The EU has given up trying to persuade Australian voters that wind and solar power is “cheap”. Instead, it’s using Upperclass centralized bully-power in an attempt to force Australia to sacrifice cheaper electricity and hobble its generation network to satisfy the EU totalitarians.
Australian exporters could face millions of dollars in European tariffs as EU seeks to punish polluters
Written by someone at Their ABC
Australian exporters to Europe are likely to face millions of dollars in new tariffs after the European Parliament voted overnight to move forward with a carbon levy on products from countries lacking serious pollution reduction programs.
The vote came after a top parliamentary committee noted concerns about “the lack of cooperation by some of the EU’s trade partners … to reach the objectives of the Paris Agreement”.
Australians installed more renewables per capita than any place on Earth in 2018-19, but that isn’t enough. The EU say we need a “target” of net-zero, (which we can point at and ignore, like most of what the EU does):
Kathleen van Brempt, a key parliamentary trade coordinator, said an FTA was contingent on “a clear vision [from] Australia by when and how they will become climate neutral and by when and how they will phase out of coal”.
Until Australia establishes a new scheme to lower emissions, its exporters to Europe face the prospect of paying additional tariffs under the new Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), which is expected to come into force in 2023.
The mechanism is designed to apply tariffs on imports equivalent to the fees paid under the EU’s Emissions Trading System by local businesses producing the same product.
Three solutions: Nukes, fake targets, or a trade war?
Being practical, given that the EU is our second largest trading partner, we can either build a few nuclear power plants, fake up a symbolic “carbon target”, or fight back in a trade war. While Australia has more uranium than any place on Earth, we also have 300 years of coal and it’s a lot cheaper. Nothing beats wholesale brown coal at 3c KWh. As for symbolic carbon targets and fake declarations of emergencies, the price is still too high. These careless declarations become potent legal tools to protect extreme protesters, excuse trade wars (like this one), and punish certain politicians and companies.
The best choice is to point out how Australia is already a super-achiever with carbon reduction per capita, and the installation of unreliable renewables. When the EU achieves similar per capita “gains” then they can lecture us — especially when we have an energy-dependent economy, live on the lowest population density country on Earth, have bigger distances to cover, and are more remote than any continent bar Antarctica. Until then Australians will just have to drink Australian wine and cheese and drive South Korean and Japanese cars.
We’ll sell our gold, shiraz and beef to the UK, Canada, India, and US. Long live The Commonwealth!
Map of the Commonwealth
Time to talk about that lop-sided AU-EU trade imbalance
In a trade war with the EU, Australia surely holds the upper hand. We export $30 billion dollars worth of goods and services to the EU, but import $80 billion dollars worth of EU goods, none of which we really have to have, and that’s despite the EU already having higher tariffs on Australian goods than we do on EU goods. Could we not just add tariffs to incoming EU goods to recover their charges and distribute them back to subsidize our exporters to the EU? Seems only fair.
Yes, yes, obviously we’d prefer no tariffs, but if the EU wants a tariff on our electricity, so be it.
If the EU wants to set our electricity prices, Australians could easily choose not to buy EU goods. It’s not that we have anything against the suffering small businesses of the EU (to whom we are rather sympathetic), but if they won’t protest at this bullying behaviour and their own stupidly high electricity prices then we can’t help them. We don’t need German windmills, French wine, Italian cheese or Spanish olives. We can supply our own.
We should also cancel our French submarine purchase “in protest” (any excuse will do — the Japanese subs are better in any case).