Treasury Report On The Economics of Climate Change Mitigation
The Australian Treasury's report on the economics of climate change mitigation was released on 30 October 2008. The report was a key input in determining the structure and targets for the Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme.
The Treasury’s modeling demonstrated that early global action to reduce carbon emissions would be less expensive than later action and stated that a market-based approach allows robust economic growth into the future as emissions fall.
The report also stated that:
- many of Australia’s industries would maintain or improve their competitiveness under an international agreement to combat climate change
- even ambitious goals would have limited impact on national and global economic growth
- Australia and the world can continue to prosper while making the emission cuts required to reduce the risks of dangerous climate change.
- Households would face increased prices for emission-intensive products such as electricity and gas, however real household income would continue to grow.
- Strong coordinated global action would reduce the economic cost of achieving environmental objectives, reduce distortions in trade-exposed sectors, and provide insurance against climate change uncertainty.
- There are advantages to Australia acting early if emission pricing expands gradually across the world: economies that defer action face higher long-term costs, as global investment is redirected to early movers.
- Australia’s aggregate economic costs of mitigation are small, although the costs to sectors and regions vary. Growth in emission-intensive sectors slows and growth in low- and negative-emission sectors accelerates.
- Allocation of some free permits to emission-intensive trade-exposed sectors, as the Government proposes, eases their transition to a low-emission economy in the initial years.
- Broadly based market-oriented policies, such as emissions trading, allow the market to respond as new information becomes available.
Read more about this topic: Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme
Famous quotes containing the words treasury, report, economics, climate, change and/or mitigation:
“In my opinion it is harmful to place important things in the hands of philanthropy, which in Russia is marked by a chance character. Nor should important matters depend on leftovers, which are never there. I would prefer that the government treasury take care of it.”
—Anton Pavlovich Chekhov (1860–1904)
“Even the ones who report favorably don’t seem to have read the book.”
—Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)
“Religion and art spring from the same root and are close kin. Economics and art are strangers.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)
“Ghosts, we hope, may be always with us—that is, never too far out of the reach of fancy. On the whole, it would seem they adapt themselves well, perhaps better than we do, to changing world conditions—they enlarge their domain, shift their hold on our nerves, and, dispossessed of one habitat, set up house in another. The universal battiness of our century looks like providing them with a propitious climate ...”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)
“It does change the age that is young, once in Paris it was twenty-six, then it was twenty-two, then it was nineteen and now it is between thirty and forty. They tell about a new young man, how old is he you say and they say he is thirty.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“Law is a thing which is insensible, and inexorable, more beneficial and more profitious to the weak than to the strong; it admits of no mitigation nor pardon, once you have overstepped its limits.”
—Titus Livius (Livy)