KEVIN, we need to talk. We need to talk about our future. Don’t get me wrong. The early days of carefree symbolism were fun.

Signing the Kyoto Protocol provided a nice, cost-free inner glow to our collective conscience about climate change. Turning off our lights for Earth Hour was a similarly low-cost bit of climate change fun, as we sat by the dreamy glow of candlelight. And who can forget going to the movies to watch Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, shedding tears for humanity and those poor polar bears? Now that the gimmicks are over, we need to get serious about our relationship. Our relationship with climate change. We need to talk about cost. Yes, I know, money is such a gauche topic. But we need to talk about just how much confronting climate change is going to cost us. Kevin, isn’t it time to start telling us how it will affect petrol prices, the cost of our groceries and our electricity bills?

Unfortunately, it is becoming clear that Rudd’s climate change policies were a welter of half-truths and platitudes dipped in soaring rhetoric to make them saleable. But now that the glossy pre-election promises are being analysed, probed and costed, the Rudd Government’s carefully constructed appeal to environmental morality is unravelling.

We now know, for example, that the mandatory renewable energy target of 20 per cent of power generation is very likely to be an expensive waste of time and money. While the solar and wind industry enjoy being propped up by government, the Productivity Commission has pointed out that mandatory targets for renewables, operated in conjunction with an emissions trading scheme, will drive up energy prices while doing nothing to reduce emissions that the ETS can’t do on its own.

We also now know that the ETS is likely to make life very expensive for the Prime Minister’s beloved working families. Rudd told the National Climate Change Summit in March 2007 that “climate change is the great moral challenge of our generation”. He made the issue a quasi-religious matter impervious to matters of mere money. Similarly, when he spoke to the Global Foundation a few weeks earlier, he committed to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, cut greenhouse pollution by 60 per cent by 2050 and introduce a national emissions trading scheme because “our planet is calling us to action”. More morality. No mention of costs.

Rudd’s aim was to seduce, not spook, voters. Indeed, apart from Work Choices, Rudd’s critical election winning promises were that he would answer the moral call to environmental arms while simultaneously reducing the financial burden on working families. More than six months later, Labor is being slowly mugged by reality. Penny Wong belled the cat last week when she finally admitted that the ETS “would have an impact on different prices in the economy”.

It now turns out that even a “soft” start to the ETS where carbon is priced at $20 a tonne will see the average household pay $200 per year more in power costs and petrol would jump 5.6c a litre. At $45 a tonne, three out of the four brown coal power stations in Victoria and others in South Australia, NSW and Queensland would close. Household power bills would be up by 50 per cent.

Even more frightening is modelling by Deutsche Bank that suggests the carbon price should at present be $65 a tonne, rising to $105 by 2020. These sorts of estimates explain why one industry association head has speculated that electricity bills could double and petrol could increase by 17c a litre.

The Rudd Government has good reason to feel nervous. When asked recently whether they would support a small hike in the price of petrol if the extra money was used to tackle climate change, 63 per cent of survey respondents said no. When the Government started means testing the solar rebate, guess what happened? The solar panel business dropped off. Turns out that working families are not so keen on climate change mitigation when it hits their hip pocket.

Having sold an alluring dream last year, Rudd will now need to do some fancy footwork to maintain any semblance of public trust on the issue. And already the soft-shoe shuffle and the fudging have started. The Government’s climate change expert, Ross Garnaut, is foreshadowing a “soft” start to the ETS, with its full rigours being introduced only in 2013. Phew. That’s two elections away, Rudd must be thinking.

In truth, these might be sensible compromises. However, Australians might have appreciated this kind of candour when Labor was whispering sweet nothings in our ear last November. There are a few things the Rudd Government needs to do immediately to start rebuilding its fragile hold on our affection. First, it needs to scrap the promise to plough taxpayers’ money into funding a green car after the Productivity Commission has shown how much it will cost and how useless it will be. It will only end up confirming what we already know: governments are lousy at picking winners.

Critically, they could start telling the truth about carbon capture and storage: so-called “clean coal technology”. The sad truth is that while Martin Ferguson is right to point out how valuable such technology could be to a country long on coal, Labor needs to remind working families about the costs. Billions will be spent and power bills will be much higher. The collapse of the Rio Tinto/BP $2 billion plant in Western Australia and the US FutureGen project suggests that CCS will not be a short-term solution.

And given that storage of carbon waste attracts similar problems to storing nuclear waste, Labor’s confected outrage against nuclear power makes little sense and prevents a sensible debate of all the issues.

It may be that the real reason the Rudd Government refuses to come clean on climate change is that it would force it to think about the unthinkable. Come on, Kevin. Don’t be just another environmental playboy. The commitment-phobes in Labor won’t like it. But if we’re to have a future, there’s another thing we need to talk about. Nuclear.  Source