Isra-Mart srl:Labor’s carbon trading bid

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Isra-Mart srl news:

IT’S more of the same in Canberra so far this year.

Labor’s pussyfooting around and Opposition leader Tony Abbott is making short-sighted decisions.

Labor’s carbon-farming initiative is starting to look like a set-up to win rural support for a carbon trading scheme.

The initiative, while still in a consultative stage, is not that much different to the coalition’s token effort at climate action, the Direct Action Plan.

So the coalition will find it tough to attack the carbon farming initiative.

Once that passes, one way to increase the value of farmers’ carbon abatement efforts is to have a domestic emissions trading scheme, so the permits can be sold both locally and internationally, and outside of weak voluntary markets. An ETS would also increase demand for verified offsets.

With the carbon farming framework in place, Labor could try to sell the argument that an ETS could boost and diversify rural incomes by lifting the value of farmer’s carbon abatement.

Imagine how much more simple it would be to put forward a trading scheme and pass it, given that’s where the Government is headed anyway.

Meanwhile, Abbott’s push for more dams may ensure his popularity with the right, but he needs to win votes in Labor-held seats, not conservative heartland.

He says dams can be a source of “emissions-free power” and “environmental flows”.

But Blind Freddy can see Abbott doesn’t give a stuff about climate change or environmental flows, and his argument that dams prevent floods is flawed. He’s pushing it because he thinks it makes Labor appear impractical and subservient to the Greens, not because he’s passionate about dams.

Nats leader Warren Truss seems determined to be more visible this year.

This week he said floods proved the Murray-Darling Basin “will not become an ecological disaster any time soon”, yet the majority of the river systems in the basin are in either poor or very poor condition.

Both would be well advised to leave the water stuff to Senator Barnaby Joyce.