You are currently paying polluters to pollute – they should be paying you.
Did you know that your tax dollars are currently paying polluters to pollute?
A carbon price is part of a vitally important process of turning that around – making sure that the big polluters pay for their pollution and some of that money comes back to you to help build a cleaner, healthier, happier community. A carbon price, teamed with policies like a feed-in tariff, means we can drive investment towards the solar future while making sure that governments have the funds to help people struggling to make ends meet.
This summer we’ve seen a terrible warning of what climate change-fuelled disruption will look like.
With scientific projections of more frequent and severe droughts, floods, fires and storms already coming true, climate change will not only drive prices for food, water and insurance through the roof, but it will risk the lives and livelihoods of millions of people around the globe including here in Australia. We cannot simply sit back and let that happen.
To prevent the climate crisis, we need to transform our economy away from the dead end of coal to the exciting opportunities of baseload solar and other renewable energy and energy efficiency technologies. We need to redesign our cities around people instead of cars. We need to protect our magnificent forest carbon stores.
All that activity will stimulate our economy. It will create jobs and investment in new industries, many of which need the same skills that people in the coal sector already have.
Economists around the world agree with the Greens and the government that it is economically sensible to use a carbon price and a suite of industry policies to drive that job-creating transformation.
And they agree that Tony Abbott’s policies would be far more expensive, far less successful and only end up costing us all more in taxes or reduced services. The scare campaign is economic nonsense.
What most people don’t realise is that, far from supporting the transition to a solar economy, our governments are handing billions of dollars of your money every year to the companies digging up, selling and burning coal, oil and gas – companies already making multi-billion dollar profits out of polluting our planet.
A carbon price is an important part of turning that around, as is a feed-in tariff to see baseload solar power plants built, as is an energy efficiency target scheme, as is cutting subsidies like the one that means that the trucks digging coal out of the ground don’t pay the fuel excise that you and every other motorist does when you fill up at the bowser when taking the kids to school or doing the shopping.
When we go to the supermarket, most of us want to buy the healthier or greener options available, but we think twice if they are more expensive. The same goes for industry and investors – they currently use coal because it is the cheapest alternative.
But coal is only cheaper than renewables because we don’t factor in the impacts on all of us of its air pollution and of climate change. We don’t factor in the costs of childhood asthma. We ignore the fact that food and water will become hugely more expensive if we let climate change happen.
A carbon price, teamed with industry policies, will mean that, when industry and investors make choices – coal or solar, a petrol car fleet or new electric vehicles – they will now see clean options as the cheaper alternative.
Now: A carbon price will make some things more expensive – we must not shy away from that fact.
But the great thing is that we can compensate people for the impacts of a carbon price, handing money back to people struggling to make ends meet to help them put food on the table and buy shoes for their kids while still encouraging everyone to buy less polluting goods and services. Instead of us paying the big polluters with billion dollar subsidies, the polluters will pay you.
And the Greens, the government and the Independents are all 100 per cent committed to making that happen.
We can compensate people for the impacts of a carbon price. But we cannot compensate anyone for the impacts of climate change.
Tony Abbott thinks he can raise a people’s revolt to stop this sensible policy change from happening. But everywhere I travel around Australia, I hear from people worrying about what future they are leaving their children and grandchildren and desperate for this exciting change.
As a nation, we are smart enough and mature enough to put our children’s future first, reject the scare campaign and embrace this exciting future.
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