negotiate a programme for reducing emissions based on how far they are from world's best practice for comparable plant and a reasonable timeframe for converging with it.

That still makes sense, unless the policy is simply to reduce national - but not global - emissions by driving energy intensive industries overseas.

This is a global problem. Penalising our economy while doing nothing for this global problem seems really dumb.