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We can finally assess (sort of) the carbon tax in Australia. It ran for two years from July 2012 to July 2014 and cost Australians nearly $14 billion. The National Greenhouse Gas Inventory Office released Australian emissions statistics for the June Quarter of 2014. The headlines hitting the press this week are saying we reduced our emissions by 1.4%. The Greens are excited, but neither the journalists or the Greens have looked at the numbers. Not only is this reduction pathetically small on a global scale, but it’s smaller than the “noise” in the adjustments. Like most official statistics the emissions data gets adjusted year after year, and often by 1 – 2%. We won’t really know what our emissions were, or what the fall was, for years to come… (if ever).
Spot the effect of the Australian carbon tax in the graph of emissions by sector below. It operated for the last two years. The falls in electricity emissions started long before the carbon tax (and probably have more to do with the global financial crisis, a government unfriendly to small business, and the wild subsidies offered for solar power).
(Click to enlarge)
Did Australian industry “reduce” their […]
As of today, Australia no longer has the most expensive “carbon” price in the world. The voters didn’t ask for a tax in 2010, but it was forced on them in 2011. They rejected it wholeheartedly in 2013 but it still has taken months to start unwinding this completely pointless piece of symbolism which aimed to change the weather. The machinery of democracy may be slow, but this is a win for voters.
11:15am EST today: The Australian Senate passes the carbon tax repeal bill.
“Australia has become the first country in the world to abolish a price on carbon, with the Senate passing the Abbott government’s repeal bills 39 votes to 32.“ SMH
Now we need to turn off the tap to all the other green gravy rent-seekers who ignore the evidence.
h/t Matthew (aka Matty thanks!)
Other news services are starting to cover this. All the cross-benchers except Nick Xenophon (who was absent) voted for the repeal. Labor and the Greens opposed it. News.com
Soon big companies will stop paying a penalty on carbon emissions, currently just over $25 a tonne, ending Australia’s most controversial policy implementation since the 2003 decision to join the Iraq invasion.
[…]
UPDATE Thursday: DONE Success at 11:15am this morning in Canberra. The Carbon Tax is gone.
UPDATE: Weds –– This could take days. The repeal was before the Senate this morning. Labor and the Greens are “dragging the debate out” with speeches. “Filibustering” according to Finance Minister Mathias Corman (The Australian). More debate is due tonight. But the Senate has agreed to extend sitting hours after Friday and keep coming back until this is resolved. They were due to start a 5 week break on Friday. (See Sky News too). This doesn’t look like being resolved today. (SMH)
Sydney Morning Herald: It [The government] was concerned that while all eight cross-bench senators say they are committed to consigning the carbon tax to history in a final vote, as many as three might baulk at the use of a guillotine to bring an end debate and force that vote.
In a further sign the government had lost exclusive control of the legislative timetable, the Climate Change Authority bill was removed from the list of those to be considered, supposedly at the insistence of the PUP.
Sources said the CCA bill, the purported vehicle for Mr Palmer’s proposed ”dormant” […]
The latest Newspoll results say that Australian voters want Clive Palmer to stop blocking the repeal of the carbon tax.
[The Australian] A Newspoll conducted exclusively for The Australian after last Thursday’s chaos in the Senate saw the repeal bills rejected, reveals 53 per cent want the controversial tax to be abolished.
Only 35 per cent want the Palmer United Party to continue to block the removal of the tax, while 12 per cent are uncommitted.
So one third of Australia wants us to keep the carbon tax (they can always pay it voluntarily thinks Jo?)
Keeping the carbon tax is costing Australians $11 million dollars a day. There is a deadline. It’s Friday:
The electricity industry incurs $11 million a day in carbon tax charges and market-traded contracts have not been trading carbon since July 1. But a carbon price of $25.40 a tonne will be returned to the contracts if the repeal fails to pass the Senate by Friday. Mr O’Reilly said failure to achieve the repeal by Friday would complicate returning savings to customers by “an exponential amount’’.
Even 33% of Labor voters want the tax gone.
8.9 out of 10 based on 64 ratings […]
Clive Palmer, the coal mining Billionaire and his three (or four) PUP Senators have voted down the Carbon Tax repeal they said they would pass. It was quite the blockbuster day in Australian politics. They supported the government move to bring on the vote at 11:45am today, then decided not to vote for the repeal bill. They hold the balance of power. The carbon tax is still law. It may get voted on again by next Thursday, but if that fails, it won’t be voted on again til August, and millions in carbon tax payments are on the line.
There are at least three version of why the bill failed (the same thing happened the day Palmer met Gore). Sky News suggests PUP wanted to change their amendments. According to News.com, Palmer says the amendments put forward by the Coalition were older ones, and not the newer ones the Coalition agreed to, and he claims the government pulled a “swifty”. In an article in The Australian, it appears the problem was that the amendments were not circulated at 8.30 this morning. Given that Palmer has been known to feed scurrilous versions to the media, perhaps the confusion here is no […]
UPDATE: 50% counted so far, likely result = Lib 2 | Lab 2 | Greens 1 | Pup 1 [ABC tally] (This page says all 6 seats are “elected” yet only 50% is counted. Can someone explain? – Jo]
The WA re-election of six senators runs tomorrow. The carbon tax lie is still here, the zombie law dead, but living. The Abbott government can’t get the legislation through the Senate to bury it.
It’s been a novel political strategy by the Labor Party: make a definitive commitment to voters, win by the skin of your teeth, then do the exact opposite. Get caned in the next poll, lose resoundingly. Then stick with the commitment you promised you wouldn’t commit too. Apparently, at the core of the Labor Party philosophy — Truth Is Optional. Changing the weather is more important than being straight with the voters. It’s how you serve them, right?
Ponder the ambition. Gillard declared “there will be no carbon tax” then chose voluntarily, in full view, and with no gun to her head, to break her commitment. She hoped perhaps the Australian people would a/ forget, b/ say thanks, or c/ be understanding — after all, She […]
This news was so boringly predictable I almost didn’t post it, but numbers like this of actual outcomes of visionary Big-Government Experiments are hard to come by.
Seven billion dollars works out to $350 per person, and $1,350 per household of four, for one year. If Bill Shorten (leader of the opposition) had to knock on doors to collect this tax, there would be a riot in the street tomorrow.
The Australian reports that the $1,350 from your house for the year to Sept 2013, produced an emissions fall from 543.9 million tons all the way down to 542.1 .
National greenhouse accounts to be released today show carbon emissions fell just 0.3 per cent in the year to September 2013. This was despite the carbon tax raising $7 billion over the period.
But I hear some cry that it did help reduce emission from electricity:
The Department of Environment figures, obtained by The Australian, show electricity emissions fell 5.5 per cent or about 11 million tonnes in the year to September.
However virtually none of the 11 million tonnes “saved” had much to do with the carbon tax. About 5 million tons was due to reduced economic activity […]
Remember how the whole world was moving to a clean energy future, and they would mock and scorn us if we did not do our part? Statement by Parliamentary Secretary Paul Calandra on Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Introduction of Legislation to Repeal the Carbon Tax
OTTAWA, ONTARIO–(Marketwired – Nov. 12, 2013) – Today, Paul Calandra, Parliamentary Secretary to the Prime Minister, issued the following statement on behalf of the Government of Canada on Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s introduction of legislation to repeal the carbon tax:
“Canada applauds the decision by Prime Minister Abbott to introduce legislation to repeal Australia’s carbon tax. The Australian Prime Minister’s decision will be noticed around the world and sends an important message.
“Our government knows that carbon taxes raise the price of everything, including gas, groceries, and electricity. Prime Minister Abbott has said that, in Australia, the repeal of the carbon tax will reduce the average household’s cost of living by (in Australian dollars) $550 a year, take $200 off household power bills and $70 off gas bills.
“Our government has reduced greenhouse gas emissions while protecting and creating Canadians jobs – greenhouse gas […]
Bill McKibben wants to stop a mine in Australia because it might affect the weather. He says wind power is as affordable as coal.
The Australian, Friday Oct 25: “… we’ve reached the point where alternatives have become realistic.Wind power is now as affordable as coal-fired power in Australia, not to mention the limitless energy potential of the powerful sun that shines on your continent.”
To which I say, fantastic. If wind power is as cheap as coal, we don’t need a carbon tax, emissions trading schemes, renewable targets, or other subsidies … people will use wind simply because it is cheaper. Alternatively, Bill is talking out of his hat.
Kill the schemes, cut the subsidies. Bring it on. I say!
We can see how many people rely on Windpower in Australia
That’s the yellow part. Coal is the black or brown part.
Source: ESAA
Source: ESAA
All the assertions of “cheap wind power” are only true if we assume our CO2 emissions cause warming, amplified by water vapor and cloud changes, which causes dangerous and expensive outcomes. Furthermore we must assume that it is cheaper to mitigate rather than adapt (which it isn’t), and then assume that taxes, […]
It’s taken a week, but at least one Labor adviser has finally got a better answer as to why the Labor Party suffered a record loss. As long as Labor “spins” its mistakes, not only does it not learn any lessons, but it gives the public no reason to trust that it has changed. Labor suffers so much from not having open ongoing debate. If Kelty (and others) had said this two years ago, they would not be in such a hole now.
The Australian
…the party’s breach of trust with voters over the carbon tax was a bigger cause of its defeat than the disunity cited by senior ALP figures.
Mr Kelty, who is backing Bill Shorten in the mould of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to become the next ALP leader, said the seeds for last Saturday’s loss could be traced back to the failure of Labor to explain to voters why Kevin Rudd was dumped in favour of Julia Gillard in 2010.
“To be honest, I think they lost the election in two points of history,” Mr Kelty said.
Spin has a price:
“They didn’t ever explain the change of leadership from Rudd to Gillard. Therefore […]
Tony Abbott announces Australia is open for business again.
Finally Australia steps back from a porkbarrelling party that stood for nothing more than being in power.
They broke promises to anyone and everyone with Olympian success. And it was not just the usual politician broken promise of failing to solve a problem they promised to solve: they brought in The Carbon Tax after dishonestly guaranteeing they would not. Would they have won the 2010 election if they hadn’t made that promise? (It would only have taken 400 voters in Corangamite to rewrite history.) They’ve taken broken promises to an all new level, where nothing they say can be trusted. It was not a question of them trying and failing, it was a question of being elected through deception. Every single Labor member chose to break that promise; any one of them could have stopped it. This is not a “leadership” question. It’s a question of integrity, and it applies to every member of the party.
The Labor Party also told us Tony Abbott was a misogynist, relentlessly negative, and a denier, and in return the Labor Party received one of the lowest primary votes in history.
I […]
Patrick J. Michaels and Paul C. “Chip” Knappenberger have created a calculator of exactly how many degrees of global warming will be averted if the IPCC is right. I can’t think why the IPCC didn’t do this before. For example, if all industrialized nations achieve a 100% reduction (that is, stop using coal, oil, gas, diesel, and avgas tomorrow*), then 87 years from now the world will be 0.352C cooler (assuming climate sensitivity is a high 4.5C and the models work, and nothing else changes in the atmosphere). The great thing is you can adjust the parameters yourself to see how many ways Global Action does not add up.
Calculator from CATO.org (Click to go to the calculator)
Unfortunately it does not also project the costs. Version II perhaps?
*Please forgive me for that sweeping assumption. We all know that to get a true 100% reduction in CO2 emissions we’d need to do a lot more. Like building nuclear plants from handmade mud-bricks using solar powered trucks and wind-powered cranes. And no more flights to anywhere unless you have a pedal powered hang-glider or one of those marvelous solar planes that takes 2 months to cross the US.
[…]
What once was the Greatest Moral Challenge, has now been downgraded. Not because the evidence shows it is futile, but because of the polls. It’s democracy in action, working through the fog of ulterior motives, and the inefficiency of lazy journalists informing distracted voters or not, polled with non-specific questions. But somehow, through the haze, the public realizes they are getting a bad deal, and finally Rudd realizes there is no rescuing The Carbon Pox that voters didn’t vote for.
We were told we needed a price on carbon specifically to increase our electricity prices, reduce emissions, and to cool global temperatures by zero degrees. Now, apparently the cost of living is too high — even though that was entirely predictable and indeed a mark of the tax’s “success”. Instead of admitting it was a mistake, we’re “moving forward” and now we need to copy a trading scheme that hasn’t worked, and which is called “free” but is fixed by EU bureaucrats that neither we nor even Europeans can vote for. The New Zealanders are ahead of us.
Australia – a non-voting non-member of the EU?
Thus the Australian economy is now partly dependent on decisions made in the EU, […]
Mark McGowan , the West Australian Labor leader hoping to win the election in March and become Premier of WA, announced that he doesn’t like the Carbon Tax. But apparently he does like emissions trading, showing that he’s as keen as anyone to help large financial institutions reap nice profits for little risk, and no benefit.
It’s an industry which deals in paper sales of an atmospheric nullity and thus, by design, prone to fraud. (See the $7b VAT tax fraud where 90% of trades in some markets were criminal). The EU emissions price is collapsing, and the scheme has made no difference to emissions in the EU. The US reduced CO2 more than the EU without a tax or a national trading scheme. In the unlikely event the scheme overcame the fraud and inefficiencies and actually reduced carbon dioxide, stopping the entire output of Australian industry and commerce would make 0.0154 degrees to global temperatures, at best, and that’s assuming the IPCC assumptions turned out to be correct despite all the evidence suggesting they are wrong.
“It’s no coincidence that the only people who argue for a free market solution are those who profit from it, or […]
I saw on the ABC news tonight that Mark McGowan announced that he doesn’t like the Carbon Tax. He’s the West Australian state opposition leader and there are just four weeks left before the State election. Strangely I can find no story, no news headline to confirm this.
What does it matter you say… it’s a federal issue, not a state one. But it says everything you need to know about how unpopular both Gillard and the Carbon tax are. McGowan has dodged the question repeatedly for months, but trailing in the polls, he finally chose to dump the policy, despite it making his name Mud with the Federal Government and his fellow Labor compatriots. Peter van Onselen suggested it would pick him up some votes only a few days ago.
He would be the first Labor State Leader to do so.
In May the former Labor premier Kristina Keneally says Julia Gillard should revoke or wind back the carbon tax in order to claw back public popularity. But she’s was safely out of the action by then. On August 9th 2012, the NSW Labor leader — John Robertson told his caucus they’d never hear him support the carbon tax, […]
Why do we need a carbon tax? A study by John Reilly candidly “explains” (albeit indirectly) why this is not and has never been about the environment. It’s all about power and money — specifically $1,500 billion dollars of it over 10 years. What better excuse to raise funds for politicians? They pretend to save the planet and use the funds to buy votes from people who don’t realize that they themselves pay for the “free” handouts — if not with their dollars, then with their jobs.
This is another piece of magic-pie economics:
A carbon tax would take pressure off Congress to find “tradeoffs” between closing the deficit gap and reviving the economy, according to John Reilly, an author of the study.
“Congress will face many difficult tradeoffs in stimulating the economy and job growth while reducing the deficit,” Reilly, the co-director of MIT’s Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, said in a statement.
“But with the carbon tax there are virtually no serious tradeoffs. Our analysis shows the overall economy improves, taxes are lower and pollution emissions are reduced.
The study found that taxing carbon at $20 per ton would generate $1.5 trillion in […]
The Australian Government,via Greg Combet, announced this week that Labor’s version of certainty is the kind that is un-certain. For two years they’ve been emphatically declaring that “Australia needs certainty” or it’s variant, “Business needs certainty” . (Right before that, they were emphatically declaring that “There will be no carbon tax”, so later, when they did exactly what they said they wouldn’t do, we found out what certainty means to the Australian Labor Party. It isn’t the kind of certainty that helps business and voters “establish beyond doubt” what a vote for a Labor Government means.)
While people are saying we have now linked Australia’s carbon “price” (from 2015 onwards) to the EU market. In effect it was linked before, as I mentioned here. Now that link is rearranged. Previously Australian companies could buy ultra cheap EU options but had to top them up to the floor price, but now they won’t have to pay extra to lift it to $15/ton.
Mr Combet said the government was not considering any other changes to the scheme. [Source: The Australian]
Yes, and we believe him don’t we?
Things are slightly more sane than they were last week, but the difference […]
It was a dumb memo to write:
“Brumby’s recommended some “simple things for you all to do to find some extra sales”.
“We are doing an RRP (recommended retail price) review at present which is projected to be in line with CPI (consumer price index), but take an opportunity to make some moves in June and July, let the carbon tax take the blame, after all your costs will be going up due to it,” Mr Priest wrote.”
“It is understood the newsletter was sent to franchise owners last month.” [The West Australian]
But the outcry about it is over-the-top. It has drawn national interest, been published on the news around the country. The company has issued apologies. The outrage has been so overdone, that today managing director of Brumbies bakery’s (Deane Priest) resigned.
The memo was dumb because it wasn’t suggesting a totally honest approach, and because it projected the wrong attitude to staff of Brumby’s, and it was especially dumb, because there is a witchhunt on for any business which blames a fraction of a cent more than they should on the carbon tax. With 300 stores across the country there was […]
From the Liberal Party site June 29th 2012 the details we hope to see unfold. The thought makes the arrival of The-Tax-On-Everything this Sunday easier to bear… savour the anticipation, and hope we don’t have to wait too long.
Abbott vows he will dissolve the Parliament if the voters choose “No Carbon Tax” (again) and the Labor party denies them their choice. Could they? Would they? Is it possible the Labor Party might knock back the legislation to remove That Tax?
The Coalitions Plan to Abolish the Carbon Tax
As soon as an election is called, the Coalition will take immediate and concrete steps to repeal the Carbon Tax.
Repealing the Carbon Tax will ease cost of living pressures on families, help small business and restore confidence to the economy.
On the day the election is called, I will write to the Secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet to make it clear that, if elected, the first priority of a Coalition Government will be the repeal of the Carbon Tax.
Within the spirit of the Caretaker conventions, I will also formally request the Clean Energy Finance Corporation to desist […]
CATA have organised a protest
ELECTION NOW!; WE’VE HAD ENOUGH RALLY 10 out of 10 based on 24 ratings […]
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