In Brief

The tiddlywinks club is coming out all over on climate change including down at Lowy where Sam Roggeveen says he’s ‘finding his thinking on this issue evolving rapidly over the last few weeks, towards a greater scepticism of large-scale, long-term initiatives like carbon trading.’

As the Nature op-ed last year recommends, he says, the more effective answer might be a massive investment in clean energy R&D, ‘though you could argue that a carbon price would be a good way to pay for such investment.’

You could, indeed, Sam, argue that.

All the evidence (during the oil crisis of the 1970s and now) is that it is the change in the relative price of carbon fuels that leads to their economisation and the investment in the new technologies that reduces their use. When pressed, even Jeff Sachs admits that there is no technology fix for unsustainable development without a change in the price we pay for carbon emissions one way or another [Sachs video here and summary of speech here].

A higher carbon price is central to getting incentives right to encourage the massive investment in carbon fuel alternatives that the science, the economics and the politics recommend if not sufficient to doing all the heavy lifting on carbon ameliorating R&D (see previous posts on this here and here).