Environment, Media, Politics, Society

Report: Carbon Emissions Increased After Six Years Downward Trend Following Abbott’s Repeal of Carbon Tax

240px-The_Earth_seen_from_Apollo_17200px-Tony_Abbott_-_2010We have been following the alarming rollback on environmental protections under Australia’s conservative Abbott, including the repeal on the carbon tax (the first of a major Western power). Tony Abbott has pledged to reverse environmental measures from the protections of the country’s famous reefs to opening up pristine areas for development. Now, just two months after the repeal of the tax on emissions, a study shows that (not surprisingly) carbon emissions and electricity demand in Australia have risen after a nearly six-year long trend of decline. This comes a week after the report of scientists who found an over 99% likelihood that humans are causing climate change.

The company releasing the report, Pitt & Sherry, tracks electricity use and emissions in Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) and said that emissions are expected to continue to rise as a result of the rollback. In just two months, the increase was the equivalent to an annual increase of 0.8 percent.

The Abbott government has also pushed for more power generation black and brown coal power stations and there has been a drop in renewable energy use. The Abbott government has now commissioned a report recommending the effective repeal of the country’s Renewable Energy Target (RET), a scheme designed to ensure that 20 percent of its electricity would be generated from renewable sources by 2020. This will likely further the increase in non-renewable energy use.

The Abbott repeal removed the tax on carbon emissions for around 300 of the country’s biggest emitters to pay for their CO2 emissions.

Source: Scientific American

79 thoughts on “Report: Carbon Emissions Increased After Six Years Downward Trend Following Abbott’s Repeal of Carbon Tax”

  2. I have yet to see economies ruined by a Wind Farm spill…
    I have yet to see pollution choke cities from Solar Farms…
    I have yet to see gulfs and Great Barrier Reefs collapse due to Tidal energies.

    There is a cleaner, greener way.
    We just need to rid ourselves FROM the carbon based energy systems that contribute to or economic struggles, international struggles, and our health struggles from all the pollution. Be it carbon emissions, slag waste, biohazards etc. Our planet and the species that survive on it can not take additional stress. Species are disappearing. We shall follow…

    1. Max-1 – not sure if you were around when Lady Bird Johnson decided to beautify the national highway system by getting rid of billboards and road signs. They were too ugly she said, they destroyed the beauty of the scenery as one drove by.

      Well, the same thing is happening with windmill farms, solar farms and tidal wave farms. All the beauty is being polluted. It is like letting your 3 year old use the diaper dropping to redecorate the Mona Lisa. Remember the Kennedys not allowing a windmill farm near their place at Hyannis Port?

  4. Australia’s got it right, a miniscule 20 million people on an entire continent. Los Angeles has 20 million in one city. If your goal is to control “pollution,” you should start by controlling the population. We do have to prioritize, don’t we?

    Why not pick on China which has 20 million on one city block in the city with air so dirty you can’t see the sun? The Chinese government is entirely aware of pollution levels and dynamically orders population activity to adapt.

    In the interest of full disclosure, honesty, veracity and accuracy, the industry should develop an INDEX that sets a standard and definitively quantifies pollution so that a statistical comparison can be demonstrated without further debate about base issues. It might be called the Volcano Index. For example, it could measure the deleterious output (i.e. sulfur, etc.) of one volcano of standardized size as other parameters and metrics are applied.

    With an index, we could stop the ad hominem, political, arbitrary and dubious criticism of people like that pesky “conservative” Prime Minister Abbott. A reliable index would take the issue of environmental pollution out of the hands of the collectivists as their hysterical rallying cry du jour.

    P.S. Please show some respect for the Prime Minister who, after all, is an elected official (he’s probably eligible too, having 2 citizen-parents).

  5. Nick, I would suggest that since France uses Light Water Reactor technology and that the govt. owns a majority share of the plants, they are not doing it smartly. I will give France this though, they did standardize. As long as we are willing to listen to the Jane’s and Yoko’s of the world and the diss-information they push, we will be waiting.

  8. raff, You can be tedious. Do your homework and read the many comments here about how JT is anti-Obama, how he’s on the dreaded Fox now instead of the beloved MSNBC. You ask such uninformed questions. I can never tell if you are posturing or just clueless? Why don’t you ask JT if he’s gotten any feces from the old left regime??

    Nuclear needs to be used smartly. The Japanese building that plant where it did was stupid. I hate France but they’ve done nuclear smart. Japanese and Russians stupidly.

  9. I think I will place my bets with the vast majority of climate scientists, as evidenced by the backward trend in Australia since the roll back Prof. Turley outlined above.
    Nick, please elaborate why you claim the so-called left commenters have been disappointed in JT? By the way, how is Nuclear working in Japan these days?

    1. rafflaw – if it were not for nuclear power in Arizona, Nick would not be able to winter in San Diego.

  10. Nick, didn’t you see “The China Syndrome”? You can’t have nuclear, Jane said so.

    I keep preaching LFTR (Liquid Fluoride Thorium Reactor) since it is really the was to go in the future. Clean, inherently safe and Th is abundant. Nuclear will have its day when the greenies finally come to grips with base load power. Well, that is if we don’t have a massive population reduction fighting over the last fossil fuels.

  15. Free, You are one of the many, new, intelligent free thinkers who have been attracted here since January.

  16. JT is doubling down this morning. Giving some love to the left commenters who have been so disappointed in him of late. I find this dynamic more interesting than the post. I find it very odd that a libertarian would support a carbon tax. But, when you got that new time religion, Climate Change, well then up is down and black is white, whatever Al Gore tells you, it is the truth.

  17. The proposed carbon tax shows the basic incoherence of liberal economic policies. The tax itself does exactly what one would expect it to do — taxing the emission creates the disincentive to emit CO2 and rationally will lead to LESS of it. Of course, that is a liberal goal, so naturally the law of demand/supply are acknowledged. Taxes generally on the economy used to fund liberal programs suddenly don’t see the same negative effect. So, if its the minimum wage or capital gains, or basically any tax, all of a sudden the law of demand and law of supply suddenly don’t apply anymore.

  18. Skimming the actual Pitt and Sherry report – rather than relying on a second hand account of it – is revealing. For example, I learned that despite having many more windmills available to execute raptors with their twirling blades, the renewable energy failed to renew because the blades didn’t twirl enough due to a lack of wind (second bullet point, pg 5).

    Immediately below that is Figure 5 depicting the trend in emissions. That little squiggle at the end of the light gray line apparently represents a suicidal society gone mad.

    http://www.pittsh.com.au/assets/files/Cedex/CEDEX%20Report%20Sept%202014.pdf

    Removing the carbon tax creates more economic liberty. The increased electricity usage after removing the carbon tax likely means economic activity is increasing. And that means more people will be lifted out of poverty and given an opportunity for a better life. Good for Abbot.

  19. Freud is out of fashion and has been for years and Toynbee is no longer taught in universities.

  20. Civilization and its subcultures can be psychoanalyzed according to Freud:

    I would not say that such an attempt to apply psychoanalysis to civilized society would be fanciful or doomed to fruitlessness.
    …
    The diagnosis of collective neuroses, moreover, will be confronted by a special difficulty. In the neurosis of an individual we can use as a starting point the contrast presented to us between the patient and his environment which we assume to be normal. No such background as this would be available for any society similarly affected; it would have to be supplied in some other way. And with regard to any therapeutic application of our knowledge, what would be the use of the most acute analysis of social neuroses, since no one possesses power to compel the community to adopt the therapy? In spite of all these difficulties, we may expect that one day someone will venture upon this research into the pathology of civilized communities.

    (Social Dementia Causes Heated Misunderestimations – 3, quoting S. Freud).

    Suicidal behavior is the most common type of behavior according to historian A. Toynbee, who wrote “In other words, a society does not ever die ‘from natural causes’, but always dies from suicide or murder — and nearly always from the former, as this chapter has shown.” (A Study of History, by A.J. Toynbee).

    One part of suicidal tendencies is some form of denial.

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