ABC Rural: Regional Australia to Suffer

Yesterday, ABC Rural reported on their website the findings of a Frontier Economics report which found that Regional Australia would bear the brunt of the CPRS that 45,000 jobs would be at risk as a consequence. The article notes that:

A report into the impact of a Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme shows that regional Australia will bear the brunt of massive job losses and social dislocation. Frontier Economics says 45,000 jobs will be lost in high energy intensive industries. Most of those will go in the Hunter region of New South Wales and coal mining and mineral processing regions in Queensland.

Report author Danny Price says the job losses are unavoidable as Australia has an energy intensive economy. However he says urban Australians should be asked to shoulder some of the negative impacts.

"If the small number of communities are asked to bear the brunt of this, then the rest of the Australian community ought to help them manage the transition" he says. "It's an important part of any government policy and yet you don't see that in anything associated with the CPRS. They [Federal Government] in fact haven't even reported regional effects because they're very concerned about the regional backlash."

Mr Price says it's possible 20,000 jobs will be created through a renewable energy industry, but they could be more than a decade away. He also says it's unrealistic to expect workers to just relocate to another another industry."

For example an underground coal miner won't easily retrain to build components for things like wind turbines."

This last point is very important, and gives the lie to the 'emerging green jobs' strategy being touted by Senator Wong and others.

For example - what do we hear from the Lunatic Greens?

"To deliver a clean energy jobs boom, we need jobs and training packages for workers most at risk in the old economy."

What does the ACF say?

It’s a myth that action on climate change will destroy Australian jobs. Creating green jobs is not about shutting down ‘dirty’ industries, but re-skilling (and ‘re-tooling’) them for cleaner production.

I think what they are trying to say here is that 'dirty' industries will be shut down (which the Frontier Economics study agrees with), and their workers will be redeployed into 'clean' industries (which the Frontier Economics study describes as 'unrealistic').

And this wishful thinking is pretty much the mantra being chanted by all the self-appointed Planet-Savers.

But who are we to believe on this issue: an economist, who has studied the fundamentals of the issue in detail and comes to the conclusion that existing "dirty" jobs and their incumbents are doomed, or a bunch of wishful thinkers who believe that it is simply a matter of shuffling the deck chairs. A 'build it and they will come' mentality.

And here's the real confusing part of the debate: Why is it that the Planet-Savers are more than happy to turn to economists who are not qualified climate scientists (Stern, Garnaut) to help define the "problem", but ignore the ones that actually do the solid work of examining the detailed fundamentals of the proposed "solutions".