Impacts of Climate Change on Household Energy Budgets in Australia
The Climate Institute has released a discussion paper from economists at CSIRO and the Australian National University on the impact of emissions trading on household energy budgets. They found that for most households wage growth will outstrip increases in energy prices.
It is a different story for the low income groups however and the effect of emission trading will be a concern until 2020. Support needs to be given to energy efficiency to help here, not just handouts to ease the pain. Esing the pain by insulating housing and providing better transport to reduce costs makes most sense to me. The report suggests that two key measures – energy efficiency and a Government energy affordability payment – could be used to insulate low income households from any short term consequences and this can be financed from revenue to be raised from emissions trading.
The paper can be downloaded from www.climateinstitute.org.au
July 16th, 2008 at 1:31 am
The Climate Institute report uses too many comparative references to Europe that don’t really gell with Australian circumstances, and takes a while to make its points – and herein lies the predicament for Australia. We are an isolated continent with huge geography and vast differences in environments, culture and economies. What is good, viable or plausible in one corner of Australia is not automaically right for another corner. Such is the difficulty for policy makers to create a unifying scheme for equitible balance in mitigating climate change, in Australia.
Yet, it makes the situation very clear. Namely, we must embrace a very wide variety of options, large and small, that suit individuals and regions while collectively aiming for long term goals.
The low hanging fruit common to all of us is the ability to harvest energy efficiency. It’s the kind of thing that everyone can do at home and work, and which surprisingly amounts to a very substantial and real opportunity to save energy, between 30% to 70%.
A suitable water industry analogy is ‘like watching the storm water rush out to sea, while the rivers run dry”.