The Next Boom A Surprise New Hope for Australia’s Economy?
http://www.futurebusinesscouncil.com/thenextboom/
Across Australia and around the world, demand for sustainable goods and services is booming. The Future Business Council has tracked the performance of leading sustainable goods and services since the turn of the century. We found compelling evidence that sustainability should not be seen as a cost, but a business opportunity. From solar panels to green buildings and sustainable agriculture, the results are striking and represent a significant new economic growth story.
The Next Boom represents a major opportunity for businesses to become sector leaders in Australian and international markets. At the national level, there is a once in a lifetime chance for Australia to position itself among the world’s leading suppliers of sustainable goods and services, capturing a share of the trillions of dollars that will be invested to meet the explosion in demand.
The rest of the world is not sitting idly by. Australia must do much more to develop new industries and support companies making the transition to more sustainable business models if it is to compete for a share of these fast-growing markets.
Turnbull’s biggest economic challenge is Climate Change
Climate policy looms as Turnbull’s greatest economic challenge, ABC News 26 Oct 15 By Ian Verrender The climate of fear may slowly be lifting after Tony Abbott’s relegation to the political bleachers but the fear of climate persists within the Government.
With little more than a month to go before the 2015 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris, we find ourselves in the awkward position of being one of the few developed nations swimming against the tide.
Earlier this month, International Monetary Fund chief Christine Lagarde suggested nations give serious consideration to implementing a carbon tax, rather than cap and trade market-based emission programs.
“It is just the right moment to introduce carbon taxes,” she told delegates at the annual meetings of the IMF and World Bank in Lima, Peru…….
Faced with a structural budget deficit, the Abbott government, in its infinite wisdom, decided to rid itself of a roughly $6 billion a year source of income from the carbon tax and replace with a $2.88 billion spending program over four years.
It was a decision that recoils from everything for which a Coalition government purports to stand.
Apart from the fiscal recklessness, which blows out the deficit and adds to national debt, it has shifted away from a pricing policy to one of heavy handed government intervention.
The Direct Action policy is nothing more than a subsidy for polluters with the tab being picked up by taxpayers.
Abbott politicised climate change, instilling fear into the electorate about the cost of a carbon price to business and consumers without ever being brought to task over the cost to taxpayers of his subsidy program.
His former comrades in arms are still at it. Last month Barnaby Joyce launched into a familiar rant on the ABC’s Q&A, claiming Direct Action was “vastly cheaper and vastly more effective”…..But where is the evidence that it is cheaper? Or more effective? In fact, the studies say the opposite. More on that later…….
Academic studies overwhelmingly reject Direct Action as an efficient or effective way to reduce carbon emissions in the long term.
A study by the Australian National University’s Crawford School found that the Gillard government’s carbon tax cut emissions from the electricity sector alone by between five and nine million tonnes a year while it was in operation. Once it was lifted, emissions began rising again.
And that’s the point. A pricing mechanism works permanently across the economy. A subsidy, on the other hand, may simply produce a one-off effect in one industry while other industries lift emissions….
Then there’s the Government’s very own Productivity Commission study back in 2011, which examined a range of emissions reduction programs around the world.
In its study of eight other countries’ carbon reduction policies, it concluded that a price on carbon was the cheapest way to go……Will Turnbull be able to bring a rational economic approach to climate policy? It is likely to be his greatest challenge as Prime Minister.http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-10-26/verrender-the-economics-of-climate-change/6883938
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 