Alan Kohler: Australia’s new emissions trading scheme is a carbon tax. That’s fine

It won’t be the companies that swallow the cost of emission reduction, it will be consumers, writes Alan Kohler. Photo: Getty/TND

It’s the machinery of capitalism that must solve climate change, not the politicians and scientists who have been meeting for 26 years and fruitlessly agreeing.

That’s why there are 25 emissions trading schemes (ETS) around the world, as politicians and scientists try to speak the language of market capitalism rather than the language of survival, or morality, as Kevin Rudd once tried.