One effect of Tony Abbott winning the Liberal Party leadership is that the mainstream political debate on climate change in Australia has been shifted a long way to the right.
Where Kevin Rudd proposes an emissions trading scheme which at least in theory makes corporations pay for carbon emissions above their allotted share of a steadily-reduced quota, Abbott proposes "direct action" - in fact, paying subsidies (from general taxation) to businesses which adopt various emission-reduction policies.
The big one is "direct action on soil carbons", i.e. paying farmers to adopt methods which tie up more carbon in the soil.
Beside that is a grab-bag of programs that include tree planting, research into renewable energy, and more emissions reductions by private business under an incentive scheme.
The specific policies proposed are not bad. The point is that a miscellany of reductions - which could be implemented alongside big increases in carbon emissions elsewhere - is made a substitute for any overall plan; and that businesses are wooed by telling them that all they have to do for emission-reduction is pick up government subsidies offered to them from general taxation.
It makes the Emissions Trading Scheme look strategic and anti-capitalist by comparison. In fact the ETS just licenses carbon-emitters, and relies on "market signals" to bring its emission-reductions. Theoretically, the total permits to emit are "capped" at a certain level, and that ensures overall emission reductions and extra costs (they have to buy permits from others) for companies slower to make reducations.
In fact many emissions escape the licensing system. Emissions trading gives major carbon-emitters free permits to emit which they can then sell on (making extra profits) if they can reduce or massage down their carbon-emission figures. In the EU Emissions Trading Scheme the Financial Times (26 April 2007) found:
- A risk of fraud, such as sale of credits from carbon reduction projects that do not exist. It is often difficult for buyers and brokers to verify the existence and effectiveness of projects as many are in remote areas.
- Funding of carbon reductions that could have happened anyway. The FT uncovered examples where carbon credits merely provided another source of revenue to projects that would have happened anyway.
- The risk of companies selling the same credits several times over.
Steve Rayner of Oxford University and Gwyn Prins of the London School of Economics have written in Nature magazine: "As an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, [the emissions-trading approach] has failed. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions".
Emissions trading, so Elmer Altvater of the Free University of Berlin points out, serves the financial industry, not the environment. The escape hatches for polluters that carbon markets leave open, his colleague Achim Brunnengraber adds, "can hardly be identified by the experts themselves, never mind by the broad public." Supported by powerful industries, Brunnengraber says, the policy "largely excludes alternative approaches to solving the problem, such as far-reaching structural change in energy production and use."
Socialists must argue for planned economic reorganisation, rather than trying to nudge the economy into lower emissions by "market signals". Some markets will remain in economic life for some time even after a socialist revolution, and there may be a subsidiary place for "market signals". Free-market prices are not sacrosanct for us! But our core demands must be for the government to plan different modes of electricity generation, transport systems, building standards, etc. One immediate focus is the demand that Australia goes ahead with solar-thermal power generation, and switches from coal.
The Greens are inadequate here too, proposing an emissions trading scheme but with a slightly bigger emissions-reduction target.
