The future

Again I keep hearing all the "problems" of imposing a carbon tax: jobs will be lost, our exports will be less competitive, electricity prices will rise, etc, etc.

How short sighted these are!

All these criticisms fail to look much further than a few years into the future.  These criticisms are probably true within the short-ish term  However look a bit further ahead and what have you got?

Firstly, carbon-intensive industries will become more expensive.  What does that mean?  Well non-carbon-intensive industries will become far more competitive!  Whilst solar panels are not the cheapest things around now, if they are competing with free carbon emissions, they'll stay that way.  But if carbon emissions have a price, they will be comparatively cheaper, there'll be greater production of them, and eventually due to economies of scale they'll get a lot cheaper.  Look at the price of DVD players when first released - somewhere around $500.  Now they're $39.95 for quite a decent unit.   Look at the price of cars when the Model T came out - a car today is cheaper in real dollar terms than back in the days of Henry Ford.

Eventually industries will adapt to the new paradigm, and it'll become second nature to look at how to produce things without spewing carbon into the atmosphere.  The earth's atmosphere is comparatively small.  In fact it is an interesting phenomenon that the oceans are far bigger than the atmosphere, and if you're really going to pollute something there's much less effect by dumping stuff in the sea than in the air!  Not that I'm advocating either - just presenting the comparison.

The one thing we do know, however, is if we look further into the future, if we continue to pollute the air for free, we'll have a much hotter world (I hate the heat!) lose species, have more intense weather systems, lose Pacific islands, lose coastal land, and a myriad of other undesirable effects.  Where's the economics in that?

It's time to bite the bullet and do what's right for the world.  Yes, it will have short-term economic effects.  But the longer term results will be a cleaner atmosphere, and saving us from inevitable destruction.  The cost of cyclones and severe weather storms is never brought up, but only in January we saw a taste of the consequences.  The residents of Toowoomba and the Lockyer Valley must surely be able to attest to this!