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The Forum > Article Comments > What carbon price is right to bite into, not bark at, climate change? > Comments

What carbon price is right to bite into, not bark at, climate change? : Comments

By Ted Christie, published 3/2/2012

Twenty-one dollars a tonne is too timid a carbon price to make any impact

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What makes people think co2 in the atmosphere is going to miraculously disappear. It is currently at the highest level since 1950.
The rise in ocean temperature is undercutting the antarctic ice shelf.
Another year of floods in qld nsw, should be enough for you, with-out looking at the rest of the world.
Posted by 579, Friday, 3 February 2012 11:26:10 AM
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What is the right price?

I would suggest a price that the WHOLE world agrees to would be a good start.
Posted by rehctub, Friday, 3 February 2012 11:50:16 AM
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While the key comment in this piece – "government (should) ensure that medium- and long-term decision-making on action for climate change facilitates public trust and confidence ...... People should have an opportunity to effectively participate in the decision-making process, secure in the knowledge that their needs and concerns will be properly taken into account" – does seem like motherhood, it contains much truth. The problem is, how can government possibly achieve this aim in the face of so much public disagreement (the preceding comments here provide a good sample) on every aspect of climate change?

We would need to be told: the real long term physical impacts (currently expressed within a wide band of possibilities); their costs (and I am fully informed on the huge range of estimates of the economic costs of potential climate impacts); the outcome of the current uncertainty about the last 12 years or so of global temperature data (which is a genuine matter of scientific debate, though brushed aside by many protagonists); the real role of a carbon price in reducing emissions (misunderstood by the author of this piece and almost everyone else); the real prospects of the many technologies proposed for reducing carbon emissions (I am betting that my grandchildren will see most as being fanciful); the global politics of inhibiting the economic aspirations of developing nations by limiting their cheap energy sources; and so on. Yes, that's an overlong sentence but it's a massive and unprecedented problem. Simplistic answers hung onto a carbon price just don't cut the mustard.
Posted by Tombee, Friday, 3 February 2012 12:09:04 PM
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Tombee - actually you make an excellent point about people being told the costs of doing soemthign about climate change, as oppossed to the costs of ignoring it.

The problem is that even if you assume full climate change the costs don't add up. Almost the only economist who found anything different was Nicholas Stern, who had to make a major assumption about the time value of money to make for limiting emissions. He assumed that that the value of a dollar today is almost the same as a dollar several decades hence.

That assumption has been kicked around quite a bit by economists since but the result is clear.. with anything like normal economic analysis there is no economic case for controlling emissions. For Australia, in particular, no economic analysis of any sort would justify going it alone in trying to control carbon - essentially what the Gillard Government is doing.

The carbon tax is there for political reasons, not to solve a problem.
Posted by Curmudgeon, Friday, 3 February 2012 12:47:48 PM
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Curmudgeon is correct to say that there is no economic analysis specifically to justify Australia’s carbon tax plans. They are indeed political, in the sense that they are intended to promote the political cause of a global approach to reducing emissions, or some such vague reasoning. But no-one, or at least no-one who can claim to be informed, has seriously suggested that Australia’s actions alone can affect climate here or anywhere else, so Curmudgeon’s point unfortunately is not very relevant.

More problematic is his claim that there is no economic case at all for controlling emissions globally (assuming of course that emissions do affect climate). The economic argument has been about modelling the real costs of the large number of possible climate impacts and about factoring in the prospect that those impacts and their damage costs will happen over a long time scale. I think it’s the latter that Curmudgeon is referring to. The time scale requires the setting of a discount rate to allow costs and benefits to be compared at the same point in time. Economists concede that setting the right discount rate is a philosophical problem, not strictly an economic one. That’s where the crux of the argument about Stern’s results lies.

The most extensive research into climate damage costs, the European ExternE Project, adopted a figure of 19 Euros per tonne of CO2 emitted (2005 base). But others have argued for figures ranging from less than 2 to over 100 Euros per tonne CO2. So obviously the ‘real’ number, if there is any such thing for what is a very intangible concept, is quite uncertain. The point is that, in concept at least, there is a cost attributable to the damage and there is a cost of avoiding that damage by reducing emissions. Only by looking at both costs can rational decisions be made as to what actions to take. The ‘economic case’ cannot therefore just be dismissed. But it’s heavy going.
Posted by Tombee, Friday, 3 February 2012 1:29:22 PM
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Gee Ted, it must be tough, having planned your whole future at big earnings in cases involving global warming to find that the whole thing is either dead or dying.

Suggest you try a new line of work mate. Divorce sounds good, but with declining number of marriages today, it could dry up, just like global warming.

Get onto Jones mate, he is supposed to have a crystal ball.
Posted by Hasbeen, Friday, 3 February 2012 1:58:17 PM
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