Factbox: Carbon taxes around the world .. plus other goodies .. :)
F6 - about the only good news in the new Barrier Reef report is this bit ..
"“If anyone’s going to do it, it’s going to be the Australians, because they really care about the Great Barrier Reef,” she said in an interview. She added that these measures will “buy you real time but not infinite time,” at which point countries will have to cut the carbon emissions that are raising sea temperatures and making the ocean more acidic."
Australian awareness is also seen elsewhere .. lol ..
Aussi treasurer Wayne Swan claims "cranks & crazies" have taken over the Republican Party
The Climate Commission says by 2013, 33 countries and 18 sub-national jurisdictions will have a carbon price in place.
Its report - The Critical Decade: International Action on Climate Change - says these schemes could be expected to cover around 850 million people, around 30 per cent of the global economy and around 20 per cent of global emissions.
The federal government's carbon pricing scheme came into force on the 1st of July 2012.
SBS looks at how the carbon tax works and which countries have measures in place.
WHY HAS THE GOVERNMENT INTRODUCED A CARBON TAX?
The federal government says a price tag on pollution is the most efficient way to discourage business and industry from emitting greenhouse gases, which are contributing to climate change.
HOW DOES CARBON PRICING WORK IN AUSTRALIA?
Carbon pricing, introduced in Australia by the clean energy legislation, applies to Australia's largest 500 emitters, which are companies that emit more than 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide or supply or use natural gas.
Carbon pricing began on July 1, 2012. In the first three years, the carbon price will be fixed. From July 1 2015, the price will be set by the market.
In the 2012-2013 financial year, the carbon price will be $A23 per tonne. It will rise to $A24.15 per tonne in the following financial year and then to $A25.40 per tonne in 2014-15.
From July 2015, the number of units issued by the government each year will be capped by regulators. Most carbon units will be auctioned by the Clean Energy Regulator and the price will be set by the market, starting from a floor price of $A15 per tonne.
Under the Carbon Farming Initiative (CFI), farmers and land managers can earn carbon credits by storing carbon or reducing greenhouse gas emissions on the land. These credits can be sold to people and businesses wishing to offset their emissions.
This scheme includes credits earned from activities such as reforestation, savannah fire management and reductions in emissions from livestock and fertiliser use.
CFI credits can also be sold to international companies.
Australia has a legislated renewable energy target designed to ensure that 20 per cent of electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020.
HOW IS A CARBON TAX DIFFERENT FROM AN EMISSIONS TRADING SYSTEM?
In an emissions trading system, a central authority sets a cap on how much a pollutant such as CO2 may be emitted. The cap is allocated to companies in the form of emissions permits, which give them the right to emit a certain amount of the pollutant. Firms are required to hold a number of permits equivalent to their emissions.
The total number of permits issued to all companies cannot exceed the emissions cap, and firms that need to increase their emission permits must buy them from companies that require fewer permits. This means permit buyers are paying a charge for polluting more, while sellers are being rewarded for reducing emissions.
CARBON TAXES AROUND THE WORLD
CHINA (state-based action)
The Chinese Government plans to develop emissions trading schemes in seven key cities and provinces from 2013. These schemes will cover around 250 million people. The Chinese Government aims to work towards a nation-wide approach after 2015.
UNITED STATES (state-based action)
There is no nationwide carbon tax levelled in the USA, although a few states have introduced the tax. The United States Administration has not been able to secure support for legislation to set either a price or a limit on greenhouse gas emissions. However, emissions trading has operated in the power sector in nine states since 2009. California’s emissions trading scheme will start in January 2013.
CANADA (province-based action)
Canada does not have a federal carbon tax, but two Canadian provinces have existing carbon taxes (Quebec and British Columbia). Alberta implemented emissions trading in 2006 and Quebec’s scheme will start in 2013. A further two provinces, British Columbia and Ontario, are considering emissions trading schemes.The Canadian Federal Government has no immediate plans to implement national emissions trading.
INDIA (tax on coal)
In July 2010, India introduced a nationwide carbon tax of 50 rupees per tonne (less than $A1) of coal both produced and imported to India.
SOUTH KOREA
The Republic of Korea passed legislation in May 2012 for an emissions trading scheme to start from 1 January 2015. The emissions trading scheme will cover facilities producing more than 25,000 tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions – expected to be around 450 of the country’s largest emitters.
JAPAN
In April 2012, Japan legislated for a carbon tax of approximately ¥289 per tonne ($A3.30) by increasing existing taxes on fossil fuels (coal and LPG/LNG) with effect from 1 October 2012. Half the revenue will fund low-emissions technologies. Japan has emissions trading schemes operating in the Tokyo and Saitama regions, covering 20 million people.
EUROPE (national-based action)
The European Union emissions trading scheme began in 2005 and now covers the 27 countries of the European Union, and three non-European Union members: Iceland, Liechtenstein, and Norway. Their current target is a 21 per cent cut of 2005 emissions by 2025 (Australia’s is a 5% cut of 2000 emissions by 2020).
A carbon tax was proposed by the European Commission in 2010, but a carbon tax has not been agreed upon by the 27 member states. The current proposal by the European Commission would charge firms between 4 and 30 euros per metric tonne of CO2.
Several European countries have enacted a carbon tax. They include: Denmark, Finland, Ireland, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland, and the UK.
FINLAND
Finland introduced the world’s first carbon tax in 1990, initially with exemptions for specific sectors. Manly changes were later introduced, such as a border tax on imported electricity. Natural gas has a reduced tax rate, while peat was exempted between 2005 and 2010. In 2010, Finland’s price on carbon was €20 per tonne of CO2.
THE NETHERLANDS
The Netherlands introduced a carbon tax in 1990, which was then replaced by a tax on fuels. In 2007, it introduced a carbon-based tax on packaging, to encourage recycling.
SWEDEN
In 1991, Sweden enacted a tax on the use of coal, oil, natural gas, petrol and aviation fuel used in domestic travel. The tax was 0.25 SEK/kg ($US100 per tonne of C02) and was later raised to $US150. With Sweden raising prices on fossil fuels since enacting the carbon tax, it cut its carbon pollution by 9 per cent between 1990 and 2006.
NORWAY
In 1991, Norway introduced a tax on carbon. However its carbon emissions increased by 43 per cent per capita between 1991 and 2008.
DENMARK
Since 2002, Denmark has had a carbon tax of 100 DKK per metric ton of CO2, equivalent to approximately 13 Euros or 18 US dollars. Denmark’s carbon tax applies to all energy users, but industrial companies are taxed differently depending on the process the energy is used for, and whether or not the company has entered into a voluntary agreement to apply energy efficiency measures.
SWITZERLAND
A carbon incentive tax was introduced in Switzerland in 2008. It includes all fossil fuels, unless they are used for energy. Swiss companies can be exempt from the tax if they participate in the country’s emissions trading system. The tax amounts to CHF 36 per metric tonne CO2.
UK
In 1993, the UK government introduced a tax on retail petroleum products, to reduce emissions in the transport sector. The UK's Climate Change Levy was introduced in 2001. The United Kingdom participates in the European Union emissions trading scheme and is covered by European Union policies and measures. The United Kingdom has put in place regulations requiring all new homes to have zero emissions for heating, hot water, cooling and lighting from 2016.
IRELAND
A tax on oil and gas came into effect in 2010. It was estimated to add around €43 to filling a 1000 litre oil tank and €41 to the average annual gas bill.
COSTA RICA
In 1997, Costa Rica enacted a tax on carbon pollution, set at 3.5 per cent of the market value of fossil fuels. The revenue raised from this goes into a national forest fund which pays indigenous communities for protecting the forests around them.
BRAZIL
The state of Rio de Janeiro is exploring options to implement a state-wide cap and trade system.
SOUTH AFRICA
South Africa introduced a carbon tax on new vehicle sales in September 2010. South Africa is planning to introduce a carbon tax from 2013, starting at R120 ($A15) per tonne for emissions above a threshold. Each company will have 60 per cent of its emissions tax exempt, with higher exemption thresholds for cement, iron, steel, aluminium, ceramics and fugitive emissions as well as trade exposed industries. Agriculture, forestry, land use and waste will not be taxed.
This Scientist Aims High To Save The World's Coral Reefs
by Richard Harris/NPR .. April 05, 201312:29 PM
.. listen .. inside .. 7 min 50 sec
9 images .. shucks can't copy ..
Most scientists find a topic that interests them and keep digging deeper and deeper into the details. But Ken Caldeira .. http://dge.stanford.edu/labs/caldeiralab/ .. takes the opposite approach in search for solutions to climate change. He goes after the big questions, and leaves the details to others.
We caught up with Caldeira on Australia's Great Barrier Reef, where he was conducting an experiment to measure how coral reefs are coping with increasing acidity in the world's oceans. People are causing this change by burning fossil fuels and putting carbon dioxide into the air. From there, it dissolves into the oceans, and makes them more acidic.
As a result, the world's coral reefs are in trouble. In a matter of decades, ocean water could become so corrosive that reefs may start dissolving faster than the coral can grow.
Caldeira works for the Carnegie Institution for Science, and he's based on the Stanford University campus. But throughout February, his base of operations was One Tree Island, Australia.
He spent many a day out on the reef, wearing a floppy sun hat, tattered shorts and a head-to-toe "rash guard" to block the intense sunlight. He and his team were pumping antacid onto a stretch of the reef to see if neutralizing some of the increased acidity would help the coral grow faster.
Caldeira has license to do this because he works at an unusual place. The Carnegie Institution for Science was endowed by industrialist Andrew Carnegie more than a century ago, so Caldeira worries less about money than other scientists do.
"My job offer letter said 'make important scientific discoveries,' " Caldeira says. "And they basically give me some resources and leave me alone to make important scientific discoveries."
This seems to have worked. More than 12,000 papers in the scientific literature refer to papers that Caldeira has written or co-authored.
Ken Caldeira of the Carnegie Institution for Science takes a water sample during his experiment on part of the Great Barrier Reef. The water is slightly pink because his team is using a dye to trace an acid-neutralizing chemical as it flows across the reef. .. Richard Harris/NPR
Science wouldn't really work if everyone tried to go after the flashy findings and not fret about chasing down all the details. But big-picture thinkers like Caldeira also help drive the field.
The reef expedition was a relatively rare foray; over the years, most of his work has been at a computer screen. He has calculated what it would take to cool the planet by spraying reflective particles into the atmosphere. He has wondered what would happen to global temperatures if all the trees near the Arctic were cut down. He has calculated just how much clean energy generation would be needed to replace all the fossil fuels we're using.
But for all that, he loves being out on a reef, doing firsthand research and taking risks on experiments that may simply not have enough power to detect the small changes he's looking for.
"This is how the science gets pushed forward, by people taking risks," he says. "And maybe we'll get lucky and it will work, and maybe it won't."
In a world where science is often driven by a researcher's ability to get government grants, taking a risk like this is a luxury.
But when Caldeira steps back to look at the big picture, it leaves room for some startling insights. For example, it might seem that our vast skies have an endless ability to hold the billions of tons of carbon dioxide we produce every year.
But here's how Caldeira visualizes it: "If you were to compress the entire atmosphere so it was the density of water, it would only be 30 feet deep, so all the stuff we're throwing into the atmosphere, it's like we're throwing it into an ocean that's only 30 feet deep."
[ lol .. that's an interesting one i haven't seen mentioned before ]
In fact, when you look at the chemistry of the oceans, the carbon dioxide is already making a measurable change. It reacts with seawater and turns into carbonic acid, and has made the oceans 30 percent more acidic than they were before the industrial revolution.
"This is a scale of change that hasn't happened since the dinosaurs became extinct, so we are making radical transformations to ocean chemistry that go far beyond what most organisms have experienced in their evolutionary history," he says.
Many coral reefs were wiped out the last time this happened, 66 million years ago. Ocean chemistry recovered in about 10,000 years. Minerals flowing down rivers and into the sea corrected the acid balance in the oceans. But Caldeira's Ph.D. work, back in the 1980s, showed that it took hundreds of thousands of years for reefs to recover.
'Transforming Our Energy System'
Out on One Tree Island, about 40 miles off the coast of northeast Australia, Caldeira and his crew gather every morning in the communal kitchen to guzzle coffee, crunch cereal, fight off the sugar ants and plan their day. Many of the floors in this rustic outpost are simply gravel-sized coral. Raucous noddy terns, which roost everywhere, add their own special flavor to the drinking water, which is collected off the roof when it rains and stored in cisterns.
The place feels magical, but the reef's peril is palpable. Caldeira ponders what to do about it.
It might be possible to save tiny patches of coral reefs by pumping acid-neutralizing chemicals on them. But it's simply not practical to scale that up, even for a single reef.
Instead, Caldeira keeps coming back to another big-picture solution — and that is to stop burning fossil fuels. Yes, energy will cost more, and because of that there's huge resistance to this idea. But Caldeira is hoping people will change their views if they simply think of the issue a different way.
"Decades ago, everybody was smoking cigarettes — and it was acceptable to smoke cigarettes indoors," he says. "And there was a phase change in social acceptability, where it is no longer acceptable to dump your cigarette smoke in air that somebody else is going to breathe. And I think we can achieve the same thing with carbon dioxide emissions, where it just becomes socially unacceptable to dump your industrial waste into the atmosphere."
Caldeira is not optimistic that politicians will make this change, and he isn't planning to take to the streets. He tried that back in 1982, when he helped organize a huge protest against the nuclear-arms race in New York City. He has moved on from that strategy.
Now, he says, it's time to pay less attention to the problem and more to the solutions.
"For me the problem is clear," he says, "and the solution is in transforming our energy system. For young people coming into science today, my recommendation would be to work on developing improved energy systems. And I wouldn't advise people to go into climate science. I think it's fundamentally a solved problem."
In fact, Caldeira makes this case to Microsoft founder Bill Gates, who sometimes calls on him for advice. If science and technology can make clean energy cheaper, he says, that would make it easier for people to look at the atmosphere differently — not as a waste dump, but as a vital part of our planet.
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