Can the govt show that the taxes on the 500 polluters will not push these companies offshore and damage the future prosperity of this country?
Yes. Go to
http://www.cleanenergyfuture.gov.au/
Read it all. Every chapter...
If you want to challenge any of the assumptions behind the modelling, post them up and we can discuss the issue. Companies in the top 500 who both have high emissions intensity and are price takers in international markets are treated separately - usually through the issue of free permits for a significant (in some cases overwhelming) proportion of their emissions.
Note this is different to the treatment of coal power station owners, who have no trade exposure.
Are there really no other domestic solutions but to pay billion dollars to other countries and buy carbon credit offsets to make up for the expected under-achievement of carbon saving? What about options for govt to plant trees on crown lands, islands, desert? What number of trees do you need per capita and what policies do you need to achieve this?
There are alternatives but they are likely to be more expensive. Sourcing credits in the domestic market alone is the same as asking for a higher carbon price. If domestic credits are cheaper then we won't be buying any internationally.
As for planting trees in the desert, there is a reason trees don't grow in the desert...
Planting trees on marginal farm land could be economic in an open carbon market however controls are necessary to prevent competition with food production.
A reason the govt thinks CT is necessary is because it wants to have global standing, 'to keep up with the Jones' globally. If so, why are imports and our foreign policies apparently spared from this CT exercise? Let's not be hypocrites and tax local polluters on the climate, but allow foreign polluters immunity, which defeats the purpose of the CT. I am aware of failed efforts in Kyoto. Surely there are other ways? For example, bilateral with Brazil and Canada, seeing we have economic similarities. Let's use our foreign aids to reflect the CT priorities, ie reduce over-logging, deforestation by fire, etc.
We do use foreign aid for that purpose but increasing our aid budget materially would require increasing taxes and we all know the difficulty of that!
As for a CT on imported goods, it's just not high enough to make the effort worthwhile for the vast majority of goods. For those where it is worthwhile it has been allowed for by the issue of free permits and targetted assistance. The admin costs of doing that across the board would swamp any benefit - the GST below $1k works in a similar way and the CT would have far less impact than that on the vast majority of manufactured. More like <1% than 10% as per the GST <$1k.
Seeing that under CT, Australia will yield little impact on the global climate change (ANU professor's assessment mentioned earlier in someone's posting), is there really no other strategies than a tax approach to the climate change issue? I am slow on this issue and do not know Coalition policies but want to approach the issue afresh. What are Australia's strengths and weaknesses? One of our main strength and wealth is our mineral sector. One of our weakness is our relative small population. It seems the CT is a weak strategic approach to the global climate change issue, if we attempt to use change in our small population to try to impact global pollution, while at the same time damaging our core interest. Wouldn't it be better for Australia to contribute to the global issue by massive investments in research and innovations in alternative energy sources? We already have some investments on alternative energy research pilots but we need to scale this up dramatically to take it as a global challenge for all energy aspects including car fuel and to address the environments of the large polluters overseas.
This package includes our first major fund for research and innovation in clean energy, that hasn't existed before. The money for such an endeavour has to come from somewhere and this package provides it. The alternative is just to tax people's income or profit more, rather than at least starting to tax environmental damage.
As for our global impact, it's a bit hard for Australia to go into international forums and argue for reductions in emissions, when we have the highest per capita emissions in the world ourselves and are doing next to nothing about it. If we start cleaning up our own mess, we can then suggest how others could do the same.
I am not pushing a Coaliton line as I have already admitted I am asking these questions with a genuine desire to engage the issues behind CT.
Me too...
