Move from carbon tax to ETS poor judgement

15 July 2013

Media Release

In the wake of Kevin Rudd’s announcement that an Emissions Trading Scheme will replace the existing carbon tax a year earlier than scheduled, Secular Party spokesperson, John Perkins, has stated that the shift to an ETS, either now or in the future, is not good policy.

Dr Perkins is a senior economist specialising in global warming models, and is the President of the Secular Party of Australia.

“Trading schemes are a fashionable way of seeming to do something but actually doing nothing,” he said. “There are two problems. Firstly, the market price may be too low to do anything, as now, or too volatile, so that you don’t have a secure base for long-term investment planning. Secondly, the foreign credits purchased may be for bogus schemes such as promised deforestation reductions which either don’t happen or else would have happened anyway.”

Dr Perkins said that environmental costs have to be paid by the market in some way. “A levy is the best way of doing this,” he said. “A price of at least $30 is needed to produce any shift in production away from coal. Australia’s grand plan is not to reduce emissions but to buy permits from countries like Indonesia. This is unlikely to result in any global benefit.”

Dr Perkins said that wealthier countries such as Australia needed to invest in and develop technologies for the mitigation of climate change, to give developing nations a chance to implement required technologies at a cheaper rate. He said that a carbon levy would encourage such investment, while the ETS concept was a “sham”.

“Of course, all this debate completely ignores Australia’s role as a coal exporter,” he added. “The emissions from Australia’s exported coal dwarf our domestic emissions. What Australia should be doing is seeking cooperation with other exporters to impose a carbon tax on coal exports.”

Dr Perkins concluded that people need to wake up to the fact that the two greatest threats to humankind are religious fundamentalism and anthropogenic global warming. “Given the serious consequences of such threats, we feel most Australians would appreciate a government whose policies were based on reason and evidence, as opposed to those who are more interested in deception in pursuit of the popular vote.”

John Perkins

President
Secular Party of Australia
PO Box 6004, Melbourne 8008
Tel 0411 143744

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Carbon tax is a phony proposal

by Dr John L Perkins

The Gillard government has finally unveiled its carbon tax plan — but does it deliver on its supposed goal of tackling climate change? John Perkins, Senior Economist at the National Institute of Economic and Industry Research, takes a hard look at Labor’s strategy, and finds it wanting.

The government’s carbon tax proposals are a step forward, but as such will do little to reduce our emissions. A tax of $23 will only cause a small shift from coal to gas-fired electricity generation. For so-called emissions reductions, the proposals rely on us buying possibly phony credits from other countries that undertake to preserve their rainforests.

We would achieve more by scrapping the plans for a trading scheme and just having a carbon tax. This needs to ramp up to much higher levels in order to justify major investment in alternative energy.

Meanwhile, we continue to overlook the elephant in the room, which is our coal exports. In its full page advertisements, the Coal Association is attempting to erect a smokescreen. The 250 million tonnes of coal that we export will produce 750 million tonnes of carbon dioxide when burnt, which is far more than all our other emissions, and is not subject to any tax.

If we were to join together with Indonesia and South Africa to impose an export tax, which would then apply to the bulk of the world’s coal exports, this would be a more effective way of reducing global emissions, while protecting our coal industry at the same time.

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John Perkins is an economist specialising in global warming models. He is the President and a founding member of the Secular Party of Australia, and is also a long-standing member of numerous rationalist and humanist societies, contributing regularly to free thought magazines. His interests include long-term global models of world trade and income, with particular application to income distribution, trade policy, resource depletion and global warming issues. His expertise is in statistical analysis, mathematical modelling and software development.

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