[LINK] Explaining Australia's New Carbon Pricing Scheme to Students

[Tom Worthington]

Students at the Australian National University will be studying "ICT 
Sustainability" (COMP7310) again from February 2015: 
http://programsandcourses.anu.edu.au/course/comp7310

The students learn to estimate carbon emissions from ICT and then come 
up with ways to reduce them using ICT. This year I had the problem of 
revising the course to take into account changes in Australian 
greenhouse gas regulations. This turned out not to be as difficult as I 
had thought. Most of the technical standards for the previous Labor 
Government's carbon pricing system have been retained by the Collation.

The difference is that rather than organizations paying to emit carbon 
(with a market to be introduced to set the price), they bid at a reverse 
auction to remove carbon for the lowest price. So I had to only change a 
few words about the old scheme and add a sentence on the new one. This 
is not to say the new scheme will be as effective at reducing emissions, 
just that in terms of the people doing the accounting and auditing of it 
(where my students can get jobs), it is not that different.

See: http://www.tomw.net.au/ict_sustainability/audit.shtml


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
The Higher Education Whisperer http://blog.highereducationwhisperer.com/
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
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Adjunct Senior Lecturer, Research School of Computer Science,
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/