Climate wars have cost us the chance to lead

The climate wars between the major political parties have cost us a host of lost business and employment opportunities, even a global leadership role, and yet we drift on without an energy policy that might provide some relief to rising power costs and some strategy to meet our commitments to reduce emissions.

John Hewson takes us through the climate wars.

The government’s most recent policy, the National Electricity Guarantee (NEG), is the fourth most effective response, only being proposed after an emissions trading scheme, an emissions intensity scheme and Finkel’s clean energy target were sequentially rejected.

In this sense, the guarantee is the last, and only, game in town, but it is still likely to be exhaustively debated, mostly for not moving fast or far enough, with concern about the longer-term future of the renewables sector.

Read John Hewson’s opinion piece from The Age - “Climate wars have cost us the chance to lead.”