Direct Action four times more efficient than ALP’s carbon tax

Environment Minister Greg Hunt may just have won the next election for the Coalition.

He is going to cut Australia’s carbon emissions four times more than Labor did with its carbon tax at 1 per cent of the price per tonne of emissions cut under the carbon tax. He is now publicly confident Australia will “breeze past” its 2020 target of cutting emissions by 5 per cent on 2000 levels.

This target is more ambitious than it looks. It involves a 13 per cent cut on 2005 levels and, given Australia’s rate of population growth — almost unique among developed nations — it’s a very respectable performance.

Carbon taxes and emissions trading schemes are in disarray and of declining relevance around the world. They have failed to cut carbon emissions. They were going down more quickly in Australia before Labor’s carbon tax and will now go down more quickly over the next few years.

The main driver of this is not the Coalition’s Direct Action policy. Carbon taxes have succeeded around the world in raising revenue; they have not done anything notable for the environment.

The government is confident not only that it will exceed its 2020 emissions reduction targets, but also that it will be able to announce somewhat more ambitious targets for the next round of global negotiations. The government will announce these targets in July, before the Paris conference at the end of the year.

The ABC, Fairfax and the climate change industry often present Australia as uniquely wicked in this policy area. Yet look at the facts. Australia did better than its target in the first Kyoto Protocol period. It will do better than its target in 2020. And it will announce a good target for the post-2020 period. In the meantime, China, India, Pakistan and many other nations continue to make massive investments in new coal-fired power stations.

There may be legitimate criticism that not all of the projects of emissions reductions in Hunt’s scheme are guaranteed not to have gone ahead without the government money they will receive. But the reverse auction process is more robust, and transparent, than the rorted European ETS and its imitators. If Australia meets and exceeds its targets by 2020, and Bill Shorten offers to reimpose a carbon tax at the next election, this will be acutely dangerous for Labor.