The Climate Change: Carbon Farming and Trading conference, organised by Yass Area Networks of Landcare groups, featured an impressive line-up of speakers, many with outstanding qualifications.
The Soldiers Club auditorium was filled to overflowing to hear of both the problems associated with climate change and the responses available to individuals.
One of the speakers was Mr David Pearce, Director and Principal Policy Analyst, Centre for International Economics, who spoke on emissions trading, which the Federal Government has promised to introduce by 2010. Mr Pearce described the ETS as ‘the biggest policy framework ever established’ in this country.
In a nutshell, in an ETS:
* businesses must have a permit for every tonne of carbon dioxide equivalents they emit
* permits may be allocated in various ways (given away, auctioned, allocated by bureaucrats.) In his report, Professor Garnaut recommends the auction method, which allows the revenue gained to be distributed to the community as compensation for low income earners, tax cuts or other government priorities.
* any shortfall in permits must be bought on the market
* THERE WILL BE A SHORTAGE OF PERMITS.
As the aim of the ETS is to reduce our carbon emissions, the shortage of permits is crucial. The whole point of the system is to encourage innovative and creative technological solutions to reducing carbon. As carbon becomes more expensive, the alternatives become more attractive.
If a business has a shortfall in their permits, they can either buy permits or reduce emissions. Businesses that are early adopters of emission reducing technologies may find they have permit surplus to their needs and may be able to sell them to those who have not yet moved into the low carbon world.
Emissions trading is based on the acceptance that global warming is real, is happening now and is caused by carbon. Not everyone at the YAN conference last week accepted all those assumptions. During one of the breaks, I had a chat with one very vocal sceptic.
Essentially, he questions the accuracy of the computer modelling involved, saying that computer models are not particularly successful at predicting weather next week, let alone climate in 50 years. He also questions the agenda and consensus of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), describing it as politically motivated. He claims there is no world wide consensus of scientists on this issue and was very well informed about weather patterns of which I had never heard. He points out that emissions trading will be a hugely expensive waste of resources if climate change is not caused by carbon but by some other factor.
It has to be noted that this is a minority view: the IPCC and Al Gore were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize "for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change".
However, it is interesting to talk to people who are prepared to stand up and defend an unpopular point of view. As Jane Baker says in this week’s Webs, Weeds and Wisdom (page 2) ‘reserve your right to think’.
Most of us are not in a position to review all the science ourselves: we rely on scientists to do it for us. We rely on committees such as the IPCC to sift through all the evidence and distil the essence of it for us. We trust them to find the answers but retain the right to debate their conclusions.
The ability to have a healthy public debate is a wonderful feature of our democracy and should be applauded.
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