Queensland Premier Anna Bligh is to be congratulated for providing such a clear example of why Australia needs a carbon trading scheme now.
The Premier has announced the Government will next week legislate to guarantee Xstrata’s expansion plans for its Wollombi coal operations in Central Queensland. This follows the Queensland Court of Appeal decision on Friday to overturn a Land and Resources Tribunal (LRT) decision allowing the mining company to expand the Wollombi mine without any conditions to offset greenhouse emissions.
Robert Kennedy Jnr, nephew of great US president J F Kennedy says “show me a polluter and I will show you a subsidy”.
Courtesy of Bligh’s decision, all Queenslanders are now subsidising Xstrata for the emissions produced by the expanded mine.
According to Sir Nicholas Stern, Head of the UK Government Economic Service, and author of the UK Government commissioned Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global warming “is the greatest and widest-ranging market failure ever seen”.
By failing to put a price on CO2 emissions, all Australians will continue to subsidise the country’s biggest polluters, like Xstrata, who while crying poor, are making billions of dollars out of the resources boom every year – US$10.4B in the case of Xstrata in 2006.
I challenge the Liberal and Labor Parties to accelerate their plans to introduce emissions trading schemes. There is simply no justification for delaying their introduction any further.
