The Environment and Communications Committee of the Australian Senate is holding an Inquiry into the Government's Direct Action Plan on Climate Change: http://www.aph.gov.au/Parliamentary_Business/Committees/Senate/Environment_and_Communications/Direct_Action_Plan
I was revising the notes for a course on ICT Sustainability in which I briefly mentioned the ALP government's plan for a fixed carbon price, to be followed by carbon trading. The new coalition government had proposed a "Direct Action Plan", but what exactly is it and how much did I need to change my course to cover this? It turned out that at a technical level there was not that much difference between the old and new approaches. The new government's approach could be characterised as a "Carbon Tax" as the cost of abatement measures by industry will be subsidised by government. In December 2013 the new Australian Government released a Green Paper on a new "Emissions Reduction Fund" (ERF): http://www.environment.gov.au/topics/cleaner-environment/clean-air/emissions-reduction-fund/green-paper The ERF envisages replacing the previous government's carbon trading scheme with a reverse auction. The reverse auction itself will be technically simpler to implement than the trading mechanism, as it will involve far fewer transactions. However, the same environmental auditing standards will be used to verify the amount of emissions traded. Also extensive measures will need to be put in place to protect the auction system from manipulation. In the end I only put a couple of lines summary about the new scheme in my course notes: http://www.tomw.net.au/ict_sustainability/introduction.shtml The course starts on-line at the ANU mid February: http://programsandcourses.anu.edu.au/course/COMP7310 -- Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150 The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/ PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia http://www.tomw.net.au Liability limited by a scheme approved under Professional Standards Legislation Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science, Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/ _______________________________________________ Link mailing list [email protected] http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
