The Federal Government released the green paper on its proposed emissions trading scheme, known as the Carbon Pollution Reduction (CPR) Scheme this week.While it should be congratulated for its ambition to introduce the scheme in 2010, and for adopting many of the recommendations of the Garnaut Review, it is sadly wide of the mark in a number of key areas.
In particular the proposal to provide free permits for the biggest polluters reduces the effectiveness of the scheme, and penalizes those industries that are less polluting, resulting in “what about me” calls such as what we saw from LNG producers like Woodside this week.
It is interesting that the Labor Party in promoting the scheme has been justifying the free permits by saying that it is striking a balance between the Greens on the left who are calling for a tougher scheme and the Liberal Party on the right.
However this distorts the real truth of the matter. It is not just the Greens calling for a tougher scheme. The vast majority of climate scientists are demanding more urgent action, and the government's own climate change advisor Ross Garnaut said in his recently released report "The world has squandered the time that it did have in the 1990s to experiment with various approaches to mitigation...an effective response to the challenge (of climate change) must be put in place over the next few years".
The Australian Conservation Foundation said "The more compensation that goes to big polluters, the bigger the financial burden on the poor, the most vulnerable and rural Australians". Read the ACF's resonse to the green paper here.
Greens Senator Christine Milne challenged the Federal Government to rethink its policy and to "inspire Australians to embrace this challenge to rebuild, upgrade and retool for a zero emissions future." Read her complete comments here.
Clive Hamilton called the green paper "Shameless Political Capitlation". Read his article on Crikey here.