Alan Pears on the flawed Clean Energy Future

Both the Victorian and Queensland governments have recently announced they are dropping emissions targets set within state climate change legislation. They say that the presence of national targets make state targets redundant. Alan Pears, writing in The Conversation disagrees. He says that because of flaws within the federal legislation there is no incentive beyond doing the bare minimum:

The Commonwealth Government’s Clean Energy Future scheme design is flawed. I, along with Richard Denniss from the Australia Institute, the Voluntary Carbon Markets Association and others have been pointing out this flaw and showing how it could be fixed, for over three years.

The problem is that if a state government, council, business or household voluntarily cuts its emissions beyond what it is legally required to do (for example, under building energy regulations), this simply frees up more permits for other emitters to use, so their efforts don’t cut the total amount of carbon emissions. But Canberra econocrats and politicians have simply turned deaf ears.

The frustrating thing is that this flaw is easily fixed.

Read more at The Conversation:

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