Garnaut Speaks at ANU
Professor Ross Garnaut, the man in charge of determining just how the Australian Emissions Trading Scheme should work, gave the 2008 Arndt Memorial Lecture on World Environment Day at the Australian National University in Canberra. His speech, Measuring the Immeasurable - The Costs and Benefits of Climate Change Mitigation has been widely reported, and mis-reported, but for me the interesting bits were the public questions afterwards. I videotaped the questions and answers for your interest.
Prof. Garnaut’s was asked about taking into account the non-fiscal benefits of our societies in terms of relationships and equity and justice and quality of life. Garnaut described
“the fourth category of the benefits of mitigation. Those that are not reflected in conventional consumption of goods and services. And we’re trying to bring those issues to account. It hasn’t been done very thoroughly before for policy purposes and so no doubt ours will be a small first step.”
This harks back to a theme I bring up a lot in the speeches I give. Every day I see something that makes me excited and optimistic about the future. Garnaut too seems quite optimistic that humanity has it in ourselves to solve, and repair this massive market failure. The writing is writ-large for capitalism. Externalities are becoming the way of the gangster, the scoundrel, the robber-baron. Pretty soon any modern business leaving genuine CSR out of their report cards will lose their social license to operate. Please enjoy. — DS
PS: Sorry it’s been a while since I posted to the blog. Our version of WordPress got hacked and broke a bunch of templates and plugins. We had to undo the damage done and upgrade the blog software and test it and so forth, and run a complete system integrity check on the blog’s server.
