On this day, November 16 in 1994, in the midst of another flare up in the “should we put a price on carbon?” battles, the Aluminium industry released more “evidence”.
THE Commonwealth’s current targets for reducing greenhouse gas emissions will cost the economy almost $200 billion over the next decade, wiping out Australia’s aluminium industry in the process, a new study released yesterday claims.
Dwyer, M. 1994. Emission cuts ‘to kill aluminium industry’. The Australian Financial Review, 17 November, p.13.
[The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 359ish ppm. At time of writing it was 419ishppm- but for what it is now,well, see here for the latest.]
The context was this –
The fossil fuel lobby and its mates were determined to kill any carbon taxes/prices at birth. This was part of the effort. Basically, find an economist willing to produce a “report” that shows the sky will fall, that the economy will collapse and we will all be reduced to living in mud huts and eating each other’s corpses if so much as a molecule less of coal/oil/gas is extracted. Time the release of the “report”, give it to your tame mates in the media, then get tame mates in Parliament to quote the report and newspaper coverage. Bish bosh…
Why this matters.
Think where we might have got to with political leaders with spine!! We might be as much as 10 per cent less doomed than we are now!!
What happened next?
No carbon tax. A carbon price in Australia didn’t kick in until July 2013. And then was killed off a year later. Ha ha ha ha .