Is it too late for a carbon price? The Climate Change Authority says yes — and experts agree
An analysis by the authority found Australia would no longer benefit from an economy-wide carbon price and cast doubt on the Coalition's nuclear plan.
Carbon pricing has a long and controversial history in Australia, the first country to introduce (and then rescind) this type of mechanism to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
But a new report from the Climate Change Authority (CCA) on Australia’s decarbonisation pathways has found it would now be counterproductive to put an economy-wide price on carbon — and experts in the field agree.
The government’s climate advisory body argued in the report released on Thursday that there are now several overlapping market-based mechanisms that have introduced a de facto carbon price to different parts of the economy, including the Safeguard Mechanism, the Australian Carbon Credit Unit market and the Emissions Reduction Fund.
Zoe Whitton, managing director of climate advisory firm Pollination, told Capital Brief, “the Australian policy system has essentially developed in the absence of a carbon price to make the system do what a carbon price should do. The interesting upside is that these individual mechanisms do not touch everything at once so they are politically safer to do.
