An edited version of this piece appeared in today's Crikey email.
Not long ago I wrote in Crikey giving the Climate Institute a very hard time over their positioning on geosequestration. While I still think they are utterly wrong on that, I write today to support their excellent report which the Federal Opposition yesterday dishonestly and disingenuously abused in Question Time.
Those with memories longer than most in the big old parties will remember that one of the Howard Government's favourite strategies in the climate debate, from the late nineties right through until their Emissions Trading Task Group report last year, was to state the costs of action in absolute terms while ignoring business-as-usual economic growth. Ably assisted by ABARE, Howard and his Ministers turned the costs of climate action into a bogeyman when a simple comparative analysis showed that the costs would be dwarfed by the rate at which we are all getting richer.
This analysis, shouted from the rooftops by the Greens, Greenpeace, Clive Hamilton and many others, was lost in the populist fray.
The Climate Institute's report yesterday, written by two leading economists in the field, former Greens staffer Richard Denniss and the CSIRO's Steve Hatfield-Dodds, is one of the best contributions to this debate yet. It demonstrates very clearly that, while the costs increases that will come down the line with an effective emissions trading scheme are quite substantial, they are still smaller than expected increases in wealth for all income brackets and for all carbon prices modelled.
In other words, even with a high carbon price, energy will actually decrease as a proportion of household spending!
The report goes on to say that, with investment in energy efficiency or cash compensation using the vast revenue accumulated through emissions permit sales, there will be very significant savings to all brackets for all carbon prices modelled. This is something the Greens have long been arguing. We strongly support compensation for low income earners, although there are far better ways to deliver it than cash payments. We propose a very substantial investment in a systemic roll-out of energy efficiency upgrades, such as insulation and solar hot water, through a scheme like our EASI policy as the best way to permanently reduce household energy costs.
To return to the point at hand, energy affordability comparisons are undeniably a tricky and complex issue, but that is no excuse for the Opposition's return to Howard Government form, quite deliberately abusing the report, taking figures out of context and using the report to say the exact opposite of what it actually says.
I've been shocked by Brendan Nelson's populism on petrol, but, just when I thought the Opposition could go no lower, they managed to achieve it. Cory Bernardi led the charge in the Senate, citing the report as demonstration of the unfair imposition on families of emissions trading.
The Government, tragically, made a ham-fisted attempt to defend its position. Instead of calling the Opposition to task for deliberately abusing and misusing the data, they fell back on first principles that the cost of inaction will be greater than the cost of action. That is, of course, true. But, when given such an opportunity, surely it would have been far better to use the details of the report itself and expose the Opposition on the issue.
This whole episode is symptomatic of the hijacking of the climate debate once again by those who would rather lie and suppress the truth than face up to the challenge. On Insiders this last weekend, George Megalogenis's valiant attempt to discuss how petrol price is actually declining as a proportion of household expenditure was shouted down by Andrew Bolt.
It is very clear that, if we are to have a sensible climate debate in this country, that debate needs to be between the Government and the Greens, leaving out the Opposition until they are willing to engage sensibly and with intellectual rigour.
