Time is running out to act on carbon

The answer is "now you know".

The EU and the UK will almost certainly have a "carbon border adjustment mechanism" or CBAM in place by 2023 to deal with exactly that problem. The Biden administration is likely to do the same. This would create a trans-Atlantic carbon-free trade zone.

Australia exporters could then be required to pay what would effectively be a carbon tax of up to $140 a tonne to access the EU, UK, and US markets. That might just be enough to knock the shine off any hopes the Morrison government has of an export drive to push along the post-COVID-19 recovery.

It would also make the current campaign to diversify out of the China export market significantly harder.

And, in the event similar policies were adopted across the G7, bringing in Japan and Canada, the impact would be little short of catastrophic. Australia would be far better off to have imposed a carbon tax of its own in the first place.

The mathematics are brutally simple. Australia's exports to China, which are vulnerable to the vagaries of the relations between the two governments, account for 40 per cent of the national total, or about $103 billion a year.

That has to be weighed against our exports to the G-7 countries. Japan takes about 25 per cent or just under $40 billion a year. The USA and the UK take about eight per cent between them or just over $20 billion. The EU takes about four per cent or just under $10 billion while Canada accounts for another $1.52 billion a year.

By the middle of the decade well over a third of all Australian exports could be subject to onerous carbon equivalence obligations that would cost local producers across almost all sectors of the economy dearly.

And, if at a later date, China and India were to go down the same path, our big miners, farmers and the like would be in even more strife than an early settler.

Australia is at the cross-roads. This really is a wake-up call for the nation. It is much later than this government, especially the climate change deniers firmly embedded within its ranks, think. The future is upon us and the time to act was a decade ago.

Scott Morrison's "preference" for net zero emissions by 2050 just doesn't cut the mustard. The Europeans, the British, and the Americans can clearly see it for what it is; a failure of courage and leadership at a time when the whole world is at risk of burning.

The imminent imposition of a CBAM across crucial northern hemisphere markets Australian agribusinesses are desperately keen to exploit makes an absolute mockery of Deputy Prime Minister, Michael McCormack's attempts to insulate mining, agriculture, and even manufacturing, from the effects of any new emissions legislation.

We have the ludicrous situation where the National's "tail", aided and abetted by an antediluvian rump of Liberal climate change deniers, is wagging the Morrison government dog.

They are doing nobody, least of all their own constituents, any favours.

Miners, farmers and manufacturers are all taking independent action to reduce emissions in the absence of national leadership.

Not only does this government need to commit to net zero emissions by 2050, it also needs to urgently review its patently inadequate 2030 targets as well.

While it is not yet too late for Australia to change course it soon will be.

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