The Big Boys Who Cried Wolf
Send your letter to seven of our biggest polluting whingers and tell them you expect them to clean up their act. Go to it and send it to all your mates.
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Comments
Carbon Tax
Something like twenty-eight countries in the European Union have been carbon trading for many years and doing their bit to reduce emissions. Australia is lagging behind many countries in effort to reduce pollution. I'm impatient with the bleating about loss of jobs. New technologies will create cleaner, healthier and safer jobs than coal mining and smelting etc.
Reply from Bluescope Steel
I received a reply from Bluescope to the effect that their business would be hard hit by such a tax but, on the other hand, they told me that they were using best practice and were more efficient than their competitors. "BlueScope's Australian steelmaking facilities rank amongst the most carbon efficient of leading steel plants globally." Surely if they were as efficient as they claim then they have a competitive advantage over others and so wouldn't be as impacted as they otherwise might be - seems to me they want their cake and eat it too!
If we have a carbon tax on the coal we export, then the people who buy our coal wouldn't get a competitive advantage.
He goes on to say "While our home base is in Australia, BlueScope Steel operates and competes internationally. Our international competitors, who are predominantly in Asia, do not currently face carbon costs on their steel industries and will therefore gain an economic advantage." If they 'operate' and compete internationally then surely they will also have the advantage of not being subject to a carbon tax in the countries in which they operate.
He then goes on to say "A threshold test could be adopted so that Australian industries would not join the scheme until a pre-determined percentage of sectoral competitors face similar carbon prices." If we wait until others jump and others are doing likewise nothing will EVER happen! This will surely result in nothing being done even in the face of our entire society/economy collapsing due to the impacts of Climate Change. Very short-sighted I believe.
...and... "This could be combined with tax incentives to promote R&D investment in carbon effective technologies." This sounds like they want the government to fund their efficiency measures. At what point does industry actually take responsibility for the pollution it causes?
Reply from Bluescope Steel
I too got a reply, and was beginning to respond and ran out of steam. Maybe someone else can jump into the fray. I hadn't got around to rebutting their reply, but the additional points I was going to make:
1. I doubt that Bluescope Steel have advised its shareholders that their investments are at risk. Nor have share prices taken a beating.
3. O’Malley, announcing yet another loss for the half-year in early February, said he’d be making $200m more in profit if the Australian dollar was at 80 US cents. The dollar fluctuations have a vastly bigger impact than any carbon price, yet we do not see BlueScope threatening to take their business overseas due to the strong dollar.
4. Any "advantage" obtained by non-carbon-priced countries is short-term. As oil and coal prices rise, the countries that have embraced alternative technologies will become cheaper. It takes decades to make this transition, and the carbon price is a nudge down that path.
5. Companies have known for at least a decade that some form of carbon price was planned. Yet there has been very little done to prepare for a carbon price. The decade of inaction does not entitle companies to whinge when the expected carbon price is introduced.
6. The need to reduce greenhouse gases is a symptom of three deeper problems:
a) Overconsumption, a product of per-capita usage and population.
b) The externalisation of the future costs of pollution.
c) A failure to understand the impossibility of continual growth (refer to Al Bartlett's youtube videos).