Albo urges climate unity in Bali
Today’s Guardian reports that “Anthony Albanese will tell business leaders at the G20 summit that one of the pathways to recovery from global shocks including the pandemic and the current inflation spiral is countries working together to deal with the climate crisis.”
If he were to suggest a specific solution that could achieve this, he wouldn’t need to go past climate dividends, an ideal policy for nations to unite around. Hopefully he will get some encouragement from Justin Trudeau about the success of a similar policy in Canada. He goes on to say,
- Nations need to ensure national tax systems reward people for hard work and encourage entrepreneurship and job creation
- Build resilience into supply chains
- Resist creeping economic nationalism
- Retool the global economy for sustainability
- Develop clean energy to enhance energy security
- Cooperate with other nations to help reduce their emissions, grow their economies and improve living standards
- Focus on the horizon, even in the heart of the storm
These are admirable objectives. Climate dividends is an ideal policy with which to achieve most of them goals, and more besides ……
- By eliminating inefficient and wasteful fossil fuel subsidies climate dividends would enable the tax system to reward constructive, planet-friendly industries.
- It would slow down climate-derived interruptions to supply chains and shift economies towards greater self-reliance
- The carbon border adjustment mechanism (CBAM) inherent in climate dividends gives strong incentive to other nations to price carbon similarly and gives the planet a real chance of creating the global carbon price that will build unity and add synergy to all the efforts of individual nations
- By driving steady and predictable emission reductions in national economies, climate dividends will help retool the global economy towards zero carbon, an essential condition for sustainability
- Climate dividends will also drive a steady and predictable transition to clean energy, giving all nations access to renewable energy, reducing the need for imports, thus enhancing energy and national security
- Climate dividends focuses on the horizon by setting a predictably rising price on carbon and gives all stakeholders including citizens a role in decarbonising the planet
It is good that our prime minister is pursuing a cooperative approach to climate in his work with other nations. Competition and insular policy responses cannot achieve the global cooling that we need as soon as possible if we are to avert runaway climate change.
Our new Policy Playbook proposes simple and rational policies that can cut through the complex, piecemeal and often contradictory climate and energy policies that are currently struggling to make any progress on domestic emissions and are unlikely to slow exported emissions any time soon.
Mr Albanese is right to be using the G20 to push for unified responses to the climate. He and his ministers would do well to consult our Playbook to get some fresh ideas about how to achieve this worthy goal.
