No need for green envy

So. The Carbon Plan. Fifteen billion dollars in tax cuts. Nine billion dollars for the worst polluters. And $13 billion for renewable energy research. The last bit, which is the bit that interests us here at The Geek's secret fusion-powered mountain top lair, gets split into $10 billion to fund the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which will invest in new technology, and hopefully not ceiling insulation batts, and $3.2 billion to the Australian Renewable Energy Agency. Christine Milne describes the latter as a one-stop shop for renewable energy research and development, commercialisation and demonstration projects. But given that its budget, $1.5 billion dollars of which is already committed to established programs, is dwarfed by the CEFC, the 'one-stop shop' rhetoric seems a bit muddled. Hopefully the funding process won't be too. But putting aside the politics - not possible, I know, but lets do it anyway - from a green tech perspective is this going to be enough? It could be, if the money goes to the right project, of course. There's any number of brilliant ideas floating around in materials science and energy research. I've written a couple of times about the amazing work being done at the University of Queensland by Professor Max Lu, which might, just might, provide us with a thin film glass coating that allows buildings to power themselves from sun light without the need for acres of solar panels.

The great carbon tax secret: who are the Misfortune 500?

When the Prime Minister took to the airwaves on Sunday night, one of the first things she tried to sort out was the rather confused issue of who pays the carbon tax. One of the downsides of calling the thing a "tax", for the PM (and there are quite a few downsides) is that the term "carbon tax" carries the redolent sense of something that will attach itself leech-like to every conceivable extremity of the ordinary householder's life. So Ms Gillard was exceedingly careful with her pronouns when she addressed the nation. "Around 500 big polluters will pay for every tonne of carbon pollution THEY put into OUR atmosphere," she said (I've added the capitals, not in order to make that quotation look shouty, but to identify the allocation of responsibility the PM's trying to convey here; WE are getting those polluters to pay for what THEY do to US). Listen to talkback for 30 seconds and you'll pick up what the general presumption is - a sort of vague impression that Big Polluters and Big Business are pretty much the same thing. But who are these 500 big polluters, exactly - this Misfortune 500, who are to be history's martyrs to the answering of our generation's greatest moral challenge? Can we get a list? No - we can't, according to the Government. The 500 companies are not an identified list. The figure of 500 is just an estimate of how many companies in Australia would be caught by the scheme's eligibility rules. Here's how it works: any company which has a facility (plant, factory, premises or similar) directly emitting more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon a year will be forced to cough up $23 a tonne for that pollution. Now, this is a bit tricky, because it means a company with 20 facilities each emitting 24,000 tonnes of CO2 a year would not be liable, while some poor boob with one factory emitting 26,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide and 19 clean green beansprout-fired tofu smelters would still have to cough up.

Australia's shiny new carbon tax is an empty promise

Australia's shiny new carbon tax, announced this week, is unlikely to change the country's status as the largest per-capita emitter of greenhouse gases in the developed world. Loopholes threaten to undermine its modest promise to cut emissions by 5 per cent by 2020. First, emissions from forestry, farming and cars are exempt from the tax. These are a significant omission. Some years, deforestation is responsible for as much as a quarter of Australia's emissions. Second, the biggest emitters are being protected. Prime minister Julia Gillard has promised tax rebates to key industries, including electricity generation and steel makers of between 66 and 94.5 per cent. The scale of the rebates may undermine the incentive to cut emissions. Australia's climate policies have a long history of being confused and contradictory. It signed up to the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, but only after securing permission to increase its emissions by 8 per cent. Since 1990, the baseline year for the Kyoto targets, its emissions from burning fossil fuels have in fact risen by around 30 per cent - more, even, than US emissions but it has, in effect, offset its rising industrial emissions by reducing deforestation: levels in 1990 were particularly high. Gillard reports that emissions are growing by 2 per cent a year, but says her carbon taxes would set the country on course for a 5 per cent reduction in emissions by 2020 relative to levels in 2000. But, once again, this ignores emissions from forests and farming. What's more, the decision to set a target relative to 2000 emissions is strategic. The growth in emissions between 1990 and 2000 means a 5 per cent reduction amounts to significantly less when put in the context of 1990 emissions.