Thanks to Peter Willkinson at Wilkinson Group for this post on the confusion resulting from pricing carbon across different countries.
Are you confused? Well, so is practically everyone else. Globally.
It seems that almost every political party has found it an environmental management minefield, juggling environmental sustainability and the economy.
Our own Australian Productivity Commission has struggled to analyse, in its first report and thensupplementary report, how to compare the cost of carbon and carbon assistance packages of different countries, pointing out that:
- “More than 1000 carbon policy measures were identified in the nine countries studied, ranging from (limited) emissions trading schemes to policies that support particular types of abatement technology.
- “All policies impose costs that someone must pay.
- “As a proportion of GDP, Germany was found to have allocated more resources than other countries to abatement policies in the electricity generation sector, followed by the UK, with Australia, China and the US mid-range.
- “Such price uplifts are of some relevance to assessing carbon leakage and competitiveness impacts, but are very preliminary and substantially more information would be required.”
…..and emphasising confusion globally as well as asking the Federal Government for more information on its policies before making a comparison.
- “The overlapping of policies in many countries makes it difficult to apportion abatement to particular policies. In some cases, a multiplicity of policies appears simply to be driving up costs and rewarding producers for virtually no additional abatement.
- “…… the estimates and analysis in this report provide little guidance in themselves as to what the appropriate starting price of an ETS should be. …. Substantially more information would be required to make a proper assessment.”
There is clearly a lot of argument, globally, still to come on the carbon tax or any other way of pricing carbon. All fuel for the Abbott ‘blood pledge’ to scrap the tax.
For more on this visit Marcus Priest’s (4th Jan) article in the AFR – (Call for Clarity on Carbon Assistance) or follow specialists in the field, like CO2 Australia.
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