Transcript
WARWICK MCKIBBIN: Several weeks ago the Prime Ministerial Task Group on Emissions Trading presented a report to the Prime Minister of Australia and the Prime Minister announced in early June several weeks ago that many of the proposals that were outlined in this report would be adopted by the Australian government. Although the text of the document sounds a little bit like the Kyoto Protocol language, this really is quite a fundamental shift certainly in the climate policy debate in Australia and could be the beginning of a shift in the debate internationally.
What I want to do in this presentation is first to lay the context, how can it be that a country that was even more fossil fuel dependent than the United States, that did not ratify the Kyoto Protocol, that had some policies in place but really did not look like taking serious action, has all of a sudden moved forward in a fairly dramatic way in a very short period of time. I want to outline the context and I want to talk about the approach taken by the task group and again to point out that it is a philosophical shift away from the Kyoto Protocol.
In comparing it, the best thing to compare it to is the DNA from which it comes and that is to compare the actual policy to the philosophical approach of the McKibbin-Wilcoxen blueprint, or as I like to call it, the Brookings- McKibbin-Wilcoxen plan or the BMW of climate change policy. The critical point is the difference between our approach in theory and the actual policy relates to the credibility of the long-term goal and how the permit allocation mechanism might work, I will talk a little bit about what remains to be done, and then offer a conclusion.
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