THE defence by the Climate Institute's John Connor (''Many ways to calculate China's carbon price'', Commentary, 17/8) of the government-funded ''Putting a Price Tag on Pollution'' report doesn't hold water. I do not dispute that China is making modest efforts to curb its emissions growth and that there are different ways of calculating the implicit price of cutting emissions. What matters is whether the calculations of the cost of doing so are comparable.
FOI documents of Department of Climate Change feedback during the editing process of the report question why inconsistent methodologies were used to compare the carbon prices for Australia and China.
The inconsistency justified the authors including in the final report a note in the table for Australia's implicit carbon price that a different methodology was used for the NSW Greenhouse Gas scheme calculations. They did so for a reason. It allowed them to justify using a higher Chinese carbon price of $8.08 per tonne of greenhouse gas emissions, than if they had used the same methodology, which would have delivered a price of $1.78 compared to Australia's $2.34.
One calculation says China is ahead of Australia, the other says the reverse and changes whether Climate Change Minister Greg Combet could use the report's conclusions as part of its political narrative to justify the introduction of a carbon tax. It's now clear that there are questions about the report's conclusions. They were first raised by the government, not myself. And with these concerns should come questions about when Combet learned of them, and if not, why not?
No comments:
Post a Comment