Censored former CSIRO economist Clive Spash will visit Melbourne next week to talk to climate activists about why he resigned from the CSIRO late last year. Clive was censored, then faced disciplining from CSIRO management after he wrote a paper critical of carbon trading, the model behind Rudd’s CPRS.
He has recently returned to Australia for the first time since his paper was publicly released. This happened in December after Senator Christine Milne raised the issue in federal parliament, prompting the government to make his work public.
He left Australia soon after his resignation from the CSIRO to take up an academic posting in Europe.Clive is scathing about the carbon trading model, which he describes as a dangerous diversion from real solutions to climate change.
Anyone concerned about climate change needs to understand why carbon trading won’t work, Clive says. He wrote his paper because, in his words:
“I’ve met many committed environmentalists who have their doubts about emissions trading but have lacked a way to articulate this or a document offering a dispassionate analysis of the critical issues. That is what I tried to offer in my work.”
He explains how corporate interests have manipulated the design of carbon trading schemes to grab windfall profits. The problems with carbon trading run so deep, from the use of shonky offsets to difficulties in measuring emissions, that they cannot be designed away, he claims. His paper concludes that carbon trading is designed to give, “The public appearance that action is being undertaken. The reality is that greenhouse gases are increasing and society is avoiding the need…to address the problem.”
Clive will talk to climate change activists about the failures of carbon trading and alternative approaches that could actually deliver action on climate change.