Environment, International, Politics, Society

Australia Repeals Carbon Tax

200px-Tony_Abbott_-_2010220px-AlfedPalmersmokestacksIn a major setback to effort to combat climate change, Australia’s Abbott government has secured a repeal of the carbon tax. It is the first major country to rollback on the basic environmental protection. Abbott’s government is suggesting that it will pay corporations not to pollute — a proposal that would cost a huge amount and environmentalists insist is unlikely to be successful.

We have previously discussed the radically anti-environmental policies of the Abbott government, which has turned a country that was once a leader in environmentalism into the leader of the countermovement.

Prime Minister Tony Abbott and Environment Minister Greg Hunt rejoiced in the repeal, which was held up by determined opposition in the legislature. It ultimately passed the Senate by 39 votes to 32.

Carbon tax programs force companies to internalize part of the costs that they externalize in production and gives an incentive to companies to find ways to cut back on such emissions. The Abbott government insists that it can achieve the same reductions by direct payments to corporations – a position that environmentalists do accept and others believe would be too costly if it were to be used to achieve real reductions.

This is an area where I agree with President Obama and admire his continued efforts internationally to create a united position of major nations. Our own country continues to lag behind efforts to curtail these pollutants. However, the position of Australia has already been a rally point for countries like China with appalling environmental records.

Source: SMH

33 thoughts on “Australia Repeals Carbon Tax”

  1. Max-1, Wind energy doesn’t produce base load needs. 75% of Germany’s power comes from non renewable sources.

  6. Reblogged this on SiriusCoffee and commented:
    More evidence that lawyers should not pretend to be economists. Taxes imposed on manufacturers of anything are invariably passed on to consumers. This includes co-called “carbon offset” taxes. In the process, the money is laundered through exchanges and the state bureaucracy, enriching the non-productive leach sector of the economy at the expense of the middle-class.
    You liberals whine about the inequality between the 1% & the 99%, then want to impose even more draconian financial policies that exacerbate the problem!
    OH NO! THERE’S A CLIMATE CRISIS (there’s a crisis) so we need to TAX MORE to CONTROL PEOPLE and SAVE THE WORLD! Ad nauseum.

  8. IMO… this will end up becoming the hottest year on record. El Nino is coming.
    Hottest March-June On Record Globally, Reports Japan Meteorological Agency
    http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/07/15/3460555/hottest-march-june-jma/

    You may recall that the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) reported last month that March-May was the hottest in more than 120 years of record-keeping. Well, the JMA reported Monday that last month was the hottest June in more than 120 years of record-keeping.

    That makes 3 straight record-breaking months for JMA — the hottest second quarter on record. It also means we had the hottest March-June on record.
    And these records occurred despite the fact we’re still waiting for the start of El Niño. It is usually the combination of the underlying long-term warming trend and the regional El Niño warming pattern that leads to new global temperature records.
    (continued)

  9. New Climate Models Predict an Australian Forever-Drought
    http://motherboard.vice.com/read/new-climate-models-predict-an-australian-perma-drought

    A new NOAA study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, applies a recently developed global climate model to the Australian situation, evaluating both the likely causes of the chronic dryness and the likely future of the region’s climate. By simulating climate change scenarios involving both manmade and natural causes, the research team was able to mostly eliminate non-anthropogenic causes, like volcano eruptions and changes in the Sun’s radiation. With these gone, the precipitation changes fell squarely on human-caused increases in greenhouse gases and continued ozone thinning.

    “In our simulations, many aspects of the observed regional rainfall decline over southern and southwest Australia are reproduced in response to anthropogenic changes in levels of greenhouse gases and ozone in the atmosphere,” the study summarizes, “whereas anthropogenic aerosols do not contribute to the simulated precipitation decline.” More specifically, large-scale climate drivers include, “poleward movement of the westerly winds and increasing atmospheric surface pressure over parts of southern Australia.”
    (continued)

  10. Intergenerational theft – Christine Milne on Carbon Price Repeal Bill

  11. What laws do we have in place that prevents public servants from profiting off of their respective offices?

    If you really want to overcome skepticism in this area then remove public subsidies and do not allow current and former public servants from earning a nickel off of ANY government action. You will quickly find out who the true believers are.

  12. Groty,
    Well put. Add to that peoples general lack of understanding of base load energy. If the govt. was going to waste $60B on something, I wish it had been on something like LFTR (thorium reactors). But then again, you bring that up and the Jane Fonda’s of the world push their diss-information about nuclear faster than you can type.

  13. I don’t agree with the assertion that the U.S. is not doing enough. The U.S. met the Kyoto protocol without ever ratifying the treaty. Emissions in the U.S. are lower today than they were in 1994. We accomplished this despite the U.S. population growing by about 50 million people between 1994 and 2014 and real GDP grew from $10 trillion in 1994 to $16 trillion today. That is an outstanding accomplishment.

    Cheap energy – specifically oil and natural gas – is at least as important as education for lifting people out of poverty. The climate change policies of the West hurt the world’s poor the most. In 2012, $60 billion was wasted on subsidies for solar and wind. In other words, government coerced us into redistributing $60 billion in wealth to solar and wind producers that would not have happened in the absence of government coercion.

    The intelligentsia in the U.S. and the West want taxes on carbon dioxide (not carbon) which will increase the costs of food, energy and transportation. Those environmental policies hurt the poor the most. China doesn’t want to harm its poor people the way rich environmentalists in the U.S. want to hurt our poor people. So if the U.S. taxes carbon dioxide and China doesn’t, global carbon dioxide emissions will not be reduced. It’s just a scheme to harm our poor people.

    Danish economist Bjorn Lomberg’s research reveals there are 3 billion people in the world who live without access to cheap energy. That perpetuates their poverty and forces them to burn wood and animal dung to stay warm and cook. That indoor air pollution causes health problems and leads to 3.5 million premature deaths per year. To reduce emissions and improve the human condition we need to make people richer, in part by giving them access to cheap energy. Subsidizing inefficient energy is a redistribution scheme from the poor to the politically connected and doesn’t.

    The West’s obsession with environmentalism results in policies that do real harm to the world’s poor today, in exchange for a hope of some highly speculative hypothetical benefits a hundred years from now. It’s a bad economic trade to fulfill some ideological vision about how the world should be.

  14. That video I posted is a ~263 foot diameter crater, depth yet unknown, in Siberian permafrost.

    One scientist said the warming probably melted the permafrost over a pressurized area causing a huge methane venting event.

  16. Fuel cell technology can now easily produce electric power cheaper than what homeowners pay from the grid, yet we continue to see utility companies erecting new power plants and transmission lines, only adding to the blight that has scourged this nation for more than a hundred years now, nevermind the added carbon footprint that comes with transmission losses, which are huge. Where’s the outcry against utility stockholders and Obama? Micro combined heat and power (CHP) systems have already obsoleted utility companies, which continue to flourish because energy policy is all about special interest, the hell with carbon footprint or consumer benefit. I want to live long enough to see the countryside as my ancestors had, without the blight of power plants and transmission lines, a micro CHP system in every home.

  17. Tony Abbott, incorrigible hippy puncher, confronted by a dirty stinking hippy he cannot resist smacking him or her in the mouth.

    Belief in human caused global warning and the desire to prevent it are dirty stinking hippy issues and for this reason all decent right wing culture warriors have a duty to oppose them.

    Of course in the real world accelerating global warming is well on the way and unacceptable climate change that will cause mass migrations and wars following close behind. When confronted with reality the hippy punchers will blame the hippies, if only the hippies had advocated burning more brown coal then the culture warriors could have opposed them by advocating replacing fossil fuels.

    Usually Australian politics is less unhinged than is that of the US, but Australia does have some extreme right wing culture warriors, and Tony Abbott is one of them.

  18. Let’s hope that our carbon tax advocates learn something from the Australian debacle.

    It sure cost the Aussies enough.

  20. The Surgeon General Warns: Cigarette smoking is dangerous. Hazad to your health. Does that mean anything to you?
    [music]
    Well, legalize marijuana. hoo hoo hoo. Right here in sweet Jamaica, hoo hoo hooo.

    –Bob Marley

    Nine will get you ten. That Aussie President is a cigarette smoker. Went in dumb come out dumb too. Hustlin round Atlanta in his alligator shoes.
    Drunk on the weekends at the barbques. He’s keeping pollution down.

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