Letter

In response to Environment: Putting a price on carbon: is it worth all the trouble?

We must pay for pollution

Peter Sainsbury writes that the overall reduction in CO2 emissions after the introduction of a carbon pricing scheme is around 0-2 per cent per year (Environment: Putting a price on carbon: is it worth all the trouble? Pearls and Irritations, 3/3).

Given the long-standing support for a price on carbon as a solution to climate pollution, this is deeply troubling. Even more so when we acknowledge that the global north now needs to reduce emissions by 11 per cent per year between now and 2030 to even have a 50 per cent chance of holding warming to 1.5 degrees.

As Sainsbury suggests, however, most of these previous iterations of carbon price or emissions trading schemes have probably been carefully crafted so that they appear good on paper but achieve little in practice.

Somehow, somewhere, the costs associated with the climate and environmental destruction that results from our consumptive lifestyles needs to be paid for.

In addition to removing exorbitant government subsides for fossil fuels (which reached $7 trillion globally in 2022), a carbon price still seems the best way to achieve this end.

— Amy Hiller from Kew, Victoria