IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/pra/mprapa/33997.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Australia's Carbon Tax: A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?

Author

Listed:
  • Spash, Clive L.
  • Lo, Alex Y.

Abstract

The Australian Government has produced a CO2-equivalent tax proposal with a difference, it is a short prelude to an emission trading scheme that will allow the increasing rate of emissions to continue, while being a net cost to the Treasury. That cost extends to allowing major emitters to make guaranteed windfall profits from pollution permits. The emission trading scheme suffers numerous problems, but the issues raised show taxes can also be watered down and made ineffectual through concessions. Taxpayers will get no assets from the billions of dollars to be spent buying-off the coal generators or other polluters. The scheme hopes to stimulate private investors to create an additional 12 percent in renewable electricity generation by 2020. A serious emissions reducing alternative would be to create a nationalised electricity sector with 100 percent renewable energy within a decade. We explore the difficulties of implementing meaningful greenhouse gas taxes in Australia.

Suggested Citation

  • Spash, Clive L. & Lo, Alex Y., 2011. "Australia's Carbon Tax: A Sheep in Wolf's Clothing?," MPRA Paper 33997, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    • Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:33997
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/33997/1/MPRA_paper_33997.pdf
    File Function: original version
    Download Restriction: no

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Jaffe Adam B. & Stavins Robert N., 1995. "Dynamic Incentives of Environmental Regulations: The Effects of Alternative Policy Instruments on Technology Diffusion," Journal of Environmental Economics and Management, Elsevier, vol. 29(3), pages 43-63, November.
    2. Robert W. Hahn, 2009. "Greenhouse Gas Auctions and Taxes: Some Political Economy Considerations," Review of Environmental Economics and Policy, Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 3(2), pages 167-188, Summer.
    3. Frank Jotzo & Regina Betz, 2009. "Australia's emissions trading scheme: opportunities and obstacles for linking," Climate Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 9(4), pages 402-414, July.
    4. Bovenberg, A.L. & Goulder, L.H., 1996. "Optimal environmental taxation in the presence of other taxes : General equilibrium analyses," Other publications TiSEM 5d4b7517-c5c8-4ef6-ab76-3, Tilburg University, School of Economics and Management.
    5. Ekins, Paul & Barker, Terry, 2001. " Carbon Taxes and Carbon Emissions Trading," Journal of Economic Surveys, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 15(3), pages 325-376, July.
    6. Loschel, Andreas, 2002. "Technological change in economic models of environmental policy: a survey," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 43(2-3), pages 105-126, December.
    7. Mokyr, Joel, 1991. "Evolutionary Biology, Technological Change and Economic History," Bulletin of Economic Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 43(2), pages 127-149, April.
    8. Pearce, David W, 1991. "The Role of Carbon Taxes in Adjusting to Global Warming," Economic Journal, Royal Economic Society, vol. 101(407), pages 938-948, July.
    9. Baranzini, Andrea & Goldemberg, Jose & Speck, Stefan, 2000. "A future for carbon taxes," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 32(3), pages 395-412, March.
    10. Tietenberg, T H, 1990. "Economic Instruments for Environmental Regulation," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 6(1), pages 17-33, Spring.
    11. Jon Skjærseth & Jørgen Wettestad, 2008. "Implementing EU emissions trading: success or failure?," International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics, Springer, vol. 8(3), pages 275-290, September.
    12. Richard G. Newell, 2010. "The role of markets and policies in delivering innovation for climate change mitigation," Oxford Review of Economic Policy, Oxford University Press, vol. 26(2), pages 253-269, Summer.
    13. David Popp, 2002. "Induced Innovation and Energy Prices," American Economic Review, American Economic Association, vol. 92(1), pages 160-180, March.
    14. Spash, Clive L., 2009. "The Brave New World of Carbon Trading," MPRA Paper 19114, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    15. Kingsley Y. L. Fong & David R. Gallagher & Peter A. Gardner & Peter L. Swan, 2011. "Follow the leader: fund managers trading in signal‐strength sequence," Accounting and Finance, Accounting and Finance Association of Australia and New Zealand, vol. 51(3), pages 684-710, September.
    16. Michael Grubb & Christian Azar & U. Martin Persson, 2005. "Allowance allocation in the European emissions trading system: a commentary," Climate Policy, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 5(1), pages 127-136, January.
    17. Spash, Clive L., 2007. "The economics of climate change impacts a la Stern: Novel and nuanced or rhetorically restricted?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 63(4), pages 706-713, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Hasanbeigi, Ali & Price, Lynn & Lin, Elina, 2012. "Emerging energy-efficiency and CO2 emission-reduction technologies for cement and concrete production: A technical review," Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, Elsevier, vol. 16(8), pages 6220-6238.
    2. Lo, Alex Y. & Spash, Clive L., 2012. "How Green is your scheme? Greenhouse gas control the Australian way," Energy Policy, Elsevier, vol. 50(C), pages 150-153.
    3. Stefano Carattini & Simon Levin & Alessandro Tavoni, 2017. "Cooperation in the climate commons," GRI Working Papers 259, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    greenhouse gases; taxation; emission trading; climate change; regulation; renewable energy; Australia;

    JEL classification:

    • D62 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Externalities
    • Q54 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Climate; Natural Disasters and their Management; Global Warming
    • H23 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Externalities; Redistributive Effects; Environmental Taxes and Subsidies
    • Q58 - Agricultural and Natural Resource Economics; Environmental and Ecological Economics - - Environmental Economics - - - Environmental Economics: Government Policy

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:33997. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: (Joachim Winter). General contact details of provider: http://edirc.repec.org/data/vfmunde.html .

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service hosted by the Research Division of the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis . RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.