I Come To Bury Howard. By David Archibald.

Howard’s last dark deed, after he lost the September 2007 election, was to pass the National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act. To put that in context, when he was a teenager Howard used to cross Sydney to sit at the knee of Sir Philip Baxter, former head of the Australian Energy Commission, and hear of the wonders of nuclear energy. As an elected politician, he became a one-man sleeper cell of nuclear advocacy.

In private conversations, Howard used to call global warming nonsense. Nevertheless, he worked towards bringing in a carbon tax. He wanted Australia to adopt nuclear energy. To force Australia to that result, he needed to make coal-fired power generation more expensive. He was being two-faced and too cute. The National Greenhouse and Energy Reporting Act was the accounting basis for the tax. The idea was to bring it in, settle it down over a couple of years and then start taxing.

Some 1,000 Australian companies continue to report their carbon consumption under that act. The total cost of employing all the accountants for this may be of the order of $500 million per annum. All of which is wasted.

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