Why You Will Benefit From the Price on Carbon

Pricing carbon emissions has been shown to  provide the most economical way to reduce a nation’s carbon emissions and addressing the problem now is will cost less than letting it cause more serious damage to both the economy and the environment.

While there is understandable concern amongst some people that this will place a further burden upon their cost of living this will not be the case; as soon as the carbon tax is implemented the government will issue a tax cut program to subsidise any added expenses incurred, and these tax cuts will rise if further offsetting is required.

The carbon tax package will create strong financial motivation for thegeneral public, businessesand especially the top 500 polluters in the country, to find and innovate more effective ways to reduce carbon emissions. This will promote more extensive use of renewable energy sources like wind and solar energy, which are currently the two top contenders in the industry.
As more large scale renewable energy investments are made the cost of the clean energy they produce will reach parity with the cost of coal generated electricity quite quickly, as their costs will fall while traditional energy costs are ever increasing. The less carbon intensive energy we use the less we will pay for our electric bills!

As renewable energy becomes more economically feasible in our country it will encourage large scale international investment into the industry in Australia instead of it going into more established European nations. Clean Energy investments by major worldwide corporations are already in the billions of dollars every year, and this will have a very positive influence on our country’s economic future.

Currently two large scale solar power projects are underway, The Moree solar farm will be largest of its kind utilising solar PV technology; the project is expected to generate 150 MW of clean energy. Construction will take place in the state of New South Wales flanking the town of Moree by 2012 and when completed the solar power farm will be comprised of 650,000 solar panels and will deliver new job opportunities during construction and eventually lift the local economy.

Paired with the Moree solar farm is the solar dawn project which will take footing in Queensland. The 250 MW project is a natural gas hybrid combined with CSP technology. Concentrated solar power (CSP) systems or concentrated solar thermal (CST) systems are systems that use mirrors or lenses to concentrate a large area of sunlight into a small area. Electricity is produced when the concentrated light is converted to heat which drives the steam turbine connected to an electrical power generator.

The carbon tax package will provide the necessary funding to propel our renewable energy industries forward, and is expected to create many“green jobs” in the near future which currently don’t exist.
The carbon tax alone has the ability to create a stable green economy and the economic benefits are expected to far outweigh any drawbacks.So the implementation of the carbon tax is not only for environmental protection and to preserve our quality of life for the future generations, as important as that is.