Thirty years ago, on this day, February 15th, 1995, the Fin editorialises…
“But no-regrets policies cannot be counted on to significantly reduce Australia’s total greenhouse emissions. The reason is that making the economy more efficient and competitive will lead to higher levels of output.”
The amount of carbon dioxide in the air was roughly 361ppm. As of 2025 it is 427ppm, but check here for daily measures.
The context was that there had been a vigorous, indeed vociferous and ultimately successful campaign to stop the carbon tax. One of the inevitable arguments was, oh, but, you know, we’ll make everything more efficient. And the Australian Financial Review, to its credit, sort of at least understood something that economists had understood for at that point, I don’t know 130 years; that increasing the efficiency of a process doesn’t mean that less of it gets used overall, but rather more. i.e., Jevons paradox.
What I think we can learn from this is that basic economic concepts (which doesn’t mean they’re right, but in this case, it seems to be) are sometimes seemingly too complex, or perhaps merely too inconvenient for some politicians who want to be able to use motherhood words like efficiency without being challenged.
What happened next The Fin has deteriorated as a paper, I would say. The carbon price, rather, was instituted very briefly and then became toxic and was killed off
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.
