Tuesday, September 15, 2009

The Garnaut Review One Year On


Ross Garnaut gave a presentation to a totally full theatre at Manning Clark Centre at ANU yesterday evening, reviewing his Review and the responses to it in the last year. From what he said he pretty much anticipated what would happen especially regarding the lobbying by business for free permit allocations (after all he's chairman of a mining company himself). Still he said that the government's allocation of compensation followed no principle whatsoever. He didn't address the delays in implementation and oddly no-one asked about that either. He did say the legislation "could be passed in a joint sitting of Parliament". That was typical indirect Garnaut humour. Another good one was that "some of Frontier Economics' other work is very good".

I found myself agreeing on all points he raised except one - the idea that business as usual emissions will rise faster than the most emissions intensive IPCC scenarios in the long-run. I don't buy that intuitively but I haven't got hard evidence to back up my position yet. My current research is meant to address that issue.

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