The CRUD Tax is back

The proposed new Australian federal carbon tax is CRUD. Australians are protesting against the lack of government action against climate change and against this ridiculous new money raising tax that does nothing to fight climate change, will encourage a lot of people to waste energy, and is distracting people from climate change action.

The CRUD tax is CRUD because it is a Carbon Rort, Useless and Destructive.

Is the carbon tax a carbon tax?

No. Carbon taxes are supposed to reduce the addition of new carbon to our atmosphere. The Australian carbon tax is still a mystery because the current Australian federal government, the Labor Party, are doing what they always do, they promise one thing then deliver something different, they ignore the people they are supposed to represent, they hide the legislation they are actually introducing and tell you stories glorious sounding stories about what they are pretending to do.

No, the only announced part of the carbon tax is a subsidy for people using massive amounts of energy inefficiently. The money they get will encourage exactly the same use they have now. There is no money allocated to reducing energy use or to switching from a carbon based energy to solar or wind or anything else.

No because the big coal consumers, the electricity generators, are allowed to simply pass on their increased expenses without doing anything to replace coal and their coal consumption will be subsidised for many years. If the government actually wanted to do anything to reduce the carbon build up in our atmosphere, they would transfer the tax money from coal to wind farms and other clean sources of electricity. Of course they cannot do that because the current government is elected by the media, not Australians, and the media are servants of the big companies.

When the government actually announces how the tax will work, we can extrapolate from their previous efforts and predict it will not work. The current government supported Kyoto, despite Kyoto being a whitewash, then they praised Copenhagen being a rubber stamp for the status quo. We can predict that the tax will be aimed only at few carbon sources, not all the sources of new carbon pollution. We can predict that the only result from the tax will be to ship a mass of jobs overseas and the carbon pollution associated with those jobs will be shipped to India or China. The total carbon pollution will be increased because of the energy wasted on transport.

Useless

The previous federal government actually made a difference by setting up a significant tax difference between renewable energy and non renewable energy in one area. If the new tax was actually a carbon tax, it would apply to all non renewable carbon sources and the money raised would pay for the infrastructure to deliver clean energy.

Sydney is expanding and needs the equivalent of a new coal fired power station just to catch up with our current peak usage. We already have brownouts most nights in summer due to the increasing use of air-conditioning. The projected income from the carbon tax needs to be spent now on building alternatives, including solar and wind power, before the coal fired power station is built.

We need to immediately start on the power supply after that because the state government controlling Sydney are working on expanding Sydney as fast as they can. We will need to build alternative energy source equivalent to a coal fired electricity generator every few years just to keep non renewable energy consumption static. To reverse carbon pollution, we have to double that effort.

Destructive

The current government, the Labor party, started their modern era with the reign of Gough Whitlam who is famous for shipping 600000 jobs overseas with just one stroke of his pen. The Labor Party did not care in part because the jobs mostly employed women and the Labor Party consider women as purely weak people to be manipulated at election time.

The Kyoto agreement was purely a device to provide big companies with an excuse to fire their workers and ship their jobs to China and India. The relocation of manufacturing from the countries of consumption to distant countries produces huge increases in carbon pollution from excess shipping and the complete lack of pollution controls in the foreign countries. Labor Party politics increases pollution al across the world.

The carbon tax is also destructive to the campaigns for responsible environmental action. When this fake carbon tax is in place, it will be many times harder to get real government action. After millions of Australians lose their jobs, we will have more unemployed than employed and will be locked into an economy based on massive debt subsidising people doing nothing.

Alternatives

The Labor Party are unlikely to ever climb down from their massive egos or listen to a voter, making alternatives unlikely. Should they ever decide to protect our environment or do anything sustainable, they could promote a solar industry in Australia for the 90 percent of Australia that has good solar supply.

Some areas of Australia have lower solar supply but have excellent wind power. The wind belt known as the roaring 40s blasts across the southern edge of Australia where there is less solar power. if you combine the wind and solar power usable in the populated parts of Australia, they could supply more than ten times our total current power use.

Consider the effect of all that almost free electricity.We could bring manufacturing back to Australia and remove the massive carbon pollution caused by all that shipping.

The current government wants everybody, except politicians, to work five years past their retirement age to pay for massive government overspending. If we had clean electricity, we could return enough jobs to Australia to employ people over the age of 40. (If you do not live in Australia, you may not know about the common corporate policy of firing most staff when they hit the age of 40. (Corporations are now working on firing everyone over the age of 25 and replacing them with cheap imported labour.))

Australia has really slack building regulations as far as quality. Most restrictions on building are aimed at controlling how buildings look, not how they function. Australia could easily add a carbon tax to most new house constructions based on the sloppy design and construction that will lead to massive energy waste. The building carbon tax would then subsidise insulation, double glazing, verandas, controllable lighting, zone based heating and cooling, a huge list of trivial changes to reduce energy consumption.

Just one example is double glazing to reduce heat loss in winter and reduce heat build up in summer. One builder said the mass production of the right type of windows would make the cost of building a house rise by $3000 or less. Fitting the same windows after construction would cost $25000. People think of a ten year saving. The ten year saving on electricity will be $5000, enough t justify spending the $3000 on double glazing. The current problem is simple. double glazing is not compulsory, window manufacturers can change a premium for double glazing, and the cost added onto a house is $6000, not $3000.

Another example. Most new houses are built on estates where all the trees are removed before the land is sold. The house is then selected and built without consideration of the environment. Trees are then planted, or not planted, randomly. If the government provided a subsidised environmental consultation and made some level of compliance attractive, houses would be altered slightly to make better use of solar heating in winter and deciduous trees would be used to control solar heating in summer. A custom consultation like that can cost $10000 but, if it were standard when housing estates are planned, it would cost only a few hundred dollars per house and they could save that much per year on their electricity bill.

conclusion

The current federal government does not care about our environment, our future, or anything other than their own personal power. Reducing our carbon pollution is far simpler than the complicated deals the government makes to keep themselves in power. The fake carbon tax is just another way to grab money they can splash out to bribe weak voters when the next election is due.