(AU RMIT ABC Fact Check) Angus Taylor Says The Carbon Tax Destroyed One In Eight Manufacturing Jobs. Is He Correct?

RMIT ABC Fact Check - Principal researcher: David Campbell

Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor says one in eight manufacturing jobs were destroyed when the carbon tax was introduced. (ABC News: Ian Cutmore)

The claim

As climate change shapes up as an election battleground, the Coalition has accused Labor of trashing the economy when last in government with its 2012 climate policy, the carbon tax.

Minister for Industry, Energy and Emissions Reduction Angus Taylor has led the charge, claiming that the policy wiped out roughly 12 per cent of Australia's manufacturing workforce.

"When the carbon tax went into place in this country, one in eight manufacturing jobs was destroyed," Mr Taylor said during an October 2021 interview.

Is that correct? RMIT ABC Fact Check investigates.

The verdict

Mr Taylor is wrong.

When the carbon tax went into place, manufacturing employed 947,500 people. 

By the time of its repeal two years later, that number had shrunk by 32,300 (3.4 per cent), with one in 29 workers affected.

Manufacturing job losses also continued in the years after the carbon tax was scrapped, though not on the scale claimed by Mr Taylor.

Manufacturing jobs were declining in Australia long before Labor came to government. (ABC News: Caroline Winter)

By contrast, roughly one in eight (127,000) jobs were lost across roughly six years of Labor government — a period that includes nearly five years before the carbon tax was introduced. Importantly, experts told Fact Check that these job losses could not be solely attributed to Labor or the carbon tax. 

For one thing, they said, manufacturing as a share of total employment had been falling for decades.

Moreover, the downward trend would have been exacerbated during Labor's term by both declining investment in the sector and the global financial crisis.

Cause and effect?

The Coalition has several times linked the carbon tax to the destruction of manufacturing jobs.

Fact Check: Greenhouse gas emissions

Angus Taylor's claim on what has happened with greenhouse gas emissions under the Coalition is problematic for a number of reasons. Read more

Referring to Labor, Mr Taylor told parliament in November 2021 that "one thing we can be sure of is that they're always going to love a carbon tax that destroys jobs".

"[W]hen those opposite were in power: one in eight manufacturing workers lost their jobs", he said.

"That was 128,000 Australians who lost their livelihoods. And, of that 128,000, 110,000 were apprentices. One in five apprentices lost their jobs, and that was a result that followed on from those opposite putting in place a carbon tax."

Similarly, Treasurer Josh Frydenberg claimed in December that the "last time [Labor] had a go at climate policy … we lost one in eight manufacturing jobs and Australians got the carbon tax".

What was the 'carbon tax'?

The "carbon tax" was Labor's short-lived carbon pricing mechanism, which reduced Australia's carbon footprint by forcing the nation's largest emitters to pay for their greenhouse gas emissions.

Introduced on July 1, 2012 under prime minister Julia Gillard, the scheme lasted just two years before it was abolished under Tony Abbott's new Coalition government. It ceased on June 30, 2014.

When the Coalition came to power in September 2013, Labor had been in government for nearly six years and the carbon tax in operation for 14 months. 

The available jobs data

Employment data from the ABS is a net figure which does not specify how many jobs were destroyed compared to how many were offset by job creation. (ABC News: Marco Catalano)

The Australian Bureau of Statistics publishes employment data by industry each quarter, with figures available for February, May, August and November.

As these dates do not align with the July 1 introduction of the carbon tax, and because November 2012 reflects the first full quarter of ABS data, Fact Check has taken August 2012 as the starting point. (Taking May 2012 as the starting point does not alter the outcome.)

Generally speaking, Fact Check prefers trend data published by the ABS and has used the most recent available.

However, as the bureau stopped publishing its trend series in February 2020, this analysis also refers to seasonally adjusted data. The most recent available when Mr Taylor made his claim covers the period to August 2021.

It’s worth noting that the data provides a snapshot of net employment. It does not show whether manufacturing jobs lost were offset by others that were created, or vice versa.

So, what happened to manufacturing jobs?

According to the trend data, manufacturing employed 947,500 people in August 2012.

Mr Taylor claimed the carbon tax cost one in eight of them their jobs (12.5 per cent).

Are more Australians in jobs
than before COVID-19?

Fact Check looks into the claim of Treasurer Josh Frydenberg that Australia has "seen employment go above its pre-pandemic levels". Read more

The data shows that by August 2014, when the carbon tax was repealed, the industry had lost 32,300 people, or one in 29 workers (3.4 per cent).

The decline continued after the scheme was scrapped, with the industry shedding a further 29,500 workers by November 2015 and taking the total fall to 6.5 per cent.

Employment has since risen and fallen several times. At no point in the trend series did manufacturing fall to more than 7.3 per cent from its level when the carbon tax went into place.

Equivalent to roughly one in 14 workers, that lowest point came in May 2019, five years after the pricing scheme was repealed.

And while the seasonally adjusted series shows larger falls, none took employment to 12.5 per cent below August 2012 levels, as Mr Taylor claimed.

Rather, the lowest point was in November 2020, when manufacturing jobs were 11.1 per cent below August 2012 levels.



Fact Check contacted Mr Taylor's office for the source of the claim but did not receive a response.

However, the trend data reveals that manufacturing jobs declined by 127,000 (12.1 per cent) across Labor's entire term, from just over one million in November 2007 to 922,000 in August 2013. 

This suggests Mr Taylor may have attributed every job lost across roughly six years of Labor to the carbon tax.

What the experts say

So, is Mr Taylor justified in attributing the net loss of manufacturing jobs to the carbon tax alone?

Jeff Borland, a labour economist at the University of Melbourne, said it was "a ridiculous statement" to say that all 128,000 jobs lost under Labor were due to the carbon tax.

Not only were many of these jobs lost before the pricing scheme was introduced, he said, but also manufacturing employment had been falling well before Labor was in government, with the industry's share of total employment declining steadily since the mid 1970s.

This was a long-run trend "driven by completely separate factors" such as automation and globalisation, Professor Borland explained.



On top of that, Labor's term straddled the global financial crisis, which would have hit manufacturing particularly hard.

"[I]f you actually look at the data on numbers of people employed, recessions or downturns are always a period when the destruction of manufacturing jobs seems to be concentrated", Professor Borland said.

Alan Duncan, director of Curtin University's Bankwest Curtin Economics Centre, told Fact Check that Mr Taylor's statement "doesn't pass scrutiny".

He supplied analysis showing that roughly 30,000 jobs were lost during the two years of the carbon tax, noting that "manufacturing jobs had been falling well before the carbon tax was introduced, with the initial decline driven by the global financial crisis in 2008 and 2009" and that investment in the industry had also fallen by nearly 40 per cent from the end of 2011 to mid 2014.

"The GFC and declining manufacturing investment are likely to have had a much larger effect on jobs in the manufacturing sector than the carbon tax," Professor Duncan said.



In an email to Fact Check, Frank Jotzo, director of the Australian National University's Centre for Climate and Energy Policy, said there was "no basis to ascribe any significant change in employment to the existence of the carbon price".

Moreover, he said it was "nonsensical to ascribe the entirety of employment changes during [2008 to 2013] to the carbon pricing mechanism that existed during [2012 to 2014]".

Links

• Angus Taylor, Hansard, November 23, 2021
• Angus Taylor, Doorstop interview, October 27, 2021
• Angus Taylor, Interview with 2HD, October 27, 2021
• Josh Frydenberg, Interview with Insiders, December 5, 2021
• Fact Check, Energy Minister Angus Taylor said greenhouse gas emissions have turned around by 1.1 billion tonnes under the Coalition, April 11, 2019
• Clean Energy Regulator, About the carbon pricing scheme, August 23, 2021
• ABS, Labour force, detailed, February 2020
• ABS, Labour force, detailed, August 2021
• Fact Check: Have greenhouse gas emissions turned around under the Coalition?

(USA NYT) Apocalypse When? Global Warming’s Endless Scroll

New York Times - Amanda Hess

From “Don’t Look Up” to Greta Thunberg videos to doomsaying memes, we are awash in warnings that we are almost out of time. But the climate crisis is outpacing our emotional capacity to describe it.

Doomscrolling through social media can be seductive when it comes to the climate crisis: It signals that we care about big problems even as we chase distractions. Credit...Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

Author Amanda Hess is a critic at large for the New York Times. She writes about internet and pop culture for the Arts section and contributes regularly to The New York Times Magazine.

I can’t say precisely when the end began, just that in the past several years, “the end of the world” stopped referring to a future cataclysmic event and started to describe our present situation.

Across the ironized hellscape of the internet, we began “tweeting through the apocalypse” and blogging the Golden Globes ceremony “during the end times” and streaming “Emily in Paris” “at the end of the world.”

 Often the features of our dystopia are itemized, as if we are briskly touring the concentric circles of hell — rising inequality, declining democracy, unending pandemic, the financial system optimistically described as “late” capitalism — until we have reached the inferno’s toasty center, which is the destruction of the Earth through man-made global warming.

This style is native to Twitter, but it has migrated to earnest slice-of-life Facebook pages, to Netflix, to books. Lauren Oyler’s coolly funny novel “Fake Accounts” begins in this mode (“Consensus was the world was ending, or would begin to end soon”) and Bo Burnham’s depressed drama-kid Netflix special “Inside” ends in it, as Burnham shrugs off the rising oceans and sings, “You say the world is ending, honey, it already did.”

And it is darkly inverted on the Instagram account @afffirmations, where new-age positive thinking buckles under the weight of generational despair, and serene stock photography collides with mantras like “I am not climate change psychosis” and “Humanity is not doomed.”

Ours is a banal sort of apocalypse. Even as it is described as frightfully close, it is held at a cynical distance. That is not to say that the rhetoric signals a lack of concern about climate change. But global warming represents the collapse of such complex systems at such an extreme scale that it overrides our emotional capacity.

This creates its own perverse flavor of climate denial: We acknowledge the science but do not truly accept it, at least not enough to urgently act. This paralysis itself is almost too horrible to contemplate. As global warming cooks the Earth, it melts our brains, fries our nerves and explodes the narratives that we like to tell about humankind — even the apocalyptic ones.

This “end of the world” does not resemble the ends of religious prophecies or disaster films, in which the human experiment culminates in dramatic final spectacles. Instead we persist in an oxymoronic state, inhabiting an end that has already begun but may never actually end.

Faced with this inexorable decline, the fire-and-brimstone fantasies grow ever more appealing. The apocalyptic drumbeat of social media gestures at the hopelessness of our situation while supplying a kind of narcotic comfort for it. Some plead: Just hit us with the comet already.


Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

That brings us to the premise of “Don’t Look Up,” Adam McKay’s end-of-the-world comedy that he has said is an allegory for inaction on global warming. In it, an American astronomer (Leonardo DiCaprio) and a Ph.D candidate (Jennifer Lawrence) discover a comet hurtling toward Earth.

More chilling than this cosmic snowball is the fact that no one seems particularly concerned by its approach. Comet denialists hold rallies instructing people to “don’t look up,” but even those who accept the situation only gesture lazily at trying to stop it.

 A pop star (Ariana Grande) stages a grotesque benefit concert; a daytime television host (Tyler Perry) jokes that he hopes the comet takes out his ex-wife; his co-host (Cate Blanchett) is more interested in bedding the astronomer than heeding him. As she paws at him in a hotel corridor, her subconscious death drive becomes manifest, as she purrs: “Tell me we’re all gonna die!”

“Don’t Look Up” fails as a climate change allegory, because climate change resists metaphor. Even though I count among the film’s villains (all its journalists are bad), I do not feel as implicated as I should. For one thing, humans didn’t make the comet. Global warming is not approaching from space but oozing all around.

My attention is diverted not only by shiny pop stars but also by taxing responsibilities and traumas, many of which are themselves related to ecological collapse. I am terrified of how global warming will affect my son’s generation, but when I learned we would need to travel regularly to a hospital as Covid spiked in New York City, I bought a car.

But the greatest liberty “Don’t Look Up” takes with its source material comes at the end: The comet hits Earth at its appointed time, at which point nearly everybody dies. It is final, dramatic, easy to understand. So, nothing like our present situation.

Global warming is what the ecophilosopher Timothy Morton calls a hyperobject, a concept that is too large to be adequately comprehended by human beings. (McKay’s production company is called Hyperobject Industries.) Its scale is not just world-historical but geological, and though it is already very bad, it will only fulfill its catastrophic potential many lifetimes from now. Its effects are distributed unequally; what I experience as an ambient stressor may cause strangers to suffer or die.

Global warming suggests that humans are powerful enough to destroy the world but too weak to stop it. Though we are driven toward world-changing innovation, we are inflexible, fearful of abandoning the destructive comforts we once saw as progress — our cars, our meats, our free next-day deliveries.

Knowing all this, isn’t it about time we do something? Hmmm. “Don’t Look Up” turns on one of the most vexing aspects of the crisis: Stating the data, shouting it even, often fails to move people, though the film is largely incurious about why. One of the stories we tell ourselves about global warming is that we need only “listen to the science.”

When this does not work, we are supplied with more science — more glacier drone shots, more projections of soaring temperatures, more scary stories about dead bees. In the book “Being Ecological,” Morton calls this “ecological information dump mode,” in which an expert commences “shaking your lapels while yelling disturbing facts.” But even this seemingly rational approach stokes an irrational fantasy: that we have a certain amount of time “left” to stop global warming — just as soon as we get our heads around what’s going on.

The word “apocalypse” is derived from the Latin for “revelation,” and our current predicament draws out the irony of that double meaning, as we mistake obsessing about the “end of the world” for acting on it. Lizzie, the narrator of Jenny Offill’s 2020 cli-fi novel “Weather,” is an information person: a Brooklyn librarian who assists the host of a cult-hit global warming podcast called “Hell or High Water.”

The podcast is “soothing to me even though she talks only of the invisible horsemen galloping toward us,” Lizzie says. The more Lizzie doomscrolls about climate change, the more she turns away from the outside world, lurking on survivalist forums and planning her family doomstead.

“Weather” sketches a scene of intellectual preppers, hoarding information about global warming as if cramming for a cosmic test. But the more information they find, the more they are able to tailor it to satisfy their own egos. In “Weather,” a podcast listener waves off talk of melting glaciers and asks: “But what’s going to happen to the American weather?”

A parable unfolds along these lines in the final season of “Search Party”: The show’s crew of millennial narcissists found a Brooklyn start-up called Lyte, which manufactures an “enlightenment” pill with the unfortunate side-effect of turning people into zombies.

As the group’s craven pursuit of consumerist illumination inadvertently hastens the apocalypse, the egomaniacal imp Dory (Alia Shawkat) tries to explain that she just wanted to help people, but all that comes out is this: “I just wanted …”

Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. Credit...Aleia Murawski and Sam Copeland for The New York Times

We may not fully comprehend global warming, but we can feel it, and not just in the weather. A whole lexicon has arisen to attempt to describe its psychological impact: climate nihilism, climate grief, climate melancholia, eco-anxiety, pre-traumatic stress.

A global survey of young people, released last year, found that more than half of respondents between the ages of 16 and 25 “felt sad, anxious, angry, powerless, helpless, and guilty” about it, and believed “humanity is doomed.”

In the 2020 Hulu documentary “I Am Greta,” the teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg explains how knowledge of global warming nearly killed her. After watching a film in school featuring “starving polar bears, flooding, hurricanes and droughts,” she says, she became depressed and anxious, stopped speaking, and “almost starved to death.”

We are getting accustomed to the idea that global warming feels bad, and this provides its own sense of comfort, as if our psychological distress proves that we are taking the problem seriously. “Civilians love to panic,” says an epidemiologist in Hanya Yanagihara’s novel “To Paradise,” which is partially set in an unbearably hot, totalitarian future Manhattan ruled by blinkered scientists.

“Survival allows for hope — it is, indeed, predicated on hope — but it does not allow for pleasure, and as a topic, it is dull.” In our response to global warming, we resemble the frog who does not hop from the heating water until it’s too late. Except we are aware that the water is boiling; we just can’t imagine leaving our tumultuous little pot.

Perhaps one of the many creature comforts we must abandon to address global warming is the anesthetizing stream of global warming content itself. As David Wallace-Wells writes in his 2019 book “The Uninhabitable Earth,” climate-themed disaster films do not necessarily represent progress, as “we are displacing our anxieties about global warming by restaging them in theaters of our own design and control.” Even YouTube videos of climate conferences can slip into this role.

As we frame an activist like Thunberg as a kind of celebrity oracle, we transfer our own responsibilities onto a teenager with a preternatural command of dismal statistics. We once said that we would stop climate change for the benefit of our children, but now we can tell ourselves that our children will take care of it for us.

The internet is often criticized for feeding us useless information, and for spreading disinformation, but it can enable a destructive relationship with serious information, too. If you’re a person who accepts the science, how much more do you really need to hear? The casual doomsaying of social media is so seductive: It helps us signal that we care about big problems even as we chase distractions, and it gives us a silly little tone for voicing our despair.

Most of all, it displaces us in time. We are always mentally skipping between a nostalgic landscape, where we have plenty of energy to waste on the internet, and an apocalyptic one, where it’s too late to do anything. It’s the center, where we live, that we can’t bear to envision. After all, denial is the first stage of grief.

Links - New York Times Climate Change Articles

• The Way We Talk About Climate Change Matters, Bill Nye Says
• Court Revokes Oil and Gas Leases, Citing Climate Change
• John Kerry, U.S. Climate Envoy, Tells Top Polluters ‘We Must All Move Faster’
• ‘Build Back Better’ Hit a Wall, but Climate Action Could Move Forward
• Here’s How Climate Change and Covid Are Transforming Skiing
• Tracking Climate Change in 193 Countries
• How Spiking Energy Prices Complicate the Fight Against Global Warming
• Judges Increasingly Demand Climate Analysis in Drilling Decisions
• How One Ski Town Rallied in a Warming World

(The Guardian) ‘Carbon Footprint Gap’ Between Rich And Poor Expanding, Study Finds

The Guardian - Helena Horton

Researchers say cutting carbon footprint of world’s wealthiest may be fastest way to reach net zero

The least wealthy half of the UK’s population accounts for less than 20% of final energy demand. Photograph: Stéphane Mahé/Reuters

Wealthy people have disproportionately large carbon footprints and the percentage of the world’s emissions they are responsible for is growing, a study has found. In 2010, the most affluent 10% of households emitted 34% of global CO₂, while the 50% of the global population in lower income brackets accounted for just 15%. By 2015, the richest 10% were responsible for 49% of emissions against 7% produced by the poorest half of the world’s population.

The wealthiest 10% of people are responsible
for nearly half the world's CO2 emissions

Guardian graphic. Source: Emissions-inequality.org

Aimee Ambrose, a professor of energy policy at Sheffield Hallam University and author of the study published in the journal Science Direct, says cutting the carbon footprint of the wealthiest might be the fastest way to reach net zero.

In terms of energy demand in the UK, the least wealthy half of the population accounts for less than 20% of final demand, less than the top 5% consumes. While their homes may be more energy-efficient, high consumers are likely to have more space to heat. They also own and use more luxury items and gadgets.

Ambrose said the cost of living crisis was likely to make those on middle to low incomes reduce their carbon consumption by holidaying in the UK, if at all, and by using less fuel. However, those who consume the most are unlikely to have to make such changes.

“It is much easier for richer consumers to absorb these increases in costs without changing their behaviour,” said Ambrose. “Unlike the less wealthy, the thermostat won’t be turned down and the idea of not jetting off on a long-haul flight to find some sun is out of the question.

In most countries, before Covid-19, less than half of people reported flying at least once a year while more than half of emissions from passenger aviation were linked to the 1% of people who fly most often.

“In many ways, the rich are being largely insulated from the spike in energy costs,” said Ambrose. “But addressing excessive personal consumption is something that isn’t on the agenda for the government and policymakers. This is bad news for the planet and our prospects of reaching net zero.”

She said the resulting policy neglect of high consumers was a “missed opportunity” to address inequality and opportunities for carbon reduction.

“Price mechanisms may force low-income households to cut back consumption to dangerous levels,” Ambrose added. “Moreover, high consumption and large carbon footprints are spatially concentrated in high-income cities and suburbs – while their negative effects, such as air pollution, typically spill over into less affluent areas.”

Links

• Rising temperatures threaten future of Winter Olympics, say experts
• Climate crisis could wipe 1% a year off UK economy by 2045, say ministers
• Global heating linked to early birth and damage to babies’ health, scientists find
• Plants at risk of extinction as climate crisis disrupts animal migration
• ‘The ducklings might not survive’: readers’ concerns over early spring
• Fury as EU moves ahead with plans to label gas and nuclear as ‘green’
• 2021: a year of climate crisis in review
• Asad Rehman on climate justice: ‘Now we are seeing these arguments cut through’