Fifteen years ago, on this day, September 15, 2008, Australian business interests were fighting over how hard to squeeze Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, and for what….
ELEANOR HALL: The Australian Government knows it’ll be no easy task to design an emissions trading scheme that’ll satisfy both business and the environment lobby.
Business is largely urging caution and warning of job losses if energy guzzling industries aren’t properly compensated.
But not every Australian blue chip company is as conservative.
The Westpac Bank is today urging the Government to keep the scheme it adopts as pure as possible and not to shelter businesses from the impact of putting a price on carbon.
Santow, S. (2008) Split in business ranks on carbon scheme “The World Today – 15th September , 2008” http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2364852.htm
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 385ppm. As of 2023 it is 423ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was the Rudd government had made big promises about dealing with climate change which … amounted to introducing an emissions trading scheme. Westpac had had its calculators out about this for years (in April 2006 it had lobbied as part of a business environmentalist roundtable).
What I think we can learn from this is that obviously if there is a trading scheme the banks stand to make a lot of money. It’s also a good way for them to polish their mostly terrible reputation.
What happened next is that Rudd continued to give ground on the policy, weakening it and weakening it more, and more concessions. By the time it got to Parliament for the second attempt at getting it through, in November 2019, it was at best useless, at worst, worse than useless.
What do you think? Does this pass the ‘so what?’ threshold? Have I got facts wrong? Interpretation wrong? Please do comment on this post, unless you are a denialist, obvs.