Interesting juxtaposition of news today – record snowfalls at Falls Creek and the ACT GreenLabor Govt inflicting more mad taxes on us. While of course their incomes and super are indexed and paid for by – you guessed it – us poor sucker voters.
Interesting juxtaposition of news today – record snowfalls at Falls Creek and the ACT GreenLabor Govt inflicting more mad taxes on us. While of course their incomes and super are indexed and paid for by – you guessed it – us poor sucker voters.
The Greens’ press release to which you link is priceless.
They crow that the ACT minority Labor government, which they hold to ransom, will legislate a 40% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions by 2020. This will be acheived through “tremendous support for energy efficiency, renewable energy and clean transport”.
Of course, legislation and intervention would not be necessary if the energy and transport measures were economically viable. If they made economic sense, they would happen anyway without any need for new laws or “tremendous support”.
So by definition the tremendous support does not make economic sense. In practice we can expect more subsidies of inefficient, costly and unreliable solar and wind power. This will drive power bills further through the roof, a distortion which may then make it appear “economic” to spend a fortune to hermetically seal your house or make other changes to cut power use.
Or, as they put it, “This target will hugely boost jobs and investment in the ACT as homes, businesses, public buildings and industry all have major efficiency upgrades. There will be a boom for renewable energy developers and installers…”
Sounds great, doesn’t it? Until you realise that every economic distortion “creates jobs” only because more work is required to achieve the same outcome, and “boosts investment” only by deflecting resources from what people would like to buy at its real cost to whatever is being subsidised. The boom for renewable energy workers will be at the expense of a bust for the workers who lose their jobs in every other industry because their customers’ reduced purchasing power.
But it gets worse: “This target is the result of the highly successful parliamentary agreement between the Greens and the minority Labor government and bodes well for serious action on climate change and renewable energy in the new Commonwealth parliament.”
Unfortunately, this could be dead right. Batty economic distortions in the ACT could be just a harbinger of much more grandiose economic lunacy at the national level, if the recent Green-Labor deal there gets those two parties into a governing coalition in the federal parliament. A combination of the economic incompetence Labor demonstrated in its first term with the economic illiteracy of the Greens could create all sort of new jobs and investment, but the destruction of other jobs and investment would be much greater.
The Greens should stick to their real reason for championing such interventions: They believe they are necessary to avert the climate damage they imagine will be caused by greenhouse gases. That might be a poor judgement, but at least it would be a sincere and arguable one. Their resort instead to pseudo-economic arguments is either disingenuous or naive. Worse for them, those arguments can be seen through now by anyone with a smidgin of economic sense, with no need to wait decades to see how climate model forecasts pan out.