Mike's Minute: The govt shouldn't have touched the carbon market

If you follow the carbon market, and you should, it is yet another lesson in the abject failure that almost certainly results in gerrymandering markets. 

Four times a year you bid for credits (offsets) to counter your polluting habits. 

You do this because we signed up to Paris and made a bunch of promises we were never going to be able to keep. 

By selling credits the Government has the potential income of about $2 billion a year. Except little, if any, of that happens because by and large people don’t turn up and bid. 

And they fail to show up, broadly speaking, because people don’t believe a word the Government says on climate. 

It's not just this Government. The last one was even worse. 

They have tried to set a price for carbon credits, remembering of course that it's an entirely invented market. So it's a dart-at-a-board stuff at the best of times. 

Of late the price was $52. Then it was $33 before settling back to about $40-something. 

Enter Climate Minister Simon Watts. Now, he doesn’t normally talk about the market because that’s interference, the same way the Prime Minister doesn’t talk about the Reserve Bank. 

But Simon has talked about the market, and he has done that because the Government are panicked. 

He issued a reassurance that despite all the changes they are making around climate, the carbon market and the ETS are still a thing. We are still committed, it's still going to happen. 

His commitments, he said, are firm. 

Except, Simon, that’s the problem – no one believes you. 

This is a Government that says one thing and does another. Don’t get me wrong, what, roughly, they are doing is the right thing. 

The tide has gone out on climate. The promises are a bust. No one is going to make Net Zero, so the answer is stop pretending you are. 

Science might come to the rescue and if it does, fantastic. 

But the governmental promises around carbon and the ETS and car import duties is all BS. There is no better proof of that than the carbon market. 

The market is calling the Government's bluff. 

Carbon credits or snake oil? Same thing. 

No one's buying figuratively and literally. 

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