Carbon tax passes the House of Reps

Yay! The lower house of parliament has passed the carbon tax legislation. In a month, it will go before the Senate, where the Greens have the balance of power. They’ve said they’ll pass it (maybe with some amendments, I’m not sure), so we should have a way to charge money for carbon dioxide pollution soon.

Some quick points about the tax:

• Australia is the 33rd country to have a carbon tax. We’re joining the UK, Sweden, New Zealand, India and other international friends in making sure that we can pay for cleaning up our atmosphere.
• It’s not a huge amount for corporations to pay, given that all the fossil fuel companies are making billion-dollar profits every year. Business groups are screaming as if the sky were falling, but if you read their annual reports you can see how they’re making plans to include it along with the other costs of doing business. They all carry on like pork chops every time someone suggests that they have community responsibilities, this is just more of the same.
• If you’d like to see how it will affect you as an individual, the ABC has carbon price effect guide.

Personally, Dave and I earn enough money that we’re not getting compensated for the entire expected cost. I’m totally ok with that, and to be honest I’d be happy not to be compensated at all if the money would go towards more renewables or compensating lower-income households instead. But I guess we have to appease the rich whingers if we want anything done in this country!

How to lobby an MP

I’m an old hand at letter writing when it comes to the environment – although in the last few years I’ve switched over to email instead of trying to wrestle with my printer! Over the years I’ve contacted many politicians, companies, non-profit organisations and newspapers and magazines about the issues I think need attention.

Ages ago I shared my tips on how to write letters about eco-issues, because I’ve usually had a decent reply to my efforts. It’s always nice to see your ideas confirmed, though, so I’m really glad that Penny Sharp MLC has written a blog post about letter writing that mostly confirms my opinions.

Sharp’s post 5 tips on how to lobby an MP and not be ignored is really helpful if you want to target a politician. She’s speaking from her own experience as a Member of the NSW Legislative Council, and I think we’d be silly not to take her advice!

She says we should include an address or at least mention which political seat we live in, write things in our own words, ask for a specific action that the MP can actually achieve, and to do our research first. I know I don’t like it when my colleagues just tell me stuff is wrong without giving me the details so I can fix it – it stops being a legitimate request for help and starts looking like whinging.

Sharp also notes that form letters are easily ignorable. I still like to send them when one of my favourite non-profits has a campaign on, because politicians do notice the volume of support for or against an issue even if they’re not reading each letter or postcard in turn. But… I don’t bother with form-letter campaigns if:

a) they don’t let me target either the relevant Minister or my local MPs and Senators, or

b) they don’t ask for a specific action. A vague request for a random person to do something is pretty much spam in my opinion, and I believe in the Golden Rule!

So: no spamming and no whinging. A nice but assertive letter to let your politician know why they should care what you think, and what you want done about it is the way to go if you want some grease for your squeaky wheel

What’s a fair rate for a feed-in tariff?

The state government of WA has decided to cut the feed-in tariff for solar panels… to zero.

When people install solar panels, there’s a contracted rate for the feed-in tariff, and Premier Barnett has just decided that he’s not going to honour his end of the bargain. I know us greenies are a pretty generous lot, but I think most people will be annoyed, especially when the government has made no moves to clean up it’s own act.

This is terrible news for the solar panel companies too – the tariff was helping them establish their businesses, by making the demand stable enough for them to know how many people they could hire without spending out of their budget. Colin Barnett is happy to help bend the rules for mining companies so they can acquire whichever patch of land they want (even if someone else is already using it), but helping small businesses isn’t on his to-do list.

A government representative was speaking about it on ABC radio last week, and kept going on about how you can’t expect to get rich quick off solar panels. What a crock. This isn’t about getting rich, it’s about a breach of contract and getting a fair price in exchange for providing a resource everyone wants.

Obviously it’s expensive to pay for this, and it means budget money isn’t going to something else (like hospitals or education or emergency services, if the Premier could tear his attention away from the mining boom for a second). But pretty much every state government, and the federals as well, severely underestimated how much Aussies want to use solar power. That’s their own fault, and to deal with that mistake by simply refusing to pay anymore  is pretty crappy behaviour.

I know there have been cuts to feed-in tariffs in every state, and the ACT is at zero already. What do you think is a fair price for providing electricity to your fellow citizens?

What other countries are doing with carbon prices

Joseph Tohill over at The 9 Billion has a good round-up of the carbon taxes that other countries have got already: How Australia’s Upcoming Carbon Tax Compares With Other Countries. Take a look if you or your friends are worried that Australia is moving too quickly on this issue – it’s interesting to see the big players already involved.

One country that Joseph didn’t mention is New Zealand and their emissions trading scheme. It began in 2009, and it wasn’t free from controversy but is now an accepted part of the economy there. The linked Wikipedia article has more details than you can poke a stick at!

Earlier this year, the NZ PM John Key was here on a visit and suggested that some time in the future Australia and New Zealand could bring their pricing schemes together. I think this would be great – it’d make it easier for our businesses to work together, and would be a good opportunity to work out any fiddly bits ahead of a true international scheme.

So really, we’re already behind the game when it comes to pricing carbon. Even the Kiwis are ahead of us! But better late than never, I suppose. The quicker we get our pricing sorted out the quicker we can move on with other environmental issues.

Carbon tax: a good start, let’s keep working on it

So this morning I watched PM Gillard’s announcement of a carbon tax for Australia. It’s a moment I’ve been wanting for at least 4 years now, so it was pretty interesting to me.

On the whole, I think that this is the best package that could be put forward the way politics are right now. But it was obviously designed by committee! There are issues that I think need to be fixed, and I hope the arrangements will be improved over time as we get the hang of it. See a summary here.

The tax will be put on 500 large corporations, the worst polluters. Obviously they will pass the increased cost on to their customers, which will flow throughout the economy. But this should be offset by the household compensation that’s been put in place too, which is higher than it was in the CPRS.

On the upside:

• Household compensation has been given by overhauling the tax system. The $18,000 tax-free threshold (up from $6000, which is the same level it’s been for over a decade) will also do more to help our economy than the generous tax breaks already given to high-earners, and hopefully make daily life a bit easier for some people.
• Independent review of the compensation given to businesses, with the Productivity Commission checking if they’ve made any windfall profits and reducing compensation sooner if so.
• Independent review of the ridiculously low target of a 5% reduction in emissions Australia-wide.
• More money for renewables.
• It will count as significant action in the eyes of other world governments, which is important as we try to negotiate a follow-up to the Kyoto Protocol.

The downside:

• The coal industry is getting $1.2 billion dollars in handouts, to add to their billion-dollar profits. As Bernard Keane put it, “Compensating the coal industry for a carbon price is like compensating the local drug dealer for a crime crackdown.”
• Steel companies will also be getting lots of cash, which is more about protecting their industry than any particular need for it under a carbon tax.
• More money for carbon capture and storage research, in spite of the billion-dollar profits that coal companies have available to spend on making their industry cleaner.
• Fuel and agriculture aren’t included. No-one’s really figured out how to count emissions from agriculture yet, and it’s not fair to tax them on averages and estimates. It’s a shame about the fuel, but it was given up in exchange for more renewables investment. I see it as the price of getting anything started at all.

If you want more details on how it’ll affect you and your family, check out the Clean Energy Future government website – they have a household calculator which seems pretty decent. If you enjoy hard data, you’ll want to look at the Treasury modelling as well.