The news overnight that the United States is unlikely to adopt an emissions trading scheme is proof that the Rudd Government’s emission trading scheme (ETS) is now dead in the water.
Prime Minister Rudd has failed today to tell the House the news that President Obama is considering a process of an incentives-based approach.
An approach in the President’s own words of “incentivizing clean energy so that it’s the cheaper, more effective kind of energy is one that is proven to work and is actually a market-based approach”. *
This is a strike at the very heart of the Prime Minister’s Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
It’s time for Mr Rudd to acknowledge that his ETS is now friendless, lonely and inappropriate for Australia.
But he won’t.
Just as he has failed all this week in Question Time to explain to the Australian people how his ETS - this great big tax - will cause household expenses to rise by an average of $1100 per annum, hurting families, pensioners and small businesses.
And just as he refused to table in the House today the full transcript from the Frontier Economics interview yesterday.
The very interview in which Danny Price, a director of Frontier Economics states that the Government’s ETS is almost the worst way in which to put a trading scheme together and how under the CPRS there is a massive change in the electricity prices to every small business, household and large business.
And the very interview that confirms what President Obama has today acknowledged that direct action – like that of the Coalition – is the way forward.
* www.nytimes.com/cwire/2010/02/03/03climatewire-obama-says-senate-may-drop-cap-and-trade-pas-21189.html?scp=1&sq=OBAMA%20SAYS%20SENATE%20MAY%20DROP%20CAP%20AND%20TRADE,%20PASS%20ENERGY%20ONLY-BILL&st=cse