Will a carbon tax double the price of petrol?
Posted: August 3, 2010 Filed under: Cars & traffic, Energy & GHG | Tags: carbon price, Cleaner Car Rebate, CSIRO, ETS, Harry Clarke, John Quiggin, Mandatory Emission Standards, petrol, Tony Abbott 5 Comments
Possible future petrol prices under different oil market/carbon price scenarios (CSIRO)
Tony Abbott made a surprising claim on Sunday that a $40/tonne carbon tax would increase the retail price of electricity by 100%. Fortunately, John Quiggin has ‘done the maths’ on Abbott’s assertion and points out that it would result in a much lower increase in the retail price to households – around 20%.
So let’s look at the likely effect of a carbon tax on the price of petrol. This CSIRO report, Fuel for Thought, estimates that a $40/tonne emissions permit would only increase the retail price of petrol by 10 cents per litre. So the additional cost of the $23/tonne carbon price touted by the Greens would seem to be no more than the weekly fluctuations in price at my local servo!
That’s hardly a great big new tax. But what’s important from a policy perspective is that a price on carbon of this order isn’t really going to have a significant effect on what we drive and how we drive. Read the rest of this entry »
What will high speed rail do for regional development?
Posted: August 2, 2010 Filed under: Decentralisation, HSR High Speed Rail, Infrastructure, Public transport | Tags: albury, Decentralisation, High Speed Rail, regional centres, very fast train, wodonga 12 Comments
Albury-Wodonga
Yesterday I looked at the carbon reduction justification for high speed rail between Sydney and Melbourne. Today I want to discuss another argument – that high speed rail will promote the development of regional centres. It is argued that this could in turn relieve capital cities of much of the burden of projected population growth.
I have no doubt that improving connection times between regional centres like Albury-Wodonga and Melbourne will benefit both.
But if regional centres are to be a serious alternative for growth, they will need to provide new arrivals with jobs. The question I ask is: where are those jobs going to come from?
One way could be that regional centres provide a “dormitory” for workers who can live in the country but commute to work in capital cities like Melbourne by high speed rail. Read the rest of this entry »
High speed rail – are the Greens as shallow as the rest?
Posted: August 1, 2010 Filed under: Energy & GHG, HSR High Speed Rail, Infrastructure, Public transport | Tags: Bob Brown, High Speed Rail, Julia Gillard, The Greens, Tony Abbott, very fast train 12 Comments
Bob Brown let us know yesterday with his call for a high speed rail link from Brisbane to Melbourne that the Greens are just as susceptible to populism as Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott.
In April he costed a Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne link at more than $40 billion. Yesterday he pointed to a survey commissioned by the Greens showing 74% of Australians support high speed rail. That’s not surprising because it is an attractive and beguiling idea – 94% of readers of The Age support it. After all, China and Europe can’t seem to build enough high speed rail and President Obama has grand plans for an extensive network in the US.
The idea of some form of very fast train service connecting Sydney-Canberra-Melbourne has been around at least since the 1980s. A number of feasibility studies have been undertaken, all of which concluded that it wouldn’t be feasible without massive Government assistance. So it’s worth asking a few questions:
- why would we want to commit billions in Government subsidies to replace one form of public transport (planes) with another (trains)?
- why would we want to replace the four airlines that currently compete vigorously on price and service on this route with a single monopoly rail operator? Read the rest of this entry »
The Melbourne Urbanist 