I have been rather annoyed with the general silence of economists on the issue of the Coalition approach to climate change in the lead up to the election.
As far as I can tell, there is virtually no economist who thinks "direct action" is a better longer term plan for achieving its stated goal than pricing carbon. The evidence is strongly suggestive that the carbon pricing is having an effect already on reducing electricity consumption. The Coalition's Greg Hunt used to champion carbon pricing, until he was told he had to come up and sell with an alternative simply so that Abbott could have a different from policy from Labor. Government seeded clean energy financing has been underway in other countries - I have not heard any economist talk about whether that has been considered successful or not.
As I have argued recently, there is plenty of room to be skeptical of long term economic modelling of the effects of climate change; but shorter scale economics modelling of how to be push society in a cleaner energy direction can be expected to make sense.
So why are the great majority of economists who support carbon pricing sitting on their hands on the topic during the election?
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