Australia's carbon budget - why do we need concessions?
The other day, while sharing a coffee (chai in my case) at the market, Alok, a normally progressive friend, put the case that Australia, because of its long distances, and coal-based energy needed a high carbon budget.
Every country makes an argument that it needs more of the world's share of carbon emissions, and I'm sure each has its own argument - and is good at challenging the others. Good enough for China and the US to impede progress as each waits for the other to move first.
So why should Australia get more than its share?
Alok argued that we had long distances to travel, I argued that in that case it is our problem, and one that should be solved by using lower-carbon transport, after all we are still building roads and shutting down railways.
He argued that food has to travel long distances, I asked why we had to produce milk in Victoria and bring it to Northern NSW where we until recently had a perfectly good dairy industry.
But what about wheat he argued - ignoring of course that Europe and America both move wheat long distances from crop to plate. I responded that if a food has to be grown a long way from its consumers, then it SHOULD incur an extra cost, and that cost should tilt the balance in favor of foods grown closer to home, maybe that would make it more cost-effective to grow vegetables, potatoes, closer to the cities.
What about energy - most of Australia's comes from Coal. But we have abundant resources of wind and solar, if coal was more expensive there would be an incentive to develop those. But - Alok argued, we've already got this massive infrastructure. But as Keith Lovegrove of ANU showed, at a presentation I went to last year, the replacement time of our energy infrastructure is very similar to that needed for reducing to near zero carbon emissions, i.e. if we constructed no new carbon-emitting infrastructure, then over a roughly 20 year period, our emissions from stationary energy would move to close to zero anyway.
Alok's final argument was a good one - that Australia is a resource producing nation, that we have a heavy carbon cost involved in mining resources, and why should the Australian public have to reduce its carbon budget to mine the minerals that other countries consume. This of course is exactly the argument for Australia to be part of an international carbon trading scheme, because if these minerals take so much carbon to produce then the mining companies should have to purchase the carbon credits from the consuming nations, increasing the cost of the minerals to closer to their true price. It is the same logic that says that the industrialisation of China and India incurs a carbon cost, that should be being paid by the consumers of the goods these countries produce, i.e. the purchasers of cheap washing machines should be paying for the carbon credits the producers of those washing machines should need to buy.
All Alok's arguments are ones that are given by Australian politicians, and I'm sure there are equally powerful arguments made in Europe, the US, China and India.
I think its time to start arguing that the world's carbon emission budget belongs to everyone, and that historically high consumption, and inefficiencies is not an argument for future high consumption. If the result is a subsidy for low-carbon countries, then isn't that a pretty reasonable mechanism for international aid?
Posted by mitra at December 18, 2007 6:29 AM
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