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Emissions trading: getting the balance wrong

By Geoff Carmody - posted Wednesday, 21 January 2009


The production road is the road less travelled. It will only be travelled if all nations act simultaneously. The consumption road is navigable even if - as is realistic - they don’t.

If they only allow the production road, the UNFCCC and Kyoto Protocol approaches fail, measured against their own objectives.

Why should such international agreements preclude options more likely to get us to the same end point?

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It’s a choice. If nations choose a better path to the same end, more progress is made than if they don’t.

I’m surprised there’s no coalition between business, unions and environmental groups in support of a consumption-based policy model. The failure of the alternative is obvious.

To adapt a famous Keynesian statement: “Given the evident failure of the production model, and the merits of the consumption model, why haven’t you changed your minds?”

Putting it in more Australian terms to these groups: “Where the bloody hell are you?”

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First published in the Australian Financial Review on January 15, 2008.



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About the Author

Geoff Carmody was a director of Geoff Carmody & Associates, a former co-founder of Access Economics, and before that was a senior officer in the Commonwealth Treasury. He died on October 27, 2024. He favoured a national consumption-based climate policy, preferably using a carbon tax to put a price on carbon. He has prepared papers entitled Effective climate change policy: the seven Cs. Paper #1: Some design principles for evaluating greenhouse gas abatement policies. Paper #2: Implementing design principles for effective climate change policy. Paper #3: ETS or carbon tax?

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