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Leigh Ewbank writes: Its time for the government and climate change advocates to stop obsessing over carbon pricing and get behind an investment-centred climate policy.
Polling released last week, as PM Gillard announced the members of her governments Carbon Pricing Climate Change Committee, showed that just 37% of Australians think it is very important to implement an ETS (or other carbon-pricing measures) to address climate change. When we consider the prominence of emissions trading in contemporary climate change policy debates in Australia, it is fair to say the measure is still struggling to win strong public support.
In dominant discourses, the phenomenon of climate change is constructed primarily as a pollution problem. The logical aim of domestic climate policy within this framing is to limit the amount of carbon pollution Australia emits. Carbon pricing is presented as the key policy initiative to achieve this end. This framework constructs the role of government as limited: it is responsible for setting carbon emissions targets and implementing carbon trading (or taxes) to create price signals to drive the transition to cleaner energy sources. Regardless of the ability of markets alone to achieve the decarbonisation needed to avoid dangerous climate changes, this is the prevailing wisdom.
The focus on climate change as a pollution problem obscures an alternative policy approach with greater potential to win public support than carbon pricing. In contrast to the pollution frame:
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