The Productivity Commission is attacking the new Australian Government’s policies in the carbon area. The theory is that a true carbon price will drive change while a subsidy to meet a 20% renewable energy target is subsidising the wind energy sector is detracting from this and pushing wind at the expense of other technologies including natural gas which is less polluting.

This whole area is a “bag of worms” and I am deeply grateful that I am not in one of the hot seats making the decisions. Some of the more obvious pressures come from:

• Petrol needs to be included in the emissions trading scheme but huge numbers of swinging voters live in the outer suburbs without adequate public transport
• The coal industry is huge and cannot just be “turned off”. However many of the green groups are very angry about a commitment to fund clean coal.
• It is fascinating reading some of the recent reports in the Financial Review and the Australian newspapers as the industries and the NGOs all start lining up to talk to the ministers and complain about not having enough time to argue their cases..
• China is replicating our entire power grid every 8 months with coal fired power stations. If we stop selling them coal they will buy it elsewhere and the coal may well be lower quality with worse emissions and more damaging mining practices.
• Power generation has peaks and troughs and energy sources like wind do not provide for this so we need a mix in our grid including some plants that can be fired up fast otherwise we will have blackouts.
• Then there is vehicle manufacture in Australia and the fact that our local car plants have concentrated on the large 6 and 8 cylinder engines when they should have looked to the future and started building more fuel efficient models. There are huge electoral and economic backlashes where large scale job losses happen and the Australian car industry looks vulnerable to me if it cannot move towards greater fuel efficiency rapidly.

Technorati Tags: Decisions, policies and looking to the electoral backlash, electoral backlash, coal, coal industry, global warming, Productivity Commission

This entry was posted on Friday, May 23rd, 2008 at 9:58 pm and is filed under Global Warming, Climate Change & Energy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.