[LINK] Australian Senate Inquiry on Direct Action Plan on Climate Change

[Tom Worthington]

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/
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/