In Senate Economics Estimates Senator Joyce asked the CSIRO the million dollar question, or should that be the hundred billion dollar question, “Will the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme change the temperature of the globe?”
The answer confirmed my worst fears in that I could not get the answer “Yes”. I was told it would depend on global factors of course! There will be no global factors if the rest of the world is not part of a global scheme. The CSIRO was sensibly and more inclined to tell me that my question was a policy issue. That is correct as it lacks scientific credibility that there will be any discernable change in the climate by reason of an Australian ETS. Later during the Committe hearing, the chief scientist said there would be a change in the climate by way of an Australian Emissions Trading Scheme. She also acknowledged there would be a change in the climate if I personally parked my car in the garage.
That is to say an indiscernible change, apart from the fact that the process involved in the most absurd form of minutia, follows the same mathematics as the overall equation of climate change.
The Australian Emissions Trading Scheme is merely a policy, a political statement, a gesture. The cost to the Australian citizen of this massive new tax associated with it, is very real however.
If you are involved in the emission of carbon, which might be from anything as obscure as ironing your clothes, cooking dinner, putting fertiliser on your field or pouring a concrete slab for your house, you will pay the tax. You may not see it but you will definitely pay it.
The removal of wealth from your life and transferred to the Treasury will be discernable, with the commission going to stock brokers and bankers on the way through.
I have to query, is the purpose of the Emissions Trading Scheme to cool the planet, which clearly it will not do, or is it to prop up a parlous state of our Government finances? The more I hear, the more I am inclined to the latter.
Australians will deliver tens of billions of dollars to the Treasury by reason of this tax in the near future.
There is far more empirical evidence in what it will cost you, the resident of Australia, than any scientific evidence that an emissions scheme will do anything for the climate.
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